Marketing: Sponsorship: A Key to Powerful Marketing

Sponsorship: A Key to Powerful Marketing

Written by Susan A. Friedmann

Continued from page 1
IEG’s Complete Guide to Sponsorship cites Visa’s fund-raising effort around its sponsorship of repparttar

Olympic Games and repparttar 120360

U.S. Olympic Team. They promoted their association by offering to make a donation to repparttar 120361

team each time consumers charge a purchase to their card. American Express used a similar strategy by donating to needy causes with their "Charge Against Hunger" campaign. As a result, both companies experienced a significant rise in sales volume. 3. Creating positive publicity/heightening visibility Every sponsor is seeking wide exposure in both electronic and print media. Positive publicity helps create heightened visibility of products/services. Various media covering repparttar 120362

event may include sponsors names and/or photos. In addition, repparttar 120363

kind of media coverage a sponsor may get is often unaffordable if repparttar 120364

company were to think of purchasing it, and if it were available. To maximize this objective, it is important for repparttar 120365

sponsoring company to have a comprehensive media campaign to augment repparttar 120366

regular media coverage promoted by repparttar 120367

organizers. Sponsorship can often generate media coverage that might otherwise not have been available. 4. Differentiating from competitors The mere act of sponsoring an event, especially an exclusive sponsorship, is a significant way to create competitor differentiation. Your company name has repparttar 120368

opportunity to stand out head and shoulders above repparttar 120369

competition. This is particularly helpful if your company wants to combat a competitor with a larger ad budget. Sponsorship allows smaller companies to compete with their industry giants. Target audiences often perceive sponsorship in a positive way. They see you as making a greater effort to support repparttar 120370

event, often allowing more or better activities to take place as a result of your sponsorship. 5. Helping with good "Corporate Citizen" role Another powerful sponsorship objective allows companies to be viewed as a "good neighbor." To be seen supporting repparttar 120371

community and contributing to its economic development is extremely powerful and creates enormous goodwill. 6. Enhancing business, consumer and VIP relations Sponsorship that offers hospitality opportunities is always very attractive to companies. Perks may include special exclusive networking settings such as VIP receptions or golf tournaments – opportunities to meet key customers and solidify business relationships. It is important to evaluate each opportunity and look for ways it could tie into your marketing objectives.

Written by Susan A. Friedmann,CSP, The Tradeshow Coach, Lake Placid, NY, author: “Meeting & Event Planning for Dummies,” working with companies to improve their meeting and event success through coaching, consulting and training. Go to http://www.thetradeshowcoach.com to sign up for a free copy of ExhibitSmart Tips of the Week.

Search Engine Marketing - John Alexander Interviews SEO author Susan O'Neil about the early days.

Written by John Alexander

Continued from page 1

Susan O'Neil: "Because of my SEO skills and my marketing expertise, I and my staff have been able to help hundreds of small to large businesses succeed on repparttar Internet. This remains exciting and gratifying. Our clients were also better able to ride out repparttar 120359 dot.com bust because our approach to providing SEO services has been to focus on repparttar 120360 long term "health" of a website, which means building quality content continuously. Robin in her teaching and, together, in our book - we've never strayed from repparttar 120361 truism that "content is king" and that continues to serve my clients well."

John Alexander: "Can you tell our readers about one of your earliest SEO success stories and what it felt like repparttar 120362 first time you made a real difference to someone's business online?"

Susan O'Neil: "A longtime PR client of mine is a publisher of fine nonfiction for children. This company was early in recognizing repparttar 120363 power of repparttar 120364 Internet and so invested in a delightful, informative website that also offered subscriptions to their magazines. However, after spending repparttar 120365 money to build repparttar 120366 website, they didn't get any visitors. I liken it to giving birth after a long labor to a beautiful new baby that no one comes to admire. Aware of their concerns, I starting tweaking tags, cleaning up code, and adding content and their site began to take off. That early first client has remained with my company all these years and has been generous in their recommending of us to others as they continue to grow their online business."

John Alexander: "What word of wisdom or advice do you have for any of our readers that might be considering building a new career in search engine marketing these days?"

Susan O'Neil: "I don't think you can be in marketing today without at least an understanding of search marketing concepts, even if you don't build repparttar 120367 code and write repparttar 120368 content. As this "new" science of SEO has become not only universally accepted but consistently praised for its cost-effective strategies, there will continue to be opportunities for people who can apply consistent, aggressive, yet ethical strategies for growing online success, both in-house for e-commerce companies and with SEO/SEM agencies like mine. In fact, my agency is growing still and when I hire someone who may have a great marketing background but be new to SEO, I have them start their learning curve with one of Robin's courses because no one can lay out repparttar 120369 ground work better."

John Alexander: "How nicely spoken, Susan."

Susan O'Neil: "The other word of advice I have is an old one: don't believe everything you read. SEO newsletters and forums are great starting points and can be entertaining, but repparttar 120370 people with repparttar 120371 best information don't go giving it away. Whatever you hear or read, never apply a strategy to a client's site without thoroughly testing it first extensively. We developed our own E- Commerce Lab for just this purpose."

John Alexander: "Finally in closing, I'll ask if you have any other favourite online resources you would care to mention for repparttar 120372 benefit of our readers?

Susan O'Neil: "As my company has grown, my responsibilities have shifted from trying to discern repparttar 120373 optimum number of words on a Google-friendly page or repparttar 120374 best marketing spin in a title tag, to focusing on repparttar 120375 bigger picture, so I'm not a good one to recommend repparttar 120376 best SEO reading today. Instead, as I lead my team into our 7th year of business, I'm reading repparttar 120377 Wall Street Journal, Forbes and repparttar 120378 UK's Financial Times, always trying to look beyond repparttar 120379 bend - to try to see where business in general is going and repparttar 120380 Internet specifically. To keep our clients ahead of their competition, we need to keep ahead of ours.

John Alexander: "That is so very true. Well, I want to thank you again so much Susan O'Neil, for taking time today to share some of your rememberances of repparttar 120381 early days of search engine marketing and telling us how you first got in to repparttar 120382 business. It has been fascinating to speaking to you and I'll just take this opportunity wish you repparttar 120383 very greatest of ongoing success in repparttar 120384 future."

This interview has been brought to you courtesy of John Alexander, Co-director of Training and Education at Search Engine Workshops (http://www.searchengineworkshops.com) and Online Web Training(http://www.onlinewebtraining.com).

John Alexander is the Co-Director of Training of Search Engine Workshops http://www.searchengineworkshops.com with Robin Nobles. Together, they teach 2-day beginner, 3-day advanced, and 5-day all-inclusive "hands on" search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe. John also teaches online search engine marketing courses through http://www.onlinewebtraining.com, and he's a member of Wordtracker's official question support team.

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