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The Cycle of Strategy

Posted by cgseo under Social Media

Share The Cycle of Strategy This content from: Duct Tape Marketing Effective strategy, be it marketing related or otherwise, is what really sets one company apart from another. I’m not really saying that every successful company plans and implements better strategy, in some cases strategy just happens because a market and a product find each other and grow organically. However, small businesses that understand the power of an overarching marketing strategy, filtered and infused in every tactical process, will usually enjoy greater success. The problem with strategy however, is that most people don’t really know what it is or, if they do, hobble its effectiveness by viewing its creation as something of a linear event – hold a planning retreat, decide on everything in a vacuum, report back next year. I don’t think strategy works well like that. Strategy planning is an essential first step, but at best it’s guesswork. You’re obligated to do it to get the ball rolling, but not as some sort of final destination to act rigidly against. The value of a marketing plan and strategy comes into focus through the process of planning coupled with real world analysis and a willingness to shift your thinking as you go. Strategy is more circular than most people view it. In fact, the upward spiral might actually be the best metaphor. In my experience there are about seven steps in the ongoing planning and execution of a marketing strategy. When effectively viewed as a tool, these steps are never done, they are just waiting around for the next cycle. These cycles happen for one reason primarily – the market tells you the answer. That answer can come in the form of growth, an opportunity to seize, or even an economic downturn. Either way, the circular motion needs to stay in tact. I believe business owners need to continuously monitor these seven elements of the marketing strategy circle. Who – Are you attracting the ideal customer and can you more narrowly define who that is? What – Do you have a clear core point of differentiation? What is it and how are you communicating it? The Plan – What action steps do you need to take today and tomorrow to bring your marketing strategy to life? What goals have your set for success of the strategy? Execute – Are you executing against the plan? Measure – What indicators need to be tracked and captured to allow you to determine your success? Analyze – How will you analyze the data you collect to determine if you are on course, need to make alterations or even move towards a new opportunity? Shift – How will you change course? How will you start the cycle over again? Holding the guess, test, and realign state of mind when it comes to marketing strategy is the one of the surest ways to successfully tap the power of effective growth by way of planning. Image credit: ZeroOne Related Posts: Stop Wasting Your Time With Social Media What's So Scary About Marketing Strategy? Get Your Shine On I Hate Business Plans Tis better to be found than to find Powered by Contextual Related Posts Like this post? Share it with others

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The Cycle of Strategy

Mommy bloggers gather to sharpen Web, business and marketing skills – San Jose Mercury News

Posted by cgseo under Social Media

Mommy bloggers gather to sharpen Web, business and marketing skills San Jose Mercury News ... for free ("Your time and your experience and your audience are worth something," Romero said) to the benefits of using Facebook fan pages and Twitter. ...

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Mommy bloggers gather to sharpen Web, business and marketing skills - San Jose Mercury News

Location-based Applications are Changing the Game for SEO and Marketing – Promotion World (press release)

Posted by cgseo under Social Media

TIME Location-based Applications are Changing the Game for SEO and Marketing Promotion World (press release) One of the most popular sites for this is foursquare, but recently Facebook and Twitter are following suit. So what does this mean for SEO and marketing ? ... Forget Foursquare: Why Location Marketing Is New Point-of-Purchase The Business Insider Location-based marketing takes off iMedia Connection How the Fashion Industry Uses Location-Based Marketing Mashable (blog) Orange County Business Journal all 29 news articles

Forget Foursquare: Why Location Marketing Is New Point-of-Purchase – The Business Insider

Posted by cgseo under Social Media

TIME Forget Foursquare: Why Location Marketing Is New Point-of-Purchase The Business Insider Its social appeal has not yet been emulated, though social giants such as Facebook and Twitter represent a threat. Today, one-quarter of Facebook's 400 ... Big Brother Orange County Business Journal all 17 news articles

