5 Digital Marketing Strategy Must-haves

Do your digital marketing plans incorporate these five crucial building blocks? The proliferation of technology platforms and marketing options can be confusing when plotting your business’ course. The newest shiny business tool can sometimes blind marketers. As a result, it can be difficult to ensure your marketing plans contain the most relevant and effective components.

To help you keep your digital marketing on course to achieve your firm’s objectives, here are the five major elements to integrate into your plans and why you need each one.

1. Website. Every business, regardless of size, needs a online home base. While acting like a business card, in today’s wired world, your website must go beyond being a few static web pages. Smaller businesses may be able to leverage blogs cost effectively. Others may need to integrate a blog to expand their content marketing so that it’s search optimized.
2. Search optimization. Just as customers looked up businesses in the telephone book in the pre-Internet days, they now turn to search, whether it’s on their computer or mobile device. To this end, it’s critical you show up for the words prospects use when and where they look for your business or services. This translates to thinking beyond just search engines. Include mobile search and search-like offerings like Yelp, TripAdvisor and Zagats. You must consider where people look for your products and how they’re reviewed. Don’t overlook the power of Amazon for providing this information.
3. Social media. Social media is the 900 pound gorilla of digital marketing. It’s where people spend their time. Further, an effective social media marketing strategy supports search optimization and leverages content marketing making it synergistic with the rest of your digital marketing mix. This doesn’t mean that you should jump onto every social media platform. Rather start by using the format(s) that’s best for your brand or product. Understand that social media isn’t free and that you can expand your usage over time.
4. Communications. Regardless of the type of marketing you use, communications are the glue that keeps you connected with your prospects, customers and the public. On digital platforms, email is often the communications format of choice since it’s cost-effective and quick. But don’t overlook landing pages, automated responses, chat and old-fashioned phone calls as well as social media options. With the introduction of social media, communications have expanded beyond one-to-many and one-to-one to include many-to-many.
5. Mobile. With an increasing number of people using smartphones, adding a mobile component to your offering is critical. (Depending on your business, it may also be useful to consider how your digital marketing appears on tablets (aka iPads.)) This is particularly important for merchants and other local businesses that people look for on-the-go. (Here are the six must-do mobile basics.) Remember customers check your website and your competitors for more information while they’re shopping in a retail establishment.

Regardless of the size of your marketing budget and the complexity of your business offering, what’s critical when using these five digital building blocks is to ensure they’re integrated and work together seamlessly. Further, your brand should be consistent throughout your online marketing.

Is there anything else that you’d put on a must-have digital marketing list? If so, why would you add it? Please add your suggestions in the comment section below.

Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen

• 4 Pillars of digital marketing
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Photo credit: Holger Zscheyge via Flickr

Does Your Digital Marketing Contain These 5 Building Blocks? – © 2011, Heidi Cohen. This post originally appeared on Heidi Cohen on July 15, 2011.

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When Yoav Medan’s mother Judith passed away in June, the Israel-based medical technology executive couldn’t decide what he wanted to write on her tombstone. After deliberating with his family, Medan decided to turn to technology for the answer and attach a QR code to the grave in Haifa, Israel.

Scanning the QR code leads visitors to a tribute website that Medan has setup and plans to evolve with stories and photos from his mother’s life. “I [didn’t] know what we wanted to write [on the tombstone] and it will never be everything for everyone. By having something that is dynamic and can extend over time, we can capture it,” he told me this week in an interview at TED Global in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Over time, Medan hopes the QR code and memorial site will help create a lasting history of his mother that will live on for generations. “I was most concerned about 20 or 40 years from now, how will she be remembered … [I wanted to put] what’s in our memory into a place that doesn’t forget,” he said.

The QR code itself is a laser engraving, filled with a black paste, and sits behind a piece of glass on the tombstone. “The guy who built the tombstone, he wants to make a business out of it,” said Medan.

He think the idea could catch on based on the feedback he’s been hearing. “People identify with this way of keeping the memory of someone and actually making it dynamic and evolving with time as you remember more,” he said. The QR code-enabled tombstone adds a new twist to the growing number of services we’ve seen emerge that are designed to help us decide what happens to our online identity after we die and create digital tributes to our lost loved ones.

What do you think of this way of remembering your loved ones? Let us know in the comments.

More About: death, Mobile 2.0, QR Codes, TED, ted global

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The following is an excerpt. The complete article, available in our Facebook Marketing Bible, includes the full six steps why you shouldn’t syndicate your Page updates to Twitter and should write custom updates for each network instead.

For the busy marketer, syncing the updates from your brand’s Facebook Page with your Twitter profile can seem like an easy and convenient way to minimize the time it takes to manage both accounts. However, as we explore below, we recommend you write custom version of your content for Facebook and Twitter, as cross-posting can work against your goals instead of for them.

