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This post highlights useful, relevant, and creative ways to get repeat visitors with online brand loyalty.

How do you create a web brand that creates return visitors? You can impress customers from the first moment they hit your page. A clear selling format can make customer interaction easy. You can have a customer service system in place to keep clients coming for more. Some of the best online brands offer freebies for new customers like free shipping, and make the return process simple.

This post is about getting that one important kind of visitor: the kind who visits not once, but several times if not dozens.

The online brand is one of the largest growing markets online; literally billions of hits every day on social media platforms like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter are hits on branded items. Someone likes the latest NBC comedy; another finds a page on how to mix drinks with a custom drink mixer; another video points out career options overseas.

The possibilities are endless. Another interesting statistic is the rate of brands being searched online. The statistics are mind boggling, with product searches being around 50% for brand names. That means instead of searching for “best pickup truck” you are getting “Ford’s F-150.” It’s another case of a brand creating such an impression via multiple channels that it gains its own power.

With so many searching for brands, you can see brand loyalty is quite important, especially for online marketing. How do you create such loyalty?

1-Let Them Inside Your Store
When they walk into the door, what do they see? Actually, what do they think? Usually you get questions. Can I trust this company? How will this help me and my family? Are these guys experts on what they do?

Those questions need to be answered immediately, not with a pop up ad, but with a clear page showing that you can be trusted (Better Business Bureau accredited), that you can save them time and money (specials and free articles), and even more that you know the subject, with the text both educating and selling on your product/service.

That’s can be difficult, but it has immense rewards.

2-Be Clear With Your Service
Next, design shouldn’t be underrated. Be clear what you are selling, its price, and how fast you can send it or get it done. Everything from your shopping cart to your quote page will be examined by the buyer. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but design is less about ambition and more about usability.
3-Give Help
Customer service has become a major point of interest online, mainly because the best do it so well. If you are a smaller company, testimonials are golden. Today, hiring a customer service representative to help explain your services in a chat is commonplace and simple.
4-What’s the Difference?
What’s the difference between your company and the store down the street? Many online booksellers offer good discounts to keep buyers out of major book stores, and buying from them. For brand loyalty, making your store the better deal creates it. If you come through for a better price, it’s economics. Amazon is better than any other web bookstore, mainly because of the entire experience, big discounts, and so on. On the other side, buyers are willing to pay more for convenience and expertise. If you can be easy to sign up with, for example, while the competitor has page after page of sign up pages, you can save buyers time (almost as valuable as money). Expertise is an even bigger benefit; if you are choosing between someone with 10 years experience in helping clients and one who just started out, who do you choose? It’s not always that simple, but often the difference goes beyond money.
5-Study Your Customers
In online branding, it’s even easier to get a grasp of who your customers are. People going online for Christmas gifts are a big market. People looking for job online have created a large market for job prospecting too. These customers are all of different demographics. To study your customers, one of the best ways is to use social media like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. These allow to not only study your clients, but to create brand loyalty with daily updates on Twitter or Facebook.

6-The Experience
Really, this is just the tip of the iceberg for how to create brand loyalty, but creating a complete experience is perhaps the best way to both 1) create brand loyalty and 2) earn repeat visitors. Many online sites, especially social media sites, have made it commonplace for someone to visit them 10 or more times in a day. Visiting your Twitter page 10 times is common! And with so many companies offering daily specials, like Amazon’s Gold Box, you can expect repeat buyers in more shopping venues too. The secret is the complete integration of design, content, and marketing. You don’t have to put 10 flash videos on your site, but you can create an experience which will make you remembered by every customer.

Blogs, social media and personal branding combined are the way of the future for internet marketing. They are the ultimate tool for creating awareness, building a community and generating real results.

But how do you use them together to build a web brand? First, let’s take a look at them individually.

Blog Marketing
If you’re a building a small business or want to create awareness for your company, blogging can create the buzz you need.

The most important thing when it comes to blogging is creating a constant stream of fresh, new content. Whether you write it yourself or opt to hire a company to do the writing for you, content is key.

Social Media Marketing
There’s been quite the buzz regarding social media lately and rightfully so. Social media allows businesses to engage clients and network in a variety of new ways.

No other field can reach so many people in a matter of seconds. When you post to your Facebook page, you’re immediately engaging an audience of limitless size. How it’s done is the viral aspects of one user who follows you turning into two, three and continuing to grow afterwards. For example, with Facebook, you have a prospective audience for your niche in the millions and a clever marketer will attract them all by building a community on their Facebook page.

Social media marketing buzz is true. Engaging clients on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is practically a must to develop any brand today. It’s also simple. Join social networks and you can market your business in a variety of ways.

Personal Branding
Personal branding is about getting down to the details about you, your company and your product. It’s your chance to prove that you’re human, you want to help others with your product and you’re interested in your clients too. No two fields work better with personal branding than social media and blog marketing.

