IMC stands for Integrated Marketing Communication, and IMC is responsible for the unified marketing message that any organization set out in the open for it to reach the target audience. In the absence of which the audience receives different communication from all the different mediums, which leads to confusion followed by chaos.

And I do not think any organization (profit or not-for-profit) can afford to put its target audience in this state. As a confused audience behaves erratically, which in most cases go against the interest of the company in question. We should, therefore, stick to one message at one point in time. This is one of the benefits of using IMC, and there could be many more. To reap the reward of IMC, your company needs to have a proper IMC plan.

In the following paragraph I will tell you why you need an IMC plan for your brand. After reading this article, you will see why I felt the need to write a full-length article advocating IMC. Read this article to the end and you will fall in love with IMC, as well.

Benefit of an IMC Plan

Clear communication

By putting an IMC plan in place you will ensure that the brand communication (I prefer calling it a brand communication as the goal of a marketing communication is to strengthen a brand) you send to your target audience through various media using various agencies is uniform, and it does not create any confusion, whatsoever, and your audience hears you loud and clear.

Advertising is not all

This comes as a revelation to those who have not thought of a world beyond advertising and mass media. Such is the power of having an IMC plan in place. It stops you from making wrong decision, and instead, put you on the right course.

An integrated marketing communication plan helps you judiciously allocate your MarCom (marketing communication) budget among different marketing vehicles to get maximum output.

Consistent Message

As part of developing an IMC plan, you will also formulate the message you would like to deliver to your audience through different channel. This will work as a guiding post for the agencies you have employed for this work.

This is important because chances are that you will hire different agencies for different function — BTL agency for below the line promotions, advertising agencies to create ads, public relation firms for PR works, and online marketing agencies for online marketing and promotion, etc. — and in the absence of an IMC plan and core message, each one of them would come up with their own version of marketing message that you want to set out. This could be disastrous for your campaign and brand.

You need to provide a blueprint of what you want from each of the agencies, which should be given to the agencies, once you have hired them. I know the agencies will not like it, but you have to do this to maintain the consistency of your brand message. The agencies are free in the creative rendition of the marketing message, but not in the selection of the message.

More impact per dollar

By delivering the same message over and over again through different media, you will have maximum impact on your audience. They will get the exposure to your message enough number of times to make a decision.

Do not concern yourself over your customers’ raising their perceptual barrier out of boredom caused by the delivery of same message over and over again because your agencies will take care it, by delivering the same message in different way. The core of your message will remain the same, but the execution will be different.

So what are you thinking…?

To have an IMC plan or not? For me, IMC is a must have for any organization. It makes business sense as well. It helps you squeeze juice out of every dollar spent on marketing.

To maximize the ROI on every dollar spend on marketing you must create an integrated marketing plan for your organization. Once you are through with that, make a blueprint for your agencies, which will guide them through the process. Do not let your agencies tamper with the message you want to deliver to your audience, no matter how compelling a reason each one of them give.

Popularity: 2% [?]

If you own a small business and you are not on the Internet then you are missing millions of customers (if not gazillions). Most of the people with college degrees are on the Internet, and as you know they make a large portion of your customer base. Which business will not like to tap into the medium that has so high concentration of buying public?

Even those who do not have college education can be seen hanging on the Internet, and there are some second-tier net users as well; those who get access to the Internet from their friends, or relatives. This makes the user base of the Internet a whole lot bigger.

But the problem is the Internet is not one thing. It is many things. It is like a garden where all kinds of flower, trees, and even weeds are present. The sheer scope of the Internet confuses the outsider. To ease them up, and to help them try the medium, we need to tell them the possibility of the Internet, and how it can help them grow their business.

This article is an attempt in that direction. In this article, I will talk about three tools of online marketing that a small business owner can use to grow his business on the internet, and that too at the fraction of cost.

SEO

SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization. This is one of the most used, abused, and confusing online marketing tool. Despite this, it is arguably the most trusted and the best online marketing tool. It is also very cost effective. But on the down side, we need time at hand to get any measurable result because of the use of this tool. The result of SEO is never instantaneous, but when it comes it is always big, provided you have hired a good SEO company to do your website optimization.

PPC

PPC is an acronym for pay per click. This tool helps you fill in the vacuum created by SEO. The results are always instantaneous, but this tool is not very cost effective, and if you or your team does not have sufficient understanding of the mechanics of pay per click ads then you may burn a very deep hole in your pocket. It sucks money like anything. But the positive things about PPC is it delivers result, and often the visitors clicking a PPC ads are more likely to buy you product, provided you have targeted a right keyword.

