Archive for month: April, 2013

The Power of Social Media nowadays

The social media are so numerous nowadays that there is no point in counting them all. They create our Internet reality, confirm or question our friendships and other relation-ships, inform us about everything faster than TV and radio news, enable us to personally “like” and “follow” our favourite celebrities, brands and trends.

Entertainment Weekly included Facebook on its end-of-the-decade “best-of” list, once said: “How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers’ birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before it?”

Let us take a closer look at it and four other most popular internationally sites:

Facebook – most used social networking service because of worldwide monthly active users. Launched in 2004, over one billion active users in 2012. Available also on a mobile device. The users register before using site. Then they create a personal profile, add other users as friends, exchange some information with them, update their profiles and get automatic notifications when they friends do that. Additionally, the users may join different interest groups organized by workplace, school or college for example and categorize their friends into specific lists.

Twitter – it is an online social networking service to send and read short (up to 140 characters) text-based messages. Those are called “tweets”. Not only a space for tweeting but also a microblogging service. People can follow you, if they like your tweets. You can follow some famous people and celebrities as well.

Pinterest – “a tool for collecting and organizing things you love” – that is motto of the site. You can for instance: make a wish-list, plan a trip, organize an event, start a collection or plan a project using Pinterest. In short it is just a theme-based image collections photo sharing website. The users can browse other pinboards looking for inspiration, ‘re-pin’ images to their own boards and ‘like’ photos. Those who like your activity become your ‘followers’.

LinkedIn – used by more than 200 milion acquired users in more than 200 countries and territories, LinkedIn is mainly for professional networking. That means it is a social networking website for people in professional occupations. It is good to be there to create the professional and official image in the world wide web.

Google Plus – sometimes called G+, it is a multilingual, international networking of 235 million active users. Identity service. Not just a single site, but rather “a layer” which covers many online properties: profile, circles. Google+ society, pictures, events, hangouts, mobile and local.

As you can see each of them is governed by its own laws. For us, as the owners of lingerie online stores, it is important to be present everywhere possible. Our image needs to be consequent and professional as explained in the article about creating a successful content. However, we need to adapt to each site separately and not to repeat ourselves. Use pinterest to share photos, twitter to run a miniblog, facebook to create a store’s profile, etc.

The power of successful content nowadays – blogs, forums and social media

When we run our own business we want it to be noticed. If people know about our activity, they visit us and check our offer. Then, if it is good, they will buy it. Simple. In real life and on the Internet as well.

If we decide to run an online lingerie store, to be noticed we need 3 things at least:
– nice and comprehensible website as a base
– being present at many places on the Internet so the target audience can easily find us and get interested in our offer (successful advertising campaign)
– being so good in our offer that when they visit us it will catch their attention and they do not just skip through it quickly and carelessly

As a client of Lingerose Network you get the website and we provide you with all the necessary technical information – you can count on our support and advice.
The you start building your brand – the social media portals such as facebook, twitter, linkedin, pinterest, google plus – they are invaluable help and it would be a pity to underestimate their powerful impact on gaining some popularity on the Internet.

To enforce the position of your store between the others it is also a good idea to start publishing something more. Something like your own opinions and ideas for example. Adverts of your products maybe. Details of the newest offers of your store…

Where to share it?

You can do it on your lingerie store social network profiles of course – twit about some spicy lingerie details, repin favorite lingerie pictures and share some more information on your business facebook wall.

But you can also go one step ahead and set your own blog which will gather all this information in one. There is more space for you to write about it there and to create more compact image of the company as well. Discussions at some social forums and leaving your card with the www address may invite interested people there and encourage them to take a closer look at the offer.

Now, how to make it fresh, bold and catchy?

You can say that possibilities of becoming unique and original here seem to be endless. However, avoid being trapped in “if there is something good to all, it is good specifically for nothing”. Internet users are bored of repletion nowadays. You do not want to be another fancy lingerie site. You want to be good at what you are doing. And it is not so difficult as it sounds! Just think of what you know the best and focus on it. Become an expert in your field. If your field is selling luxurious lingerie you want to become a luxurious lingerie expert. Then you build your own content here.

How to create such a thing?

There are to schools: you can either be spontaneous and try some innovative solutions following your intuition or you can study some previously approved techniques, tested by some other specialists before and adjust yourself to their specific guidelines.

More on those two solutions in the second part of this article – “How to build a successful content II”

Advertising cheaters – quality as the most important factor.

Before we decide to start our marketing campaign, it is worth considering if we do it by ourselves or with the help of some external agencies. It depends mostly on our budget of course, but also our knowledge is an important factor and the amount of time we can spend doing it.

We can assure our clients of Lingerose Network to be as helpful as possible explaining different methods of creating effective marketing campaigns. Even if you do not decide to promote your business on your own, you will at least know better what to expect from the advertising company and how to choose the good one and avoid some potential ad defrauders.