But first, we’ll cover how Facebook’s official Twitter application allows Facebook Page owners to automatically syndicate their posts to Twitter after installing the app on their Facebook Page.

Link Your Facebook Page To Twitter

To start syncing your Facebook updates to Twitter, simply navigate to www.facebook.com/twitter to add the application, and click the Link a Page to Twitter button.

From there, choose the Page you wish to link to Twitter and click Link to Twitter.

As the Page administrator, you can decide whether to share everything you publish on your Facebook Page with your Twitter followers, or be more selective and choose from Status Updates, Links, Photos, Notes and Events. Status updates and links work best as these types of content can be consumed via Twitter without users having to return to Facebook.

If you have multiple Pages, you can also link each of those Pages to different Twitter accounts.

Updates are posted to Twitter with a shortened URL from bit.ly.

6 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Do This

Syncing up your brand’s Twitter profile with your Facebook Page seems like a smart idea, but it’s not something that we would recommend for a number of reasons.

1. Twitter Isn’t Facebook – They’re very different social platforms with different communities, expectations and norms. You won’t get as many clicks or as many people following your calls to action unless you write for your network-specific audience.

The full version of this article, which covers all six reasons why you should write custom updates for each network instead of cross-posting, can be found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s complete guide to marketing, advertising, and ecommerce on Facebook.

Here’s an interesting tidbit from the Google+ stats trackers: Three quarters (or more) of Google+ users are male.

SocialStatistics, a third-party site that gathers data from select profiles, pegs the percentage of male users at 86.8%, while FindPeopleOnPlus, which curates information from about a million users, says men constitute 73.7% of Google+.

FindPeopleOnPlus also discovered that 95% of the Google+ users who say they are “looking for love” on the site are male. Some 25,000 users in their sample identify themselves as single, versus 19,000 married and 12,000 in a relationship. The vast majority of the million users sampled don’t say what they are.

With around 60% of users identifying themselves as web developers or software engineers, that paints a fairly stereotypical picture of Google+’s userbase: nerdy guys who have deep understandings of technology and who don’t mind killing some time setting up Circles of friends.

It’s true that the early adopters of any new technology are usually male. But Google+ will have to appeal to a mainstream audience if it’s to reach mass adoption anytime soon. Consider the gender breakdown for Google+’s biggest competitor, Facebook. The social network is close to a 50-50 split between men and women. And some of Facebook’s most addicted, most enthusiastic users are women.

Meanwhile, Google is about to stop requiring users to input their gender — meaning we may get less accurate stats as time progresses.

Screenshots: Inside Google+

Google+ Logo

This is the Google+ logo.

Google+ Icons

The Google+ icons. Starting top left and circling to the right: Circles, Hangouts, Home, Sparks, Profile, Photos.

New Google+ Navigation Bar

All Google sites will sport the new Google+ navigation bar. It includes notifications, profile information and content sharing options.

Google+ Stream

This is the Google+ Stream, where users share content and see what their friends are sharing. It is similar to the Facebook News Feed.

Google+ Circles

Google+ Circles is Google's version of the Facebook friend list or the Twitter List. Users can select multiple friends and drag-and-drop them into groups. This makes it easier to send stuff to friends, family or the entire world.

Google+ Circles Editor

This is the Google+ Circles editor in action. Google has created unique animations for adding and removing friends through HTML5.

Google+ Sparks

Google+ Sparks is Google's content recommendation and discovery engine. Users can search different topics and find relevant articles, videos and photos. Users can then share that content with their friends.

More About: gender, Google, Google Plus, sausagefest, trending

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The search giant earned $9.03 billion in Q2 2011, a 32% increase from Q2 2010. Operating income also increased by 32% to $2.88 billion. Google garnered $2.51 billion in net income for the quarter, up from $1.84 billion in Q2 2010. The numbers are also up from Google’s Q1 results of $8.58 billion in revenue and $2.8 billion in operating income.

69% of the company’s revenue came from Google-owned sites ($6.23 billion), while 28% of Google’s revenue came from AdSense ($2.48 billion). 54% of total revenues were from international business. Google now employs 28,768 people full-time, up from 26,316 in Q1 2011.

At the same time, Google’s overhead is exploding. The company’s costs grew from $4.46 billion to $6.15 billion — an increase of 39% from Q2 2010 to Q2 2011.

Still, investors are very happy with Google’s numbers, with shares rising by 58 points in after hours trading, an increase of 11%. We’re on Google’s investor call, so stay tuned for more details about Google’s record-breaking quarter.

More About: earnings, Google, Google Plus

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We know food trucks are embracing social media, but there’s more to running a food truck than marketing on Twitter and Facebook.

There are trucks all over the country that are going high-tech to launch, build and manage their businesses.

