Category Archive: Interactive marketing

5 reasons a business needs a blog?

Posted by on November 3, 2009

20000blogSocial media is changing they way businesses do business and people are demanding this change. Companies no longer have complete control over their brand. Some very savvy companies and CEOs are turning to blogs as a way to create online communities, communicate with their customers and employees and bring transparency to their business. Below are 5 reasons why a blog is a good idea:

  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?

Image used under creative commons license: Annie Mole

Categories: Blog Business eMarketing Interactive marketing SEO Small Businesses Social Media Technology Web 2.0 Web 2.0 tools | No Comments »

Using Web Video Marketing

Posted by on October 18, 2009

Videos are extremely powerful marketing tool and can be used very well in business. People like to watch not read and videos can sometimes showcase your product much better than any press release or print ad will.  With social media gaining more and more momentum and people spending countless hours consuming user-generated content, videos will become a part of your overall marketing mix. Did you know that it will take you 460+ years to watch all videos on YouTube?  It’s fairly easy to integrate videos in your overall marketing campaign. You just need some strategy, creativity, a Flip camera and some time.
I found this great presentation from ReelSEO on how to incorporate videos in your online press releases. You can use videos to help with your SEO efforts as well.
There are some excellent video stats in this presentation. I recommend that you quickly read through it. As marketers, we need to know how to use this medium well. Even a small business can benefit from videos distributed online on various portals.
Do you use video for your business? What have you found that works or doesn’t work?

Categories: Blog eMarketing Interactive marketing SEO Social Media Social Media Marketing Technology Video Web 2.0 Web 2.0 tools | No Comments »

Out&About Marketing Goes Live

Posted by on July 26, 2009

Hello and welcome to my website and blog!

I’m very excited to announce that Out&About Marketing is now live. I created this website and blog to help people in the travel and tourism industry learn about successful marketing strategies and tactics, social media and Web 2.0.  New media emerged and changed marketing forever. Customers expect companies to communicate with them on a whole new level, engage with them in places that are new and exciting.

I want to share my passion for social media and marketing with focus on travel, tourism and the outdoors with anyone else who shares the same passion or makes their living in these industry. I wasn’t able to find a good resource on the web so I created one.

I hope marketers and business owners with remarkable products and services will find my website and blog useful and use it as place to engage in discussions relevant to the tourism industry. If you are interested in becoming a guest writer on the website, please, let me know.

Also, please, let me know if you find something on the site that needs to be fixed. It’s a new site and may have some glitches or spelling mistakes.

I would love it if you sign my digital guestbook. It will help me learn more about my readers and write posts that are relevant and interesting to you.

I will update the blog as often as humanly possible after my full-time job and my love for the outdoors. If you want to stay current, make sure to subscribe to the RSS feed and every time I write a post you will get automatically updated either on your reader or email. If you prefer, you can sign up with your email address directly.

Enjoy your stay and thank you for visiting!

Categories: Blog Business eMarketing Interactive marketing Marketing Small Businesses Social Media Web 2.0 | 2 Comments »

6 Best Practices for Engagement

Posted by on July 26, 2009

Social Media does work. If you need proof, take a look at this very useful tool, Engagementdb for measuring companies’ engagement. It’s not always about “eyeballs”, “fans” and “friends”. Social Media is Social – which means it’s about people and not about technology. Now, there is a tool that can measure how engaged your company is with your customers. Of course, this report is concentrated on big brands. But it’s a start. What can we learn from companies like Starbucks and Dell and apply to the tourism industry? I picked my favorite 6 Best Practices for Engagement from the Engagementdb report:

  1. Starbucks social media team comprises of only 6 people. Dell’s social media team is only 3 people. This is a small department for the size of these companies. Starbucks obtained the highest social media score among 100 brands, as ranked by the Engagementdb report. A small staff sometimes can accomplish miracles on the social web. As a brick-and-mortar store, Starbucks and Dell came ahead of many large brands, some of them very high-tech. Once again, this proves that social media is more about engaging with your customers and less about technology. The size of your social media team does not necessarily become the most important success factor for your social media efforts.
  2. Understand how each social media channel works within your social media strategy. Facebook is going to provide you with a customer interaction that will be different from Twitter. Startbucks uses Facebook to create a dialogue with customers. Their Facebook page grew virally from 200,000 people to 3.5 million fans – one of the largest Facebook pages. Starbucks also discovered that for every 4 people who comment on their page, they add 3 more fans. A good indicated for viral content. Starbucks uses Twitter differently than Facebook – they use their Twitter account for customer service, to answer menu questions and deliver breaking news and contest.
  3. Your social media strategy needs champions from within the company to be successful. Look for people in your organization who are familiar with social media and who can become champions of your efforts. Startbucks used CEO Howard Schultz to personally launch myStarbucksidea.com.
  4. Understand that once you commit to social media, you are in it for the long haul. Once you have decided to open up for a dialogue with your customers you can’t shut the door. You need to allocate time and resources and commit to the engagement.
  5. Spread the responsibilities with other people in the company. If you are starting out on the social web you probably have a small team of people with full-time jobs. Social media becomes an additional responsibility for them. Find other people in the company who are interested in contributing with content. Make sure you have a social media policy in place to avoid potential costly mistakes. Train them how to engage on behalf of the company properly.
  6. Make social media part of everyone’s job. This one is my favorite and speak to the one above. If everyone spent 20 min a day engaging on social media on behalf of the company, the responsibility will no longer fall only on a few people to manage the content. A few tweets, a Facebook update, a blog post may be all you need to stay active. In addition, a different point of view sometimes may bring in refreshing perspective and spark a conversation.

These are my favorite 6 best practices from the Engagementdb report. You can read all of them here. Let me know what you think. Which ones do you think are most applicable to the tourism indsutry?

Categories: Blog Business eMarketing Facebook Interactive marketing Measurements Social Media Social Media Marketing Twitter Web 2.0 Web 2.0 tools | 1 Comment »

Free E-kit to help you understand Web Marketing for Tourism

Posted by on July 5, 2009

Tourism EKit

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”. Continue reading Free E-kit to help you understand Web Marketing for Tourism

Categories: Analytics Blog Business Email marketing eMarketing Interactive marketing Marketing Measurements Media SEM SEO Small Businesses Social Media Social Media Marketing Technology Travel & Recreation Web 2.0 Web 2.0 tools | 1 Comment »