1. Listening tool: It creates online space for people to interact with your brand. They can leave comments on your posts and allow you to get feedback. Although there are better ways to listen to what people are saying about your business, your own blog provides one more channel to receive feedback.
2. SEO: A blog can help you with search engine optimization. By continuosly adding engaging and fresh content, while still incorporating your main keywords in your posts, your positioning on the search engine will improve. Google, Bing and Yahoo will rank your website higher with your blog (make sure your blog is connected to your domain) thanks to your content and it will improve your overall search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
3. Create a vibrant online community. By providing interesting content, uploading videos and photos and writing often about topics of  interest to you, you will create loyal readers on your blog. By building trust with these people, they will be most likely to purchase from you than from a competitor business that doesn’t show interest in engaging with their customers.
4. Expert positioning: By writing a blog about the topics you are knowledgeable and expert in, you will position your business as a leader in the industry. You don’t always have to write about your business, products and services. If you represent a hotel, you can write about the surrounding areas, special events and happenings, local tips, shopping places, ways to save when you travel, and anything else related to general travel or the activities that your customers mainly engage with why staying at your  place. You can highlight your chef’s specials, contribute some specials recipes and cocktails and make people feel at home before they have even arrived. When people start looking for a place to stay,  they will consider your hotel first because of the existing relationship they already have with you.
5. Engagement & Transparency: You are not afraid to put yourself on the web and open up to people’s feedback whether that’s positive or negative. You embrace the fact that people now have a lot more control over your brand than they used to. You are open to receiving feedback, you are listening and hopefully making changes to your business based on customer feedback.

These are my 5 reasons why a business can benefit from a blog. There are many more reasons why a business blogs. What are yours? What do you think abusiness blog can do for the bottom line of an organization? What are your favorite blogs? Why?

Leave it to my Australian friends to create a useful and practical free resource for tourism web marketing. Funded by the Australian State and Territory Tourism offices and created by the National Online Strategy Committee in Australia this comprehensive online marketing ekit is for the tourism industry and covers off a variety of basic and advanced topics. The free web marketing for tourism eKit covers fundamentals and advanced topics to get your tourism business off the ground or refine your existing strategy. As the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse  says on their website, this e-kit was “Written by experts but understood by everyone”.

The e-kit includes various topics that you can download by themselves if you are not interested in the entire package. It also gives you approximate reading time for each.
Topics include:

* Step-by-step tutorials on e-marketing
* Hundreds of online marketing resources
* Social Media marketing
* Pay per click campaigns
* Email marketing
* Tracking and reporting
* Online distribution

You can download the e-kit from the ATDW website here. Leave me a comment and let me know how you used it and what you liked about it. Have you seen something similar in the US? Please, let me know and enjoy your reading.

Milena Regos Mountain Biking

What do business, marketing and social media marketing have in common with mountain biking in Lake Tahoe?

A lot as I found out yesterday. I went for an amazing bike ride yesterday at Sawtooth Trail near Truckee, CA with my husband. He’s an excellent rider. We started off and within minutes I wasn’t able to see him anymore amongst the pine trees. When he stopped to wait for me, I asked him while trying to catch my breadth: “Why am I biking so slow?”. He responded: “You are not slow at all, you are doing really good. I’m just too fast. Remember to look ahead and prepare for what’s coming ahead of time”. It got me thinking about business in general and how some companies are doing so well yet others fail, how some businesses anticipate what’s coming ahead on the trail and prepare for it by shifting gears on time and how some companies fail to do so and end up in the back of the group.

I found a lot of similarities between business, more specifically marketing and mountain biking and I’ll try to explain my analogies here for those of you who understand one or the other or have an appreciation and interest.

1. You have to be passionate about marketing. Otherwise, it will be just a chore for you. Just like biking, if I wasn’t passionate about it and loving every minute of it I wouldn’t be doing it. If you don’t like marketing and you find yourself putting it off because you don’t believe it works or you don’t think it’s important for your business, then find some outside help and hire someone who understands it and knows how to do it well. The same applies to social media marketing. If you are not into it and don’t understand how it’s applicable to your business, you are better off finding someone who does. Your customers are talking about you online and offline. It’s the old word-of-mouth way of communicating turning into a word-of-mouse way of finding advice and referrals about your product and service. People are talking about your company. Do you know what they are saying? Do you care?  Can you afford not to?

