Marketing Virgin

Scott Daughtry*, a SEO and SEM specialist, contributes his best tips and tricks.

SEO = Search Engine Optimization (Results show up in the free/organic listings - the green highlighted section below)

SEM = Search Engine Marketing (Results show up in the paid listings - the red highlighted section below)

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Every now and then, I run across a really great start-up. I learned about a company called CIRadar through a friend of mine.

CIRadar has a competitive intelligence solution that is very innovative in its approach. They acquire information about your competitors and place it into different modules titled: Alerts & News, Research, Marketing, and Sales. The company has bots that crawl the Internet, looking for useful information.

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First of all, what is a blog? A blog is a website that displays information in chronological order. The information on the site may be commentary on someone’s personal life, an interesting article they read, or a review of a good restaurant – it’s whatever the author wants it to be. A blog gives readers the ability to provide feedback on their site. Technorati monitors over a million blogs everyday.   

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These days it’s almost impossible to get someone to read your e-mail. I’m a pretty difficult subject myself, half the time I don’t even read the e-mails my own friends send me! Then again, all I get from them is…(Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Read this!!!). So in business, how do you get your prospect to open your e-mail?
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I once had a professor who would pose this question every time I went to class. His answer: “A relationship.” Nothing more, nothing less. We all gave him the, “huh?” look the first few times, but then we quickly learned how to give him the response he desired. In time, before he could even get the question out, someone would yell, “a relationship!” That sentence was the only thing I learned in that class – and by the way, I got an “A”.
Misconceptions about marketing:
1. Marketing = Advertising Advertising is a function of marketing. Marketing uses advertising to gain interest in a product, service, or the company as a whole. 2. Marketing = Sales Sales follows marketing. It is the job of marketing to gain the interest of prospects, nurture and build a relationship, and turn over the qualified prospects to the sales staff to “seal the deal”. 
 

Marketing is the process of generating interest in you. Your goal is to build awareness about your brand, solution, or service among the people you think are most likely to benefit. This group of people is also known as your target market. You want this group to give you information about themselves – their general interests, contact information, timeframe for purchase, etc. This will help your company close a deal.  
What is marketing to you?