Online Marketing and eFocus Marketing

eFocus Marketing.com – Working on Marketing Strategy, Database optimization, and Affiliate management with more assignments on the horizon. It looks like things are picking up again and it’s always good to see that business is up. It makes work that much more enjoyable even though the economic environment is still far from rosy when so many are being negatively affected! Let’s hop that this is a preamble to unemployment dropping below 9% soon. http://bit.ly/j1wjHK

Artmuse.Net – Art, Photo and Stock Photography

Re-launching stock photography site, Artmuse.Net:
OK, one of my passion has always been photo and film or now video since all is going the digital path. I’ve had Artmuse.Net for a long time and have not done much but I finally decided to take the time to take care of this site. I’ll be adding a great number of pictures as well as new tips an review of equipment soon. I hope that you’ll come visit… http://bit.ly/lg2NCb

June Newsletter Includes News on FaceBook, Affiliate Solutions, Video Essential and Much More

Don’t miss great articles and resources including:

Facebook Introduces Tagging of Items Shown on Photographs
click here to read the article

New and Top-Tier Solutions in Affiliate Software
click here to read the article

Volkswagen Launches the New GTI Using iPhone App as its Main Promotion Channel
click here to read the article

Video Essentials: A 5 Minutes Tutorial on what Everyone Must Know About Videos Online
click here to read the article

Plan for the Social Buyer Before it is Too Late
click here to read the article

Google Introduces ProtoRPC
click here to read the article

Six “Must Know” Oracle Commands
click here to read the article

I also have some important White Papers from IBM, Comscore, Adobe and much more including:

Digital Marketing Trends Survey – 2011

US Internet Stats for Q4 2010 (Comscore)

CMOS Online Brand

Userlytics’ User Behavior

eMail Institute 2011 Spring Lookout

Benefit of Cloud Computing (IBM)

Read it all at click here to read the article

EnContext Advertising Offers Better Reporting and CPA Option for Advertisers

Well, we’ve done it and it’s quite exhilarating to see a concept coming to life “brick by brick” sort of speak. EnContext Advertising is now providing full reporting support to our clients accounting for every click’s origin, action taken, offer selected, and much more. Next, a CPA capability something that is being tested… Check it out at http://bit.ly/fF9BOG

Video essentials: A 5-minute tutorial

(From iMedia)

To say things are changing is an understatement. Morgan Stanley (2010) recently reported in a study that there are now more social network users than email users. An even more profound and sobering fact is that 80% of business buyers today say that they found their vendors as opposed to vendors finding them. If you are a Chief Sales Officer, when was the last time you checked how often your sales teams are making contact with potential buyers? You might be surprise that most often, outbound calls are going directly into voice mail. Don’t worry, you are in good company as 85% of business phone calls go into voice mail and are never returned.

What is happening? For starters, businesses using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking platforms are expected to grow at a rate of 20%-30% this year and even at a greater rate next year (CIO Insight, 2010). The Fortune 500 is jumping on board with nearly 70% actively pursuing social networking as a business benefit for their buyers (McKinsey, 2009). Marketing, as we know it today, will see its’ percent of activities devoted to social marketing increase past 50% over the next two years. What we are seeing is the rising importance of social marketing and social selling. The definitions as well as trajectory of social marketing and social selling are still in a progressive state however to ignore them can put your company in peril.

While the Fortune 500 may have started actively pursuing social networking technologies, we are still left to wonder how actively the Fortune 500 and other businesses are adjusting their views of buyers. These views of buyers ultimately affect the ability to plan. If your views of buyers have gone unchanged over the past few years and are still in the framework of buyers in companies making decisions via meetings internally with sales representatives, then most certainly this needs adjusting. More than likely, these views put your marketing and selling strategies in the framework of being highly dependent upon outbound activities that are intent on finding buyers. And almost by default, leadership’s role is left to constantly exhorting the troops to try harder, to push harder, and to find ways to make contact.

In terms of how an organization conducts strategic planning, it may be time for some revisions on how to plan for acquiring and retaining buyers. If your planning is not taking into account changing behaviors of buyers, then the organization will be in misstep with its buyers. Planning today should include a significant component devoted to understanding your social buyer persona and understanding the implications they may have on your business strategy and structure. There should also be a healthy realization that knowledge of buyers may be not up to date. Insight into the social buyer persona is even more important if your targeted segment happens to be one of those adopting social technologies at a fast rate.

An organization also must take care to putting themselves in a contradictory position. What do I mean? For many organizations, they rely on the sales force’s knowledge of buyers and then plan around that knowledge gleamed from call reports and sales automation systems. However, trending information clearly points to the fact that sales reps are having a hard time making contact with buyers and don’t get involved until much later in the buying cycle. Therefore, if planning is done solely on the input of sales knowledge, then this knowledge is certainly limited for there is a significant non-involvement factor in the buying cycle. I find it a contradiction when I hear an organization claim to know its buyers yet has a heavy reliance on field sales and little inbound and social marketing tactics in place.

In today’s social age, organizations that will put themselves on an evolutionary path that puts them in alignment with their new social buyer persona will have the best chance of succeeding in the future. I’m afraid that the “future” is much nearer then we think at the moment. This will require a shift in how a company goes about planning around its buyers. It starts with a dedicated commitment to understand exactly who their social buyer personas are and devoting strategy planning to this understanding.

For many companies today, it requires a shift in thinking of social networking technologies in terms of something that social buyers do to accepting the realization that it know defines who they are. If an organization doesn’t begin to put planning into place for their defined social buyer personas soon, when they eventually do – it may be too late.

To read the June Newsletter: Click Here