You know when you’re searching around on the internet and ads pop up that you might be interested in? Well turns out they may be smarter than we think!
Advertisements start to pop up when you type in words called keywords. These keywords can be for anything, say a book you’re looking for or that pair of earrings you are dying to buy! Well if you type in “diamond earrings”, up pops ads for diamond earrings.
Advertisements are getting smarter. They start to know how many times you look something up and then will offer ads based upon how many times you’ve typed in that specific keyword. Soon we won’t need to type anything cause the computer will know exactly what sites we normally want anyways!
Online advertising is essential to creating positive flow to the online site. Utilizing sites such as Google Adwords allows businesses to make their site known to the public and increase the amount of visitors to their site. This increases awareness and therefore increases revenue.
Advertising through such means as Google Adwords use what is called keywords. Keywords are main words that, when inputed into a search engine such as Google, bring the person searching to site pages where the advertisements would be located. When those keywords are entered people are automatically sent to sites where they wish to be and are shown advertisements that match up with those keywords. ie keywords such as Scrapbooking bring up search listings on scrapbooking and advertising for sites such as www.makingmemorieswithwscrapbooking.com
An online presence is integral to all businesses, no matter what business they have. By advertising online it increases awareness of the business and therefore increases flow to their website. As 99% of businesses are online these days it makes sense for a business to want to get as much flow to their site as possible. Online advertising allows that to happen. So really, you should.
In China they call it Quang Xi. What it means is that you know maybe 500 people and those 500 people know 500 people each. You have a network of 500 people but together you can help reach millions. This is very important when doing business because it’s all about who you know, in China especially, so much that they gave it it’s own name.
Recently I decided to use my network. I belong to a site through Facebook called the Sunshine Coast Buy & Sell. I have become quite addicted to it, searching through the posted items on an everyday basis, buying up items like crazy. I thought to myself, why aren’t I using this to my advantage? So I posted a couple of items and decided to start selling them. It was a relatively simple process: take pictures, post to the site, place comments on details of and how much it’s selling for, and then wait for bites. I waited patiently for a day or two without anything and then my posts started getting noticed. Of the 6 shirts that I posted I have sold 2 and am going to be meeting up to sell a 3rd tomorrow.
This networking example was to sell shirts but networks can be used for lots of things. What do you use your network for?
Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn are three of the main sources of Social Media used today. All three are sound boards for thoughts and ideas and each one is intended to reach different markets.
Facebook is for friends, to connect with people that you went to school with or grew up next to. It is very much a younger age group and a lot of people have pictures posted of them out at clubs drinking or other social events. Facebook has been classified as dangerous for some to have as it has more of a personal persona instead of perhaps a more professional image one would be trying to put across. I know some that have jobs in government positions that were informed that if they wanted a certain promotion they’d have to get rid of Facebook.
Twitter is somewhat better than Facebook. Twitter users can tweet up to 40 words on what they’re doing, how they’re doing, what’s going on with them. Businesses use Twitter to post tweets stating promotional events that they are hosting and offer a way for their Twitter followers to stay connected to them. To have a presence through Twitter you have to tweet and you have to tweet often about topics that will interest your followers. If not, they will stop following you and we don’t want that.
LinkedIn is more for the professionals. You can add where you work and then create a network of other professionals through it. This is the place to network professionally, to look for jobs and connect with others with the same professional goals as you.
So to reiterate, Facebook is personal networking, Twitter is mostly business advertising and random status updates, and LinkedIn is professional networking. Enjoy!
There are four main points that are taken into consideration when marketing a product.
These are known as the 4 P’s of marketing:
1) Price
2) Product
3) Place
4) Promotion
When marketing, first off you have a product. You can either create it or purchase it or just be hired to work with the marketing of it. The first thing you need to take into consideration with the product is place, where are you going to market it? Place can be a country, a store, a portion of a shelf. Both macro and micro are taken into consideration here. Depending on where you market it will entail how much the price of the product will be. Various financial factors need to be taken into consideration, such as tariffs if going international, charges from the various outlets that may offer your product, even the cost of the product itself. From there you may decide to offer promotions, to help move the product along faster and create flow. These may be online or offline promotions, depending on the place to where you think best to market your product.
The 4 P’s are an integral part of marketing and must be taken into consideration. Not having all 4 results in disaster and is best to be avoided.
On March 13, 2012, my team, the Kings and Queens, as part of a Leadership assignment, hosted a seminar by the wonderful Teg Brar.
Teg Brar is a mentor in the Leaders of Tomorrow program through the International Board of Trade and is a speaker who talks about the importance of Personal Branding in today’s online society. We hosted him through CUBES and as part of the Business Week through Capilano University.
Teg talked about the importance of Personal Branding and how to give yourself a better online presence. Q: Have you ever Googled yourself? Go do it, right now. My name, Dana Skonberg, is quite original so all that comes up is about me. One of my classmates, Julian Bell, shares his name with a famous poet and a couple of other people. He doesn’t even show until about 6th place down the page. Teg talked about ways to make your name be #1 on that list, through the importance as blogs such as this one. Each one of us are in charge of our own personal presence. Knowing where we are listed online and what we can do to make ourselves #1 are key to creating our own personal brand.
Logos, we’ve all seen them, they’re everywhere! Every company has, or should have, a logo. They don’t have to be big, they don’t have to be flashy, but they do have to be unique to that company.