2. You always have to push the limit to get better at marketing. Just like biking, if I don’t always try a harder trail, a jump, a technical move I won’t get better. I’ll continue to enjoy it and continue to participate in it but I won’t get better at what I do. It’s the same with marketing. You have to explore things, try something new, fail every once and a while, learn from your mistakes and keep doing it. You will get better with time.

3. Measure it! How do you know what works and what doesn’t if you don’t measure it. Some people think that you can’t measure marketing or social media marketing. I disagree. You can measure a lot of things. It depends on your business strategy and marketing objectives as to what you want to measure. Establish your goals in the beginning. Adjust your goals as you go along. Once a month or more often see how you are doing against your goals. Unless you push yourself and your business to do better against your strategy you won’t have a goal. My mountain bike computer establishes some numerical measurements for me: riding time, highest speed, average speed, etc. These are quantitative measures. The same is available for your marketing efforts. With marketing you can measure customer growth rate, share of preference, share of voice, share of distribution, share of wallet, net promoter score. Online marketing is especially easy to track. You can start with something as simple as Google Analytics to see where your customers are coming from, how much traffic is your website getting, what keywords are driving traffic to your website, how long are they staying on your site (the stickiness of your website), bounce rate to determine how targeted your marketing efforts are and how effective your landing page/ home page is. With pay per search keywords on search engines, you can also measure clicks (how many people clicked on your link), cost per click (how much you are paying to bring a customer via a specific keyword), etc. Google Analytics is a free program. Other programs to help you measure your social media quantitative efforts are AideRSS, Feedburner and Xinu.

With email marketing you can measure how many people opened your email campaign, how many people clicked on a specific link or downloaded something from your website. Depending on what software you use, the tools are probably already built into the system.

With social media marketing, you can measure friends and followers, traffic to your website, direct sales revenue,search engine optimization,  customer service touches and more. You can get more elaborate tools to help  you track conversion of customers and leads and really dig into how successful your marketing and social media efforts are. Some of them I already listed above. Here’s a good post by Jacob Morgan in Social Media Today on how to measure your social media efforts.

Additional businesses to help you with your measuring are:  Mongoose Metrics, WebTrends, Omniture, Hubspot, and Hitbox (now Omniture).  It all depends on what you want to measure and your budget.

There are also qualitative measures that are just as important. How much fun I had on the bike ride, spending time with friends and my husband, getting exercise, enjoying the outdoors. There are qualitative measures as well in marketing and social media marketing that are just as important as quantitative measures. In marketing you have advertising awareness, brand awareness, word of mouth. In social media, you have  corporate reputation, customers engagement, customer feedback sentiment, conversations, customer relationships and more.

Go out there and explore. Practice, learn and have fun while doing it. And most of all Enjoy the Ride!

More resources:

How to measure Social Media ROI for business

Top 10 Google Analytics Tip and Features for Sales and Marketing

How to Measure Marketing Goals

If you don’t measure you can’t manage: The Best Metrics for measuring marketing performance

http://www.visionedgemarketing.com/

In my full-time job as a Marketing Director for Incline Village General Improvement District I deal with daily challenges on how to communicate better with our customers, how to engage them and how to listen to what they have to say. We adapt our marketing strategies based on our customer feedback. As the Marketing Director for Diamond Peak Ski Resort, The Golf Courses at Incline Village, The Chateau at Incline Village, The Recreation Center and Tennis Center I have a responsibility to serve our customers by providing the best products and services for their money. To achieve this I need to listen to our customers. I’m starting this blog as an opportunity to engage more effectively with our customers. I also want to provide lessons that I have learned, research I have found and real life experiences all in one place for people who are interested in Internet marketing, social media marketing and web 2.0. I will continue to update this blog with all things marketing, Internet marketing, web 2.0 and social media marketing that I find interesting and worth reading. This is my personal blog and my thoughts and opinions are not associated with the organization I work for (IVGID).

I hope you enjoy my blog. Send me your feedback and let me know how I can make it better, what interests you and what you would like to read about.