Every now and then something catches your eye in the media that leaves you thinking I wish that had been my idea! 

That was how it was when we first saw The Marketing Map (created by B2B contact marketing)- which is a diagram based on the London underground, and it provides a great visual aid for organisations who are brainstorming their marketing strategy.

Each underground route (that you know as the central line or Piccadilly) actually represents each area of marketing that your business needs to consider when putting a strategy together or perhaps launching a new product, so the central line suddenly becomes advertising, while Piccadilly shows you about everything digital and whilst the list isn't exhaustive, it certainly is just a great starting point for you.

If you go to their website you can see each marketing route separately so that you make sure you're covering all your bases. If you want a copy for yourself just head on over to their website, (you'll have to give them your email address for the download)

In the world of Twitter sometimes it would be a great idea to be able to attach a tweet with a physical location, so if someone tweets about a football game they can put it into context by also telling everyone where they are watching it from, perhaps a pub or even the football stadium. Each location will have its own twitter page, this will give you the ability to look and see who else is tweeting from the same location. This is a brand new feature that is being rolled out - so watch out for it and be sure to set up your page sooner rather than later.

In order to take advantage of this new feature you must make sure that in your Twitter settings you enable the Tweet with my location feature, once this is done and Twitter places is available to us here in the UK you will see under the box where you normally type a tweet the area where you can select a location. If the location isn't already there you can manually add the location that you want and mark it on the map for other users.

image taken from twitter help centre

How can this feature help businesses?

Well it could be quite neat if people tell you where they are and that they are in need of something, for example, when the users in the Empire State Building all started tweeting that they wanted an ice cream delivery the local chain Tasti D Lite was on hand to satisfy the desire!

Will this feature be used heavily, we're not sure at this stage, there maybe privacy concerns about giving out ones location at a given point in time, but we'll be watching this space eagerly as location sharing (just look at the popularity of Foursquare) does seem to be coming a mainstream activity.

As your clients are moving from looking at traditional print advertising to online how do you advertise to them to get your brand and products or services in front of them. If you're not on page 1 of Google organically then you might want to take a look at Pay Per click marketing

Why Pay Per Click?

Well, when people are online they are looking for information in two ways, either by asking their Social Circle (yes you need to play there too!) but also they will simply Google what they want. And this is where the magic of Pay Per Click comes into its own, as your advert will appear at exactly the time that your prospect is looking. You can't get better 'cold' advertising than that.

If your advert is crafted well the prospect will click through to your website and providing they find exactly what they want they are easy to convert into a client. If your advert is not created well, or is not absolutely relevant to what the client wants then they probably won't take any action with yo u, but you only pay when someone clicks through.

Other benefits

For new websites, or particularly competitive environments, this is a great way of launching your company onto the front page of the search results easily and effectively, within a few minutes your ad can be showing.

Also what can be very beneficial to local organisations, you can make sure your ad only shows within a certain geographical area, between certain times of the day. Its subliminal, but if you see the same company a few times on the search results page, you will click through to their website as you will feel you already know that company.

What other advertising can you do?

Banner Advertising

If you are looking for brand recognition then perhaps display advertising is the way forward, this is where your banner add (normally graphical) appears on other websites, the key to this success is where these banners are placed. You need to make sure that the audience will be receptive to the ad, so it needs to be placed on the correct websites, that could be news sites or lifestyle ones or a multitude of others that would work for your sector. You can also look at geographic targeting, demographic targeting and premium placement. This can be very successful if it is properly managed and measured.

Behavioural Advertising

Behavioural advertising is now becoming quite mainstream with the introduction of ads on Facebook, you can cleverly target your audience by gender, age, location and interests. So if you sell products for dogs, how neat is it that you can target anyone who has described themselves as a dog lover, you can even target people on their birthday perhaps with special offers etc. This is one area of advertsing that will grow dramatically in the future.

A word of caution

All advertising needs to be tested and measured, if you are running any kind of advertising campaign online, you need to make sure that it is running to its optimum, and providing you with the kind of conversion rate that makes you want to spend more money and not less!

With all of these schemes you need to be tweaking your funds on a daily basis to make sure your best performing ads are working hard for you 24x7, and when you've got the formula right then stick to it like glue.

Need some help advertising your business online then give us a call we'd be delighted to talk to you.