Brand5’s Internet Marketing Philosopy

People are always asking us questions like, “What’s your take on Facebook?”, or “What am I supposed to do about Foursquare?”. We love those kinds of questions!

To help you get to know us better, we’ve put together the following quick guide to show you our high-level philosophy on some of the most popular aspects of Internet Marketing.

website content strategyWebsite Content – This is where all of the magic of Internet Marketing happens. The content on a website should be the foundation of a brand’s Internet Marketing strategy. Everything else, like social media for example, feeds off a website’s content. Without a long-term content strategy that’s sound in search engine optimization fundamentals, an Internet Marketing strategy won’t work.

wordpress integrationBlogging – This as a required piece of any Internet marketing strategy. If a company’s goals include generating more relevant traffic, then a blog has to be part of the formula because it helps three basic principals of SEO fundamentals – more indexed pages, more inbound links, and more traffic. A blog must have a defined purpose, preferably one that’s unique. In almost every case it has to be be hosted on the brand’s website (never on a WordPress subdomain for example) and it must have a long-term strategy for constant posting.

facebook marketingFacebook – Most companies don’t have unlimited marketing resources. Therefore they need to make careful decisions about resource allocation. Every company has a Facebook Page these days. But how many of those pages are actually returning value? How many are diminishing value? Facebook is extremely powerful, but it’s not for every company.

By the way, there’s far more to Facebook than just Fan Pages. Applications may not be what they were three or four years ago (mostly because Facebook has done a lot to discourage application development), but apps can still be highly-effective in the right situations.

twitter expertTwitter – There are a lot of people talking on Twitter, but how many people are actually listening? We don’t think that many. Unless your brand is a well-known, national brand it’s tough to build up a base of followers that will actually bring value to your investment on the micro-blogging platform. In terms of followers, we believe in quality over quantity. Having a few engaged followers is far more valuable than thousands of followers who don’t care what you say.

Twitter is, at least, very valuable for listening to potential and current customers, as well as competitors. It’s an awesome tool for customer support – provided your customers are on Twitter (something you should know about your customers).

Like Facebook, Twitter is another pressure point that most companies feel. Unfortunately, in a rush to keep up, most companies manage their Twitter presence without any strategy. That results in wasted resources and a diminished brand.

foursquare for businessFoursquare – Using Foursquare as a representation for all of the “check-in” services, right now there’s far more value to the brand than the user in this space. Every business should claim their venue(s) and monitor them. There’s a lot that can be learned about customers. We’re all big fans of testing incentive programs. Try some special offers and coupons. See what effect they have, if any, on sales. Until more brands get engaged, it doesn’t seem with the time for consumers to check-in to everywhere they go. Hopefully that will change because crowdsourcing and geo-location apps have a lot of potential.

marketing with yelpYelp – Yelp really is an analogy for reputation management. It’s an imperative to monitor what’s being said about your brand. And the easiest way to make sure good things are being said are to first, provide the type of service people deserve. Second, sites like Yelp need to be embraced instead of ignored. One simple way to embrace them is by encouraging customers to leave you a review. Combine that with constant monitoring and there’s now a level of control over what’s being said.

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