Many restaurants are using social media to enhance an age-old marketing technique: Making customers and their experiences the face of their brand.
Let’s YO Yogurt, which launched its first franchise location in Marlboro, N.J., and has about 30 more units sold and preparing to open in New Jersey, New York and Florida, is using social media as a main driver to grow the business. Owner Eric Casaburi, who also founded the RetroFitness franchise, said social media is the best way for a brand to truly connect with customers. The Let’s YO logo is in the form of a text message, while a 48-foot billboard in Monmouth County, N.J., reads, “Like Us on Facebook,” and “Make ur own 
”
“You know that smiley face, you’ve typed it a thousand times. I’ve now connected with you on a social level,” Casaburi said. “I feel I have to make sure people have the most creative way to hear about our brand. In today’s world, the most creative way to talk about branding and getting your customers engaged … is social media.”
Let’s Yo holds “Let’s YO Fan of the Week” contests on Facebook that involves customers taking pictures of themselves with their favorite yogurt flavor, posting it, and having people vote on their favorite picture. The winner gets a free week’s worth of yogurt, or a similar prize, if they get the most votes.
Customers also get hit with social once as they walk through the doors—stores have 70-inch TV screens that show live Facebook and Twitter feeds of what people are saying about the company. Customers can immediately post their own reviews or show off their new flavor concoction with the iPads installed in each table or their own mobile devices. Afterwards, dad can read the Wall Street Journal on the iPad, while his kids play Angry Birds. Kids beg parents to bring them into the store, said Casaburi, and parents willingly oblige, since there’s entertainment for the whole family.
“You talk about the social media promoting your brick and mortar–we promote social media with our brick-and-mortar,” Casaburi said.
Let’s YO also features the “Let’s YO! Name Fame” game on Facebook, that picks out a name every day and customers with the same name get 50% off a cup of yogurt that day. When people with the name of the day come in to redeem their discount, they often bring non-qualifying customers with them—increasing foot traffic. Casaburi said this promotion is very popular with the younger crowd.
“This customer for Let’s YO yogurt is just a huge demographic and the way we communicate with them … we’re just going to market so many different ways, talking to people who we know are customers because we’ve identified them,” he said. “We know how to speak to them – that’s key. We have the message in the right place.”
The most affordable promoting accessible nowadays is PPC, shell out per click on, and search engine advertising. As a flourishing organization PPC search engine advertising was anticipated to $eight billion in revenue by 2008. The complete concept guiding PPC search engine advertising is producing sales opportunities. When carried out proficiently creating leads aids buyers in locating the specific site that delivers the products or service they are seeking for.
That is not to say that PPC advertising is the conclude of the method. While research engine advertising and marketing will deliver a site prospects these folks must discover some thing of use on the website when they get there. Good info is a essential part of PPC search engine advertising and one particular that is disregarded typically by web site builders. Remember people are more inclined to purchase merchandise or service from a web site that offers them at minimum the pertinent details they have been searching for in the initial spot.
Convertible Targeted traffic from Search Motor Advertising
Maybe the greatest benefit of PPC advertising is the simple fact that the visitors is specified. The people clicking on the ads are these who are actually searching for a product or services associated to the lookup. This does away with random clicks from individuals who are not intrigued in the products, reducing costs and growing profits. PPC promoting is a fantastic way to get a return on your expense.
The price of a specific key phrase is established by means of a bidding process. PPC search engine advertising budgets can variety from $a hundred – $a hundred,000 relying on the phrase and number of search phrases searched. The value for a certain keyword or search phrase can rapidly improve and a lot more companies bid on them.
Shell out per click adverts are exhibited with related research motor results, which are appropriate to individual searches. The person willing to spend be
st bid for a term or phrase will have their ads displayed at the leading of the results page. This placement puts the advertiser in the greatest position for obtaining the PPC advertisements clicked by an fascinated searcher.
PPC Search
There are three fundamental factors concerned in lookup engine advertising and marketing these are constant monitoring, refinement and response analysis. All these components are crucial to the campaign. You will only see huge revenue when you effectively control PPC search engine advertising.
You will be capable to keep an eye on the productiveness of all your PPC adverts. This is useful simply because you will have the alternative to discontinue any ad that is not returning on your expense. This is 1 of the good reasons PPC search engine advertising is a extremely value successful way to promote on the internet.
The amount of clicks you obtain on a Pay Per Click advertisement establishes your value from PPC search engine advertising. These clicks will be totaled and subtracted from the original amount you compensated to the research engines for advert placement. You will have to frequently check these numbers for each and every PPC search engine advertising campaign you launch in buy to reduce price and maximize your revenue.
This is such a great article about online media. I love number 2 because so many companies these days sell a bucket of click to customers and then hang their hat on it.
The other day I tweeted about the most common come-on in online advertising, that integration of some new behavioral/widget/toolbar/bulls**# service would be as simple as “one line of Javascript.” And it’s true, that you can implement a service that will deplete your business model, annoy your users, and destroy your user experience with just one line of Javascript.
With that in mind, I thought it was worth enumerating the 10 biggest lies in Online Advertising. And not even with a slideshow — think of all the lost pageviews!
1. “Just One Line of Javascript”
Yes, with one line of javascript you can integrate virtually anything into your site. That’s not a benefit, it’s a threat. Just because it starts with <script src= doesn’t make it OK. Hey, just integrate this: <script src=”blow.my.head.off.js”>. Seriously dude, the script can a) capture all the data of your search referrers; b) cookie users for targeting based on your site’s profile; c) correlate those users to your referral URL, thereby profiling your site so it can be bought at a discount; d) read everything on your site, including confidential user data; e) add latency to your user experience; f) insert other javascript from other sources into your page; etc; etc. Think before you cut-and-paste.
2. Clicks and Clickthroughs Matter
This is only a lie to the extent that intelligent people benefit by continuing to believe it. Studies have shown that most people don’t click; that those who do are less desirable consumers; that most clicks are accidental; and that in any case clicks are very rare. Yet, clients and media planners continue to evaluate online advertising based on click-through-rates. There’s still a place for clicks on pure direct response offers or specific calls to action, but they aren’t a viable currency for generally evaluating online ads and should stop being treated as such.
3. Reach = cookies
Reach is defined as the number of people reached by an advertising campaign or media property. Cookies can measure the number of browsers exposed to an advertising campaign. Browser<>Person. Unless you have a mapping (panel, statistical, or otherwise) such that f(browser)=people then you can’t calculate reach. And just grossing up based on deleted cookies doesn’t qualify.
More than two-thirds of marketers (67.5%) say they plan to invest more dollars in display advertising over the next 18 months, and 59.0% plan to invest more in mobile over the same period, according to a new survey from Bizo.
Asked to rank their top 3 priorities over the next 18 months, marketers also cite paid search and SEO (55.4%), social media (48.2%), and email (31.3%).
Below, other findings from Bizo’s Online Marketing Survey of 130 marketers, conducted in March 2011.
Benefits of Display: Site Traffic, Conversion