A logo in most times speaks for the brand. You see a logo, you think of a brand. A logo doesn’t need to have the company’s name, though most times it does help to grab consumer’s attention and make it known that that product is theirs.
Logos need to be simple and clear to attract attention. Too much added stuff takes away from the product that the logo is on and suffocates the brand. Also for social media sites where images are small, simple is best. Logos need strong vibrant colors to atract attention and stand out from the crowd!
Quick, first thing that comes to your mind when you think of the colors red and white?! If you said Coca-Cola you wouldn’t be alone. Coca-Cola has created one of the world’s most recognizable brands. It is so influential of a brand that Santa Claus himself had his suit changed from green to that of red and white, to match the Coca-Cola brand!
Brand’s are living and breathing things. They are born and grow from young to mature and die after time if they cannot survive. It is said that most brand’s have a chair in boardrooms and are talked about as real as you and me. A company’s entire business can be supported by their brand, if the brand fails then so do they.
Many things go into creating a brand. Color, font, style are some of the many considerations that are discussed. A brand represents that business, that product, that company. Who their brand is defines them. What their brand stands for shows the world what they stand for. The brand speaks for the business.
Individuals, as well as Corporations, have a brand. Personal branding is becoming much more important in today’s technologically advanced world. Who you are online can depict what job you get. Many businesses these days do a search for their potential employees long before they hire them. They like to get a feel for that individual before they offer them a high paying position, creating a sense of security for the business.
Have you ever done a search on yourself? Do it. What does your brand say about you?
Moving from the Industrial Age into this Information Age it seems odd nowadays for a business to not have some sort of web presence. Being online means having the ability to connect with those around the world with just the click of a mouse. Technology has opened many doors for businesses and its up to those businesses to use the technology that’s available to them.
Online a business can be much more than what they already are. Some businesses has a strict online presence, meaning that they do not have a physical store presence and do all their business online. This can be dangerous as I believe that a combination of both online presence and physical store presence is integral. Call me old school but when I have a problem with something I like to take it into someone and have them look at it with me. I like that personal approach that some businesses have lost somewhere along the way.
With technology we rely on our computers and our smart phones, and our w.p.m. is an asset when finding a decent job in today’s economy. This was unheard of 20 years ago and yet is common lingo today. I admit that I am addicted to my smart phone. Like many others I find an overwhelming need to stay connected to everyone at all times, even if they have no idea who I am… I wonder who’s following me? Gives the term stalker a whole other meaning…
My online presence is important to me as much as any businesses’ online presence should be. The need to connect with their target audience, the need to reach out to them and offer their product and service to those that require it. This is technology! No longer do we need to physically grab ahold of someone, we can do it online! The future? Of course it is! But how and to what extent is up to the business owner. They should be in control of their online presence and know that they have the ability to change when needed. After all, too much online is scary, right?
On March 28, 2011, guest speaker Cam Kowalski came in to Cyri Jones’ Project Management class. Cam is a lead airspace designer, as well as a security planner who worked as a project manager for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games and the G8/G20 summits in Huntsville and Toronto Ontario.
As the project manager for these events, Cam was responsible for aspects such as deadlines, human resource management and other day-to-day operations. Some of the key points he emphasized were to understand the task at hand and to understand your working partner’s roles and responsibilities. He said that no matter what it was important to Be the Boss! Sometimes this was not easy as altogether there was about 250 persons who looked to him for guidance and assurance.
Some of the things he and his team worked on was to carefully lay our their plans utilizing pictoral depictions, so that everyone knew their goal, knew where the team was headed as a whole, and were able to follow up on areas that fell through. Many times people would want to point fingers at others but by keeping everything organized and by seperating duties in a concise manner, this was never considered an option.
One thing that I will always remember about Cam’s speech, he noted “Plan for the worst, hope for the best”.
As a final project for BMKT 365, Marketing Strategies and Decisions, instructor Claire Booth introduced us to a personal friend of hers who has a new product that he was looking to market.
Q energy is a powder that is added to water. The product’s main ingredient is Quercetin, an all-natural product that is an antioxidant and an anti-histamine that coerces your body to create energy in a natural way. Too many energy drinks contain high amounts of sugar and caffeine that trick your body into surging only to crash down fast when it’s over. 40% of the energy drink market is owned by RedBull, who has 27 grams (!) of sugar in each small shot can.
Q energy is marketed at what the client calls “Everyday Olympians”: healthy, active, working individuals who have a lot to get done each day. Their target market of 25-60 years is quite broad. My team’s objective with this client was his Strategic Position.
To position this product we had to look at where the organization stood and what statement they wanted to present to others. Positioning is all about the mindset of the consumers so we discussed what views we had of the company, for the company, from the information he gave us. We discussed the determinant attributes of the product and came up with certain qualities of the product that we thought would make people want to purchase it.
Our analysis led us to classify Q energy as a healthy, energy drink. The team agreed that knowledge of the primary ingredient, Quercetin, would differentiate the product from others and implement the Q energy name into the minds of consumers. By concentrating on the Quercetin and the all-natural attributes of the product, we believed that consumers would go out of their way to find it and purchase it, which would establish the brand in the minds of the consumers.
Claire’s friend was very impressed with our recommendations and left the presentation feeling stronger about where his company stood in regards to their position in today’s drink market.
