367 Hospitals In US Use Social Media

clipped from www.marketingcharts.com

The Good and the Bad in Brochure Printing

• The good: Brochures are effective marketing tools - First, we have the greatest good that color brochures give. They are very effective marketing tools for small businesses or projects. They can give small but precise marketing messages to lots of people in a small and inexpensive package. Color brochures can easily reach many people on a local level and increase a business' exposure to the market immensely.

• The bad: It requires creative thought and cunning to make it effective - Of course, it will require you to be creative and resourceful to make the brochure as effective as it is. You need to compose marketing messages that relate to your readers, while your distribution strategies must be good and aimed at the right target markets for your brochures. You have to think this all through.

• The good: Brochures look good and makes your business look good - Brochures also have the advantage of letting you form a business image or reputation. By utilizing a very convincing design that projects your business or corporate philosophy, you can convey to readers that you are striving for excellence, good service and professional work. They can basically make you and your business look good for the market.

• The bad: You will need an expert designer to make it look good - However, to make you look good, your brochure design should be well made. You might probably need an expert designer or layout artist so that you can have a very good-looking marketing tool that does display your philosophy. It is all about the design, so you have to get it right.

• The good: Brochures can be given away anywhere to many people. Many people like how these materials can be easily given away to a mass audience. It can be mailed, distributed by hand, left at public locations and included with other products and things. There is absolutely no expertise required to give them away, making is a very simple medium to work with.

• The bad: You will need to spend some money for them to last - While it is easy to distribute them, it might cost you for those color brochures to last long. Being easily distributed means that most of your brochures will be exposed to a lot of harsh environments. If you want them to survive to deliver your message, you will need to spend money on high quality materials to make them tough.

Source: ArticlesFactory.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Katie Marcus writes about the printing brochures or brochure printing technologies used by businesses for their marketing and advertising campaigns.

Power Marketing Through Folded Postcards

Some printing services today offer printing of so-called folded postcards. This kind of postcard is a more powerful kind of postcard for business marketing because of its improved abilities as a marketing postcard. Just read on below to know about these improved abilities.

• Giving better and more detailed messages – The major advantage is their extra space. With double the usual postcards space, it is possible to give better and more detailed messages to your readers. You can detail the best features of your product or services, or you can tell the whole story about your company.

You can list down all your products for sale and turn it into a small catalog. In fact, you can do anything you can think of that is good for marketing. There are lots of possibilities that you can do with all that extra space, and you can make it as extensive as you possibly can to achieve your goals.

• Showing more impressive images – Having more space provided for your advertising material means that there is space for more images that are quite impressive. While the cover of the postcard is the main attraction, you can also add in some other minor images that can be equally impressive. This gives you more opportunities to connect with your readers through your images, giving you the best advantage that you can have in postcard marketing.

• Better quality postcards – You can also consider them as stronger advertising tools. With the added extra layer of material folded unto itself, most folded postcards are more durable than regular ones. They can withstand physical damage better, while most of them have special water resistant coatings that should help them endure weather effects. They can reach your market with possibly no lasting damage at all, and help your message be seen much longer too.

• Cheap and easy production schedules – Of course, with modern printing technologies, folded postcards can be cheaply and easily produced. Simple desktop publishing software can take care of the design, while online printing services can take care of the printing. There is absolutely no hassle of producing them.

• Cheap and easy distribution techniques – Finally, distributing these advertising tools is a pretty easy task to do. Besides the obvious use of the postal service for distribution, many courier companies attached to printing services can immediately distribute your folded postcards after printing. As long as you provide the needed addresses, you can print and distribute your marketing postcards in one-step. It is indeed powerful technique in your advertising campaign.

Therefore, as you can see, with the improved abilities of a folded postcard, your marketing can be more powerful and more effective. Try printing those folded postcards today.

Source: Articlesfactory.com

About the author

Katie Marcus writes about the folded postcards and post card printing technologies.

