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Recently Lee Odden of Online Marketing Blog conducted a survey on “How Online Marketing Blog readers use twitter?” The survey has 220 respondents which is a decent number and results are also pretty much in line with the expectations.

To read more about the survey and result, please visit Top 10 Uses of twitter and Tools.

One of the uses which Lee mentions in the last part of the post is “Customer Support and Customer Outreach“.

I would go a step ahead than Customer Support and Customer Outreach and would talk about Engaging customers with Twitter. Customer support is a product’s view of marketing where customers are seen as a burden and hence the word “support”.

Today businesses talk about customer centric marketing and believe in relationships. For maintaining relationships, it is important to engage customers rather than supporting them. But how does one engage customers?

Customers get engaged when they have an ecosystem where they have the freedom to not only provide feedback, express their concerns and complaints but also partner in designing better value proposition for them i.e. better products and services for themselves. The engaging ecosystem also provides a platform for businesses to offer their services in a fun manner which in this case is 140 words tweets. J And above all, it comes free.

To provide an example of engaging customers through twitter, assume an online internet based marketing club which offers its services to small and medium enterprises. Now being a small company itself, it can’t afford to invest much on marketing collaterals or feedback channels. Also since the industry is so dynamic, it becomes imperative for the company to partner the customers in designing value proposition rather them delivering them a product.

Keeping all these things in mind, what should the company do? How should it make sure that it engages its customers in the true sense?

It uses twitter as a platform for feedback where customers can complain, if they have any and then they are taken good care of (and not Support). The company also uses twitter to provide consulting to its customers as telephone sessions across the globe would cost much more. Community is built around twitter for people to interact, communicate and share. Above all, it provides a medium to the company to make their customers, partner in designing better value proposition in future. Customers could be reached directly and requested to provide invaluable insights on products before the actual launch.

Conclusion

Uses like customer support are product’s view of marketing and not good for any business. Today for businesses to thrive, it has become imperative for companies to talk about engaging customers rather than satisfying them or just meeting their needs. And Twitter provides a perfect platform to companies to do just that Engage Customers.

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OK! A quick question: How many $$ is a million hits per day worth for? Of course there is no definitive answer to that question and I don’t think an industry benchmark exists for it.

When it comes to the traditional medium of advertising (the idiot box!) there are definitive models used by broadcasters and Television channel owners to ask for a price. Factors involved in quoting a price primarily consists of the viewership (TRPs) and the length of airtime involved.

What would be an analogues model on the web? It’s not very complex on the web. It basically boils down to Number of hits and the ad size and placement. But how much would you charge?

Here is a case in point: The Indian Railways online booking website invited bids for ad space on their site, perhaps one of the most viewed websites in India (irctc.co.in) . They receive around 5 million hits per day (The newspaper ad did not mention whether these were unique hits), and they have quoted an earnest money of Rs 600000 ($15000) for an ad on their pages for a  period of two years.

So next time somebody asks for $$ for X hits, I am surely going to do a quick rough comparison!

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I read somewhere in a Philip Kotler’s marketing book that the smallest and the simplest definition of marketing is “meeting needs profitably”. Therefore the process starts from identification of needs, designing a product or service which contains requisite features and then the exchange of the same. The exchange will leave all the parties involved in the transaction better off i.e. a win-win game and not win-lose game.

For both (assuming there are only 2 parties involved, although there could be more than 2 as well) the parties to gain from the transaction, it is important or rather essential that both see some value proposition in the exchange. Due to its extreme importance in the business, the concept of value proposition is taught in every B-School. Every marketer, every business man, every CEO swears by it. They always talk about adding value to their share holders and stake holders.

But does the concept hold any relevance at SME (Small and medium enterprises) level? Do they also understand so called Value Proposition?

Recently I met with one of my friends. He has skates manufacturing unit in Noida (a suburb of Delhi). He happened to mention that he would like to have web presence for his business. We readily offered our (my friend as well) services but he mentioned that the final decision had to be taken by his father, who was running the business. He also warned us that his father is a tough nut to crack as many SEO consultants have found out earlier. So we decided to meet his father to explain to him the benefits of internet marketing and internet at large.

