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How Do You Monitor Your Social Brand?

It’s essential for you to establish your presence in different social networking sites. This is where most people are currently talking and connecting with others, so you would be amiss if you don’t use these different platforms for engaging your audience.

Word of mouth marketing is more important than ever yet is also a double-edged sword. It has also become vital to your personal brand that you monitor what’s being said about you. Social brand monitoring needs to be an essential part of your personal brand communication plan.

There are many reasons why monitoring your brand can help you in your career or business.

Here are some of them:

1. It helps you understand how your brand is perceived

As a personal brand, it is essential that you know how your audience views you. If the feedback is mostly positive, then you must be doing something right and you seem to be on the right track.

On the other hand, if the feedback you’re getting is mostly negative, then you need to start reassessing. Your reputation is suffering, which is not going to be good for your personal brand. It’s essential that you understand how people perceive you, in order to make changes and improve your brand.

2. It helps you stay ahead in your industry

Monitoring your personal brand, related keywords, and your competitors can help you stay ahead in your industry. It keeps you up to date about the current trends, so you know how to keep your skills and knowledge sharp and dynamic. You don’t want to get left behind as others move forward and embrace what’s new.

3. It helps you make informative decisions regarding your brand

Personal brand monitoring helps you make informative and educated decisions regarding your brand. It gives you a more targeted outreach, and helps you learn what would best engage your audience.

4. It helps you know your audience, your connections

With social brand monitoring, you can learn about your audience’s demographics, and gain insights on what your audience wants. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to enhance their experience and deliver a more targeted message.

Monitoring your personal brand in social media helps you respond to your fans and followers, and really know who they are – not just who you ‘think’ they are. You can learn what engages them, and what doesn’t.

5. It helps you facilitate and filter what’s being said about you

By monitoring your social brand, you can respond to what’s being said about you and try to filter that message. The worst thing you can do is ignore any issues that comes up regarding your brand – you need to address them as soon as possible. That early intervention can prevent something that is small from becoming an issue.

Brand monitoring is essential

In the dynamic and highly competitive world of today, to achieve success, you need to be aware of your reputation. Learn your strengths and weaknesses so you can become a better personal brand.

You see, conversations about your brand happen whether you listen to them or not. So it is in your best interest to find out what people are saying about you.

Here are some tips to help you monitor your brand:

1. Use Twitter Search and Twitter management tools
Twitter Search is a great way to find out who’s talking about your brand and what they’re saying. Use it with a Twitter management tool such as Tweetdeck or HootSuite so you can continuously monitor what people are saying about you.

2. Use the Google Email Alert System
It’s easy and convenient to sign up for Google Alerts so that every time someone mentions your brand or keyword, Google sends it straight to your email inbox so you learn about it.

3. Use SocialMention
Another excellent tool for monitoring your social brand is SocialMention. It monitors more than a hundred sites directly, so you can quickly know who’s talking about you and your brand. You also have the ability to click on the link where your brand is mentioned, enabling you to answer or enter into a conversation with them.

4. Use Brand-Yourself
This is a great free tool that shows you were your search results are when people Google you and what links of information are already out there about you. My favorite part of this tool is that it’s an organic Google Search that you are working with – not a custom search with a link to that search. You are getting feedback and insights when people actually search you on the web. We’ll be discussing this tool more in future posts and on the twitter chat I moderate, #brandchat, this coming Wednesday, March 28th.

8 Marketing Tips That Can Catapult Your Business Into Success

Growing a business takes time. There are some people who can make a lot of money in a short period of time, but most of the time, these are the people who have a large customer list and have been in business for a long time already.

But if you have neither, then this article will be particularly useful for you. Because inside this article, you will learn 8 great marketing tips that you can use to take your business to the next level. It won’t happen overnight, but with time and a steady focus, it will happen eventually. Let’s take a look at the first tip:

1) Generate leads

You will want to generate leads so that you can follow-up on these leads over and over again to make it easy to close the sale. It’s hard to sell your products in a small ad, therefore you want to generate a lead so that you can present your full sales presentation in future contacts with your prospects. Here’s the next tip:

2) Operate in a niche market

If you try to market to everyone, more than likely, you’re going to have poor conversion rates. If you can operate in a niche marketing and structure your message according to one kind of prospect, then you will have more success with your marketing efforts.

