That is a question you may ask yourself everyday, perhaps even multiple times a day.

…is it worth doing this load of laundry now, knowing the kids’ practice clothes will be in the clothes hamper in four hours?

 …is it worth washing the car even though there is rain in the forecast tomorrow?

 …is it worth going to the gym this morning when the entire house needs cleaned and exercise will be obtained via vacuuming and scrubbing floors?

 Okay, maybe these are just the neurotic questions I tend to ask myself as I’m always looking for ways to be more efficient in time management, but you get the point! Does point 1 outweigh point 2? Does it make sense to do A, when you know what lies ahead with B?

In any business, one needs to ask questions and assess information to make good, solid decisions, especially in these volatile economic times. Most decisions directly affect bottom line, and that is where the question of “is it worth it” comes into play. Maybe the questions above aren’t the best to illustrate an “is it worth it” question from a financial standpoint (although with gas so high, daily exercise through cleaning house or jogging the neighborhood may outweigh driving 14 miles roundtrip to the gym and back). Every dollar matters today, and every decision made in business should be viewed from a financial standpoint.

 Take the situation of one of our clients. In the manufacturing sector, they and their peers, including other manufacturers, vendors, OEM’s, etc. participate in several trade shows per year. Trade shows are the perfect venue to display new goods/services, meet and greet customers, clients and prospective customers and clients, hold strategic planning meetings with vendors and distributors and generally speaking, “be seen”!

 But at what “cost” is it worth it to be seen these days?

 I’ve approximated the amounts below for a client’s participation in a recent trade show:

•  Booth space at expo hall: $33,000
• Exhibit company – prep, shipping, set-up/dismantle: $15,000
• Hotel for eight employees (3 nights/each): $5,400
• R/T airfare for eight: $6,000
• Meals, cab/bus fair, other incidentals: $5,000
• Meetings/meals for customers: $8,600
• New shirts for staff: $1,700
• Marketing firm work (i.e. advertising/press; coordination of all hotel, meetings, space, exhibit; correspondence with all staff, sales representatives, hotel staff, banquet managers, etc.): $8,000
• Other miscellaneous (i.e. shipping charges, special signage/printing, etc.): $3,000

 Total: $85,700

 Wow – a lot of ca-ching for three days of exposure! Think about the kinds of things a business could do to gain similar exposure with almost $90,000? That kind of money buys a lot of print advertising in trade journals and magazines. It would also buy a company a lot of air time on regional radio stations. A new website with all the bells and whistles, plus a mobile website for smartphone using customers? There is a good chance $90,000 would cover it! How about engaging the company in a new internet marketing plan, including SEO, PPC and a social media plan to go with? With $90,000 they’d be off to a great start!

 Now this article isn’t to knock trade shows as there is a lot of marketing benefit from gathering with peers, competitors and customers who are all like-minded in their business goals and who can share ideas, thoughts and product innovations. Instead, the point of this blog is to pose the question as you ponder business decisions for 2012…

 Is it Worth It?!

Call the internet marketing experts at AGIS for information and a quote (and yes…we do trade shows, too!)

To build trust you must first gain permission to communicate with your potentials clients. Here are a couple of ideas how do connect/educate and build a relationship with your clients.

1. Offer Subscriptions
2. Ask them to sign up on your email list
3. Blog Readership
4. White Paper Downloads
5. Helpful Tools
6. Twitter/Facebook/Social site engagement
7. RSS Subscriptions

Six steps to building that longer term relationship.

1. Ask for permission
2. Create stepping stones
3. Make your customers successful at something i.e. makeing a sale or increasing click through rates
4. Segment and treat them special. Give them something of value the can’t get anywhere else
5. Provide learning content
6. Be respectful of peoples time

If you focus on longer term relationship vs the One Night Stands you will win in the long run and gain repeat business.

The first thing I try to tell a customer is imagine taking all the words and phrases in your copy or links from your home page (the most important page to a Search Engine), jumble them all around, then reading  this mish- mash, can you determine what your site is about? Also, if you throw out all the generic words that could apply to most things or most any site, is there anything left?