After an hour discussion, we were able to convince his father about the benefits of internet marketing and got the final approval. My friend was ecstatic and surprised as to how did we pull it off!

The answer is simple.

“Value Proposition”

Yes, we tried to show him the value which he would derive out of internet marketing instead of talking about Meta tags, keywords, alternate tags etc. which previous SEO companies did. We understood a very elementary thing that at the end of day, it is the extra business which he is interested in and not “search engine visibility”. He does not see value in being top on Google or Yahoo but generating that extra revenue.

So after this whole experience, I can safely say that yes the concept of “value proposition” is universal, exists even at Small scale level and will never lose its importance

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How to find the right keywords for your web presence?

One would say why another post on something which has been beaten around so much. By this time, everyone knows everything about keywords for websites or blogs and they don’t need another article/ post on the same.

But recently I met with one of my friends who was in the process of optimizing his web presence. During the conversation, he mentioned about the process of keyword mining for his business. After listening to him, I thought to myself

“Is it really the way how it should be done?”

The process involved usage of one of the free tools available to find out root word for his business and a tail related with that. In this context, the stem/ root word was human resource. And woila!! That was it. The search for the right keywords ended there.

This whole process of keyword mining forced me to pen down my thoughts about how it should be done.

First businesses should not look at their web presence as mere websites. Problem creeps up when the management doesn’t show much enthusiasm and interest in building a powerful web presence and treat it as just another marketing activity. Web presence (or web sites for small businesses) is their signature; it is like a visiting card which would tempt people to come to you and buy something from you; it is your identity to the world. And if it is your identity to the world, then care as well as quality time should be devoted in developing it.

Another important thing to be kept in the mind is that YOU are the best SEO consultant for your web presence. No one else could help you more than you yourself. It is you who know inside out about your business and not somebody else who has technical aptitude. Therefore invest time with your SEO consultant or company for finding out the right keywords for your web presence.

The process of finding out the right keywords starts from putting yourself into the shoes of your customers and ask these basic yet important questions:-

What do your customers look for when they come to you?
What are those words which are repeated in your marketing and advertising materials?
What is your differentiation strategy in the industry?
What is your USP?
What sort of questions do your customers (both external as well as internal) ask you?
What would you say if you were to ask what business are you in?

Only after you have answers to these simple yet important questions, any SEO company or consultant can help you. After this step, it doesn’t matter what tool he uses or whether it is paid or free.

 To sum up, no one else can really help you in identification of the right keywords other than YOU. SEO companies will merely execute the things but ultimately it is YOU who holds the key for your web presence’s better search engine visibility and drive up the sales since at the end of day it is the hike in revenue which matters to YOU.

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Before any marketing campaign, it is necessary to understand the landscape first and then devise a strategy according to that.

If that comes across as a common sense, then why don’t we do the same for search engine marketing? I wonder how many self proclaimed SEO companies actually understand the science behind search engines. SEO, acronym for search engine marketing, is not only about Meta tags, keyword targeting or keyword density. True search engine marketers need to understand the anatomy of various kinds of search engines and the search process.

Most SERPs (search engine result pages) present information from various sources like

1) Crawler based search engines

2) Search engine advertising

3) Human edited search engines, also known as web directories

4) Speciality or topical engines also known as vertical search engines

While most SERPs present hybrid information with data collected from more than one source. But search engines are classified according to the main source used. For example, Google is crawler based search engine. Yahoo directory or Dmoz falls in web directory category.

Now delving more into the crawler based search engines, it consists of 3 main components

1) Spiders: Responsible for finding and fetching web pages; a process known as crawling or spidering. Spiders also built a list of words and phrases found on each web page.

2) Indexer: Creates a database of words and phrases and then places web pages into the database.

3) Query Processor: It allows user to run searches for keywords on that database and fetches the most appropriate results from it.

I am sure this simple knowledge about search engines and the search process will go a long way in launching an effective search engine marketing campaign.

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