It’s important to realize that not everything you do for your site’s optimization is going to have a direct effect in this way. A lot of the work done on your site’s optimization is designed to give your site’s reputation a general boost, which ultimately increases your ranking. Some of the tactics that have a direct impact on your standing with the search engines have less of a long-term effect. A search engine optimisation plan needs to have a mix of both to really have a chance to succeed.

SEO tactics which swing

There are some things you can do to your pages that, for almost every new site to SEO, will have a near-immediate effect. These are the things that many SEO experts will do first, so that their clients can enjoy an increase in rankings while they wait for the long-term work to be done.

The sort of tactics we’re talking about here include the placement of keywords where there were none before, the reorganisation of architecture from complicated to simple, and the polishing up of code which was a little cluttered before. Fixing these things can have a swift effect because they have such a big impact on how the search engines communicate with a site and so are really useful search engine optimization tools.

Some SEO tactics that produce a swift swing in rankings can be detrimental in the long term. Most black-hat SEO work tends to sit within this category. As time goes by, a pattern is emerging which indicates that the search engines will crack down on any techniques which have a swift effect. These tend to be the techniques most easily manipulated for dubious means.

The effect of roundabouts

Quite a lot of the work you do to optimise your site will have a less-than direct effect on your rankings. You can discuss this with our experts at www.seoconsult.co.uk. Things like creating quality content or hosting a community forum on your site will have more impact in the long term, when the search engines notice that your site is active. There is also a quality effect over time, as the search engines notice that people like your site.

A lot of the best SEO outcomes come from quite roundabout methods. A social media campaign, for example, will take a long time to kick in with results and often won’t even get you inbound links. Businesses still use this technique, however, because it wins out over time.

As every good search engine optimisation agency will tell you, effective SEO requires patience. It is worth the wait to put some roundabout techniques in place. Although some roundabout techniques may cause you to pull your hair out in frustration, your site will benefit in the long term.

Points and perks expire. What lasts is the company’s “personality,” as well as a two-way relationship with the customer that reinforces the brand

But how does a company ensure that its loyalty program achieves effective share of heart? Here are five principles to consider:

Roots of Loyalty

The first principal may be counterintuitive to those who work so hard trying to create committed customers: Loyalty is natural. Think about it. Identify with someone or something, then reinforce the credibility of our beliefs and one way we do that is by forming loyalties to them. So we give them repeat business and brag about them to our friends.

Appealing to the Heart

The second principle: behavior often comes from the heart.

We care about performers because we empathize with them. They lay themselves out for us—whether it’s an actor demonstrating raw emotion, a musician performing passionately, or an athlete leaving it all on the field. The common thread is vulnerability, the willingness to expose themselves and take a risk. And that creates a heartfelt response which makes us want to attend the movie, buy the CD, or sit in sub-zero temperatures watching the game (at full price, mind you).

Take Your Time

Love takes time. It’s as true in business as it is in romance.

A Two-Way Street

The fourth principle may be the most significant because of the damage that can be caused by ignoring it. Put simply, relationships are reciprocal.

True relationships develop along the lines of give-and-take. Relationships develop only so far as trust develops. And trust develops only by mutual disclosure and the circumspect protection of valuable information. The more data you collect on your customers, the greater the danger that the give-and-take balance will get out of whack.

It’s More than Numbers

Fifth, just because you can’t precisely measure something (or measure it easily) doesn’t mean it’s not working. We don’t know how poetry moves the heart but our lives would be much less fulfilling without it.

Behavior tends to get measured because it can be measured. But measurement can create its own reality and cause the loyalty marketing focus to become too narrowly defined.

Be polite, be respectful, and be patient with your loyalty marketing efforts and you’ll find that they not only increase short-term transactions but drive long-term affection as well. That affection will pay off for years to come, long after the points and perks expire.

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The essence of marketing is to understand you customers’ needs and develop a plan that surrounds those needs to create your offers. Let’s face it anyone that has a business has a need and desire to grow their business. The most effective way to grow and expand your business is by focusing on organic growth.

You can increase organic growth in four different ways. They are:

• Acquire more customers
• Persuade each customer to buy more products
• Persuade each customer to buy more expensive products or up selling each customer
• Persuade each customer to buy more profitable products

All four of these increase your revenue and profit. Let me encourage you to focus on the first which is to acquire more customers. Why? By acquiring more customers you increase your customer base and your revenues then come from a larger base.

How can you use marketing to acquire more customers?