Here’s a look at how food trucks are innovating with marketing tools, productivity apps and the truck design itself.

1. Evernote: Rice Paper Scissors

Friends and street-food vendors Valerie Luu & Katie Kwan founded Rice Paper Scissor, a pop-up food cart in San Francisco. Dealing with the logistics of finding locations, planning a menu, marketing and finance means they need to stay organized, and they use notetaking app Evernote to do so.

On the Evernote blog, they write, “We snap photos of potential locations with Evernote on our iPhone — we can then review and discuss potential locations later.” The women also create shopping checklists on the app and religiously check off items and tasks to stay on top of things and within their budget.

“The cool thing about Evernote is that it’s this amazing business tool for us, but it’s also a place to store and track all sorts of ideas. We keep track of ideas for home decor, writing projects, and conversations with interesting people,” they say.

2. Square: The Meatyballs Mobile

In the world of merchant processing, Square has quickly become a rising star. Just ask the team behind one of the many food trucks that employ the credit card reader on their mobile devices. “We use Square over a traditional POS because it’s simple and we don’t need anything else,” says Angus Gorberg of The Meatyballs Mobile. “The ubiquitous nature of the smartphone means that we don’t have to train new drivers on how to use the app because it’s easy to learn.” Plus, Gorberg says the fact that there are no monthly fees or commitment guidelines and that Square has “tremendous” customer service means Meatyballs won’t be switching from Square any time soon.

As gourmet food trucks knock down the preconceived notion of “street meat,” digital tools like Square make running a mobile business much easier and more efficient, since you don’t have to waste time counting cash or getting change from the bank. “It adds a great tech element to the experience, and we would be super disappointed if we couldn’t get our balls into the mouths of the cashless,” says Gorberg.

3. Intuit GoPayment: Chi’Lantro BBQ

Korean BBQ joint Chi’Lantro went digital just in time for this year’s SXSW conference. Like Square, Intuit‘s GoPayment offers a free card reader (with no monthly fee) that works on more than 40 mobile devices. Intuit worked with the popular Austin food truck, which hit up various SXSW hotspots, offering 25-cent tacos to those who followed the truck on Twitter and paid by credit card.

Jae Kim, owner and founder of Chi’Lantro BBQ, says the promotion was a win-win and is proud that his food truck uses iPads and Androids as credit card machines, which is convenient both for the business and the customer.

4. Mobile Meteor: Frying Dutchmen

Mobile Meteor is a company that helps businesses create mobile websites. The rise of the food truck, though, has expanded their business, and now it has functionality that works with a food truck’s existing Twitter account. Food trucks, such as New York’s Frying Dutchmen, for example, send a tweet to @Mvendor with “#open” plus the truck’s address, and a pin automatically appears on a map on the business’s mobile website. Tweeting with “#closed” removes the location on the map. Truck owners can also use a web app and their smartphone’s internal GPS to update the truck map, without having to log in to Facebook or Twitter. Click here to see a Prezi that explains how Mobile Meteor works.

Since Twitter and Facebook are blocked at a lot of businesses (especially at financial firms in neighborhoods like Midtown Manhattan), Mobile Meteor provides another way for trucks to share their ever-changing locations with hungry customers — on their smartphones.

5. Paperlinks: Austin Food Carts

Another SXSW food truck and tech integration came from QR-code startup Paperlinks — apparently digital-food partnerships happen when digital natives are crammed into a food truck mecca for a week. By scanning a branded QR-code sticker for Austin Food Carts, SXSW-goers could access a list of truck locations, a Twitter feed and information about the Austin food truck scene.

Paperlinks provides QR-code marketing solutions for individuals and businesses — the company has a self-serve online platform for creating a QR-code, a QR-code scanning app (although the codes scan with any QR-code reader) and design and printing services for designer QR-codes and large-scale campaigns, like the one at SXSW. Paperlinks is in talks with other food carts in L.A. and San Francisco.

6. Make Your Own App: Schnitzel and Things

Looking to order your favorite food truck dish? There’s an app for that. In fact, some food trucks make their own app for the customer’s convenience. Digitally savvy New York food truck Schnitzel and Things has an app on which you can place your schnitzel order and find out where to pick it up, since the truck location changes daily.

Looking to make your own app? Here are some tools to help you do so.

7. Mobi Munch: Nom Nom Truck

Mobi Munch is a one-stop shop for would-be food truck entrepreneurs. They can purchase mobile food infrastructure, learn how to use social media tools, design a menu, have access to human resources tools and get tips on how to scout and reserve locations. The package has a $125,000 price tag, which is apparently a reasonable price for a food truck concept. Like we said, it’s a one-stop shop, and several prominent food trucks were built on the structure, including Nom Nom Truck, one of Los Angeles’ most popular snack mobiles.

