Marketing: How Businesses Can Attract Today’s Consumers

How do companies have success in the marketplace?  They have to figure out what products and/or services consumers really care about.  Then, they must separate themselves from the competition.

Entrepreneur and blogger, Seth Godin, believes that how marketing was done in the past doesn’t necessarily work for today’s consumers.  In the following video, he shares his thoughts on which ideas are most successful and how to market them. Continue Reading

The Power of Cell Phone Text Messaging

CollegeRecruiter.com has been delivering targeted cell phone text messaging (sms) campaigns on behalf of our employer and consumer marketing clients for about five years now and we’ve learned a lot in that time. For example, it used to be that we’d send the text then follow up with an HTML (graphical) email a few days later and the open and click through response rates would be far higher than if we just emailed the same people.

Now we are seeing comparable open and click rates but the real response rate — applications for employers or leads/sales for consumer marketers — are much higher than you’d see with just an email.

We also continue to see far higher response rates than other types of media such as banner ads. Our numbers are consistent with those published by the Direct Marketing Association in its 2010 Response Rate Survey. It saw click through and conversion rates of 0.76 and 4.43 percent for banners, 6.64 and 1.73 percent for email campaigns, and 14.06 and 8.22 percent for sms campaigns.

So what does this mean to you if you are marketing employment or consumer marketing opportunities? Well, a click is not a click is not a click. Clicks from sms campaigns convert better than those from emails but banners outperformed both. On the other hand, banners grossly underperformed both sms and emails in generating the clicks in the first place. At the end of the day, sms campaigns are proving to be very effective and efficient sources of clicks and, more importantly, applications or leads/sales.

Have a Facebook Fan Page? Get Ready for Changes!

One week from today, Facebook will force some significant changes upon employers, consumer marketers, and others with profile and Fan Pages. Most individuals likely won’t notice or care too much about the changed appearance of their personal pages as Facebook has made many such changes in its short existence. But the changes will come as a rude awakening for many organizations.

According to Facebook’s blog entry that announced the changes, they will “simplify navigation for users, reduce complexity for developers and enable [Facebook] to build the next generation of tools for growing your business with Facebook.” There will be three primary changes:

1. Any “boxes” that exist in the sidebar of a page will be removed.
2. The Boxes Tab and all of its contents will be eliminated.
3. When you click on a tab, the page itself will become narrower. The new width will be 520 pixels.

If your organization has a Facebook Fan Page, immediately do the following:

1. Check it to see if you have any custom tabs. If so, click on the tabs. The narrower page width means that Facebook will re-size or re-format some and perhaps all of your images or banners. Of course, any such changes will be made automatically so no one at Facebook is going to look at your page and make the changes in such a way as to minimize their impact on you. Nope. The changes will just be made. It is up to you to minimize any impact.
2. If you have a Boxes Tab, click on it to see what content you have there. If you still want that content to be accessible to your visitors after Monday, August 23rd, create new, custom Facebook tabs.

How to Get Free PR on CollegeRecruiter.com for Your Product, Service or Opportunity

The re-launch of CollegeRecruiter.com earlier this week has provided employers, consumer marketers, schools, and even job seekers with the ability to promote their products, services, or other opportunities for free on our site. How? Post a blog article. The process for posting a blog article is quite simple.

First, either login to your existing account with CollegeRecruiter.com or click the Sign-up link on the right side to create a free account:
Then, click the links to Settings:
Then, click the Save button near the bottom of the page:
then My Page near the top center of the page:
then Blog Posts about halfway down the left side:
then post your blog article!

Note that blog articles should not be self-serving and we reserve the right to remove any blog article for any reason but expect to have to remove very, very few. Don’t write an article primarily about your product, service or opportunity. Instead, write something that is likely to be of interest and somewhat related to your product, service, or opportunity. Then, include a byline at the bottom in which you tell the reader a little about yourself and the product, service, or opportunity you want them to consider. A good rule of thumb is a sentence or two about yourself and then a sentence or two about the product, service, or opportunity. Feel free to link from the mention of the product, service, or opportunity in your byline to the web page that to which you want the reader to click through. The byline will look a lot better if you italicize it as the reader will understand that it is somewhat separate from your article.

The staff of CollegeRecruiter.com will regularly feature on our home page and other prominent locations the blog articles which are likely to be of most interest to our readers. The less the article is about your product, service, or opportunity, the more likely it is to be of interest to the reader and the more likely it is that it will be featured. Having your article featured will drive a huge amount of interested eyes to your blog article and therefore to your byline. Your byline will also be more credible to the reader if they haven’t just read through a bunch of self-serving drivel.

Want an example of a great blog article? Carole Martin, the Interview Coach, posted a great one shortly after our re-launch. It is entitled Cut to the Front of the Interview Line.

Questions? Please contact our staff writer, William Frierson.