One of the most interesting infographics that I’ve seen in a long time regarding social media and it’s from a very reliable source at Pew.

Microsites Targeting Specific Demographics Of Customers

Each customer is different – even if they share a lot of the same characteristics. Different customers have different needs. Hotels and resorts have realized this for a long time, but commonly business travelers and leisure travelers are where the differences are drawn up. At a series of hotels owned by the same franchisee, however, the line is being drawn in a different fashion. Its not just business or leisure travelers that have different needs – men and women travelers have different needs, too.

At three hotels throughout the Southeast:

• the Crowne Plaza Knoxville hotel
• Crowne Plaza Baton Rouge hotel
• Holiday Inn Columbia MO hotel

have decided the time has come to consider the needs of businesswomen.

To do that, they have developed an amenity package specifically designed to appeal to businesswomen. The hotels provide robes, bath sheets, and curling irons in their rooms, and guests are encouraged to promptly notify the front desk if any of these items are missing.

This business travel practice gave me an idea – why not make a travel microsite that caters specifically to your target audience? For example, each of these hotels could have a microsite made that caters specifically to business women traveling to the area. In addition to pinpointing specific perks each hotel offers women, the site could also include an events calendar with notices of ladies night events at local nightclubs, special offers from area spas and salons, and information on area fitness clubs that offer programs like Zumba classes.

Cater the information on the website to women traveling to your area, and also offer them the opportunity to book their stay at your establishment.

Offer Special Discounts And Incentives To Specific Online Retailers

Several years ago, I learned about a cross-promotion hotel package built by the Ritz-Carlton and Mercedes-Benz – and I think this could work online, too.

I’m paraphrasing/summarizing here, but the basic concept of a special hotel discount for a specific online retailer would work something like this:

• Potential guest buys product X, Y, and/or Z (for the sake of an example, let’s say 3 articles of essential rock climbing equipment from REI.com).
• Following checkout and during all follow-up emails regarding the purchase, potential hotel guest is offered a special promo code to book a stay at your hotel (say, in Colorado Springs – home of Pike’s Peak) for a reduced rate.

The genius in this marketing campaign isn’t really for the retailer itself – it’s for you (although this might only work for a chain or a franchise). There is a very high likelihood that the demographic of customers buying rock climbing equipment from REI would be interested in booking a trip to Colorado Springs to conquer Pike’s Peak. Large online retailers often have TONS of behavioral data on their customers because of today’s analytics tools, and you can reap the benefits of potential new customers who have recently purchased products indicating they are interested in visiting a destination near your hotel.

Now, all of this is assuming that the online retailer has a sophisticated web analytics platform and a proper follow up system in place to deliver your message to potential guests. However, this campaign should be a productive program for increasing leisure travel room night sales.

Would love to hear your feedback on any of these marketing ideas for hotels. Has your hotel tried any of these concepts? How did they perform? What unique ideas have you heard about for hotels?

Please share in the comments below.

For more unique hotel marketing ideas, please visit GetBentz.com.

When you go online, you play games, enter your personal information, pull out your credit card, and never think twice about what you are doing. For some reason, many people believe that having an antivirus system on their computer keeps them safe no matter what they are doing. Unless you have the right antivirus system, only your computer is protected and your personal activities and it’s open season for hackers and thieves on your personal and financial information whenever you’re online. Full-fledged systems like Symantec Norton 360, provide protection for your computer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with threat monitoring.

A good online security system will scan your downloads and ensure that viruses and other threats are removed before they ever make it your computer. Additionally, the best type of internet security system will find problems that already exist on your computer and remove them before you experience a technology tragedy. You may sometimes be turned off by the cost of true online security but if you care about your personal information and your computer it’s important to purchase top of the line security that meets your needs and keeps you safe no matter where you go online. You need to make sure that you are safe when you are surfing the internet at all times. Norton 360 is a great way to keep your computer safe from online fraud.

The way that people use the internet is evolving constantly. As such, it is important that companies evolve their strategies to woo these people at a similar rate. For businesses wanting to market their products via the popular social media, here are some hints and tips for using Twitter as the vehicle.

On the microblogging site, users post 140 character-length updates onto their profile. These are either public “tweets” or private one-on-one dialogues between users (called Direct Messages or DMs). Users can follow the updates of other profiles, re-tweet updates they like, or label their messages with hashtags (including ‘#Marketing’ in a message means that the tweet can be searched for as ‘Marketing’).

Only 6 years old, Twitter has over 500 million registered users who pump out over 340 million tweets per day. It is one of the 10 most-visited websites worldwide according to Alexa.com. If you are looking to reach a large audience as easily as possible, Twitter is the right place to look.

