Professional, responsible and sophisticated- are the key factors that define corporate blogs. Different from generic blogs, corporate blog designs are more classy and uncomplicated.
Here is a collection of ten most popular corporate blog designs that are a perfect blend of style, simplicity and branding:
Yahoo
Nike
Dell
Cisco
Walmart
Design Matters
Johnson & Johnson
McDonalds
GM
Blogging is a raging web trend and with more and more people trying hands at it, sailing through the cut throat competition gets tougher by the day. The key to survival lies in implying technical innovations that pull the blog through a down phase.
When you see your blog traffic slipping, don’t panic. Instead, imply this five point strategy to perk up your blog during a slowdown:
Socialize your posts
Link, Digg, Tweet or Stumble some of your posts to create a buzz. Share your posts through your network on social media sites and attract viewers to your blog.
Revitalize the dead headings
Even the most engaging articles may fail to attract eyes if they suffer a poor heading. Slowdown is the best time to analyze posts that were not well received and give them a facelift with a new heading or introduction. Be a SEO pro and use keywords in your headings and intros that rank your blog high during relevant searches.
Follow suite
Check out what is selling the best and follow the trend. Simply following what readers are liking and blogging about it can be a very effective traffic booster. Whether it is an outfit, person, place or concept, if it’s a hit, it should be on your blog too.
Blockbusters that weren’t
You perceived some of your posts as stalwarts, but your readers thought otherwise. May be it was a case of wrong timing, may be you did not use the right key words, or may be you simply chose a wrong subject. Dig your blog archive for such posts and refurbish them. Give them a contemporary touch and calibrate them with the SEO tools. Edits may give some boost to these posts, as well as to your blog.
Set the timing right
Survey and analyze the time that people tend to spend over reading blogs. It could be weekends or working days. See what the trend for your genre is and set the frequency of your posts accordingly. Coming up with a new post every weekend is a good idea. This would not only cover the weekend visitors, but also help in developing a long term habit in your readers for checking your blog every Monday for something new.
With the whole world flocking to the social media sites like Twitter, Digg and LinkedIn, making your business visible on them has become extremely challenging. Social Media Optimization (SMO) is your only chance to remain afloat in a swarming pool of competitors. SMO is novel marketing strategy that has rapidly gained popularity in recent times. The concept is simple, get your website refurbished so that it is easily linkable to social media sites, is found on all popular blogs and podcasts and is extensively bookmarked.
Why Social Media?
A marketing study conducted by WhitePaperSource.com reveals that marketers are increasingly drawn towards social media marketing because it yields better results with lower investment. According to the report, the primary benefits of promoting your business through social media are:
Who doesn’t want to see their business grow by leaps and bounds in minimum cost? Social media is a fabulous opportunity for doing this and you should just not miss it!
However, only knowing about it and creating accounts on Twitter and LinkedIn will not get you the desired results. Marketing through social media needs extensive planning and effective SMO to ensure that your business is visible wherever your clients may look for it.
How do I make my SMO activities effective?
The answer is simple- proper planning and a well executed SMO strategy. Optimizing your website to ensure that it qualifies all parameters of social media marketing, coupled with effective management and maintenance of the same is what will get you maximum eye balls.
Here are some tips for a perfect SMO that will get you maximum attention on the Internet:
1. Increase your linkability – Mobilize your website. Update it regularly and imbibe blogs and whitepapers to enhance its linkability.
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy – Tag and bookmark your pages with all popular websites.
3. Help your content travel – SMO goes beyond modifying structure and content of your website. If you have content that is in portable formats like PDF, audio-video files, PPTs etc, the same can be submitted to sites like YouTube, SlideShare, etc..
4. Make web friends – Go ahead and exchange content and videos with other websites. Experiment with RSS and facilitate others in driving more traffic towards your web content.
Give your website the SMO power and see its presence grow in every corner of the World Wide Web!
Information is key to making a big sale and database marketing allows every marketer the opportunity to gather as much information they can about the prospect, customer or partner. In the current economic scenario with budgets being frozen and sales cycles extending, it pays to know your customer better.
So what exactly is database marketing? Database marketing is the activity of gathering data about your prospects and customers and then use this data to market your products and services more efficiently and effectively to them. Every business, from a small mom-and-pop shop to the big publically traded companies have databases of some kind – used in a multitude of ways in order to generate a need for the services offered by the company.
When we talk about a B2B marketing database, it may require more information that a normal consumer database in the form of annual revenues, SIC codes, organization structure, etc. The most effective database creation tools are:
With a robust database, the company can utilize the information available to them in many ways. Marketing to a complete database allows marketers to pitch the right product at the right time to the correct contact. Email marketing still remains a powerful tool available to B2B marketers as it practically costs less and delivers high on ROI. Telemarketing still holds onto its allure while direct mailings can deliver results if approached in a targeted segmented manner.
The major hurdle in database marketing is the dynamism of the B2B industry. With constant movement of contacts between companies and also, within the same organization, your database can become redundant if not refreshed time and again. Technologies to overcome this are now available to marketers in ways of lead nurturing programs. Lead scoring and lead nurturing helps marketers to keep track of leads and their buying stages while also concentrating on generating new business from old customers.
Lead verification is also a technique whereby older databases can be checked for relevant contacts and enhancement of the old database can help generate a fresher, more current database to market to.
‘What is content marketing?’ – A general user of Internet, after hearing the words ‘content marketing’ will have this first question in his mind.
” Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases. In contrast to traditional marketing methods that aim to increase sales or awareness through interruption techniques, content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action. “ As described under Wikipedia entry for content marketing.
In a layman’s language, whenever you read, see or listen to something that interests you, the content that engages you, whether it be a post on a blog, an article published on a magazine, an informative video, an interesting menu card in a restaurant, the striking headline in your local newspaper that fetches your interest, the newsletter or the content in a website, is a form of content marketing.
Importance of Content Marketing: The USP (Unique selling point or quality) of content marketing is, its unique and your very own engaging content, that talks distinctly about the entity whether it be you, the company, or the product/services you want to sell. This USP really is important as well to engage your customer/visitor reading something new & interesting and making you stand out of the rush of other related product/service providers. The content marketing, if its USP is retained, helps you positioning your business as the trusted resource in you niche.
“ Marketers may use content marketing as a means of achieving a variety of business goals, such as thought leadership, lead generation, increasing direct sales, improving retention and more .” says Wikipedia page for Content Marketing, this itself shows the importance of content marketing in retaining your customers.
Another important USP of content marketing is that it is permissive not disruptive to consumer. Unlike the old interruption marketing, content marketing is based on the user permissions, if a user want, he/she reads or uses the content that might be on your blog, website, e-zine, magazine, newsletter, white-paper, email, social media content or elsewhere.
Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. It is non-interruption marketing. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent. The essence of this strategy is the belief that if we, as businesses, deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately reward us with their business and loyalty.
Yes, you really can create marketing that is anticipated and truly makes a connection! You can develop and execute “sales” messages that are needed, even requested, by your customers. To retain your customer, you need to have a successful content marketing in place and to market your content successfully either you should write content yourself, keeping in mind your targeted readers, customer base, or should take content writing service from such experts who really understands and knows your niche and knows what interests your customer base. The intriguingly written, unique content can help retaining your business customers as well as building the new consumer base.
Author: Kitz S
Follow us