Marketing techniques are constantly evolving – what was once considered effective may not be current with today’s best practices and customer demands. Businesses that choose to ignore these changing trends by not updating their marketing strategies are not in tune with their customers – for small  business owners, this can mean the difference between marketing success and marketing failure.

The Move to Email Marketing

An important trend in marketing today is the move to email marketing. Telemarketing, once a top choice for many companies, is gradually being phased out worldwide, as ‘Do Not Call’ legislation is being passed in many countries. Companies with lower marketing budgets need to find alternative ways to get their message to their potential customers. Email marketing is becoming an increasingly important part of the marketing tool box for small businesses, as it is a proven method to level the playing field between them and their larger competitors. Since mass media advertising is undisputedly expensive and difficult to measure the results of, email marketing is becoming the logical choice of small businesses. Surveys have shown that email marketing earns the highest return on investment over search engine marketing and direct mail. It offers lower costs and a broader reach than most other marketing formats. Email marketing can help small businesses stay competitive with larger companies, since it encourages real relationships with their customers.    more...

Europe’s travel market took a hit in 2009. According to the most recent “European Online Travel Overview” by PhoCusWright and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), total spending on nonbusiness travel was an estimated €214 billion ($300 billion) for the year, down from €239 billion ($335 billion) in 2008. more...

After all the rumours and last-minute botched deals over the years, it's finally happened: Microsoft and Yahoo have reached an agreement to merge their search services in hopes of finally being able to compete with the grand search overlord, Google.

Under the new 10-year, $275 million agreement, Microsoft's new Bing search engine will power Yahoo Search, while Yahoo Search Marketing will be powered by Microsoft AdCenter. So what does this mean for small-business owners? Well, keep an eye on your Yahoo rankings because they are going to change once the Yahoo search engine is replaced by Bing.

As for your Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns, the good news is that your ads will now be seen across a greater number of websites. If you've been running campaigns through Microsoft AdCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing, once the change takes effect you will only have one campaign to manage, which will free up your time to work on other search marketing strategies.

If you've never bothered with Microsoft's search offerings, the best way to get ready for the coming changes is to learn how to optimise your site for Bing and become familiar with the rules and regulations of Microsoft AdCenter.

Since its launch, Bing has proven itself to be very amenable to webmasters' optimisation efforts. That means that with a little tweaking you can get your site listed at the top of Bing's search results quickly. And if your site is brand-new, you can probably get it indexed faster on Bing than on Google, so you might want to focus your optimisation on Bing first. Then, once you're ranked well in Bing's listings, you can tweak your optimisation efforts to meet Google's more stringent requirements. more...

A good 3-4 minute video that gives a simplified overview of what SEO is all about without any technical jargon. more...

I like this video on soial networking http://www.yourwebchick.com/come-to-the-party-on-twitter  more...

Here's a down to earth thought on social media and where it fits into a business strategy. Hope you find it interesting!

http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/Conversational-Marketing-White-Paper.pdf
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An interesting and short presentation on the social media revolution. Covering the explosion of systems like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Wikis, this video gives a dramatic and easy to follow update on the growth of these medias.

http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/the-social-media-revolution-visualised/
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