Using Blogging, Social Media and the Personal Brand to Create a Complete User Experience

The cliche, never put all your eggs in one basket, works for marketing too: never put all your marketing goals into one form. Use as many fields as you possibly can. Do you see major companies only using TV commericals to promote  a new product? No, you see them using a variety of tools, from Facebook campaigns to PPC Ads.

Online, beyond the static site, you’re best method of marketing is using blogging, social media and branding together in a process designed to create that unique user experience. 

For your blog and brand, social media marketing creates awareness and responses. You might have a Facebook page created simply to market your blog. This is even simpler than starting up the blog. And with applications to connect your main Facebook company page to Twitter, you can constantly promote new posts across the web. You can do the same thing with your company site.

There are many other social media tools you can use to create buzz for your blog, which in turn creates brand awareness. Two of the simplest and best are StumbleUpon and Digg, which improve response to every blog post you share with readers.

Let’s connect the dots for all these forms.

To create a user experience, web marketers use marketing in a cycle. For instance, you can use Facebook or Twitter to create buzz on your blog, your blog can help you define your personal and  business brand, and your brand can attract attention to your Facebook and Twitter pages. One buyer reads your Facebook page, travels to your blog, is impressed by your expertise and buys. They then continue to follow you on all these forms. Why? If it works out, you’re creating a unique user experience.

Web branding is inexpensive and when done right, can be very powerful. By utilizing social media and blogging together to create a strong and integrated web branding campaign, you can increase the worth of your company, your personal brand and can expect to earn more. And all it really takes…. is time, so let’s get web branding.

Social media and email marketing together can mean the difference between success and failure online.

Some say email marketing will go the way of direct mail marketing. Did email marketing really kill direct mail? No. Actually, direct mail is still a major business. Just because you can get higher response rates for lower costs with email marketing, doesn’t mean one can replace the other. And many major businesses are seeing the light.

Recent studies on social media pointed out that older generations actually respond more to direct mail. Why? The majority of buyers older than 60– a huge market already –don’t get on Facebook, don’t Tweet on Twitter, don’t network on LinkedIn and certainly don’t watch YouTube marketing videos.

The same thing that was said of direct mail was and is considered for email marketing in comparison to social marketing. But it’s not a decision to try one over the other; the new rules of marketing say using social marketing and email marketing together provides the greatest opportunity to generate buzz and increase consumer response.

Now that we’ve established email marketing as far from dead, and that social marketing isn’t for all buyer groups, let’s define how you can use social email marketing.

Make Social Email Marketing Simple
Twitter is 140 character messages, Facebook is a vast ocean where it’s hard to make a splash and although email marketing messages are often longer, you still need to master the fine of art of simple, direct, short marketing.

Typically, email marketing messages have shorter content when compared to the general direct mailer and a much shorter response rate. Nearly 80% of recipients will respond (by either taking action or deleting the message) within 48 hours. Email marketing needs to be condensed for social media and network sites. This means shorter posts, quicker calls to action and adapting to much faster response rates.

Subscribing Rules on Social Email Marketing
Social email marketing is about using email and social media as tools. Since readers of your Facebook page may be interested in your emails and email readers may want to “Like” your business on Facebook, you need to understand how to use the two together to position your brand for success. How? Make it simple for current email readers to follow you on Facebook, Twitter, etc. and vice versa. Make it valuable for your target to follow both – run different deals, offer additional discounts or have certain information only available on one. Maybe you link the headlines of your monthly newsletter on Facebook, but in order to view the entire newsletter they have to subscribe to your email list.

Find Your Prospects, Create Customers
Depending on your main client base, you may have a variety of readers and followers. No problem. Research who’s following you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks. See what customers are responding to in your emails. The results may surprise you and change your future marketing efforts.

What’s the Competition Doing?
Lastly, no matter if you’re failing or succeeding with these strategies, social email marketing is still advertising and you still need to know about the guy charging less than you for the same product and the girl charging more than you but getting more sales. Some critical research on the competition– following their Facebook pages, subscribing to their emails –can help you, your brand and your product stand out. There are no rules saying you can’t–all marketers do it.

Social and email marketing aren’t going to work for all brands and all products. Some consumers are going to prefer traditional means of marketing communications, where others are going to prefer social media over email and vice versa. Marketing isn’t about choosing one media and hoping for the best, it’s about strategically reaching buyers across multiple platforms to position your brand for success.

6 Benefits of LinkedIn Marketing

If you run any kind of business, you can reap the benefits of LinkedIn marketing. While it’s beneficial for getting traffic, LinkedIn is masterful in engaging new clients for your business in new ways.

The benefits of any social media marketing can be huge, but using networks together is the best way to use the social web. While there are many useful social networks to use, and many strategies on succeeding, one of the best ways is to connect to readers via Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This guide focuses on one important piece–the LinkedIn marketing formula and its benefits.