How does SEO Optimizing help with this aspect of your site? SEO Optimizing starts by adding or improving your; Head Tags, Links, Titles, Descriptions and Copy.

Take the example above. Let’s assume after SEO Optimizing your copy is either good or with some minor tweaking has been improved. You should now have at least some descriptive Keywords and Phrases that help explain what your site is about. SEO Optimizing of your copy has likely increased the density of important words of phrases, so highlight those in your mind.

With your Meta Descriptions added or improved, you can now highlight, or highlight more, those words or phrases that are also in the Description. Same goes for the Title. Now, highlight further anything that is a Link or with a List Tag and strongly increase anything included in a Head Tag.

Throw out the words with no highlighting and rank the rest based on the weight of the highlighting. What you have left is simple example of what a Search Engine will take away from your site. Chances are if you do this before SEO Optimizing and then after you will see a vast improvement in your rankings for Keywords and Phrases important to you, from seemingly minor adjustments.

As luck would have it for you, AG Information Systems has a wide variety of plans from Basic to Advanced. Check out AG Information Systems‘ SEO page and request more information. With so many sites dependent on Search Engines for 75% or more of their traffic, can you really afford to let your competitors rank above you?

Although Helm has a nice easy section called Multi-Recipient Addresses, it won’t allow Forwards from an ACTIVE email account. This is set-up for outside senders who might email support@ or marketing@ so that those emails could go to various people in the organization without having to set up email accounts under those names or for deleted accounts of people who may have left the organization.

This is also how we will trick Helm into allowing us to Forward to Multiple Addresses for a temporary period when we might not want to delete the actual email account, say if someone was out on extended leave or a long vacation. 

First we set up a Multi-Recipient Addresses Forward for a non-existent email account say IAmAway@MyCompany.com. The @MyCompany.com must be your email domain name. Have the IAmAway@MyCompany.com Forward to the addresses you wish, for example we will use bob@MyCompany.com and jim@aol.com. Notice that the Forward from has to contain your domain but the Forward to could be to any email account. Then just go to the active account you wish to have the Forwards coming from, say jane@MyCompany.com and initiate a Forward to IAmAway@MyCompany.com.  

Now when an email comes to jane@MyCompany.com it will Forward to IAmAway@MyCompany.com which will then trigger the 2^nd Forward to bob@MyCompany.com and jim@aol.com.

It seems like a lot of effort and extra work, I agree, but that is the easiest way to Forward automatically from one active email account to multiple accounts. Don’t ask me why it doesn’t allow for it without these extra steps. 

Contact helpdesk@ag-is.com or go to http://www.ag-is.com/Corporate/Support.aspx if you have a hosting support contract and you need assistance.

We get a lot of questions about how could a spammer get your email even though you are careful or how did you get an email which seems to have been sent by you or your company but is actually spam. 

Although the methods spammers use are as numerous as bad drivers on the road, I will only cover a few here, perhaps some of the less obvious. 

We will take the example of John Q. Public at U. S. Marketing. Emails: johnp@usmarketing.com and jpublic@usmarketing.com 

Undoubtedly, U. S. Marketing has a website, www.usmarketing.com. Since spammers can crawl the web just as search engines do, they now have access to a potential source for an email address, @usmarketing.com, since many companies use the same domain for their web site and email. 

If there are any contact us pages or bios on the web site, with email addresses, the spammer now has those addresses, since the crawl program just has to look for an @ sign. The crawlers also look for @ signs anywhere on the net. Is your email in any social media blogs, business directories or almost any electronic form accessible on the web? 

So, now the spammer has a domain and potentially some email addresses. But they do not need specific email addresses to send spam. They can create potential email addresses by running through many combinations and variations. How about williamp@ or johnp@ or maybe even stumble on jpublic@. 

OK, so they have some emails and 1000′s of potential emails. The spammer doesn’t have to send all those emails to know which ones are valid, though they could, they can test them without actually sending an email, sort of like pinging. Bingo, now they know both johnp@usmarketing.com and jpublic@usmarketing.com are valid emails. 