How Good is your Profile on Social Networking Sites?

Source: eGrabber Newsletter

All sales people know that their prospects search the Internet for information about the product, the company and competitors, before they purchase something. But, what is now new is they check out the sales person they are in contact with too. Does your LinkedIn profile have the right ingredients to create a sense of trust that would make your prospects better inclined to buy from you?

Prospects would like to know how long you have been in this industry, your experience with the company / products, your qualifications, companies you have sold to, etc. How many of your customers have recommended you on LinkedIn? Are you associated with groups and associations related to your work and industry?

These things really matter a lot. If your answer is a ‘No’ to any of these questions, then it is time you started working on them.

Are you Adept at Web Conferencing Yet?

Source: eGrabber Newsletters

Companies and sales teams face significant challenges in selling cost-effectively to businesses today. Old selling habits that rely on face-to-face contact is simply too expensive for most businesses in the current market. More importantly, surveys show that, customers prefer online interactions, over personal contact, when possible.

A web presentation in which you show your PC desktop and demo something relevant to the prospect has become more effective. It is also rather convenient to both than a face-to-face conversation in the potential customer's office.

You can also easily record these web conferences and review them later to improve your selling skills and techniques. So, get started on using web conferencing.

Add Contacts into Outlook Addressbook with AddressGrabber - wikiHow

Add Contacts into Outlook Addressbook with AddressGrabber - wikiHow

Build Targeted Sales Lead Lists from the Internet

The Internet is one of the cost-effective ways to build a quality list of targeted sales leads. Buying or renting a list can be expensive and you can never be sure if you are getting the exact customers you want. Also, there is the issue of outdated contact data since contact information may change over time.

The Internet has many sources of free-leads. Online directories (such as YellowPages.com and SuperPages.com), association websites, membership directories, White Pages, MLS listings, etc. are some of the sources that you can use to build a list of prospects for e-mailing / tele-calling.

ListGrabber allows you to quickly capture contact details of prospects from all the above online sources and automatically add them to your database (Excel, Outlook, etc.)

So, stop wasting money on expensive lists. Use ListGrabber and see how it directly helps you sell more.

Download the 10-day trial version of ListGrabber today.

Cost - Per - Lead Advertising Report - Pontiflex

clipped from www.marketingcharts.com

Pontiflex's Analaysis - Source: MarketingCharts.com

In its “Cost-per-Lead Advertising Data Report,” Pontiflex defines basic data as information such as a user’s first name, last name, e-mail address and postal address. Premium fields include more detailed data such as telephone numbers, social networking usernames, and custom questions.

Pontiflex’s analysis found that the overall cost for a basic lead, across all industries is $0.60, while the cost for a premium lead is $2.27. However, the increases are not consistent across industries.

Specific vertical differences:

• In the entertainment industry, a basic lead costs $0.80, while the cost for a premium lead is $3.00.
• In the CPG industry, a basic lead costs $0.87, while the cost for a premium lead is $1.13.
• In the health industry, a basic lead costs $0.60, while the cost for a premium lead is $3.36.
• In the non-profit industry, a basic lead costs $1.33, while the cost for a premium lead is $1.85.
• In the technology industry, a basic lead costs $0.43, while the cost for a premium lead is $3.75.
• In the travel industry, a basic lead costs $1.40, while the cost for a premium lead is $2.50.
• The cost for a online retail basic lead is $0.59.

The report also found that advertisers often engage marketing leads through social networking groups and community sites, while a significant percentage also use e-newsletters to collect information

Ad Spend Sinks 14% in H109

clipped from www.marketingcharts.com Ad spending fell 14.3% in the first half of the year, to $60.87 billion, according to TNS Media Intelligence. The TNS number is similar to that reported two weeks ago by The Nielsen Company, which said that total ad spending was down 15.4% for H109, to $56.9 billion. Second-quarter spending was similar to Q1 spending, which could indicate that the steep decline may have have leveled off. These 14% declines represent billions of dollars in lost revenue, said John Swallen, SVP of research for TNS, who cautions that too much optimism could be premature. Early data from Q3 hint at possible improvements for some media because of easy comparisons against distressed levels of year ago expenditures, reports MediaBuyerPlanner.