We have to remember that there are many pseudo–professionals or just regular cheaters on the Internet. Although we are not able to say exactly how to recognize them, we can give you some real–life examples instead.

We highly recommend you to avoid the phenomena of the following type:

Bargains at the websites such as Groupon.com etc.
There are often some ads of the agencies connected with the SEO industry (search engine optimization). They want to sell their services, previously worth e.g. 1500 Euro at the price of 50 Euro now. Where is a catch?
In this offer, which we pay for, the company is running very elementary page optimization. It is often so simple, that we could easily do it ourselves and it would take about 20-30 minutes. Of course, we can buy it if we want to. Just remember that we cannot expect some miracles just because of this fact and our notes in the rankings of SEPR (search engine results positions) will not impressively grow once we buy the service.

Affiliate companies
Some time ago one of our lingerie stores connected with some big affiliate company. (For those who may not know – that is a kind of enterprise which works as a broker between the store and some portals and websites of different kinds.) In our case it was supposed to be a banner campaign. Our banners were said to be exposed – caution – about 2.000.000 times in many different places. Profits? One customer! We were lucky enough to pay the commission on our profit only. For those 2.000.000 banner displays it was a cost of a few Euro, so we were not too defeated. However, we strongly doubt in the quality of the websites our advert was displayed on.

Fake social media promotions
Sometimes you can “buy” the social media followers who will “like” your website at some portals like Facebook.com, etc. For example: you can have 1000 likes for about 5 Euro – there are many similar ads on the net. In our opinion, there are no more benefits of such a solution, except for maybe some kind of prestige that we have “1000 likes”. Although, you have to remember that those fake followers will never ever come back to our profile, neither comment nor like anything again (unless we buy some further activity of theirs). In this context, “fake followers” literally means “fake” – those people just do not exist in a real world. Sometimes this phenomenon can be even harmful for us and our company. Imagine that one day all of them may simply disappear – banned by the host portal. Do we want to be banned with them?
Another fake promotion is for example: 1000 visits per day. Of course we have to pay for it, for instance – 10 Euro daily. It is also a very popular strategy of some monkey business companies. They usually use some secret techniques in order to achieve that and we do not doubt that some of them may even be illegal. Eventually, our page visitors statistics may show about 1000 entries a day, but how profitable it will actually be for our store?

To sum up:

There are of course many reliable companies and agencies offering similar services of higher standards. Not only the low cost and low quality techniques exist on the Internet. Some of the companies base on a solid work supported by some knowledge and experience. However, we need to remember that this ‘real’ advertisement will cost a lot more than numerous fake promotions. As in a ‘real life’ – quality often goes together with higher price. The Internet advertising is no exception here.

Internet Advertising Revolution – Inbound Marketing

Today we would like to tell you about the marketing and advertising Internet revolution that is taking place nowadays because the old method has just stopped working.

What was the old method? We may call it: outbound marketing.
In traditional, outbound marketing, we focus on finding customers. However, the techniques of it are poorly targeted and that interrupts people. They involve: cold-calling, display advertising, junk mail, spam.

Now we want to change our attitude and approach to the subject. Our customers are tired and they got advanced in Internet and advertising field. That is why Inbound Marketing will be focused on getting found by customers, not looking for them itself.
What do we need to do to be found by our customers? Certainly we have to attract their attention.

There are three key components of a successful Inbound Marketing campaign for our lingerie online store:

– Content – the core factor of our campaign. We have to create content which shows that our brand is an authority in the lingerie field and it is worth buying products from us. Building the content may include: blogs, videos, ebooks, etc.

– SEO – in the article about a search engine Google we have precisely explained how important it is to be present in its results. We also know that SEO (search engine optimization) for the beginner users of our online lingerie store (those who do not have a lot of experience) may seem to be a little difficult at first. So we have advised to start with Google Adwords. However, both methods are worth using.

– Social Media – using social media (facebook, twitter, linkedin, pinterest, blogs and forums) strengthens and develops the impact of our content. When the content is distributed across and discussed on numerous social networks, it becomes more authentic, popular and that way it may draw qualified customers to your site.

Advantages of Inbound Marketing:

– it costs less than traditional advertising – if we know enough we might even do it for free (of course spending our time). We need to be creative and would want to share some information educating our customers

– better targeting – we approach people who are interested – they demonstrate an interest in our content, so they are likely to be interested in our products.

The main advantage of Inbound Marketing is that all those three parts (components) of it:

– content

– SEO

– social media

have a big impact not only on each other but also on the whole marketing itself. We can say that they act together and affect each other at the same time. And we can observe their biggest influence on SEO. Why?

We build content that gives signals to Google – that our lingerie store is worthy and might be shared in social media. We are getting more popular in social media and this also gives signals to Google algorithm – that our content and our lingerie store is trustworthy and people like it.

So now we see that we at least double our results – of time or money spent on advertising campaign.

We encourage you to read our next articles where we write more about the components of Inbound Marketing separately.