You can use this tool in conjugation with other tools we have discussed in this article. PPC works particularly well with SEO, for both of them supplement each other.

E-mail marketing

To praise e-mail marketing, it will suffice to say that if you have 10,000 subscriber with an intention to buy then you may not need to use any other online marketing tool except this. But the catch is to get that much subscriber, and for that you will have to use PPC and SEO, among other online marketing tools.

To make your e-mail marketing successful, you need a list of people in your database, and this list should not consist of anyone and everyone. Only those who are willing to listen to you should be there on this list.

If done properly, trust is at maximum among the sender and the receivers in this form of online marketing communication, provided effort has been made to establish and nurture relationship with the e-mail subscribers.

Last few words

The online marketing tools I have discussed here do not for in choice (either this or that) category. Each one of them is indispensable, and they all should be used judiciously. Which one should be used when and how often depends upon the status of your website (for example: if it is new you will need more PPC to get visitors, but if it is established then continual SEO is to go for), and the amount of money you have to spend on the marketing activity.

Whatever is your budget, and status of your website, never give a second thought while using e-mail marketing as a marketing tool. This is a must-use tool for anyone who is serious about web. So gear up and get your own online marketing plan rolling.

Popularity: 4% [?]

For a small business, a virtual assistant (VA) is a life saver. He comes with an arsenal of marketing weapons and changes the way a small business owner conduct business. A VA adds muscle power to a small business, and with his support, the small business slowly starts gaining mass and eventually become big.

There could be many reasons for a small business to hire a virtual assistant, but to a non-convert all the reason sounds gibberish, mere sophistry. We should, therefore, list the effect of hiring a VA to the bottom line of a small business’s balance sheet. This will help non-convert come to a right decision.

Benefits of hiring a virtual assistant

Cost effective

A virtual assistant is indeed very cost-effective in comparison to the cost incurred on having a full-time employee to do the exact same work. In fact, a VA will do exactly all the work plus more that any full-time employee can do. Not only that you pay your VA only for the hours he worked for you, which is not a case with a full-time employee, who charges you for every single minute he spent at your place (read office) after stepping through the big giant office door.

A VA cannot, by definition, charge you for the hours he had not worked for you. It means you get the worth of every penny you spent on hiring a staff.

No overhead cost

There is another benefit of hiring a virtual assistant, and that is his inability to add even a single variable cost to your overhead. Unlike a permanent staff, you do not have to pay for the electricity consumption of your virtual assistant, for his high-speed Internet usage (or movie downloads – this is what employees do with the office bandwidth.), for his space, his stationary, or for his tea and coffee, etc.

There are many small expenses that you incur when a full-time person works for you from your office, which you do not incur when you outsource the same work to a VA. A virtual assistant works from his home or his office without adding even a single penny to your overhead.

Generally, I suggest people to have a permanent employee to do the core work, or the work that cannot be done outside the office, and hire a reliable virtual assistant to do rest of the work. This makes business sense.

A VA works as a Swiss knife

A virtual assistant not only keeps your operation cost low, but he also helps you grow your business by performing various tasks. A virtual assistant is like a Swiss knife that does a lot many things along with opening a beer bottle (well, not exactly).

A virtual assistant will handle your work load, freeing you to do the things necessary to strengthen the core of your business. Because of his nature of work, a virtual assistant generally maintain a good contact with people in various profession. If need be, he can mobilize this resource to get your work done. A virtual assistant is very versatile.

Help you grow your business

Generally, a virtual assistant has experience of working in different industries. Some of which may be related to the field you are into. You can use his experience to enrich your business. From time to time, he will also give you inputs that may save you some extra dollars, or help you solve your customers’ problem more efficiently.

So what do you think…?

Hiring a virtual assistant is not a bad bet. A virtual assistant has become necessary for the survival of a small business. He helps you keep the input cost low, and in today’s world, where competition is trying to eat your share from every side, it is a big thing.

But not all virtual assistants are cut to be equal. You should, hence, be very critical of the claims (read tall claims) made by a VA. Hire only the one who has a verifiable track record, and one who have knowledge of your field.

Always remember, a virtual assistant is not just a replacement of your regular employee. He is much more than that, so do not settle for the one who says he will just do the work your full-time employee did for you. You will be losing on the opportunity, if you hire someone like that.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Online or in the offline world, success comes to those who work diligently, not to those who shift from one project to another because of the fear of losing. And to get success in business, particularly online, you need bring some characteristic changes in you to align your thought process with your goal.