8. Digital Menu Board: Jack in the Box

While many food trucks keep it simple and write a chalk menu each day — perhaps even changing menu items daily — one food truck has the deep pockets to finance something a bit snazzier. Fast food chain Jack in the Box has a 34′-long Munchie Mobile food truck that boasts a 47-inch digital menu board. Obviously the advantage of a digital menu board as opposed to a chalk one is that the images can change. So what does Jack’s digital display show? Spokesperson Brian Luscumb admits that it’s pretty static and lists menu items, pricing and food shots. However, if the Munchie Mobile is at an event or running a promotion — like when the truck team was giving away free tacos at a March of Dimes event — then screen can be updated to reflect the offerings.

There’s a lot of potential for digital menu boards, as a food truck can display Twitter feeds, YouTube footage, truck locations and photos of the staff and consumers — it’s a blank canvas on which food trucks can get really creative and ramp up branding efforts.

9. Tapviva: La Cocina

Tapviva’s three co-founders lived in the Bay Area when they got fed up with waiting in line for ten minutes at Starbucks. It occurred to them: Why can’t we order and pay ahead of time on our phones, pick up our coffees and go? Basically, they wanted their food to wait for them, not the other way around.

Tapviva is currently running at La Cocina, a non-profit that helps mostly low-income Latina women start food businesses. Beginning next week, the Tapviva mobile ordering solution is going live at several La Cocina-affiliated carts and kiosks in the San Francisco area. The Tapviva platform will be onboard a grilled cheese cart that’s opening in Central Park this summer — Manhattan yuppies can have their grilled cheese prepped for them without having to pause their frisbee game. Tapviva’s pre-ordering system is reminiscent of the Zingle text-message ordering service, which will also be launching on New York food trucks later this year.

What other digital integrations have you seen on tech-savvy food trucks? Let us know in the comments.

The Social-Savvy Food Truck Series is supported by the Ben and Jerry’s Scoop Truck. In New York City or San Francisco and want a free scoop? Follow @BenJerrysTruck and @BenJerrysWest for details!

Images courtesy of Flickr, Patrick Giblin, and Jack in the Box

More About: evernote, facebook, GoPayment, intuit, mobile apps, paperlinks, Social-Savvy Food Truck Series, Square, tapviva, twitter

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In the tech and social media world, daily deals have become a bandwagon of sorts — something every other startup has been tacking onto their offerings to start generating revenue.

And generate revenue they do. These web-based coupons are the sole business of Groupon, which just saw an astoundingly profitable IPO.

But where did consumers’ love for daily deals come from? After all, we’ve come a long way from our coupon-clipping heyday in the 1960s, when around half of American consumers clipped paper coupons from grocery store circulars.

And although the use of digital coupons, including web, mobile and other innovative media types, has skyrocketed, daily deals have continued to make great strides since their 2004 launch with Woot, the site that started the daily deal craze.

Here’s a look at the changes coupons have seen, along with data on the rise of daily deals.

Click image to see larger version.

Top image courtesy of iStockphoto, webphotographeer

More About: coupon, daily deals, infographic

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Google+ has launched to great aplomb, but its “project” status means some tools have yet to be developed. While Google works on adding more features, some available Chrome extensions can fill the functionality gap.

Whether you want to get better notifications, enjoy improved sharing options, or scroll through your stream more quickly, there’s an extension available — for free — to help.

Take a look through the gallery for five tried and tested picks that will help you be more productive on Plus. Let us know in the comments about other Chrome Extensions you’ve found useful — they may end up in a future gallery.

1. G+ Count in Title: Add a Notification Count to Your Google+ Tab

A simple but useful option, this extension adds a counter to your Google+ page tab so you can see at a glance how many new posts you have to view.

2. G+ Extended: Add Shortcuts

Simple and very unobtrusive, this extension adds more shortcuts, as well as offering one-press "+1" options, when a post is highlighted you can press "e" to expand all the comments or "s" for quick sharing options.

3. Helper For Google+: Get Desktop Notifications

This extension has tweaked search and also lets you share to Twitter. Helper gives you desktop notifications for new Google+ posts with a little pop-up window or an audio alert option. There's also a "translate" button, which some may find useful.

4. +Comment Toggle: Hide Comments

If your stream is busy, then this extension will save you some precious scrolling time. It automatically hides all comments on a post, reducing the on-screen info to a simple comment tally (which you can choose to expand if you wish.)

5. Extended Share For Google+: Share Plus Posts to Other Networks

This handy extension expands your sharing options. It adds a "Share on..." button that gives you the ability to quickly and easily share a Plus post to Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

More About: chrome, Chrome Extensions, Google, google chrome, Google Lists, Google Plus, Google Plus Lists, List, trending

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