Niche marketing is all about separating yourself from your competitors and marketing to a specific kind of prospect. The more specified your marketing efforts are, the better your results will be when it comes to closing sales.

3) Create a free offer

Everybody loves things for free, so with a free offer, you give yourself the opportunity to generate a lead or inspire people to come into your store. And you don’t have to limit yourself on ways to apply this to your business. Your free offer can be a free report, a free consultation, a free sample of your product, and more. You want to mention this free offer in your ad to get as many people as possible to respond to it.

4) Use a variety of marketing tactics

You want to find multiple ways to get your message out in front of your prospect. You can do direct mail, yellow page advertising, newspaper advertising, press releases, joint ventures, val-pak advertising, and so much more.

The possibilities are endless and wherever you advertise, be sure to include your free offer to generate the most response.

5) Contact your current customers more often

You’re missing out on a lot of business if you’re not contacting your customers on a monthly basis. 80% of all business profits come from the backend, so this is why a strong backend marketing strategy is key.

You can send your prospects a free monthly newsletter, or simply coupons with special offers every month. You always want to find good reasons to contact your customers so that you don’t lose them to a rival competitor.

6) Promote one product a time

When contacting your customers, it’s best to focus on one product at a time. If you have a catalog of products that you sell, this is fine, but you should highlight one product at a time to your customers so that you don’t confuse.

Your opinion has weight in the eyes of your customers, so if you recommend something useful for them, they will take your word for it and purchase the product that you recommended. But recommending more than 1 similar product will only confuse them, so be sure not to do this.

7) Offer a money-back guarantee

You want to offer a money-back guarantee on all of your products. This will only increase your response rates and will inspire trust amongst your prospects. By offering a money-back guarantee on your products, it means that you stand behind all of your products, and it also lowers the barrier to making the sale.

8) Track everything

Testing and tracking is important because you want to know what is winning for you and what is not. This way you can cut out all the losers and only market the winners. This in turn will decrease your marketing costs while improving your profits. So testing and tracking is key.

Use these 8 tips to boost your business now while you still have the chance. They will prove to be very useful for you.

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A Short Introduction to Automotive and Car Dealership SEO

Online success for automotive repair shops and car dealerships is realistically achieved through search engine optimization. If you own one or both businesses, it’s time to know how automotive and car dealership SEO strategies work.Knowing SEOSearch engine optimization is a process used to gain higher rankings on major search engines. Companies providing the service often target first page rankings and top ten listings.Basic strategies use keyword research, article creation, and back link building. Keyword research involves finding terms used to search online. These phrases are usually related to the service or product they want. Say, a web user wants to find a clothing store in New York. This user will likely type in those words when looking for listings. The keyword specialists working in SEO firms must anticipate these phrases and relate how these fit with their company’s clients. They can supply terms like ‘clothing shop in NY,’ ‘clothes store NYC,’ and so on.Once they have a list of keywords, the next phase consists of writers and editors. Writers will use the keywords on articles, blogs or other content. They will observe word count along with keyword density (number of times it appears in an article). Word count and keyword density depends on each SEO company. Editors will edit and proofread these before sending these to a submissions team. The team in-charge will then upload these works on different article directories.Back link building combines some writing skills along with finding high page rank (PR) sites. SEO specialists need to make relevant comments on these websites. They incorporate keywords and seed these with the client’s links so the client’s site gains rankings.This process is not just for clothing stores or other businesses, as it’s also for car dealerships and automotive. SEO, when done properly, delivers more sales opportunities to these businesses too.Are car dealerships or automotive SEO processes any different?It depends on the company hired. Some automotive and car dealership SEO businesses employ the steps mentioned. There are also those offering different automotive internet marketing strategies.So what can an automotive or car dealership SEO company deliver?An automotive or car dealer SEO company provides higher web rankings. This visibility allows your company to gain more customers as you maintain better positions. Potential clients can visit your site more and increase web traffic. While they do, they can also explore what your firm offers. They can make inquiries and schedule orders as they please. Overtime, this can translate to word of mouth if they find your product and service consistent.What to do nowThe first thing to do is to find a company offering sound practices and proven results. Find the top ranking car dealership or automotive SEO firms in your area. Key indicators should be their past years’ performance along with client base. The more experience and clients they have, the better services they might give.

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