Avenues Consult is now a Google Adwords Certified Partner, after having officially achieved the Company wide certification in Search Advertising. This also makes us only the 18th Search Engine Marketing Company in India to attain this status.

Adwords Certified Partner is a certification of efficiency provided by Google, the world’s largest Search Engine & Pay-Per-Click Advertising Platform. Eligibility criteria’s requires a Search Marketing firm to pass rigorous set of exams, in addition to illustrating practical expertise in managing Adwords accounts.

Adwords is the Online Advertising program from Google aimed at serving as a performance based platform for businesses to reach new customers and grow their business. The solution provides direct marketing medium which is both real time and a measurable. Advertisers can easily set the budget and evaluate the impact within less than 24hours of starting their marketing campaign.

Interested advertisers can contact Avenues Consult for their online marketing campaign management directly via this official profile page link.

Branding is about differentiation and showing pride in what you do

What is your product, service, or company? What do they do, and how are they different from other outfits? Branding entails a strategy which repeats what you want your brand to say consistently, so that in time, people hearing or seeing it will associate it with the product or service you provide, and with the luster and pride you have injected into your brand. Example: examine your emotions when you are hungry and you see the golden arches of McDonald.

In your subconscious you might salivate to your favorite McDonald food items. And do you remember the first time you bought an iPod? Do you recall your admiration of its packaging and feel, and the way you could not wait to get home to open it? The Apple brand was strong and unique and evokes concepts like “excellence”, “innovative”, and “I have to have it” The same with BMW and its image for “German Engineering”.

The word “brand” and the many forms it can take

The word “brand’ is the name of a product or service that you use repeatedly to put some distance between your product or service and those of competitors. It can also be a symbol, a sign, or any other representation, or combination of representations. Example: the original, glass bottle of Coca-Cola, together with Coke’s red colors and the Coke logo, are all part of the Coca-Cola brand.

When that is strong enough, such as with Coke, the combination can be broken up and still represent the brand, such as with the word “Coke” on its own, or the globally recognized symbol “Coca-Cola”.Note that we have brought up examples of hugely successful images. To have a successful image out in the marketplace is the foundation of every successful endeavor, particularly with the outfits in their foundation stages.

Growing businesses should start branding early

We realize that you may think you have other priorities when you have an emerging business. After all you have to worry about your cash-burn rate, your staff, and what may understandably seem to you to be a hundred and one other issues. However, if you do not pay attention to the image you are emitting, the damage may become irreversible.

Branding is about being conscious, from early on, about what you say and project. A good strategy is to be very specific in your mind about what your core services, and project those repeatedly and faithfully at every turn. Obtain a copy of our earlier “Talking Points” blog and develop language that you adhere to. Get help in developing your basic messages, for they are the way your clients will perceive you.

Your website is a great starting place

One of the huge mistakes start-up and growing business entrepreneurs commit initially is in trying to spice up their websites on their own. You really don’t earn the penny that you saved, it’s disastrous. If you feel you could use some help, seek it. The rewards down the line are enormous, compared to the damage you might do if unpracticed.

We are talking about your brands collaterals like logo, website, brochures, packaging, presentations etc turning into a creative and bold voice for your brand, with succinctly formatted features, and language you can be proud to use with your future customers.

Twitter: you use all gears to drive your car; use all marketing components to drive your brand

At the risk of repeating ourselves, only well integrated and multifaceted marketing efforts have good odds of shining above the fray (Branding). Success requires that marketing efforts be orchestrated to use all of its 20 or more instruments harmoniously. It is thus essential that you first refine your offline image (logo, slogans, tag lines, exhibits, fliers, newsletters, brochures), and then work on online growth engines (SEM), including Twitter. Social media marketing tools (for which the buzz word is Web 2.0) add to your arsenal something akin to the difference between analog and digital. In the same manner as your “customer engagement” effort on the internet is incomplete without an effective SEO campaign, your brand -and dreams- are also stuck in the low gears if you are not active on the social networks.

