Mastering Search Engine Marketing Basics

By Matthew Kwan
Principal Consultant, Adams Company Limited (www.adamshk.com)
© Copyright. All rights reserved.

Baidu, Google and Yahoo is definitely the biggest and most powerful search engines in the world. However, companies and marketing professionals must be careful enough to choose the right search engine for the right market for their specific industry as well as their specific target potential customers and audiences.

In general, Google is the No. 1 leader of search engine in the world. It has a very sophisticated interface and system (AdWords) that would allow you to uniquely and accurately define your marketing campaigns to reach your target customers across countries and regions. It would also allow you to advertise your text ad or image (banners) and video/animated ads on their extensive partner network of those which already join through AdSense.

However, there are always local kings like Baidu in China which is the default choice for many people both commercially and personally for searching Chinese websites that are hosted and targeting the mass population of Internet users in China. On the other hand, Yahoo is especially more prominent than other search engines in certain countries/regions like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan...etc.

Find out more on www.adamshk.com/e-Marketing/seo_sem.htm

e-Mail Marketing as an effective tool!

By Matthew Kwan
Principal Consultant, Adams Company Limited (www.adamshk.com)
© Copyright. All rights reserved.

E-Mail Marketing is an very effective tool, yet very difficult to master in today's environment with so many junk or spam mails bombarding our e-Mail inbox everyday. It is relatively "cheap" to cover a broad base of customers directly. The key success factor to e-Mail Marketing is to send the targeted e-Mail message to the right target audience. Subject line is the very first barrier for any e-Mail to be opened by your potential customers though the design of the message also plays a very important role.

The technical requirement of sending e-Mails to your customers systematically and periodically as well as observing the legal issues involved is mandatory to any company which considers employ e-Mail Marketing seriously.

Not only Subject line is the very important barrier to the email readers, the content of e-Mail promotion is also extremely important. There are actually many little tactics to apply in order to perfect an attractive e-Mail message driving the target audience to respond as well as taking action according to your design.


Find out more on www.adamshk.com/e-Marketing/edm.htm

Scaling Your Online Presence with Powerful Tools

By Matthew KwanPrincipal Consultant,
Adams Company Limited (www.adamshk.com)
© Copyright. April 17, 2009


There actually many ways that you can scale your company's online presence by using powerful tools or community website like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare...etc

A simple example is that you can create a blog entry, then the entry can be automatically copied to Twitter and from Twitter to Facebook. Your effort is not so much but your online presence is increase by 3 folds at least. Once you work out how to connect them with minimum effort, it is just a matter of submitting meaningful contents to your registered sites.

e-Marketing或是Online Marketing 可達到的成本效益已經越來越被大小企業所重視

雖然經濟不景氣，企業不能不宣傳！e-Marketing或是Online Marketing 可達到的成本效益已經越來越被大小企業所重視，具多項研究報告顯示互聯網於香港已經成為第三大宣傳媒體，而且有持續增長趨勢。按香港電訊管理局2008年12月統計 ，香港約有八成家庭有寬頻線上網。

Successful Customer Database Management for Winning e-Marketing

By Matthew Kwan © Copyright. All rights reserved. Principal Consultant

Adams Company Limited www.adamshk.com

So you are generating good responses from your e-Mail campaigns, online advertising, search engine marketing and etc...The next most important thing you need to do is to manage your customer database successfully. Without this, your e-Marketing strategy will always have a missing link. You can grow to certain level with success but if you want to grow from good to great, Customer Database Management is the area you need to plan in the beginning of your e-Marketing effort.

What can you do if you are running on lean budget and do not want to spend a lot to buy Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software at the start. Here are some good practical suggestions you may consider:

1. Spreadsheets

2. Mail Client Software

3. Accounting Software

1. Spreadsheets

Obviously, MS Excel is the most commonly used spreadsheet software in the market. However, you can use any kind as we are just keeping a simple list. The trick is that you create multiple files of e-Mail/Contact Lists by segregating your Suppliers, Partners, Customers, Prospects and other categories in different files for ease of management. In future, whenever you have new e-Mail addresses/Contact information, you just need to append to the relevant lists/files to keep them up-to-date.

2. e-Mail Client Software

Most of people would use MS Outlook Express or whatever free e-Mail Client provided by the Operating System in your computer when downloading e-Mails from server. It is relatively simple to keep your master e-Mail/Contact Lists within the same e-Mail system or your e-Mail Client Software you are using. The idea behind is the same as you would do using spreadsheets. You just need to create different "Distribution Lists" or "Groups"...etc to maintain your e-Mail campaign lists. One good function with some e-Mail Client Software is that when you add duplicate e-Mail addresses to the same list, the software will automatically add only one entry to the list rather multiple. This would minimize the unpleasant experience of the receivers when they are receiving multiple copy of your e-Mails just because it was not properly managed.

3. Accounting Software

As I proposed often, your e-Mail campaign should always sending to your closest relationship groups first. e.g. Suppliers, Partners, Customers, Prospects...etc. These closest groups are typically already captured by your accounting software for invoicing or billing purposes. Therefore, you may make just a little bit of effort to keep up your contact database in your accounting software to make sure e-Mails are properly input and up-to-date. Preferrably, you may ensure your accounting software could give you some options or remark fields to sort out the lists with additional criterias to facilitate better management.

Other than the above 3 suggestions, the next best option I can think of is using the e-Mail Marketing software. The price of these kind of software can range as low as US$100 to very high prices depending on the kind of functionalities they can provide.