The strength of using Twitter as a marketing tool is that it gives the company a human face. For a company to be successful on Twitter, they should think of it as a multitude of individual interactions between the company and the public, not as a space in which to endlessly throw PR material.

In addition to the promoting themselves through links to their website and adverts for their products, a business Twitter account is well-placed to respond to customer criticism or enquiries. Software exists to monitor what is being tweeted about the company – the account user can then respond directly to the dissatisfied customer to offer compensate or assistance. Swift handling of the problem by this means often reduces the customer’s ill-will; a company that is publically seen handling problems efficiently in this manner will maintain its reputation among those close to the complainer.

To tie in with the “public face” ethos of Twitter, you could set up accounts for important figures within the company to tweet their updates. It is quick and simple for a CEO or global head to post about their company, and the weight of their names is likely to make the message stronger than if the same update came from a faceless company account.

As most consumers are on Twitter as a form of leisure and personal entertainment, a useful business strategy is to generate challenges for the public to respond to. For example, a software company could invite their followers to tweet about “My favorite place to surf the internet” as a way to raise publicity. A word of caution: Twitter followers might not respond to such a challenge in the way you want them to, as British supermarket chain Waitrose found out last year.

Because Twitter is published and read in real-time, businesses have the option to live-tweet their events as a way to engage their audience. Not all tweets from the product launch have to be a hard sell; it might be a more effective tactic to engage followers by talking about how bad the weather is. The followers are more likely to positively respond to a comment like “6am. Arrived at venue to find snowstorm – hope everybody in NYC wraps up warm today! #conferencename”.

If you don’t have the resources to employ a Twitter Relations officer in your business, then there is plenty of software that makes using Twitter as straightforward as possible. The applications available are suitable for all types of hardware from netbooks to desktop computers (for those of you wondering ‘what is a netbook?’ – it is a small laptop). Popular programs include TweetDeck, which allows users to access Twitter directly from their desktop. There is also Hootsuite, which integrates with many different social media platforms (including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and lets the company track their analytics, converse with internal teams, and schedule Tweet publishing.

This article barely scratches the surface of what savvy tweeting can do for a company’s profile and brand strength. Fortunately, there are plenty of social media consultants out there who can help you further with developing an online marketing strategy and answer the more specialized questions you might have. Happy Tweeting!

For starters, you need accurate keywords on the website. Keywords are how individuals find your website through the search engine. When you design such a website you need to have the keywords be very specific to the site and not just general words. If the words are on the general basis, you are going to find the search results bring up tens of thousands of search results. The more specific your keywords the easier it is for people to find your website and see its listing.

Using Meta tags on your website is important, although not as important as it used to be. In the coding of the website, the Meta tags are similar to the keywords of your website. These tags help slightly improve your website’s standing on search engines such as Google (it also helps on other sites as well). Other ways you can increase the standing of your website on Google is through back links, or links placed on other websites that direct traffic to your own. Google sees a website with more back links as more valuable), not to mention pictures and videos, because the more pictures and videos a website has the more ways someone can find the website (through a video or image search).

In order to promote your website it is a good idea to utilize a service known as Google Adwords. With Adwords, you create advertisements and have the content appear on Google and similar sites when a search is performed with your given keywords. Once the search is performed your advertisement appears. This way, you do not have to spend money on your advertisement appearing for individuals who are not going to actually show interest in your product or want to buy it. This gives you a direct link to your key demographic and saves you on marketing money, all while pushing the website to the top of the Google search engine.

Author’s bio:
Maria Rodriguez: Maria is a kindergarten teacher from Glasgow. Maria works as a blogger after school. She works on articles based on finance like PPI claims, loans and how to handle your credit card in a wiser way. She loves music and art. Catch her at ppiclaimsmaria.

Budweiser and its iconic Clydesdales sure do have a way with making great television commercials.  The 2013 version is the best since the Clydesdales were kicking field goals.

Then we may end with the file name and that file name might end with a file extension. Thanks to blogging software it’s become common these days to not end file names with a file extension. I believe that it is a good idea to differentiate between file names and directory names and you do that, using file extensions. It doesn’t have to be HMTL it could be PHP, ASPX or whatever.

But I think it’s a good idea to make sure that Google knows the difference between your file names and directory names to help it understand your site structure. Perhaps the most common problem with URL’s is that they simply convey no information to search engines.
Consider the following URL: http://www.twotreesoliveoil.com/news.html. Yes it does have olive oil in the domain name, but as far as the directory structure file name goes, there is nothing, no keywords, something like this might be better; http://www.twotreesoliveoil.com/olive-oil-benefits/olive-oil-news.htm.

Get some keywords in there, separate the keywords with a dash not an underscore or space. Many developers will tell you that the separator should be an underscore but they won’t be able to give you a rational explanation why. Just tell that Google actually recommend dashes over underscores and no I’m not making that up. By the way, a quick tip related domain names; most domain names when printed or displayed on the screen should be title case, it makes them much easier to read.