You can scalp off the top of Twitter; but for leveraged rewards, get an expert marketer on your side

In our last article (Facebook), we listed some of Facebook’s astounding stats, in particular its 800-million membership, and its trillion page-views per month. With 300 million users, 300 million tweets a day, and 1.6 billion (yes, billion with a “b”) search queries per day, Twitter is not far behind. Twitter owes its success to several unique characteristics, not least of which are:

• Its SMS tag: a “Short Message Service”, accepting short tweets only –a max of 140 characters each. Short tweets are easier to deliver and more conducive to rapid chit-chat.
• The site is unbelievably quick. Intended recipients are updated instantly, and the message you send or post gets disseminated at the speed of light. In addition, when you belong to a community, there are Twitter apps to capture the demographics of other participants.
• Twitter is the preferred platform of many, and the most informal. People are happy to engage you, particularly if you radiate authenticity and expertise. Before long, you might end up communicating with trade people, other brand handlers and prospective customers.
• Twitter combines between you personally and your enterprise. Your business page starts off by containing your own profile (max 160 characters), and it has a photo of you rather than the company’s logo. This humanizes your business and tends to make your messages more genial.
• Some of the hundreds of Twitter applications for business, like Hootsuite.com and Tweetcheck.com, enable you to schedule your messages in advance. You can thus be posting on Twitter while doing something else.

LinkedIn: mistakenly viewed as a site for résumés, LinkedIn will take you the extra mile

You’ve done everything else, and now you’re staring at the ultimate opportunity for you to shape and control your identity online, as well as keep up with that of the other players who matter to you. With over 120 million registered professionals and business people exchanging information on LinkedIn, you use this platform to find and be found, to network, to conduct your essential company research, and to keep tabs on those you might hire both in the U.S., with 21million visitors a month, or globally, with 47 million. Once you get registered and start using LinkedIn, you will wonder how you managed without this global professional registry. Here are “tip-of-the-iceberg” characteristics that you might find particularly appealing:

•  If you’re on LinkedIn, you’re also almost automatically high up in the listings on Google. This leveraged visibility can only benefit you, particularly when you update your profile regularly
• LinkedIn has other onsite search tools that provide you with an amazing array of information, and for every search finding, you are informed of any direct or trade tie-ins to you.
• LinkedIn enables you to sync blog posts to your profile. This content through apps is a great facilitator in your quest to become a pillar in your online community.
• The link from your website and blog posts to your profile gets updated with key blog information as well as a link to the full blog or website.
• LinkedIn Groups is a unique feature that again positions you as an expert or “connector” in your trade. In this app, you view other members’ information while highlighting your own insights.

Amongst the social networks, LinkedIn has the reputation of being the scholarly, serious encyclopedia, or a modern-day who’s who. All of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. Surely that has a powerful connotation. People who register on LinkedIn aren’t there to send fun messages and be entertained. They are there to improve their lot and carve themselves a greater future. Serious entrepreneurs, without exception, should participate -or be left behind.

Still think social media is for sending pictures of your children and pets?

The numbers are so unreal that although you’ve heard them before, they bear repeating:

1)      Facebook membership now up to  800 million

2)      A quarter million new subscribers every day

3)      one trillion pageviews per month

4)      25-year-olds and older make up the fasted growing and most exciting demographic

In the end, it boils down to this: of the billions of minutes per month spent on Facebook, not a single minute is spent about your business if you’re not there.

Is your business ready for Facebook? Are you a branded enterprise?

For emerging and midsized companies who view all the social media as hooplas or fads, here today, gone tomorrow, the news is somber indeed. They are being left behind in the most dynamic era of hyper-connectivity ever. There is a caveat however: you don’t go to a big wedding wearing your torn jeans, and you don’t want to be seen on Facebook in anything other than your eye-catching, best looks. If you’re a smartly branded enterprise, then Facebook offers the perfect medium for reaching your target audience, no matter what sized business you are. If not, then you would be well advised to first give a face lift to your logo, banners, messages, sales materials, and website. Get a brand!