• Create a strategic plan and spend time researching and planning.
• Guide your product development to reach out to customers you aren’t currently attracting.
• Price your products and services competitively.
• Develop your message and materials based on solution marketing.

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If you are like the majority of small business owners your marketing budget is limited. The most effective way to market your company is to create a well rounded program that combines sales activities with your marketing tactics. Your sales activities will not only decrease your out-of-pocket marketing expense but it also adds the value of interacting with your prospective customers and clients. This is priceless.Small businesses typically have a limited marketing budget if any at all. Does that mean you can’t run with the big dogs? Absolutely not. It just means you have to think a little more creatively.  How about launching your marketing campaign by doing one of the following:

• Call your vendors or associates and ask them to participate with you in co-op advertising.
• Take some time to send your existing customers’ referrals and buying incentives.
• Have you thought about introducing yourself to the media? Free publicity has the potential to boost your business. Position yourself as an expert in your field.
• Invite people into your store by piggybacking onto an event. What about a concert coming to town, willing to sell those tickets for them? If not, how about a walkathon that is taking place in your area, why not be public outreach and distribute their material?

When you do spend money on marketing, don’t forget to create a way to track those marketing efforts. You can do this by coding your ads, using multiple toll-free telephone numbers, and asking prospects where they heard about you. This enables you to notice when a marketing tactic stops working. You can then quickly replace it with a better choice or method.

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Understanding customers and examining their role in the marketing process is very important.  We will see that for most organizations understanding customers is necessary not only because of their effect on marketing decisions but because customers’ activities influence the entire organization.

Yet, understanding customers is a never-ending challenge.  One reason is that not all customers are the same and, consequently, benefits sought by one customer may differ from those sought by another.  Because of this marketers must continually conduct marketing research to evaluate customers and to determine what they want.  And uncovering what customers want is made significantly easier if a company establishes methods designed to manage their customers.

In this tutorial we explore the techniques marketers use to manage their customers.  We begin by defining what a customer is and why they are important to an organization.  We then look at what tools and strategies must be in place to skillfully manage customers including the crucial requirement that marketers build relationships with their customers.  Finally, we conclude with a discussion of how servicing customers is often just as critical as selling products to them.

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What Are Patents, Trademarks, Servicemarks, and Copyrights?

Some people confuse patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Although there may be some similarities among these kinds of intellectual property protection, they are different and serve different purposes.

What Is a Patent?

A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Generally, the term of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the United States or, in special cases, from the date an earlier related application was filed, subject to the payment of maintenance fees. U.S. patent grants are effective only within the United States, U.S. territories, and U.S. possessions. Under certain circumstances, patent term extensions or adjustments may be available.

The right conferred by the patent grant is, in the language of the statute and of the grant itself, “the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling” the invention in the United States or “importing” the invention into the United States. What is granted is not the right to make, use, offer for sale, sell or import, but the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention. Once a patent is issued, the patentee must enforce the patent without aid of the USPTO.

There are three types of patents:

1) Utility patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof;

2) Design patents may be granted to anyone who invents a new, original, and ornamental design for an article of manufacture; and

3) Plant patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new variety of plant.

What Is a Trademark or Servicemark?

A trademark is a word, name, symbol, or device that is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others. A servicemark is the same as a trademark except that it identifies and distinguishes the source of a service rather than a product. The terms “trademark” and “mark” are commonly used to refer to both trademarks and servicemarks.

Trademark rights may be used to prevent others from using a confusingly similar mark, but not to prevent others from making the same goods or from selling the same goods or services under a clearly different mark. Trademarks which are used in interstate or foreign commerce may be registered with the USPTO. The registration procedure for trademarks and general information concerning trademarks is described on a separate page entitled “Basic Facts about Trademarks” (http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/tac/doc/basic/).

What Is a Copyright?

Copyright is a form of protection provided to the authors of “original works of authorship” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works, both published and unpublished. The 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work, to prepare derivative works, to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work, to perform the copyrighted work publicly, or to display the copyrighted work publicly.

The copyright protects the form of expression rather than the subject matter of the writing. For example, a description of a machine could be copyrighted, but this would only prevent others from copying the description; it would not prevent others from writing a description of their own or from making and using the machine. Copyrights are registered by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress.

