Now we are starting to see a new generation of start-ups focusing on moving transactions back to local neighborhoods through location-based mobile advertising.

Imagine this….

The Broncos are kicking off at Suncorp Stadium against your favorite team in 1 hour’s time.  Instead of going to eBay and bidding on tickets that won’t arrive until next week, now you can utilise location based apps on your mobile.  These apps allow you to see what is available within your local area, meaning that you may only have to make a short trip down the road to purchase those hallowed footy tickets.

But these apps don’t stop at tickets! You can see garage sales, jobs, real estate properties, restaurants, surfboards and more, all based on where you are located.

Some app development companies have been very specific in what they are targeting. Real Estate start-ups Zillow and Trulia have focused purely on Real Estate listings. Both apps allow users to instantly browse properties nearby and Trulia has noted that the percentage of its online visitors who also used its mobile app was as high as 46% in some US cities.

Another market that is inherently local is the job market. In the US, startup Zaarly is gaining some traction by creating a peer-to-peer job market. Zaarly allows users to state what they want done – bring me a drink, mow my lawn, teach me algebra – and the price they are willing to pay. Users can apply for jobs that appeal to them in their local area.

As advertising shifts local, here are some tips to ensure that your business is ready:

• Crawl before you can walk. If you’re a startup, or you are making your first investment into online marketing, get your backyard right first. Too many companies try to target everything under the sun and forget where their real customers come from.
• Be Specific. If you’re a restaurant, make sure that you’re listed on relevant apps like Urban Spoon etc. Keep an eye on what people are saying about your food. After all, if you’re only down the road from someone and they like your food, you’re likely to get them in your restaurant regularly.
• Target Local Keywords. When it comes to promoting your website, ensure that you are targeting a mixture of generic and local keywords. People are getting savvier and more specific in the way they search. Searchers are less willing to travel far distances.
• Remain Competitively Priced. With everything being at people’s fingertips through online and app-based devices, it’s imperative that your products/services are competitively priced.
• Get Social! Social Media strategies are incredibly effective in breaking down demographics amongst target markets. If your business hasn’t taken advantage of Facebook or Twitter, get in touch with Reload today!

Let us know how your business is ‘going local’.

Firstly,  as search engines are now factoring in social media content and interactions into their algorithms more and more, it is a no-brainer that social media is becoming a critical factor in the online success of your business. However, it is important that your chosen social media  partner develops a strategy to suit your business needs and objectives.

I see a few parallels with the late 90′s. Back then, many web design companies were trying to push every business into building an eCommerce powered website – even if there was no strategy behind it.

I see this happening in the Social Media landscape today. Many companies and ‘experts’ are simply pushing for their clients to build Facebook pages and twitter accounts without giving a second thought as to the reasons why the client needs these mediums or how they should be using these channels.

Choosing the right channels is a critical factor in any Social Media strategy. Where a Facebook page might be the best way to engage customers for one client, a poignant, industry leading blog might be the best solution for another.

It is also important to remember that, although social media can be very powerful, it often cannot replace the relationship building power that a simple lunch with a client can have.

Does your business rely heavily on offline relationship building and high valued, ongoing clients? If so, your social media strategy would not be customer relationship management focused.

However, I do personally believe that the integration of social media is critical to the success of the modern business; but only if an air tight social media strategy has been drafted first.

So where do you start when looking to hire a social media marketing company or strategist?

I have complied six top tips that I believe will help you narrow your search:

1. Look for a company who is aligned with your business vision and mission. They need to understand your “DNA” and all that you stand for so that they can correctly look at the reasons for setting up your social media strategy.
2. Choose someone with proven success and a good track record in developing successful, custom social media strategies for their clients.
3. Make sure you have a meeting with your company/strategist to discuss or determine your social media goals and objectives.
4. Find out from your company/strategist what they envision to be the optimum strategy for your business. Do you agree with this? You don’t want to pay lots of money on a strategy you are not comfortable with or do not have the resources for.
5. Demand that a content calendar is developed as part of your social media strategy. If they don’t know what this is then do not hire them!
6. Find out if your Brisbane social media company offers ongoing strategy and co-management of accounts.

There are other factors just as important, but these should get you started on the road to social media success!

Our crafty friends at Google have found a way to compete with Facebook’s much loved ‘Like’ button – Introducing Google +1.

Google is making a huge push into social with +1, a similar feature to Facebook’s ‘Like’ button.

Starting next Wednesday, users can opt in to taking part of the +1 experiment. Essentially, the aim of +1 is to add a ‘public stamp of approval’ to search results. According to Google, using the +1 feature will result in your name becoming associated with a link, an ad, a search result or anything where you think “this is pretty cool” across the web.

Google does however face a steep uphill battle against Facebook’s ‘Like’ button. Over 2 million sites and counting have the Facebook ‘Like’ button installed.

Ad experts seem to be split on whether Google’s +1 will take off, however if it does, it’s likely to further an existing move toward marketing transparency.