Whether you’re local, national, small, or big, a business Facebookpage is for you

Facebook is malleable and can be used in many ways, depending on your products or services. You can target your messages with pin-point precision by demographic and category (age, gender, interests). You can also leverage your brand almostad infinitum: some ofyour first circle offans (“likes”, as they’re formally referred to) will share or forward your message to some of theirs, and you start seeing the size of your own fan pool grow, along with visitors to your website. But let’s not fool anyone with a tale of a seamless path to prosperity through Facebook. For businesses, Facebook can be tough to set up and get cranking.

 For reliable and faster results,consider outsourcing your businessFacebook page

Facebook is like eBay, if not moreinvolved. The more familiar with it, the more effective you get. You can spend months studying its intricacies and still leave much to be learned. The issue is how to get maximum penetration to the people of interest to you in the most efficient way, and to do that with customizable fan page tabs that are search engine friendly. This involves the creation and disseminationof SEO content, and freshening up you custom business page at a regular clip. If you can maintain a compelling story and purpose, your business page will become a hub of expertise, and you gradually build a community around your business.

With Facebook you can adjust your ad budget frequently and adopta pay-as-you-goapproach

You can buy a package of 10,000 fans, for example, of an age group, who live in some area or other, and who share the same interests. You can also experiment with image or text ads. These tools are not expensive, and the trial and error process is quick and permits adjustments on a daily basis.For pay-as-you-go tactics, you can adopt CPC or CPM tools (only pay when visitors click or see your ad).Facebook also offers internal advertising. Although this is almost guaranteed to steer multitudes of readers your way, it can become expensive as you have to pay for that traffic, whether it benefits you or not.

What do you say, are you ready to take the plunge?

There are dozens of ways to exploit Facebook with a customized business page, but this is not the space to examine social media marketing. The message in this space is twofold:

1. Get yourself ready to come out into society, much like a debutante. Be a consultant –or better still, GETa consultant- to determine whether your brand has a “feel-good” sparkle to it –whether it is ready for the big day.
2. Then approach the social media, Facebook first, with a carefully planned scheme and modest expectations. You cangrow at the pace and budget that suit you. The great feature of Facebook is that you can put your foot on the gas pedal slowly at first, then press it down at will, enjoying the pay-as-you-go approach.

Did you imagine a 2 or 3-week attempt at SEO was going to do the job?

Internet marketing is an all-encompassing, comprehensive, lifetime endeavor, much like rearing a plant or a child. You have to keep nourishing it so that it is always –at the very least- at par with your competitors. If you don’t, you get left behind faster than you can say “whatever happened to me?” the marketplace has no mercy and does not comprehend the language of laggards. You’re either in The arena, with your full arsenal, including a “latter day” website, or you might as well stay home and ponder at what happened to you.

From offline to online: many are having difficulty taking a hefty leap

Many entrepreneurs & managers pay attention to their brochures, catalogs, fliers, and other offline sales materials. Wise and experienced business people may even seek expert help in developing those, starting with the logo, the letterhead, and the basic slogans. When it comes to their online businesses however, their outlook goes back to the Stone Age. They view their website as being “OK”, and they are content doing a little patchwork every now and again, happy enough to be able to put a “www” address on their business cards. In today’s global environment, those would be dinosaurs competing against giants.

4 out of 5 business owners would do well to scrap their old websites

Before considering Internet campaigns, you ought to be procuring a brand new, search engine compatible website; one that has a state-of-the-art design, is user-friendly, and crafted for handling traffic efficiently. With your new looks and multi-message capabilities, you can then get discovered, and getting discovered is the beginnings of mission accomplished. You want to be in there when businesses are conducting their searches for products or services in your domain. You want to come up as a resource for the type of information they are looking for. An expert marketing organization can show you how to achieve this. It can put at your disposal a proven array of communication and other tactics that will simplify your task.