Creative Selling Can Be a Double-Edged Sword

Source: eGrabber Newsletters

With so much competition and too few prospects, both marketing and sales have to be creative to attract and sell to consumers. Surveys show that though creative marketing and sales approaches are successful at getting attention, they create higher expectations in the prospects they engage. The more creative you are, the higher the expectation. This continues even after they become your customers and they are prone to being easily disappointed. So, when you fail to live up to these expectations, you end up doing more damage than if you had simply not chosen to think out-of-the-box.

So before you start thinking of creative ways to engage your prospects, make sure you have the means to perform higher and better.

Search Engine Reports : Bing Grows 22% in August

clipped from www.marketingcharts.com

Tune your Ad Copy for the Recession

Source: eGrabber Newsletters

A tight economy does not mean buying and spending will cease altogether. It is only natural for people to be more and more cautious with every dollar they spend. Considering this, you will have to tune your ad copy to meet the expectations of cautious buyers.

Focus on the ROI: Let your prospects know exactly what they will get for the dollars they spend. Use verifiable customer testimonials like never before; cautious buyers look for those. Let the benefits you outline be objective and data-driven. Adopting these can help your reach across better to your prospects.

Nurture your Prospects

Source: eGrabber Newsletters

Not all prospects make an immediate purchase, especially in a B2B environment. In the case of high-end / expensive products, the decision to buy could take days, weeks or even months. This behavior is even more pronounced in a slow economy. But, eventually when your customers buy, they buy it from the person or company that helped them most with their buying decision or from those that stayed on top of their mind.

Hence, it is important that you nurture your prospects and leads. Make efforts to stay connected with them in a meaningful manner. Send, at least once in 2 weeks, information they might find interesting and useful - white papers, articles, tips, etc. Make it personalized. This keeps your leads warm, and you on top of their mind, until the right buying time.

How to quickly scrape contacts from the web page and transfer them to Excel?

The web remains the major source of business leads that are available for free. Unlike old databases, online web directories like Yellow Pages, White Pages, Super Pages; association websites; membership directories; MLS listings, etc. provide fresh leads that can be immediately leveraged upon by sales/marketing professionals.

The question now is, how to quickly and accurately transfer those leads into the database? As a busy sales/marketing professional, you cannot afford to spend most of your productive hours in manually entering the contact details. This is where a web scraping software like ListGrabber can be handy.

With ListGrabber, you can automate lead capture process and save more than 50% of your time. You can quickly and easily scrape contacts from the web page and transfer them to Excel, Outlook, ACT, CRM applications, etc. in just a single click. You can transfer multiple contacts from multiple pages without any manual intervention. More importantly, you can maintain an error-free database as ListGrabber eliminates typos.

Let us see how we can quickly transfer contacts from the web to Excel spreadsheet.

For a free trial, Click download web scraper software

Please follow the steps given below:

For example, let us take a web directory.

Step 1: Launch any Yellow Pages directory, enter the search criteria and click

Search. For example, “Real Estate Agents” in “CA”

Step 2: The results are displayed. Select the results page and click the Microsoft Excel icon on ListGrabber toolbar.

Step 3: The ListGrabber – Capture Settings dialog box is displayed. Click the Proceed button.

The eGrabber - Confirmation Window is displayed. You can verify the address and other contact details in this window.

Step 4: Click Transfer All to transfer the contact information to Microsoft Excel.

Note: By default, the eGrabber - Confirmation Window is displayed when you transfer the contacts directly to your database. If you do not want the confirmation window to be displayed every time you transfer the contacts, select the option Always transfer – do not display this results window and click Transfer All. The next time, when you transfer the contacts, the eGrabber – Confirmation Window will not be displayed.

