Monday, October 19, 2009
The Critical Contribution of Social Marketing
Guide to Small Budget SEO Strategy
The cheapest search engine optimization service strategy is to do it themselves. This is much easier said than performed. If you are on a budget, the thousands of dollars you are able to save in consulting fees & services will be worthwhile for your original strategy. As the Website up the search charts, you must either hire an expert or outsource to a consultant. The goal is to make it affordable over time.
If you want to be a successful and booming, you must follow each step!
Here are the ways as well as steps you will have to perform.
a) Make certain your Website is clean -no broken links- is hosted by a prestigious company, or by yourself with a static IP address, and quickly.
b) Optimise your keywords and keywords-phrases
c) Submit to search-engines (SEs) and also on directories
d) Increase your Page Rank (PR)
e) Upload more selected and quality content
Step a: Make certain your Website is clean
A clean start with a clean site hosting. Affordable SEO servicedoesn’t mean free or even cheap. If you want to host the Website you have a static IP address. A dynamic-IP-address and a DNS redirector will allow search engine robots problems.
Now that you are correct host be sure the Website itself is clean. This consists of two primary components. Make certain you’ve no broken links, and be sure the Website loads quickly. This does not unnecessarily graphic. You should also try the site that scales and at different resolutions and with different browsers. It does not help with affordable SEO, but it will ensure the visitors you drive to your Website will have a pleasurable experience.
Step b: Optimise your keywords and keyword-phrases.
Always keep your keywords for each page to a minimum of two/three. Once you have selected on your keywords to do a search with a keyword tool (you can search the webpage or website, there are few, all pretty good) and see how many searches are done for each sentence.
Step c: Submit your Website to search-engines.
Critical comments! Don’t use search-engine submission software to submit the Website. Google’s terms of service clearly state that this is a violation. Most quality search-engines will see this as spamming the Website and penalise you for it. These products are good to work on your page, they’re not good for actually doing it. You will discover that the road to affordable SEO, and even professional SEO service, offers no shortcuts.
Step d: Work and increase your page ranking.
Remember Page-Rank (PR) is the critical metric that boosts you extraordinary of your competitors when everything else is equal. To increase your PR you require to get elsewhere linking back to you. There are many ways to do this, some of them will contribute to a strong, others will do evil. Link exchange programs was the old way of increasing page-ranking. Some of them till now offers value, but it is limited. You will have links back to your Website to be quality, not just a page with links to a thousand people trying to increase PR. Your best two choices are writing-articles that are published, and requesting links from suppliers and other business partners.
Step e:. Upload more selected and quality content.
Steps d and e can work together. As you write the content for your website you can submit a part or the whole page to the article-directories to increase your page ranking. By adding content or niche to your Website, do not go overboard. If you have written a really great piece that does not add to your website, you must use it to make the PR. If you just add page after page of your site, you will end up with something that is difficult for visitors to use, frustrating them and cost you sales.
Example of a Marketing Mix Strategy
As an example, the marketing mix strategy for a breast cancer screening campaign for older women might include the following elements:
- The product could be any of these three behaviors: getting an annual mammogram, seeing a physician each year for a breast exam and performing monthly breast self-exams.
- The price of engaging in these behaviors includes the monetary costs of the mammogram and exam, potential discomfort and/or embarrassment, time and even the possibility of actually finding a lump.
- The place that these medical and educational services are offered might be a mobile van, local hospitals, clinics and worksites, depending upon the needs of the target audience.
- Promotion could be done through public service announcements, billboards, mass mailings, media events and community outreach.
- The "publics" you might need to address include your target audience (let's say low-income women age 40 to 65), the people who influence their decisions like their husbands or physicians, policymakers, public service directors at local radio stations, as well as your board of directors and office staff.
- Partnerships could be cultivated with local or national women's groups, corporate sponsors, medical organizations, service clubs or media outlets.
- The policy aspects of the campaign might focus on increasing access to mammograms through lower costs, requiring insurance and Medicaid coverage of mammograms or increasing federal funding for breast cancer research.
- The purse strings, or where the funding will come from, may be governmental grants, such as from the National Cancer Institute or the local health department, foundation grants or an organization like the American Cancer Society.
Each element of the marketing mix should be taken into consideration as the program is developed, for they are the core of the marketing effort. Research is used to elucidate and shape the final product, price, place, promotion and related decisions.
Additional Social Marketing "P's"
Publics--Social marketers often have many different audiences that their program has to address in order to be successful. "Publics" refers to both the external and internal groups involved in the program. External publics include the target audience, secondary audiences, policymakers, and gatekeepers, while the internal publics are those who are involved in some way with either approval or implementation of the program.
Partnership--Social and health issues are often so complex that one agency can't make a dent by itself. You need to team up with other organizations in the community to really be effective. You need to figure out which organizations have similar goals to yours--not necessarily the same goals--and identify ways you can work together.
Policy--Social marketing programs can do well in motivating individual behavior change, but that is difficult to sustain unless the environment they're in supports that change for the long run. Often, policy change is needed, and media advocacy programs can be an effective complement to a social marketing program.
Purse Strings--Most organizations that develop social marketing programs operate through funds provided by sources such as foundations, governmental grants or donations. This adds another dimension to the strategy development-namely, where will you get the money to create your program?
Promotion
Place
Price
"Price" refers to what the consumer must do in order to obtain the social marketing product. This cost may be monetary, or it may instead require the consumer to give up intangibles, such as time or effort, or to risk embarrassment and disapproval. If the costs outweigh the benefits for an individual, the perceived value of the offering will be low and it will be unlikely to be adopted. However, if the benefits are perceived as greater than their costs, chances of trial and adoption of the product is much greater.
In setting the price, particularly for a physical product, such as contraceptives, there are many issues to consider. If the product is priced too low, or provided free of charge, the consumer may perceive it as being low in quality. On the other hand, if the price is too high, some will not be able to afford it. Social marketers must balance these considerations, and often end up charging at least a nominal fee to increase perceptions of quality and to confer a sense of "dignity" to the transaction. These perceptions of costs and benefits can be determined through research, and used in positioning the product.