How do they get you to open their email? Since they know the address (they are sending to it, aren’t they?) they can add a few tricks. First, for the most part, they can make it seem like it is sent from any address or display name they want. The from address or the display names are among the easier things for them to fake. Often your own email program will add the display name from your address book. So, if they make it seem like it is to johnp@usmarketing.com from johnp@usmarketing.com Outlook, or whatever program you use, might display your full name in the inbox, even though the spammer does not know your full name. 

Another trick would be to send it from info@usmarketing.com or support@usmarketing.com or any potential general account a company might have. If they chose the johnp@ as the address to send it to, then they also know your first name is John, so why not add your name to the subject, Hey John, open me. Tricky, huh? 

Well those are just a few of the tricks and, having said all that, I will now help them out a little by posting this and telling everyone to go to our website at http://www.ag-is.com. Who knows, maybe they will crawl my post or a search engine will pick it up and they will crawl that link.

First – Check to see what the first thing is that jumps out on your Home page. Make sure that what ever your visitors see is engaging and is a “hook”  to learn more.

Second – Can you tell visually or a quick read what the website is about? Too many words, images or distractions will confuse the user. It is imperative that you provide a clear path to what you are offering.

Third- Does your website provide the important information above the fold of the website. Make sure that what sets you appart from your competition is above the fold. What does “above the fold mean”? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Above_the_fold

Fourth – How quickly can the visitor find your services or products? If it is difficult to access your key services or products and how they can benefit the visitor they will loose interest. Remember you only have seconds per page to engage the visitor.

Fifth – Are you asking the visitor to take an action, for example; request a quote, download literature, sign up for a seminar, watch a video, sign up for an e-newsletter, purchase a featured product….what ever the “call to action” is make sure it is a simple form. Maybe you only ask for their email address for future marketing opportunities.

This review should only take 10-15 minutes to answer these questions. If you really want feedback ask your employees or someone who has never been to your site before to respond to these few questions.

Good luck and stay tuned for the second post next week.

Here is an inexpensive solution to usability testing that just might help you win that next opportunity

http://www.usertesting.com/index.aspx

Give it a try

Corey Mahoney

VP AGIS

For any interactive or traditional marketing needs please visit us at www.AG-IS.com.

And then there are the absolute, must-have, “can-not-do-my-job-without it” types of tools essential for ANY kind of success. BPA Worldwide (www.bpaww.com) is a non-profit media-auditing organization based in Shelton, CT and is the latter of the two tools for the media buying trade.

To say BPA Worldwide is a wealth of knowledge is a pure understatement. They provide media audits for over 1,500 B-to-B publications, 350 consumer magazines, 150 newspapers, 450+ Web sites and a variety of email newsletters, databases, wireless and other advertiser-supported media. They boast the largest membership of any media auditing organization – their worldwide reach spans more than 25 countries. BPA provides credibility as an independent, self-regulating organization governed by a Board of Directors that is comprised of 17 advertiser and advertising agency representatives and 15 publication representatives.

But what is a BPA audit exactly?

Say you are trying to choose between four industry trade publications for which to place your company’s (or your client’s) advertising. Sure, each one of these publications will have a media kit filled with information for you to digest. But where do you find comprehensive, targeted demographic information that is unbiased and precise, measured and presented in an easy-to-understand format with plenty of quantitative information to compare one magazine to the next? A BPA audit, of course!

No, I don’t work for BPA! I work for an advertising firm and I place trade magazine advertising for one of our clients in the manufacturing sector. I’ve been an avid “BPA audit” reviewer from day one. There are many publications to choose from and the decision is never easy. BPA audit allows me to see lots of useful information such as the circulation for each magazine and where the circulation is concentrated – important for my particular client who sells mainly in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions. The audit also shows me the breakdown of “types” of people that receive the magazines and positions they hold – i.e. presidents, executives, sales people or trades people – also important factors.

To be honest, there are magazines that I’ve bypassed, simply because they were not audited by BPA. It is definitely my “go-to tool” for media buying.

Register online for free at www.bpaww.com.