A shift has taken place in the world of marketing! – Take advantage of this emerging trend and capture more customers than ever before.

Traditional marketing focused on “outbound” tactics such as direct mail, broadcast media and to a certain extent email. These methods are pushed on prospects by the marketer in hopes that someone qualified prospect would take a second to consume that message at just the right time and at some point take action.

Inbound marketing acknowledges that the power is with the prospect. Consumers and business prospects control their media and information flow.  People choose when and where to consume media in today’s market.

The most successful Inbound Marketing campaigns have three key components:

• Content – Content is the substance of any Inbound Marketing campaign. It is the information or tool that attracts potential customers to your site or your business.
• Search Engine Optimization – SEO makes it easier for potential customers to find your content. It is the practice of building your site and inbound links to your site to maximize your ranking in search engines, where most of your customers begin their buying process.
• Social Media – Social media amplifies the impact of your content. When your content is distributed across and discussed on networks of personal relationships, it becomes more authentic and nuanced, and is more likely to draw qualified customers to your site.

Contact 314media to learn how we can increase your warm prospects with our innovative inbound marketing campaigns.  We offer affordable consulting rates and monthly  rate  packages to educate you on marketing trends and increase and optimize your inbound marketing campaigns to bring more prospects to you.

St Louis  web design company 314media is integrating websites with Twitter and other social media sites in order to increase ROI for your web site.  Not only can you automatically post new content to your website with ease, you can also do some cool Twitter integration in order to automatically notify your Twitter subscribers that there is new content on your website.

Contact 314media for more information about our Twitter Integraion and learn how 314media can help your business with our Inbound Marketing and Social Media Marketing services.  We offer affordable packages that link your website with Twitter integration and Facebook integration.  Get your site out in front of your customers in the Social Media Sphere.

We offer affordable Twitter integration as well as Facebook, Linked-In, and more.  Contact us to learn how we can help your business.

Contact 314media to learn how we can make Social Media Marketing work for your business.  Give us a call at 314-714-5448 to get started marketing to social media today.

Inbound Marketing is marketing focused on getting found by customers.

In traditional marketing (outbound marketing) companies focus on finding customers. They use techniques that are poorly targeted and that interrupt people. They use cold-calling, print advertising, T.V. advertising, junk mail, spam and trade shows.

Technology is making these techniques less effective and more expensive. Caller ID blocks cold calls, TiVo makes T.V. advertising less effective, spam filters block mass emails and tools like RSS are making print and display advertising less effective. It’s still possible to get a message out via these channels, but it costs more.

Inbound Marketers flip this old marketing stereotype and bring clients (inbound) to you!

Instead of interrupting people with television ads, they create videos that potential customers want to see. Instead of buying display ads in print publications, they create their own blog that people subscribe to and look forward to reading. Instead of cold calling, they create useful content and tools so that people call them looking for more information.

Instead of driving their message into a crowd over and over again like a sledgehammer, they attract highly qualified customers to their business like a magnet.

The most successful Inbound Marketing campaigns have three key components:

• Content – Content is the substance of any Inbound Marketing campaign. It is the information or tool that attracts potential customers to your site or your business.
• Search Engine Optimization – SEO makes it easier for potential customers to find your content. It is the practice of building your site and inbound links to your site to maximize your ranking in search engines, where most of your customers begin their buying process.
• Social Media – Social media amplifies the impact of your content. When your content is distributed across and discussed on networks of personal relationships, it becomes more authentic and nuanced, and is more likely to draw qualified customers to your site.

314media can provide a solution for your business that brings together blogging, social media, and search engine optimization.  Contact us for a risk-free quote to learn how your business can benefit from inbound marketing and get started today.

As the economy slows down, companies are turning to Inbound Marketing because it is a more efficient way of allocating marketing resources than traditional, outbound marketing. As Brian Halligan puts it: “When you’re inbound marketing, the thickness of your brain matters a lot more than the thickness of your wallet.”

There are three specific ways Inbound Marketing improves on the efficiency of traditional marketing:

• It Costs Less – Outbound marketing means spending money – either by buying ads, buying email lists or renting huge booths at trade shows. Inbound Marketing means creating content and talking about it. A blog costs nothing to start. A Twitter account is free, too. Both can draw thousands of customers to your site.  The marketing ROI from inbound campaigns is higher.
• Better Targeting – Techniques like cold-calling, mass mail and email campaigns are notoriously poorly targeted. You’re reaching out to individuals because of one or two attributes in a database. When you do Inbound Marketing, you only approach people who self-qualify themselves. They demonstrate an interest in your content, so they are likely to be interested in your product.
• It’s an Investment, Not an Ongoing Expense – When you buy pay-per-click advertising on search engines, its value is gone as soon as you pay for it. In order to maintain a position at the top of Google’s paid results, you have to keep paying. However, if you invest that money in quality content that ranks in Google’s organic results, you’ll be there until somebody displaces you.