Internet Marketing need not be overwhelming and can bring a relatively quick return on investment

Get expert advice on your side. Here are some of the benefits that will accrue from pursing effective online models:

1. Designing an intelligent website that sells and converts traffic into business. This combines between aesthetic appeal and search engine friendly code structures.
2. Mastering the search engines for free traffic and ensuring that offline and online elements work harmoniously together. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) improves the volume and quality of traffic to your website. Visitors are more likely to click on free organic listings than on paid listings.
3. Ensuring interest through a continuous stream of outstanding content, building targeted website traffic, and generating a growing buzz about your brand. Coupling that with call-to-action resource boxes and landing pages where sales and email addresses can be captured.
4. Email Marketing campaigns, aimed at promoting repeat business and generating leads. Once you are optimally structured, with attractive, professionally designed custom email newsletter templates, you can be a smart marketer with real-time response and tracking analytics.
5. Social media optimization is invaluable (for some products and services more than others), requiring research, and meticulous planning and execution. There are 600 million Facebook users, and 200 million Twitter users. It is critical for most businesses to have a dynamic presence there.

Internet marketing always works, providing it is part of a comprehensive effort

SEO, internet marketing, a modern-day website, a well crafted logo, good banners and slogans, yearly updated brochures and other sales materials, and clever talking points that are repeated over and over, all of that –and much more- is part of branding. Together, they speak of you, your image, and how you want the public to perceive you. You cannot be doing a good job with your brochure and other sales materials only to have the prospective client go to your website and find a calamity there. Give yourself fresh luster and a winning look, all over. And when it comes to a sophisticated field like Internet marketing, it is inconceivable that you should go down that path without expert advice.

Your website and its listings on Google

It is important that you fire-up your website and make itslistings more visible to people on Google and other search engines. People will generally congregate to the sites with the higher listings. You can achieve good results through Search Engine Marketing, SEM, which, in essence, serves to get more visitors to your website. SEM combines between search engine optimization (SEO) and promotion, and it is a necessary though long drawn effort.

Let us say your company is XYZ Electric, and you have a website

People looking for an electrical contractor may not find you. Why? Because there are fortyother companies listed ahead of you on Google and other search engines. They get listed ahead of you through their efforts in SEM . If you engage in search engine marketing long enough, and with adequate knowhow, not only would you raise XYZ Electric’s listing a few notches, but people hitting on other key phrases of your designation,such as for example “electro-magnetic consultant”, would be directed to your listing as well. That would have been a key phrase, electro-magnetic consultant, that you would have used repeatedly in conjunction with your site.

Witness the magic of SEM

Not only can you get XYZ Electric’s listing to the top of the heap, but you can also get a separate listing for your “Contact Us” tab, for example, making it a one click entry into your “Contact Us” page, as against at least two for your competitors. Thus, If you were to look up any large corporation on Google, you would see that they practically monopolize the first Google page with their links, using their various department names as well as key phrases representing their services.

How does it work?

Search engines use intelligent crawlers described as “spiders” (computer programs) that gobble up the billions of web pages on the net and then use ranking algorithms that calculate the number and order of searches that result in the ranking of listings. Thus the XYZ Electric listing gets lost in the shuffle initially, but when the XYZ site starts getting hits particularly buyers and repeat hits, which the computer programs can discern, the rankings gradually improve.

Where would the hits come from?

That is the essence of “marketing” in search engine marketing. SEO experts cite a multitude of ways to achieve a gradual ascent in the rankings. These can start with optimizing the website, monitoring the site’s positioning on a regular basis, studies of the search trends in a specific field, how many competing websites are going after the same key phrases, and detailed analysis and planning of how targeted viewers are going to be captured.