1-Make More Sales with LinkedIn Networking
If you don’t want to use all the social networks, if you don’t have the time to market separately, you can connect to buyers directly with LinkedIn and use the Twitter application to post all updates on both networks. LinkedIn uses the same 140-character update as Twitter, and it can be posted to all your fans on both networks simultaneously.

Social media may be a friendly technology, but for businesses, the opportunities it presents are enormous. Perhaps best of all, if you’re a B2B service, there are hundreds of thousands of businesses and professionals of all kinds on LinkedIn.

2-Study the Competition with LinkedIn Search
If you’re a startup or new to the social web, no problem. With LinkedIn, you can directly access pages for thousands of businesses in your niche (if not more), to see what they are selling, who they are selling to, how they are using social networks like LinkedIn, and how you can compete with them via certain products/services. Simply use the built in search feature at the top right of the screen. You can look under people, jobs, and companies for most success. Just type in your niche, decide whether you want to focus on companies or people or jobs, and you get instant researching tools.

3-Brand Awareness and LinkedIn Marketing
Perhaps one of the best parts of social marketing is using the network to create awareness and buzz about your brand. We’re all equal on LinkedIn in most cases, but the more you and your company network, the more connections you get, and the more reader feedback you receive, the better chance your LinkedIn marketing effort will succeed.

4-Product Demand via LinkedIn
You might be interested in starting a new service business. Let’s say you wanted to be a tech consultant, and you weren’t sure of who was buying what and for how much. You can do this with LinkedIn networking. Not only can you ask questions, but you can also see the main competition. If there are a lot of competitors, the market may be saturated but hot. Or it could be a smaller niche with less competition, and more demand than supply.

5-Networking with Professionals on LinkedIn
If you’re a small business owner or freelancer, you might want to be introduced to certain people and companies on LinkedIn. On the other hand, you may want to market your job skills in your hunt for employment. The more connections you make, the more opportunities you have for your network size to grow. LinkedIn has a feature where you can ask to be recommended to associates. So if you want to meet Employer 1, and you are already connected to Employer 2 who is connected with Employer 1, you can be introduced.

6-Feedback and Recommendations on LinkedIn
Feedback is one of the prime benefits of social media marketing in general. However, LinkedIn has a recommendation feature where you can personally be recommended by others in your profession. If you’re just starting out as a tech consultant, a few recommendations on LinkedIn can really “up” your business skills. In fact, many resumes now feature “see my recommendations on LinkedIn” as part of the reference or experience section.

As you can see, LinkedIn can be both a networking portal and a marketing gold mine. Now that you know the benefits, it’s time to reap the rewards.

The growing phenomenon of Facebook hasn’t been all due to one simple form of content, marketing or application. Facebook’s success is a combination of dozens of features, which make the user experience better. And any change to Facebook, no matter how small, could impact your social media marketing campaign greatly.

The most recent change proves the point: Facebook will change the “become a fan” button for business pages to a “like” button. This means, if you follow an author’s Facebook page, or a company’s or your favorite brand of coffee, instead of “fanning” the page, you’ll be “liking” it when you subscribe to updates on the Facebook page.

This may seem to be an insignificant change, but few one-word changes will have as much impact on marketing as this one. As you can already “like” a comment, picture, wall post or status update on Facebook, you can now do the same for brands you’d like to give a thumbs up, without declaring yourself a “fan”.

This came about after recent research that Facebook users, an estimated 400 million who log in daily, use the “like” feature far more than the “fan” feature. The Facebook study said nearly twice as many people “like” items than “fan” brands and company pages.

Why is this so important? And what effect will it have on web marketing?

Users feel less commitment to “liking” a page. It can seem less promotional than “Becoming A Fan”. Users feel it’s less of a stretch to say they like a brand. And what if you fan more than one brand? Now you can “like” as many brands, even competitors and not feel conflicted about it.

The idea behind the change then is that more people will “like” business pages than those who were “”fanning” them. Facebook is hoping the new feature will encourage more companies and startups to build Facebook pages and pay for additional advertising, Facebook’s main source of revenue.

But will this truly make a big difference?

Experts are arguing what will happen is users will simply “like” brands the same amount as they became a “fan.” So there are predicting no change whatsoever.

Traditionally, Facebook marketing was not a major business. With companies actively looking to promote their brands on Facebook over the past years and with many other social networks connecting to Facebook (such as Twitter and LinkedIn), it’s become a boon for marketers with any size plan. You could be a Fortune 500 company or a small business selling cookies. With companies actively courting readers to follow them on Facebook and Twitter, it’s only logical Facebook would try to encourage more uses to follow theses companies. It is the companies who write the checks after all.

One word may seem to be a small change, but Facebook is betting money this tiny twist will lead to more users connecting with brands and more advertising dollars. For marketers, it may encourage a larger following. But is more followers what businesses really need to be more successful on Facebook? Or will this just over saturate Facebook with business updates and dilute their messaging to their actual target market?

For now, we have to wait and see.