Build Loyalty
Unless you are a Target or Wal-Mart you should focus on a specific type of product and not every product. For example, it doesn’t make sense to combine stickers and metal detectors on one website. They are each very different products with a very different client base. When a person knows what products to expect from your online store and combines that with positive feedback you have a very good chance of having a repeat customer.

Market Research
When you focus on a limited range of products you can do market research quickly and efficiently. That can make the difference between you being the innovator and you being the follower. Online businesses thrive when they are the innovator. Market research should always include learning about your competitors, their price ranges, and how they drive people to their site.

Scalability
Scalability has everything to do with picking and choosing vendors. If you have a smaller array of products you can purchase from fewer vendors. You take advantage of the best rates because you are purchasing more. That means you will have increased profits.

If you are not happy with the results that your online store is producing, you may want look at your products. If they are not compatible there is a good chance that you are not building customer loyalty. Now is the time to help create your solution. Your first step is to talk to the experts at The Plum Tree Group. They will help you find the solutions you need for your emerging business. They will help you build a loyal client base, do the proper market research, and learn to utilize scalability to increase your bottom line. Specialize to maximize.

1.  Ubervu is a free social monitoring tool.  It has some great features.  I found you can log in to see your saved searches and I love that.  You can use a full range of social media information with it too.  Ubervu handles Tweets, comments, posts, and videos.  The things that concern me with it are the occasional issues with the interface in Chrome and some glitches in the default settings in the daily mentions.

2.  For $1.00 per month you can use BrandsEye.  If you are looking for a tool for social monitoring it is a bit lacking.  A majority of its features work well with the older management tools though.

3.  Social Mention is a pretty decent free monitoring tool.  It is visually appealing and easy to use.  I see its only major shortcoming come from its search ability.  You cannot save a search and come back to it later.  That can end up being pretty inconvenient and potentially wastes time.  I am not happy when my time gets wasted.

4.  Viralheat is a very affordable monitoring tool at $9.99 per month.  I found it a bit difficult to learn the navigation.  Once I did, the information I had access to was awesome.  I found graphs, statistics, activities, and countless other bits of information.  It is great to have all your pertinent information in one central spot.

5.  A free trial is a nice incentive and I like that Trackur gives us that option.  After the trial you are looking at about $18.00 per month cost.  The basic account is named correctly – it is very basic.  If you like more jazzy features to go with the straight forward format you could be disappointed.

For more information about how you can leverage social monitoring tools, call Plum Tree Group at 800-540-4165

The first step that the Plum Tree Group takes is to conduct a comprehensive market research on your industry, including market structure and segmentation, target costumers, competitors, product brands, product trends, and social media analysis. Once we come up with a list of hundreds of keywords, we evaluate them according to the following criteria:

Search volume
This metric indicates the number of people searching for a given keyword. Although this information is pulled from Google, the numbers are not completely accurate, and therefore it is important to weigh them relatively to the search volume of the other keywords in our list.

Relevancy
This refers to the degree that the keyword connects with your goals. In other words, how would a searcher feel if they searched for this term and found your site? Would your site satisfy the searcher’s need? Once we have determined the most relevant keywords, specific landing pages should be developed for them.

Competition
The competition level represents the number of sites targeting a given keyword. There are two primary sources to determine this level: the number of sites competing for the keyword advertising space on Pay Per Click networks, and the number of sites optimized for the term.

Final Keyword Evaluation
The most valuable keywords will strike a balance between search volume, relevancy and competition. There are three combinations that hold a high value:

Higher competitiveness and higher relevancy: Sometimes there is no choice but to fight for a competitive term. If this is the case, we have to make sure that the term has a high degree of relevancy.

Higher search volume, lower competition and higher relevancy: Keywords that have high search popularity, are targeted by a reasonable number of competitors, and are related to your site conversion goals represent the ideal balance and must be on our keyword list.

Lower search volume and higher relevancy: Even if the number of people searching for the term is small, the people that do execute this query are more likely to land on your site and ultimately convert.

Hence, keeping your eyes on the bottom-line prize.

Those two aspects got me thinking about the other vital components of a successful campaign, also of such utmost importance, functioning almost like a human’s vital organs: Acting together in harmony, and can only be effective if all are working correctly in unison.

[Editor's note: This is a stronger reference to public relations plans, incorporated with marketing. So you won't see the basic 4 P's of Marketing here, especially because we're talking about online interactive marketing and PR.]

Let’s jump ahead, figuratively, and put on our campaign-planner hats. We’ve spent hours researching our client (or, if this is an internal campaign, our own company): We completed the S.W.O.T. analysis (identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats), identified P.E.S.T. factors (political, economical, social and technological), and are ready to start with campaign deliverables, in the following order:

What is the problem or opportunity at hand? (Situation Analysis)
What is the campaign goal? (General and overarching)
What is the target market? Who is your primary audience?
What is/are the key message (or messages) that you wish to exude through this campaign?
What are your measurable and specific objectives?
What is your overarching strategy for this campaign? (Think: Vital Organ!)
What tactics will you use to achieve your strategies and goals?

Now, this has taken substantial outside research and strategy just to get to this point of the campaign-planning process. But we can not forget three more important pieces to the puzzle:

What is your campaign timeline?
And, even more importantly, what is your budget? (The oil that makes the machine go ’round, no?)
And lastly, but just as importantly, how will you measure your above efforts?

All of these components warrant significant thought and individual posts on their own, because if one step is missed, the campaign will crumble.

Tune back soon for more interactive marketing insight and conversation.

MarketPointe is a division of The Plum Tree Group (PTG), an integrated business solution provider that focuses on solutions for emerging businesses. The PTG focuses on Information Technology, Business Process Outsourcing, Marketing & Communications, Consulting and Micro Venture Support Services.

Our mission at MarketPointe is to help small- and e-merging businesses target and build their growing online marketplace through custom interactive campaigns and resources.

There, introductions aside, now to the Pointe:

We are priveleged enough to provide our online marketing services to myriad clients in multiple industries. That being said, our marketing goals, strategies and tactics also vary as widely as our clientele. However, several overarching tactics remain the same, such as social media networks and engagement, e-mail marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).

I came across a very informative SEO post earlier today highlighting the reasons why it’s important not to merely spit out what you’re going to do for your client and do it once, but to continuously update and stay current with your online marketing and consultative services.

The post brings up several terrific reasons about leaving SEO to the SEO pros: The lack of implementation by the client, consistently participate in and increase link building, staying current with search engine changes, the downturn of employees due to this downward market, and the importance of utilizing in-house analytics.

MarketPointe proudly stays on top of these robust and dynamic tools and methods. Don’t believe me? See for yourself and give us a ring.