The selected contacts are transferred to the Microsoft Excel sheet as shown below.





For a free trial, Click download contact capture software

Apart from websites like Yellow Pages, Super Pages ListGrabber also supports:

www.192.com, www.askalix.com, www.bt.com, www.lawyers.com, www.hoovers.com, www.realtor.com, www.switchboard.com, www.upmystreet.com, www.whitepages.com, www.whitepages.co.au, www.whitepages.com.nz, www.yell.com, www.infospace.com.

Note: You can also get customized drivers for the website of your choice. Contact eGrabber's Sales Specialists for more details.

Find Missing Email Addresses of Contacts in your Database

Source: eGrabber Newsletter

The new LeadResearcher from eGrabber is an automated Internet research tool that allows you to instantly find the missing email addresses in your database.

LeadResearcher helps you save hours of Internet research. All you have to do is:

1. Input the Contact's Name and Company-name
2. Click on "Find Email"

LeadResearcher intelligently scours Search Engines, Company Websites, Networking sites, etc. and finds a valid business email address.

Our sales specialists can quickly show how you can use LeadResearcher to find missing email addresses in your database. You can either Schedule a Demo with them or Download a 10-day trial version of LeadResearcher to try it yourself.

Give Serious Thought to Drip Marketing Campaigns

Source: eGrabber Newsletter

Drip marketing can be particularly useful in a damp market that is characterized by slow purchases. It involves sending messages on a regular basis through email / post (usually weekly) to your prospects. By doing this, you are on top of their minds when they are ready to purchase. This method can be extremely effective if your

- products involve a longer buying cycle
- prospect has put off purchasing for a month or more
- prospect will research for a few more weeks before deciding to buy

Prospects are most likely to do business with you if you regularly send them helpful information. More importantly, to deliver successful drip marketing campaigns, work in conjunction with your sales team to provide information that is relevant to your prospects.

Small Ads More Effective than ‘Framing’ Ads

clipped from www.marketingcharts.com Smaller online ads may be more effective than their larger counterparts, a new study by Dynamic Logic found.The study shows that ad shape and placement may be more important than size. Half banners, at 234 x 60, and 180 x 150 rectangles were shown to be more effective than ads that frame the page, like high-profile leaderboards and skyscrapers. It is possible that users no longer see such framing ads because they have developed “banner blindness.” In addition, smaller ads may be more effective because they tend to be better incorporated into the content of Web pages. However, that does not mean that larger ads don’t work, Dynamic Logic’s svp of custom solutions Ken Mallon says. He points out that the research was based on 2,390 online display campaigns that took place over the past three years - before the Online Publisher’s Association standardized three new oversized ad formats in March. Mallon says he believes the new OPA formats are likely to do “very well,” writes ClickZ.

Tuesday Tops for Facebook Brand-Page Clicks

clipped from www.marketingcharts.com Content posted on Facebook-based brand pages has an average click-through rate (CTR) of 9.89% on Tuesday, the highest for any day of the week, according to data from social media services vendor Vitrue. Tuesday is followed closely by Wednesday, which has a CTR rate of 9.87%. Not surprisingly, Friday and Saturday have the lowest click-through rates, with 2.67% and 2.70% respectively. Brand pages, which are similar to human profiles but are organized around companies, typically aggregate news about the brand in question. Users can become “fans” of brands for which they feel an affinity, and receive updates from them on their news feeds. CTRs Higher than Display Taking all days of the week into account, click-throughs for Facebook brand pages average about 6.76%. This average is lower than Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but still much higher than average CTRs for display advertising across social networks in general, including Facebook itself, according to Vitrue.

