Apogee Marketing Partners Launch

Are you a small to medium sized business? Looking to add marketing to your business or to complement your existing team with affordable professional marketing resources? Stay tuned...Apogee Marketing Partners will change how you approach marketing. Meanwhile, feel free to follow us on Facebook or Twitter for the latest updates.

$FREE.99

For most companies, business is probably down for 2009, and as a result dollars for marketing budget is also down. What does this mean for 2010 initiatives?

The outcome of this economic downturn impacts small to medium businesses most siginificantly, and as a result marketing campaigns are either significantly reduced or completely eliminated. Unfortunately, in both cases, exposure of a business within a market is drastically reduced. This may very well send an already troubled business into an unrecoverable tailspin. Reality is that cost containment is a must in these circumstances to improve bottom line performance; however, you can only manage bottom line if you have a revenue stream to maintain business viability. So marketing activities must remain in some form to ensure income.

Fortunately, there are many resources available in the market today that can be utilized at practically no cost. If you audit your existing marketing efforts as it relates to the suggested activities below, chances are there will be numerous FREE marketing initiatives that you can launch without ever reaching for your checkbook.

Website

If you are in business today, the likelihood is that your business will have an online presence in the form of your website. If not, consider the numbers: in 2000, there were 361 million users of the internet; today there are over 1.7 billion users, a 325% growth (Source: Nielsen Online).

Your website is your storefront for your business in this virtual world; it’s the portal to your product or service. It delivers the value proposition to your customers, and if your visitors like what they see, then they may become customers. Review your website with these things in mind:

• Content
• Keyword optimization—make sure your copy includes keywords that are relevant to your business
• Ensure keywords are at the top of the page, preferably in the beginning and end of a paragraph
• Bold and underline key words where appropriate
• Ease of navigation
• This will allow you to reduce your bounce rate (bounce rate is the percentage that your visitor will leave the website upon hitting a page in your site)

If you don’t have it already, sign up for Google Analytics; it is FREE, http://www.google.com/analytics. This tool will help you to analyze the traffic that is visiting your website, and therefore make some informed decisions when the time comes for you to re-arrange your plan.

Social media

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn are just a few of the social media sites available to you at no cost to join. Facebook just announced that it has over 300 million registered users! Twitter is predicted to have 18 million users by the end of 2009 (Source: Mashable.com). Access to these users is all for FREE!

With a social media plan your business can target specific target markets. Facebook, for example, allows a business to target within specific parameters such as gender, age, region, etc. Blogging is also another channel to reach your market. In most cases, start-up companies today will employ a blog prior to actually setting up an official web page for their business. Why? Because they can create content that helps to improve their position in search engines.

Not free, but not expensive either

Affiliate marketing is a good alternative to those expensive print ads that require design and insertion dollars. The cost of printing an ad in most magazines, newspapers or any printed medium is generally about $2500 to $5000. However, you can research numerous websites (e.g. msnbc.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and most have reasonable fees that you can limit on a per-day basis. Meaning you can cap the amount of money that you want to spend in one day, so if you determine that $50 per day is your budget, then your ad will remain until a quantity of click-through equivalent to $50 is achieved.

The cost to design a banner-ad for an affiliate marketing is generally $300-700 depending on complexity.

You can obtain more information on the above topics through our Know-How guides and marketing tools and templates at http://www.apogeemarketingpartners.com/.

You complete marketing toolbox

Anticipating and meeting the needs of your market profitably is the role of your marketing department.

Like a Rubik's Cube, however, this is no easy task. Consider the sides of cube as the major elements of marketing in our world today, and the individual squares within the sides are the possible variables to be considered as you plan and execute your initiatives. The possible combinations is astounding and the following equation illustrates the enormity of the possibilities, which represents the possible combinations of a Rubik's Cube.

Realizing the complexity of marketing, it is essential that your team has the right tools to develop and effectively execute all their initiatives. And that is why we have developed Apogee Marketing Partners. It is simply a resource for businesses seeking to maximize their marketing efforts, but also for marketing professionals that want to implement novel tools and strategies that can make an immediate impact on their overall plans.

With our combined experience of over 20 years in marketing, we deliver proven tools that will expedite your growth objectives.

Spend more time implementing and executing by becoming a member of Apogee Marketing Partners. Become a fan on our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter and be a part of the launch of Apogee very, very soon!!!!