7-Eleven is using the presidential election as a way to build hype around a new Slurpee flavor that ultimately builds the company’s SMS database and drives in-store traffic.

1. Localize

National brands with local physical locations typically spend more time and effort on national marketing, limiting or eliminating the local message. However, that can be a mistake. Local efforts are instrumental in driving increased local business. 

One of the first things consumers look for when considering a purchase is a review of the product or service. They look to their peers for input and advice and trust those voices far more than your brand's, especially if they've had little to no interaction with the brand.

How do you get those first few reviews to help curb the concerns of new purchasers?

1. Why should you encourage online reviews?
2. How do you encourage online reviews?
3. How do you respond to negative reviews?

We help our clients bring their national strategy into a local context.  It’s great when we hear from clients that want to start a local marketing program.  It’s a new channel that’s not easily understood unless you’re like us and you do this as your job.  We see several opportunities for new clients that want to start a local marketing program.

What if you could add your customers to a text message program where they receive instant offers from their favorite local location.  What if the local location could send out an offer when they had overstocked inventory, perishable items, great weather locally, just beat a local rival in a sport, etc.  You can do all of this.

We can setup a centralized collection process where all your ads, local POP, etc. can direct customers to your website or Facebook page to enter their phone number and ZIP code to start receiving local instant offers via text messaging.  This can be combined with our email-marketing program so the customer has one place to control their communications profile.

Here are the main reasons search marketing has such a high return on investment:

     *  Targeted - we can limit who sees your ad based on where they are, the day of the
         week, time of day and what they're looking for.
     * Pay for Performance - you only pay when the prospects actually goes to your
        website (no waste)

The consumers this year would be much alike from last year. The speedy networks will encourage people to acquire web-centric smartphone devices. According to IBM Benchmark, the sales from smartphones and tables accounted for 11% of total online sales which raised 5.5% in December 2011.

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter will be patronized by the users. Other new social networks that are gaining popularity will also be invaded

Local marketing includes several different Internet and mobile marketing tactics.  This article summarizes the list of local marketing initiatives.  People in general want to belong to something and want to be treated special.  Local marketing gives that customer the idea that your brand is part of the community vs. being a “chain.”  People today associate the word “chain” with national or the opposite of being local.

This is a question we get a lot.  Let’s first look at some statistics.  Research shows that people spend almost as much time on the Internet as they do watching TV.  However, advertising spend for the Internet is one third of that spent on TV.  Internet is still a new channel to some and thus the marketing budgets are still playing catch up.  So in essence the amount of your marketing budget for the Internet should be roughly the same as that of TV.

There may be more than six but we’ve listed six different ways to capitalize your search PPC program during the Holidays and product seasonality.

1. Grab the Low-Hanging Keywords

Now that you know what’s popular during specific gifting seasons, if any of the popular categories correspond to your business, you can simply add the occasions as modifiers to your existing keywords.

If you’re selling on the keyword “video camera,” next spring you should try keywords like “video camera for graduate” or “video camera graduation sale.” It’s a volume opportunity for additional clicks, which often will come cheaper than your existing keywords.

When you go online and start to do your purchase research you’re bombarded with sites wanting to give you quotes, have you call them, fill out forms, etc.  They want you to make your decision right now and buy from them right now.

This is mainly because many lead-management programs make the mistake of treating all prospects as if they're ready to make a purchase right now. The following helps you give the researcher what he/she wants while still trying to make a sell:

The easy days of SEO are over and it's now important to include competitive analysis into every SEO effort to identify opportunities and set priorities. Having said that, a lot of companies haven't done competitive analysis. If you're one of those, here are some quick tips to get you started.

Why

Consider the following facts:

• Hispanic moms are one of the fastest growing demographics online.
• Eighty-two percent of mid- and high-acculturated Latino moms are online.
• Virtually 100 percent of Hispanic moms online are engaged in social networking.
• Eighty-four percent of Hispanic moms are on Facebook.
• Their presence in MySpace is 40 percent higher than white moms (29 percent reach).

Many have said tradeshow marketing is dead.  Even though we work in the area that supposively killed tradeshows (Internet Marketing) we don't believe it's dead.  We also believe heavily in the relationship opportunities that a tradeshow can drive.  We do believe that tradeshows need to be handeled differently.  We believe that if you concentrate on these steps you can make each and every tradeshow event successful.

1.  Start planning early