Negotiation techniques for a Downturn

Source: eGrabber Newsletters

Among the skills most sought after in a seller is the ability to negotiate. Here are 3 things you should know as you prepare to negotiate:

• Know what you want exactly
• Decide on the lowest price you are willing to accept from the prospect
• Know when to walk away
  

It is also prudent to determine the above 3 things for the other side (prospect) too. Given the nature of the economy, many sales people make the mistake of rushing in with offers and discounts without determining what the prospect is willing to pay. They then negotiate on the discounted price. You must resist the urge to do so.

Remember, your negotiation should always focus on solving the problem and closing the gap between what both parties (you and your prospect) want.

Formulate Unique Discount Offers for your Customers

Source: eGrabber Newsletters

Recently, visitors to a small business website were offered a "6-year price rollback". The store on the company's website displayed rates that were in effect in the year 2003, for its products. Is your business offering unique discounts for the customers?

Today, consumers are receiving scores of messages with special offers, discounts, coupons, etc. Retailers are going all out to draw in budget-conscious consumers in these economically challenging times. How do you make your offer stand out from the rest? What do you do to grab a prospect's attention? See what other business owners and retailers are doing different to attract consumers and adapt these techniques to suit your business. If done properly, your offer can pull in lots of inquiries.

Use Specific Customer Testimonials

Source: eGrabber Newsletter

A generic testimonial like "Your product was great" will never be as impressive as "Your email marketing templates helped me increase my email ad response rates by 40% and thereby, the sales of my company by 20% in 1 week."

Generic testimonials do not grab attention, appear insincere and might actually have a negative impact, whereas the opposite can serve as powerful persuaders and help you gain credibility.

Remember, the next time you ask your customers for a quote, request them for something that is NOT vague or cliché. Also, ask for permission to display their name, title and company along with the quote.

CRM Gets Sociable - Brandweek.com

clipped from www.brandweek.com Social networks are key venues for companies to manage relationships with their customers. Twitter has emerged as a primary destination for customer comments and complaints. Consumers have quickly realized that Twitter has the potential to give them a larger voice than a blog or company-feedback Web page can. Between June 2008 and June 2009, the number of people who used Twitter grew 1,928 percent to nearly 21 million unique visitors, according to Nielsen. Not surprisingly, Twitter had the top growth rate among social sites in its peer group, followed by Facebook, up 198 percent to 87 million-plus, and Tagged, up 166 percent to more than 7.6 million. LinkedIn grew 19 percent, while MySpace and Blogger each rose 6 percent. Among the top 10 sites, three showed declines: Yahoo Groups fell 15 percent, TypePad declined 10 percent, and WordPress dipped 2 percent.

Capture Email Contacts using AddressGrabber

Copy pasting every contact details to address book could be time-consuming. If you are looking to automate copy-pasting then use AddressGrabber to save your time.

AddressGrabber for Outlook is an Outlook add-in that helps you capture contacts in your emails.


AddressGrabber captures contact details from incoming emails, instantly transfers them into your address book with a mouse click!

The contact details such as First Name, Last Name, Phone, Email, Address, etc is automatically added to your outlook address book.

AddressGrabber also checks for duplicate contacts before creating a contact in the addressbook.

Price: $69.95/user

For a free trial, Click capture email contacts

To purchase the product online, Click Buy AddressGrabber

Facebook serves 8.2% of all online ads

clipped from www.marketingpilgrim.com Facebook has a lot going for it lately. They’ve got more than 250M users worldwide, they’re the most popular social network in almost every country in the world, they’re hiring in a down economy, and according to a new comScore report, 8.2% of all Internet ads are served on their site. But, then, maybe this all makes sense. Since Facebook is so popular, it’s not entirely surprising that they serve one out of every twelve online ads. Even better? At least some proportion of their on-site CPC ads lead to another page on the site—so they’re getting money and traffic. This isn’t a recent development, of course—we’ve all seen ads to “Become a Fan” of something on Facebook. But as smart as it sounds to make your advertisers pay for generating traffic to your site, the underlying logic is pretty much a stroke of genius:

eGrabber Announces Compatibility With New ACT! by Sage 2010

eGrabber’s complete suite of sales lead and resume capture solutions now support ACT! by Sage 2010, the latest version of Sage's Contact and Customer Management Product.