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Before you learn more about marketing, you should get a basic impression of what marketing is. See What’s “Advertising, Marketing, Promotion, Public Relations and Publicity, and Sales?”. Basically, you might look at marketing as the wide range of activities involved in making sure that you’re continuing to meet the needs of your customers and are getting appropriate value in return. Think about marketing as “inbound” and “outbound” marketing. (In the following, consider “product” to be either a tangible product or a service — nonprofits often refer to these as “programs”.)Inbound Marketing Includes Market Research to Find Out:

1. What specific groups of potential customers/clients (markets) might have which specific needs (nonprofits often already have a very clear community need in mind when starting out with a new program — however, the emerging practice of nonprofit business development, or earned income development, often starts by researching a broad group of clients to identify new opportunities for programs)
2. How those needs might be met for each group (or target market), which suggests how a product might be designed to meet the need (nonprofits might think in terms of outcomes, or changes, to accomplish among the groups of clients in order to meet the needs)
3. How each of the target markets might choose to access the product, etc. (its “packaging”)
4. How much the customers/clients might be willing pay and how (pricing analysis)
5. Who the competitors are (competitor analysis)
6. How to design and describe the product such that customers/clients will buy from the organization, rather than from its competitors (its unique value proposition)
7. How the product should be identified — its personality — to be most identifiable (its naming and branding)

Outbound Marketing Includes:

1. Advertising and promotions (focused on the product)
2. Sales
3. Public and media relations (focused on the entire organization)
4. Customer service
5. Customer satisfaction

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Marketers have seen the customer service process evolve from an area that received only marginal attention into a primary functional area.  In response to customers’ demands for responsive and reliable service, companies are investing heavily in innovative methods and processes to strengthen their service level.  These innovations include:

Increased Customer Self-Service

A major trend in customer service is the move by companies to encourage customers to be involved in helping solve their own service issues.  This can be seen in retail industries where self-service ranges from customers placing their own grocery products in shopping bags all the way to having customers do their own checkout including scanning products and making payment.  Also, as we will soon discuss, customers needing information are being encouraged by companies to first undertake the effort themselves often by visiting special company-provided information areas (see Website and Phone Accessible Knowledge Base below).  Only after they have explored these options are customers encouraged to contact customer service.

Revenue Generators

Companies that maintain a customer service staff have found that these people not only can help solve customer problems but they may also be in a position to convince customers to purchase more.  Many companies are now requiring sales training for their customer service personnel.  At a basic level customer service representatives may be trained to ask if customers are interested in hearing about other products or services.  If a customer shows interest then the representative will transfer the customer to a sales associate.  At a more advanced level the representative will shift to a selling role and attempt to get the customer to commit to additional product purchases.

Out-Sourcing

One of the most controversial developments impacting customer service is the move by many companies around the world to establish customer service functions outside of either their home country or the country in which their customers reside.  Called out-sourcing, companies pursue this strategy to both reduce cost and also increase service coverage.  For instance, having multiple customer service outlets around the world allows customers to talk via phone with a service person no matter what time of day.  The ability to move service to another country is only viable in large part due to technological developments (see Internet Telephone below).  But such moves have raised concerns on two fronts.  First, many see this trend as leading to a reduction of customer service jobs within a home country.  Second, customer service personnel located off-shore may lack sufficient training and often lack an understanding of the conditions within the customers’ local market both of which can affect service levels.  At the extreme a poorly managed move to out-source customer service can lead to a decrease in customer satisfaction which in the long-run could affect sales.

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• Product: The product aspects of marketing deal with the specifications of the actual goods or services, and how it relates to the end-user‘s needs and wants. The scope of a product generally includes supporting elements such as warranties, guarantees, and support.
• Pricing: This refers to the process of setting a price for a product, including discounts. The price need not be monetary – it can simply be what is exchanged for the product or services, e.g. time, energy, psychology or attention.
• Promotion: This includes advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and personal selling, branding and refers to the various methods of promoting the product, brand, or company.
• Placement (or distribution): refers to how the product gets to the customer; for example, point of sale placement or retailing. This fourth P has also sometimes been called Place, referring to the channel by which a product or services is sold (e.g. online vs. retail), which geographic region or industry, to which segment (young adults, families, business people), etc.

These four elements are often referred to as the marketing mix, which a marketer can use to craft a marketing plan. The four Ps model is most useful when marketing low value consumer products. Industrial products, services, high value consumer products require adjustments to this model. Services marketing must account for the unique nature of services. Industrial or B2B marketing must account for the long term contractual agreements that are typical in supply chain transactions. Relationship marketing attempts to do this by looking at marketing from a long term relationship perspective rather than individual transactions.

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