7 Insanely Useful Ways to Search Twitter for Marketing

Posted by cgseo under Social Media, Web Marketing

Share 7 Insanely Useful Ways to Search Twitter for Marketing This content from: Duct Tape Marketing This article originally appeared on American Express OPEN Forum and is one of the most retweeted articles I’ve ever written so I thought I would share it with you here. As a marketing tool Twitter gets much more interesting and useful when you can filter out 99% of the junk that doesn’t apply to your objectives and focus on the stuff that matters. The basic search.twitter.com functionality is fine for searching things that are being said about your search terms. The advanced search function offers more ways to slice and dice the stream, but still leaves some room for improvement as it only searches what’s being said and where. From a marketing standpoint who is saying it might be more useful. Now that the search engines are all pretty geeked up over real time search you can create some very powerful searches and alerts combining Google and Twitter. 1) Target by occupation Let’s say you have a business that sells an awesome service to attorneys. A simple search on Twitter will turn up thousands of mentions of the word attorney, but many of them will be from people talking about this or that attorney or the need to hire or not hire one. That’s probably not very helpful for your purposes. However, if you cruise over to Google and use a handful of operators from the Google shortcut library (more on that here) you can create a search that plows through Twitter and gives you a list of all the users that have the word “attorney” in their title (username and/or real name) – Click on this search phrase and see what happens – intitle:”attorney * on twitter” site:twitter.com – what you’ll find is a handy list of attorneys of one sort or another on Twitter. Without getting too technical, this search basically asks Google to look in the title attribute of profile pages on Twitter – obviously you can use any word to replicate this. The * tells Google to find the words “attorney on Twitter” without regard to order or other words – “on Twitter” appears in the title of every profile page so we need that term to make sure we search profile pages only. 2) Target by bio In some cases searching through the optional biographical information can be more helpful than the username or real name fields. Maybe you’re looking for a very specific term or some of the folks you are targeting only reference their profession in their bio. Google search to the rescue here again. This time add the intext attribute, the word bio and our key phrase to search bios – So a search for web designers would look like this – intext:”bio * web designer” site:twitter.com . When you look at this list you might notice that none of the people on the list would have been found by searching in their title, as in the first tip, for web designer. Try it both ways to test for best results. 3) Target by location Location search by itself is simple using the Twitter advanced search tool – if you want a list of people in Austin you would use this in Twitter – near:”Austin, TX” within:25mi and Twitter would use the location field to show you Austin Tweeters. But . . . let’s say you wanted to target salons in Austin or maybe the whole of Texas – it’s back to Google to mix and match – (intitle:”salon * on twitter” OR intext:”bio * salon”) intext:”location * TX” site:twitter.com – we search the title, bio and location to get a very targeted list of Salons in Texas on Twitter. Note the OR function for multiple queries. 4) New sign ups Another handy thing about using any of the searches above is that you can also use the exact operators to create Google Alerts . By going to Google and putting in your search string as described above you’ll get everything they have now, but by setting up an alert you’ll get an email or RSS alert when a new attorney (or whatever you’re targeting) joins Twitter – I can think of some powerful ways to reach out to that new person just trying to find some new friends! 5) Keep up on your industry Some of the best information shared on Twitter comes in the form of shared links. In other words people tweet out good stuff they find and point people to it using a link. I love to use a filtered Twitter search to further wade through research on entire industries, but reduce the noise by only following tweets that have links in them and eliminating retweets that are essentially duplicates – “small business” OR entrepreneur OR “start up” filter:links – this gets that job done and produces an RSS feed if I want to send it to Google Reader. Don’t forget the “quotation marks” around two or more word phrases or you will get every mention of small and business. 6) Competitive eavesdropping Lots of people set up basic searches to listen to what their competitors are saying and what others are saying about the competition. I would suggest you take it one step further and create and follow a search that also includes what the conversation they are having with the folks they communicate with – not just what people are saying about them, but to them and vice versa – from:comcastcares OR to:comcastcares . 7) Trending photos Photos have become very big on Twitter and the real time nature of the tool means photos show up there before they show up most anywhere. If you want to find an image related to a hot trend, or anything for that matter, simply put the search phase you have in mind follow by one of the more well known Twitter image uploading services such as TwitPic and you’ll get nothing but images. So, your search on Twitter might be – olympics twitpic OR ow.ly (You can add more photosharing sites to expand the search). There, Twitter just go way more interesting didn’t it? Related Posts: Mining Twitter with Google Turns Up Some Interesting Stuff A Practical Use for Twitter Twitter People Search is Back Adding search to your site Google Alerts Hack Powered by Contextual Related Posts Like this post? Share it with others

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7 Insanely Useful Ways to Search Twitter for Marketing