Voicing the most pessimistic view on +1 was David Hallerman, a senior analyst at eMarketer. He notes that search is more a utility than a social activity, making recommendations an odd fit. “It’s not a medium where people spend time,” Hallerman says. “It’s a tool that people use.”

But as DeepFocus CEO Ian Schafer suggests, +1 could make search more social, changing behaviors in the process. “When someone is searching for a piece of information about a product, a review, or insightful commentary, it is typically a very insular activity,” says Schafer. “But being able to place a ‘seal of approval’ next to a search result may have the effect of making a typically insular activity more collaborative – hopefully improving the ‘algorithm’ through the quality of your connections.”

If +1 gains popularity, there’s a strong possibility that businesses will begin trying to collect +1s the way they currently try to accumulate Facebook ‘Likes’. “It encourages that kind of behavior — the gamification of marketing,” says Josh Rose, executive vice president and digital creative director of ad agency Deutsch LA. “This will definitely play into those hands.”

If +1′s aren’t gamed too much, Rose and others see the new recommendation aspect of search as a positive force, holding brands and their advertising more accountable. Leonard points out that if the +1′s contribute to a marketer’s Quality Score, they will pay less for advertising than others with lower scores, giving consumers a new way to, in effect, vote on a brand. A large number of +1s could raise expectations about a product, Leonard says.

Overall, there is exciting times ahead with the movement into social search. Would you be more likely to click on results that your friends have recommended? Let us know your thoughts below.

You can view ‘Everything You Need To Know on Google’s +1 here.

With its open graph protocol spreading around the internet like wildfire, over 500 million active and interconnected users and a critically acclaimed motion picture now released, Facebook has not only anchored itself within the very fabric of the internet, it has embedded itself within modern popular culture as we know it – and there are no signs of slowing down.

The Facebook website itself states that a standard Facebook user creates 90 pieces of content per month and is connected to an average of 80 pages, groups and events.

So how can your business connect with these consciously connected consumers?

Whether you already have a Facebook page or not, the following tips will help you create a presence for your business on this social behemoth and, furthermore, will keep them coming back for more!

1. STRATEGY

With all the hype surrounding Facebook these days, it’s easy for many businesses to forget the importance of strategy and just dive right in. However, these businesses often neglect the fact that they don’t yet know how to swim in the murky waters of social media and in turn, find themselves flailing and sinking (Paul ‘likes’ this self indulgent analogy).

It is imperative that you make sure you have a clear objective and goal for your page. Is your strategy based on:

• Customer Relationship Management?
• Customer Engagement/Loyalty?
• Recruitment?
• Sales?
• Branding?
• Awareness? etc

The list goes on. It is vital to know where you’re headed on Facebook so that you know you have arrived when you get there!

2. CONTENT, CONTENT SCHEDULES & CONTENT TIMING

Content is not only ‘King’ on Facebook, it is the lifeblood of the entire network. I cannot stress the importance of quality, consistent and engaging content enough.

There are three common content questions you should ask yourself before you submit a piece of content to your Facebook page:

Is this content engaging while still being relevant to my business?

Is this content entertaining while still being relevant to my business?

Is this content educational while still being relevant to my business?

If you cannot consciously answer ‘yes’ to any of these questions, then CAN THAT CONTENT!  Post it somewhere else if you need to but not on your business page. It will dilute your strategy and confuse your customers. Good content should have your fans consistently returning to your page for more.

Secondly, at Reload Media we recommend to every client who is about to implement a social media strategy to have a comprehensive content schedule prepared before they even think about setting up their page.

A content schedule is basically a guide as to what content/promotions/events you will be posting to your page and when.  It can often be set out similar to a media plan and simply creates a blueprint for you to follow throughout a set time period (e.g. 6 months).

And finally, remember to keep your content flow steady in volume and well paced. This stuff is getting posted to your customer’s news feeds so you don’t want to upset them by posting too much & too often!

3. LANDING PAGES

Landing pages are a great way to increase the amount of unique likes or fans that your business page has. This is obviously important as, the more fans your page has, the more viral your content can become.

You can make this page to only be visible to people who do not yet like your page in order to create a customised experience for different Facebook users.

Here are some examples of successful Facebook landing pages:

4. VANITY URLS

Vanity URLs allow you to have a short and simple url for your business page as opposed to the default, long winded and convoluted url you will be provided with.

Once your page has 25 people ‘liking’ it, you can snatch up a vanity url for your page (for example Facebook.com/ReloadMedia).

Simply head to Facebook.com/Username and follow the prompts.

5. FACEBOOK PROMOTIONS & APPS

One great way of supplying your fans with a creative and engaging ‘content moment’ (as described by David Smerdon of Clemenger BBDO), is to create a custom Facebook app centered around your business in some way.

Here is a great example of an engaging and viral Facebook app by Sony Vaio.

Facebook apps however are a bit more tricky and you would need to find a developer capable of creating custom Facebook applications.

Another opportunity would be to launch a promotion through Facebook. Promotions allow users to not only engage with your brand, but be rewarded for doing so. Research shows that promotions are one of the best ways to create an active and engaged fan base on your business page.

Beware though!

