Posts Tagged ‘interactive marketing’

5 Completely Affordable Social Monitoring Tools

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

I am so thankful for innovators like The Plum Tree Group.  They bring me comprehensive and interactive marketing through MarketPointe. They understand who it is important for me to have a social media tool to help monitor my online activity and maximize my results.  Here are five of the least expensive social monitoring tools out there.

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

How To Optimize eCommerce sites for SEO Purposes

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

With the emergence of newer platforms for online business, SEO for e-Commerce sites has been attracting a lot of attention. MarketPointe can help business managers in implement SEO best practices for their e-Commerce web sites.

MarketPointe can help you in selecting the right set of relevant keywords for your e-Commerce web platform. So whether you are providing a platform to sell clothes, shopping accessories, computing inventories or any other products or services, MarketPointe can enable seamless virtualization of global services.

MarketPointe can configure the web platforms in a way to increase your chances of being featured on the first page of Google search engine for specific keywords. MarketPointe has provided consulting solutions to various business mangers that have been facing low online traffic concerns.

An improved SEO strategy can translate into higher revenues. With an increase in online traffic, sales numbers usually increase. MarketPointe can provide these full-proof scalable business solutions to e-Commerce business owners and mangers.

MarketPointe’s professional team understands the requirements of the business solutions and the needs of clients. A feasibility analysis regarding the requirements is done before development phase initiates. Clients are delivered a fully functional e-Commerce channel. Business users and managers can utilize it to drive sales and increase their bottom-line.

MarketPointe provides post implementation support. For small to mid enterprises MarketPointe can drive traffic and sales through targeted marketing campaigns. MarketPointe’s customers are set up to succeed in today’s hazy economic climate. So what are you waiting for? Get more inquires and lead conversions through MarketPointe’s business solutions.

Continued: Eyes on the Prize

Friday, January 15th, 2010

Research and Strategy are what is on the brain today. Refer to our parent company’s blog, The Plum Tree Group, for my post on the importance of research and strategy for any successful (interactive) marketing campaign.

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.