Email Marketing Opportunities

Email marketing, certainly something within my background of medical devices and diagnostics that has not been employed. But in looking at it as an opportunity for other industries that are not as highly regulated as the medical arena, the following statistics are intriguing and certainly should support some thought into developing a strategy in evolving your efforts in possible employing an email marketing campaign.

Marketing Tip #1: Business cards

Chances are that you have a stack of business cards that you have collected in the past, either from a networking function or a meeting. Do you remember what you have done with any of them? This stack of business cards is a gold-mine for your business...how you say? Out of these cards may be new clients, strategic partners, new vendors or maybe a new employee.

Start out by making a few categories that you can put each card into--strategic partner, prospective client, vendor, etc. There will probably be a few others that you can include but begin to place the cards that belong to each category. In each category, pick the top five candidates that you have the greatest chance in achieving your objective. In the strategic partnership, these five may be contacts that can help you expand your service or product offering. The vendor category may be contacts that can help you optimize your cost. An so on and so forth...

This will afford the ability to identify some "low-hanging" opportunities that you may have not previous been aware until you took a look at your contacts.

Visit our Tools section to peruse through some of the tools that we can offer to your business.

Apogee Marketing Partners Launches

After a lot of late nights, we have now completed the website for Apogee Marketing Partners. Once the dust settles...oh wait...we can't wait until the dust settles! We have to get working now...this is where the true work begins. And I will post some key learnings here about the journey of designing the site and optimizing it to be found on the vast world wide web.

In the meantime, let me speak about the memberships and services that Apogee Marketing Partners offers on our site. The concept is simple...as it stands in our economy, small-business and non-profits have very small, if not, non-existent budgets for marketing. Therefore, their ability to plan for growth is very limited. Our goal is to provide our marketing expertise available to companies with limited resources and budget. Obtaining access to experience like this is not readily available at an affordable price.

Visit our website to learn more about Apogee Marketing's memberships. We are confident that there is a membership that will fit your budget.

Apogee Marketing Website Overview

My first attempt at utilizing iShowU. Not quite the best quality as I imported into iMovie, but I will get better at doing this I am sure. Enjoy the overview of our website.

Facebook for Businesses: A Beginner's Guide Part II

Upon reading this post, hopefully you will have had a chance to set-up your Facebook Fan Page for your business and have been navigating it to learn its functionality. By now, you may have a few fans, if not, go and invite your friends to become fans of your new page. In this guide, I will go over the elements that can optimize your existing Fan Page.

Wall Page
Let's begin by looking at your Wall page. This is where you and your fans can interact. This is a neat feature in that you have the ability to update your fans without spamming them. They can view your wall at their convenience. Consumers can now choose when they want to engage, and this is the beauty of social media, like Facebook. With that in mind, you will need to keep your Status Updates interesting to ensure your fans have a reason to keep coming back. In your updates, you can insert Links, Photos, Videos, Events, etc.When you are ready to share, simply click on the "Share" button to publish. This will now show on your all your fans wall.

Customized Link
When you initially establish your Fan Page, Facebook assigns you a fairly complicated URL that you often can't use for distribution unless you create a hyperlink. However, once your Fan Page achieves 25 fans, you can apply for a customized link at facebook.com/username. After completing this I was able to get facebook.com/apogeemarketing, much more simple.

Landing Page for Non-Fans
When visitors that are not yet fans of your Facebook Page, they will land on your Wall page, which is not the best welcome page for someone who knows nothing about your business or product. It's probably more appropriate to have them land on your Info page or another page that you create from FBML (we will talk about this another time as you will need some coding experience to get this going). But for our purposes here, we will have them land on the Info page. You can achieve this by selecting Edit Page and go to the Wall settings to edit. Now you can select the landing page for everyone who is not a fan. In doing this, you are now giving visitors a chance to learn about who you are.



















Applications
Facebook is great in that it has many applications that you can add to make your Facebook more dynamic for your fans. If you have a Twitter account (if you don't, you should), you can link your Twitter account to your Facebook Fan Page. You can selectively tweet to your Facebook page by ending your tweets with the hashtag #fb. That simple...this way you don't flood your Facebook fans with non-relevant tweets that may not apply. Just go to Selective Twitter Status to add this application to your page.

Do you have a blog? Well, now you can include your new posts to your Facebook Page. This is automatic, so anytime you post it is included in your Wall. Be patient, it is not instant. If you don't see it immediately because it will take time. Go to Networked Blogs to add the application.

Did you find this useful? Well, be on the lookout for our Screencasts of tutorials to help get you going on all your marketing.