Facebook have some very strict promotional guidelines now set in place. If you breach these guidelines you could find your page deleted without notice and all of your hard work and fan base can be undone in an instant.

For more information on Facebook’s promotion guidelines, visit their page here or call Reload Media for a walkthrough in layman’s terms!

Apologies for the acronym soup I’ve served up today. Before we indulge in the main course, here’s the menu in brief:

IMC

IMC stands for Integrated Marketing Communication. According to Wikipedia, IMC is a “holistic approach to marketing” that “aims to ensure consistency of message and the complementary use of media” (IMC, Wikipedia, 2010).

SEM

SEM is short for Search Engine Marketing. In many cases, search marketing includes a wide variety of disciplines but for the sake of this article, when we refer to SEM we will be referring to pay-per-click search advertising. This includes sponsored advertising on the Google, Yahoo and Bing search and display networks.

SEO

If you are an avid reader of this blog, you will likely already have some idea of what SEO is. SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation (or, for the Americans reading this, Search Engine Optimization!). This involves the process of optimising your website in a bid to improve your search engine rankings on the keywords that are most valuable to you. SEO is achieved through a multitude of visible website changes (on-page SEO) and non-website (off-page SEO) strategies.

SMM

A relatively new acronym in the online marketing field, SMM simply stands for Social Media Marketing. This involves harnessing the communication and viral power of social media platforms in order to achieve a particular marketing objective.

The Main Course

Ok. Now that we know the dishes, it’s now time for the special – a combination of the four!

Consistency. This the main ingredient in a quality IMC campaign. IMC involves creating a consistent tone, character, appearance, personality and message across your entire marketing mix. IMC has been widely accepted as the most effective way to cut through media clutter and deliver a single minded brand proposition to your target market.

You have probably already experienced a quality Integrated Marketing Campaign without realising it. Consider Optus. The way Optus have developed their IMC campaign is through the use of a consistent brand theme throughout all of their visible customer touch points. This theme of course, revolves around the brand colours yellow and turquoise and the use of wild animals in all of their marketing discourse (open a new browser/tab and check out their website now – you’ll see what I mean).

So how can SEM, SEO and SMM be integrated into an IMC campaign? Here are a few tips:

SEM

• Ensure that you develop your PPC advertising campaigns to include keywords that are utlised in your offline marketing efforts (for example brand slogans, tvc messages, etc)
• If your brand has a recognisable and distinctive brand personality, try to incorporate this personality into the writing of your ads.
• If you have a special offer or promotion running offline, replicate and reinforce this offer though your ad copy in the search engines.
• Let users know they have landed in the right place by integrating your landing page/website design with offline marketing themes.

SEO

• Like with SEM, make sure you have optimised your website for keywords and phrases that a potential customer might type in after ingesting your offline marketing material.
• Increase your search engine real estate by dominating the most valuable keyword groups relating to your industry. This will increase your branding and will allow you to reinforce your integrated marketing message every time a user searches for a relevant term in your industry.
• Make sure that, in making on-page SEO changes to your website, that you are able to create a balance between SEO and readability so as to maintain a clear and consistent marketing message.

SMM

• If you have an actual brand character, consider integrating this character across all of your social media channels. Brand characters are very powerful marketing tools and work well to create instant brand recognition and connection.
• Once again, if you have offline promotions running, you can boost the profile of this promotion through a creative social media marketing strategy.
• If you have decided on the brand tone and personality you would like to convey to your audience (are you young with attitude or conservative and corporate?), make sure to convey this personality in your social media interactions. A great example of a brand with a consistent brand personality and theme is Virgin (cheeky, red and white, casual, innovative, slightly (and ironically) anti-corporate)).

Mmm delicious…

I hope you’ve enjoyed this quick taste test on some ways you can incorporate SEO, SEM and SMM into your integrated marketing campaigns.

Please feel free to add a comment below if you:

• Did or didn’t agree on any of the points,
• Know of another good IMC example?
• Or simply have a question about this post!

This is great news for users as it means they will be shown real time content based on popular user tweets. As the competition in Search Engine Space becomes more intense, Google and Bing are trying everything to attract users. The big news, however, is this officially makes Twitter the most influential social networking site on the web.

Bing Tweets pulls in trends from Twitter and filters into categories such as “Popular Now”, “People”, “Places” and “Products”, supposedly providing easier navigation to changing trends. When you do a search, you’ll get tweets at the top of the page and shared links at the bottom. The result displayed removes duplicate tweets, and filters out any adult content for better usability. When you do a search, by default new tweets will flow automatically into the tweets section of results.

Google, on the other hand, displays the five most recent tweets for the query the user has searched, giving both real-time Twitter search results and Google results on the same page. So users can not only view the pages indexed by Google but also see relevant Twitter conversations happening for that particular search query.

This will result in companies marketing aggressively in the social media space. It also creates challenges for businesses to ensure that users are updated with latest offerings and ensure customers are satisfied with the products and services they provide, in order to maintain their brand image.

The inclusion of Twitter into the search results will change the internet marketing space, but only time will tell how users respond to those changes.