People choose from the first 3 search pages

With 10 search listings per page, many buyers will choose from the first page, the rest going to the second page, some filtering to the third. The issue clearly becomes that of the number of companies that are listed ahead of you in your field. As we have described, results do not come overnight, so the sooner you get involved, the higher your listing, and the less invisible you become.

This one is easy: it’s you or a competitor of yours

Navigating your website is unlike looking in the mirror. When looking in the mirror and see something you don’t like, you correct it, to the best of your ability. Not so easy with your prospective clients though. They see something that’s not right, they move on. STAND OUT FROM YOUR COMPETITORS BY SECURING AN EMOTIONAL CONNECTION with your potential buyer. Customersbrowsing on your site must feel a certain degree of comfort and warmth that they don’t get on other sites.

Give your site an identity through a live-chat capability

Just think of consumers clicking on your site and then leaving it because they couldn’t get answers. A live chat capability should not be allowed to intimidate you or make you think that you’re too small for a project like that. The degree of capacity customization these days will leave you astounded, and the costs are completely affordable. This can be a one-operator set-up or more, for one division or more, a hosted chat, live help for 10 hours a day or for 24/7, a hosted chat providing you with A BRANDED USER EXPERIENCE THAT YOUR COMPETITORS WOULD NOT HAVE.

Video Content is great for engaging prospective clients

Imagine how comforting it is for a customer to actually see you –or your staff or hired folks- through some video content. The daily viewership of You Tube says it all: more and more people are seeking visual rather than readership solutions. Stop telling people how good you are –SHOW THEM. So why not spice up your site with a clever few minutes of video?

Ever thought of giving a webinar?

What a great instrument a web-seminar is, both in a live format and through a recorded copy of an event, enabling participants to share in subjects important to your business. You can take your time recording your message(s), and thengive a webinar, which is no more than an online presentation to groups –groups of clients, vendors,intern staff trainees, or other categories.

Post anewsletter on your site

If you were to post a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly newsletter on your site, the first thing that will amaze you is how fast the number of clicks grows on your site. In a newsletter you can communicate directly, in the first person, with your client. You can tailor the messages with utmost precision to their needs, and the big prize is that a good string of newsletters will generate repeat business like no other tool.

Additional must-have items for your website

1. Newsletter Registration: a call-to-action for your site visitors, using a statement like: “here’s an opportunity for you to register to receive the latest Avenues-Consult newsletter, subsequent newsletters, special announcements, and any webinars we might conduct in the future. Your information will only be used to distribute to you the information you request.”
2. Social Media Integration (Twitter ,Facebook , Google Plus or LinkedIn): There is not a better way to leverage your message and see it reach a number of potential consumers exponentially larger than the one you targeted at the start –if you manage to catch fire, that is. You would be well advised to get expert advice here, as the difference between success and a big nothing lies in fingertip familiarity with the ins and outs of social media marketing.
3. Blogs  or Forums, whichever suits your site better: Imagine a glossary on your home page that lists 5-10 blog titles, and imagine if you update this tool in a consistent and well advertised manner. Your site is likely to become a hub for all those who are interested in your subject matter. In addition, you get the extra benefit of enhancing your site to SEO-friendly status, the blogs carrying a mass of your own specified key phrases.
4.  FAQ’s are essential to your good health: they protect you from every spontaneous whim and provide your customers with easy answers without having to wait.  Craft your FAQs adeptly though, your objective being to indirectly invite your customers to stay on your site. Also, provide a “contact us” way out should they get frustrated with the FAQs.

For more on this, contact us to provide you with a copy of the recent blog we posted titled: “5 TIPS FOR EMAIL NEWSLETTER WRITING.”

Are you skeptical about email campaigns generally? And yet, email newsletters enable you to communicate and build ties with a vast numbers of readers almost effortlessly. We can help you set up from scratch, and we can then deliver the content that suits your exact needs.