San Jose, CA, September 01, 2009 - eGrabber Inc. today announced new versions of lead generation and candidate sourcing solutions that are compatible with the new ACT! By Sage 2010 CRM. The products that are now compatible with ACT! by Sage 2010 are AddressGrabber Suite for ACT!, AddressGrabber, ListGrabber, ResumeGrabber, eMail-Lead Grabber and DupChecker for ACT!.

eGrabber solutions enable sales and recruiting professionals to quickly capture and process Internet sales leads and resumes into ACT! by Sage 2010, enabling them to save time and improve productivity.

"We are well known in ACT! by Sage circles as a company dedicated to developing top quality products with the objective of improving ACT! by Sage user productivity," said Chandra Bodapati, President and CEO of eGrabber Inc. "Our continued partnership and support for ACT! by Sage, spanning nearly a decade, is testimonial to eGrabber's commitment to better the professional lives of ACT! by Sage users. I am excited about the new features in ACT! by Sage 2010 and happy to have our products support the new version."

eGrabber's products incorporate patented data-capture technology that eliminates manual data entry byautomatically recognizing and reading the contact information on web pages, online directories, in e-mail signatures, documents, spreadsheets, etc. Essential contact information is accurately extracted and populated within ACT! by Sage for immediate follow-up and tracking.

More information on eGrabber is available at http://www.egrabber.com. In addition, existing customers will be able to benefit from discounted upgrade prices by calling 408-516 4579.

About ACT! by Sage

ACT! by Sage is the #1 selling Contact and Customer Manager worldwide with over 2.8 million users. ACT! users can organize all the details of their customer relationships in one place to improve marketing effectiveness, attract new customers, and create more value from existing relationships. Complete sales pipeline visibility helps ACT! users identify and take action on the most qualified sales opportunities. ACT! is easy to use and integrates with existing business solutions including Microsoft Outlook®, Word, Excel® and Lotus Notes®. For more information call 866-903-0006 or visit www.act.com, www.act.com/facebook, www.act.com/twitter or http://community.act.com.

About eGrabber, Inc.

eGrabber is the leading provider of automated Internet Lead Generation solutions. Founded in 1996, eGrabber pioneered, invented and patented revolutionary Internet research business processes and data capture algorithms. Over 100,000 sales, marketing and recruiting professionals use eGrabber tools to accelerate list-building, candidate-sourcing and Internet lead-research. Our brands include AddressGrabber, ListGrabber, ResumeGrabber, ResumeFinder, LeadFinder, LeadResearcher, SearchBot, ResumeBot and eMail-Lead Grabber.

For more information, please visit www.egrabber.com or call (408) 705-1106.

ACT! is a registered trademark or trademark of Sage Software, Inc.

When Marketing Online, Social Media is Only One Piece of the Puzzle

With social media fever at an all-time high, it’s easy for people to lose sight of the fact that these tools are only one piece of an overall online marketing strategy.

While Facebooking, Tweeting and the like are fabulous methods, they’re not the only game in town. For best results, you want to have a mix of marketing tools in play all at once.

To read the complete story, Click communicativevalue.com

Train yourself to Get Better at Sales Writing

Source: eGrabber Newsletter

Getting prospects on the phone is becoming tougher and tougher these days. Many want you to send them an email or a proposal outlining the pros of your offering. With fewer sales opportunities available, and competition being fierce, your written sales communication might very well be the key to your success.

In addition to having a good understanding of your customer, you should be good at choosing the right combination of words to craft a winning sales email / letter. You can find several resources on the Internet that give you tips on how to draft a professional sales letter. One oft-repeated or key tip is to ensure every word that you write is absolutely significant in persuading the prospect to buy your product / service. Redundant or wasted words can mean wasted opportunities.