There is another common problem with URL’s often found one very large sites. If you have what is known as a dynamic site you may have this problem. A dynamic website is one of which web pages are created on the fly by pulling data out of a database and merging it with the template. Most shopping cart sites are dynamic sites. The problem is that many of the systems were created by developers who were not thinking about search engine optimisation, so they built URL structures that contain database queries.

For instance the site might have URL’s that look like this, http://www.twotreesoliveoil.com/sp/fQzomQuhofA&list=UU9iTFWWz4putE8-sux-ggcQ&index=14. There are two problems with this type of URL. First such engines are less likely to index pages with complicated URL’s but to be honest that was much more of a problem in the past then today, but why take that chance? The other problem is that there are no keywords. It’s a huge waste of primacy real estate; here is a better URL; http://www.twotreesoliveoil.com/buy-olive-oil/zoe-extra-virgin-olive-oil/ and what a bunch of lovely keywords. So if your site has this dynamic URL problem, are you going to fix it?

You something called URL rewriting, it is a job for a programmer but it is not necessarily a terribly complicated job. Search for ‘mod rewrite’ or ‘URL writing’ to find more information. A quick word about directory structure, keep it simple, don’t go down fifty levels, keep it to two or three at the most and use keywords instead of generic directory terms. Use ‘buy olive oil’ rather than just ‘shop’.

Now and then you might run into web developers who tell that URL’s really don’t matter or even the putting keywords into your URL can get your site penalised by Google. I just heard the second one recently when a client went to his web development company with a list of fixes for his site. Both of these statements are completely untrue, rather than arguing the point though I simply explain that Google itself actually recommends that you put keywords in your URL’s.

Using nicely key worded URL’s is important whether your site is large or small, but consider very large sites with tens of thousands of pages, a small fix can have a huge effect in the search results as tens of thousands of file name become well key worded.

Sadhiv Mahandru has been developing websites and optimising them for over a decade. Specialising in SEO Manchester and throughout the UK. You can learn more about Internet Marketing and SEO by reading my personal blog.

By Steven Pope

“News jacking” might end up being turned into a single word “newsjacking.” It probably will be by the end of 2013 after more businesses start doing it. It became a trendy thing to do in 2012. So what is news jacking? News jacking is a marketing term that means embracing a current event by your company in social media or advertising. A great example of this is when Felix Baumgartner did his infamous space jump.

It was a worldwide story that had massive implications. It was a world breaking stunt, and it was novel. Nobody had jumped from outer space into the world before. So during this event I was discussing it with our company’s social media following. At the time I was working for a higher education company so I posted things like, “This guy dreams big.” Since most people dream of getting their college degree it wasn’t that much of a stretch. And regardless, this event is interesting to any demographic. So no matter what business you have you could tweet about it, share it on Facebook, etc.

The idea of news jacking is to get engagements, and to get users to share your story. IE creating buzz. Even if what they share from your social media has nothing to do with your product your name is attached to it. Since your post is free, you might end up getting a few clicks that would have cost you some advertising money.

The 10:3:1 rule

News jacking helps you with the 10:3:1 rule. For every 14 posts you make, you should have 10 that talk about your product in general, 3 that promote something that isn’t your product, and 1 that is a straight-up lead generation. News jacking falls into the “3” category most often. Give it a try!

Here’s a math puzzle that I shared on a company’s Facebook page. It received 15,000 comments! The thing went viral, and you are welcome to post it to your own social media to give it a try. It technically isn’t news jacking but has all of the associated benefits and follows the news jacking method. Because others are using the puzzle already, it technically still is news jacking.

News jacking can also be defined as the act of redirecting the impact of breaking news into your company’s favor. For instance, if a world event like when miners were trapped underground in Chile in 2010, and your product can help in the relief effort you could gain major media attention. That’s what Oakley did, providing required sunglass eyewear that protected against the sun in the relief effort.

Author Bio: Steven Pope is a journalist turned marketer. Currently unemployed he is blogging to get exposure. See his LinkedIn resume here, and let him know about any job opportunities. You can also follow the author on Twitter @NewAgeMarketer.

That was yesterday; today is (well) today.  Things have changed.  There are more of us classified as geeks and some of us that are non-technical people could have proudly taken the moniker of being geeks from 15 years ago.  That’s because websites of today are so simple to do that almost anybody can make them.  You don’t need a college degree in computer programming and you don’t even need to know any html.

There are so many website builder tools out there and they are so easy to use.  If you can understand WordPress and similar, you can build your own website today.  It’s that easy to do and you don’t need to have any special skills to do so.  Just check out sites that offer website builder tools and you’ll be on your way to your own internet site.