1-Death in the form of a yawn
Newsletter writing is much like TV newscast producing: the producer’s attention is focused on keeping the viewer from reaching for the clicker, and so must the writer’s, keeping the reader away from the delete button. The TV producer would never use a line, for example, to the effect that there will be four minutes of commercials. Likewise, adding the word “newsletter” in your subject line is poison. The producer use a teaser such as: “We caution our viewers that our next story may not be suitable for the whole family -right after these messages.” When crafting your next newsletter, use your subject line for eyebrow-raising bait.

2-Not you, them
A common pitfall is that you might think that an email newsletter is to flatter you, whereas in essence a newsletter that carries a punch barely has room for you. You, your company, your wares, your team, and your activities are all irrelevant. Carry instead your reader’s banner, story line, background, and wellbeing. Your turn will come down the line in subsequent newsletters, once you have gained a loyal audience.

3-Creativity, anyone?
Creativity is where everything subsequently lies. It is tough to advocate for such abstractions as wit, humor, and empathy. Do you recall the emotions the first iPod generated? Creativity evokes emotions and binds author to reader. You can conduct significant research, but all you will learn would relate to general structure and form, and tips authored by this person or another, which makes you entirely ready to… create! Wear your reader’s shoes, and try to view the world from their perspective.

4-It is your subject matter, so switch it around
Exhaust any research you may get hold of, and lay out your content until you feel ready for the effort. It is not uncommon for the entire content of a newsletter to boil down to one or two concepts. It would behoove you, before you start mixing it up, to be able to put your finger on those concepts. You can thus build up to your ideas, while keeping a strong emotional hold on your reader.

5-Edit and tweak -then edit again
What will your piece look and feel like? Will it have graphics? Will it be serious, light, humorous, fast-paced, laid back, poetic? Did you deviate from the plan? Tweak the copy to go back to your original vision which propelled you in the first place. And as a final word, there is merit for the theory that says that the best editing is done the morning after. Thus, after all is said and done, sleep over it. You will always find fresh and pleasant angles in the morning.

It is a well known fact that experienced marketers never leave home without a bunch of well rehearsed talking points. If you could use some assistance, call us today to help equip your business in the creation of simple and succinctly formatted talking points.

Improve: a hit-and-miss approach that is best left to others
When confronted with a: “Tell me about your service,” are you confident enough to come up with the most astute sets of answers every time? How about your staff: do you depend on each and every one of them to instantly come up their own pathway to a clever presentation? There are times when you are compelled to improvise, but even then, you ought to have a couple of flexible scripts up your sleeve. When emotions are high and a sale is in the air, you’ll feel in charge when nicely prepared.

Plan carefully and harvest what you plan for
Whether a product or service; you need to package your brand carefully, giving it measured, distinct, and instantly resonating talking points. Those points then have to be implanted into your everyday vocabulary so that each of the points will come up for you as well as for key members of your staff instantly and without reflection. Then turn the combination of a couple of your winner talking points into your rallying cry, and watch the proverbial cash register going into action.

Look out –develop your talking points with dedication
Essential is that every talking point:
1. Be crafted for putting sufficient and easy to understand distinctions between you and competing products or services
2. Have imbedded in it whatever it takes to elicit sufficient emotion to cause the potential client to feel favorable to your organization or brand
3. Bring to the fore some of your be-kind-to-the-planet, or to animals, or to other philanthropies
4. Be original, fresh, and representative of your best thinking

Keep your talking points abreast of what’s going on
Don’t keep showing off a particular strategy or issue if the whole subject matter has gone moot, arguable, disputable, or sounding like yesterday. Clients will be kind to you in part depending on what they gauge is contained in your package, particularly if it contains social and corporate responsibility issues. When branding and preparing the marketing plan for your next fiscal year, that is the time to sharpen and put new gloss over your talking points –and make sure the staff who talk to clients in person or on the phone are abreast of the updates you decide to make.

Find out how a Utah man used YouTube to build a multi-million dollar business:

Get in touch with us today to start a Youtube Marketing Campaign for your business!