For an online business, if the whole world is the market then the whole world also is also competitor. You never know from where who will come and with what product and destroy your entire customer base. To be successful, therefore, on the Internet you need certain skills, which I am going to talk about in this article.

Ability to trust and delegate

Ability to trust others is the primary skill or aptitude, if we may say, needed to be successful as an online entrepreneur. The online world is filled with cheaters, scammers, and those who are waiting to jump on the opportunity to run away with your hard-earned money, yet you need to be trustful of people around you because there is nothing that you can do to someone sitting on the other side of the computer terminal, perhaps thousands of miles away. Hence, trust is the only way out.

It is the trust that allows you to offer “30 Days”, “60 Days”, or “90 Days” money-back guarantee on the products (primarily digital) that you sell on the Internet. If it is not the trust then how could you say that person asking for refund on your product was really not satisfied by it, and he will not use the product in the future? After all, we do not need Einstein’s brain to understand that once downloaded digital document can be copied used for unlimited times.

It is the trust that allows us to outsource work to people outside your organization. While doing so you trust that your service provider, who is sitting half-world away from you, will not sell the information to someone else, or they will not run away with the money you paid as an advance for the work. And it is the trust on their part that makes them work for you without getting 100% advance.

Passion for being on the top

Not just on the top of your industry’s food chain, but also on top of the news that breaks in your industry, and also on top of the news. It is the passion for your work that keeps you involved in learning new skills and tricks of the trade, so that you can outpace your competition.

To be successful on the Internet, you need to have passion to stay on top of the ongoing events, developments, and trends of your industry. Then only you can be on the top of a customer’s priority list, when she thinks of spending any money in your industry.

Agility and nimbleness

The world is changing fast and the virtual world is changing mind-bogglingly fast. To catch up with everyone around, you need to be agile in your movement, and nimble in your response. On the Internet, the steadier wins the race only if he is also the quickest. There is no place for the slower ones here. Slow and steady may wins the race, but somewhere else.

An elephant may dance in the world of brick and mortar. But here in the digital environment, an elephant cannot dance. Till the time a fat elephant learns to dance, the dance steps become obsolete, which left him where he started from.

You need to be quick and decisive should you want to match your speed with that of the world around you on the Internet.

Dare to act

Planning and strategizing is not enough, one needs to act to make it big on the Internet. You should have the ability to act despite the lack of proper knowledge, and despite you have not-so-perfect product. Perfectionism is an illusion, and if you can dare to proclaim that, and trod ahead without a perfect product then the world is for you to rule.

Success comes only to those who act, and not to those who plan or react.

Finishing touch

Remove any of the four factors from the equation and you fall short of achieving your goal as an online entrepreneur. You need to have all these traits to make a mark as an online entrepreneur.

Popularity: 3% [?]

There could be a big debate on the topic that whether you should hire a person to take care of your blog, or should you do it all by yourself. I know proponents of both schools of thoughts have many logically-oiled bullet points to prove themselves right and they can even stretch the verbal battle on this topic for years to come.

But, here I have decided to take side of any one party, and as the title must have given you the idea that I am with the former group that believes that at some point of time you should let go of blogging and hire someone to do that work for you. Which brings us to the original question: why should you hire someone to manage your blog? To find the answer, read this article to the end.

Because you need time to create

If blogging is not the main thing you do for living then shifting the responsibility of blogging to a full-time blogging professional is the ideal thing to do. It frees you from the obligation to write one or more posts daily, and you can use this freedom to create value for your customers.

Always keep in mind that your customers are with you not because of your ability to write eye-catching titles of your blog post, or keeping them engaged with your lucid style of writing. But they are with you because you solve their problems, because they know you have the solution to their problems. It is, therefore, beneficial for you to invest your time creating value for them.

Also because you cannot do it on your own

We all have only 24 hours in a day, and if we spread ourselves too thin in doing all the activities that need to be done to make a business successful then our businesses, for which we are spreading ourselves too thin, will not survive the competitive warfare.

It is not humanly possible to do it all by oneself. Thus soon we start missing the deadlines. For a busy business owner, one missed deadline means adding extra burden to the next day’s schedule. And what happen the next day? You miss one more deadline because of the yesterday’s burden, and it continues to add up, until you get agitated, frustrated, and start pulling your hairs out.

You can save yourself from this, and for that you need to learn to delegate non-core works to others. If you do not have a team then you should hire a virtual assistant blogger and outsource this work to him or her.