314media can provide a solution for your business that brings together blogging, social media, and search engine optimization.  Contact us for a risk-free quote to learn how your business can benefit from inbound marketing and get started today.

Trend #1: Digital Portfolios

Whether you like it or not, you are in the process of developing a unique digital portfolio for your business. This may include your website, your blog and your email newsletter. It may include your Twitter feed, your Facebook page and your Yelp profile page. And even if you do not actively set out to create a digital identity, your customers will take care of this for you with customer and product reviews, blog comments and online forum discussions. Face it, digital footprints are everywhere now. Expect 2010 to be the year that successful companies stop conducting random digital tactics, and instead start developing holistic digital strategies that showcase the company’s identity and tell the most effective story.

Trend #2: Customer Voice

Customer and product reviews are highly valued by consumers and have a major impact on purchasing decisions. Expect the customer voice to get louder and louder in 2010. Google Sidewiki is just one example of this, where Google enables the website visitor to leave comments on ANY website for others to view. Successful companies will strategize to monitor the digital landscape, listen to the customer voice and actively engage with customers. Further to this, they will actively solicit customer advice and guidance through crowdsourcing, online forums and other customer-feedback channels.

Trend #3: Google & Bing Innovation

Microsoft introduced their new search engine Bing in June 2009, and soon afterward entered into an agreement with Yahoo! to power the latter’s future organic and paid search results. Bing keeps gaining incremental marketshare, while Yahoo!’s continually deteriorates. The innovation battle between Bing and Google has officially started. Expect intense competition between these two Internet powerhouses in 2010, and don’t be surprised to see them introduce a dizzying array of experiments well beyond Search, including innovation in the usability, mobile and collaboration spaces.

Trend #4: Real-Time Web

The pace of Internet Marketing quickened rapidly this past year, and there’s no turning back. Twitter is all about real-time communication. Facebook and LinkedIn offer real-time updates. And this Internet Marketing trend became so strong, that even Google started incorporating real-time listings in its SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) earlier this month. The real-time web puts new demands on a small business, and successful companies will find a strategy and sustainable process that enables them to have an authentic, consistent real-time voice in the marketplace in 2010.

Trend #5: Mobile

The mobile market is exploding. According to the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), mobile marketing expenditures are expected to exceed $2 billion in 2010. Cell phone penetration in the US has surpassed cable TV, web access and home PCs. Nearly 50 million people in the US access the web on a mobile device. It’s being predicted that by 2014 nearly 20 billion mobile apps will be downloaded yearly. Thirty-eight percent of youth already claim that mobile is more important to them than their wallet! There’s been a lot of hype about mobile for years now, but the mobile web market is really here.

Trend #6: Location-Based Marketing

With the explosion of demand in the mobile market (see Trend #5: Mobile, above), location-based marketing is set to correspondingly ignite. We already see services like Loopt, Google Latitude and Yowza!! offering location-based marketing services. It’s only a matter of time before Yelp starts dynamically generating real-time restaurant offers as you search for a local eating option on your iPhone. Although 2010 is sure to be a year of experimentation in this area, expect to see activity around location-based marketing, both to passers-by as well as to social networking groups, in the coming year.

Trend #7: Social

Social marketing has also received a lot of hype. Facebook boasts over 300 million users, and roughly half of these log in every day. Twitter attracts more than 22 million unique visitors every month. YouTube has more than 100 million users in the US, and adds 20 hours of content every minute. Expect a maturing of the market in 2010, where social marketing becomes less a tactic or novelty and instead becomes more of an authentic process for businesses to listen, converse and engage with customers.

Trend #8: Video Blogs

According to comScore, more than 78% of the US Internet audience view online videos. As an example of successful video marketing to this audience, the Wine Library video blog attracts more than 100,000 visitors every month. Face it, people like video. And both online and mobile-based video usage is increasing. The technology to publish videos has been simplified greatly through The Flip, the iPhone 3GS and YouTube. Just as text-based blogs took off in popularity several years ago, expect a similar rise in video blogs and embedded videos in text-based blogs in 2010.

Trend #9: US Hispanic Market

Hispanics are the fastest-growing segment of the US population. And as they represent approximately 25% of new births, expect them to have an impact on your future business. Research
points to Hispanics spending more time online than non-Hispanics and being more active online than non-Hispanics. Seventy-percent (70%) of Hispanic Internet users describe themselves as “frequently” or “always” online while watching TV. To reach the US Hispanic market, remember that 88% of US Hispanics learn Spanish as their first language. Expect savvy businesses in 2010 to accommodate this fast-growing market with localized websites and localized online marketing.

Trend #10: Marketing Integration

The most successful small businesses in 2010 are going to be those that integrate their marketing efforts. Consumers and business buyers simply want to buy something, or solve a problem, or achieve a goal. They do not differentiate between online and offline like marketers tend to do. So in 2010 it will be important for businesses to understand this critical point about their customers and start aligning with the actual purchase process, which is much more of a holistic, messy, zig-zag process rather than a sterile straight line with one message, one call-to-action and one “buy now” click.