Because someone else can do it better

You may be the best product creator in your industry, but that does not make you the best blogger of your industry. You need someone who has a captivating writing style, and a good understanding of your industry, or ability to research for the topic and willingness to stay on top of the news in your industry to write on your blog.

A professional staff blogger (who makes his living by blogging) is anytime better equipped to handle the blogging workload, for this is his job to do so. He knows what it takes to make the audience talk about the blog. He knows how to keep people involved, and what to write about, so that people could start speaking their hearts out. A professional staff blogger knows the art of involvement.

Because you need to know more about your industry

Whatever the level of understanding you have of your industry, you need to know more to stay ahead of the competition. The speed at which your industry is changing is mind-boggling, and you need to outpace that change to be the champion. And for all this you need time, energy, money, and ability to maneuver all the resources. You can either do this, or invest time in writing blog posts for your readers, all of whom are not necessarily your customers.

So what have you decided?

To continue blogging on your own and investing time creating wonderful pieces (blog posts) that will make your audiences more knowledge about your industry, or you want to spend your time injecting value (using the knowledge you have) in the solution you offer to your customers, and letting the communication and connection part rest in the able hands of a professional staff blogger?

The decision is yours because you have to decide what is more important for your company, and for your customers?

Meanwhile, I like to introduce our staff blogger Bikram and Maria, check out how they work hard to get us well researched blog posts. If you feel like hiring a VA to manage your website or blog, check out our Virtual Assistants offers to learn more on all our other services.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a secretive art; at least it appears to be, if you are not among those who practice this craft. If you do not believe me then talk to any SEO guy, and everything they will say will go over your head. All will be Hebrew for you. Because of this there are many myths around the industry circulating in the air. These myths do nothing, but add to the confusion.

In this article, I will examine 3 such myths and will bust them. These myths are related to SEO agencies, related to what they say to get your business. So you should read this article to the end.

Myth 1: Good SEO service will not cost much

We all know the age-old maxim: pay peanuts and get monkeys. This holds true for SEO as well. To get good quality SEO service, you will have to invest in a good quality SEO company, and that never comes cheap.

But, why some SEO companies are cheaper, while, others are not-so-cheaper?

In one word, the answer is “quality”. A good SEO company will help you get better ranking for a term that is highly searched by the target audience, whereas, SEO companies with shabby reputation will get you ranking, but for the keywords that get very little traffic, and thus of no use for you.

Hiring a good SEO company may cost you more dollars, but it will deliver the result. Investing in a bad SEO company is like throwing a coin in a pond and waiting for your wishes to get fulfilled. It never happens. Even a one dollar investment that brings no result is of no use.

Myth 2: You can stop doing SEO once you got the ranking

Follow the above suggestion at your own risk. The sooner you stop investing your resources in optimization of your website, the quicker your ranking starts disappearing, and then follows your listing, as Google and other search engines update their database every day. And a website that does not have fresh and meaningful content and links are dropped from priority listing.

You need to invest in SEO and its ranking factor continually to maintain the position you got in Google’s SERP. Agreed that the investment will not be as huge as it were when you were trying to climb up in ranking, but there is some investment in maintaining the rank.

Myth 3: SEO happens on the page

This is what coders or designers turned SEO expert will try to make you believe. You can find such people standing on their roof tops and shouting this maxim at the top of their voice so that you start believing this.

On-page factors, indeed, matter, and they matters a great deal, but not more than off-page factors. It is the off-page factors that count most, not the on-page.

A SEO-optimized HTML code, or website design is indeed a prerequisite for your SEO effort to be successful, but they are not it. On page factors create a basic ground on which off-page factors play the game.

I am not suggesting that you can do without on-page optimization, but this optimization is not the only thing you need to do. You can start with on-page optimization then you will have to move towards getting as many inbound link from as varied sources as you can, if you want to get higher ranking in search engine result pages.

So what should you do?

You should not subscribe to any of the myths we have discussed above. Subscribing to any of them will rob you off of any chances of getting higher ranking for the chosen keywords. I will suggest you to invest in a good SEO company that can show you provable result.

You should run a search in Google on a SEO company by adding words like scam, fraud, cheat, and reap off, etc. before hiring any company for your SEO work. Do not go with a SEO company that cannot show verifiable result, no matter how big they claim they are. Ask for reference, and verify the quality from there.

Do not get sold for empty promises. Stay away from a SEO company that says yes to whatever demand you put, chances are they will not honor their words.

Popularity: 4% [?]