Internet Marketing can really encompass several different concepts or terms – online marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), website marketing, to name a few. Whichever terms you’ve heard before is not too important; the important take-away is that you need to promote your business online, grow traffic to your website, create an awareness and brand your business online, improve your search engine result rankings and make the Las Vegas community aware that your company even exists.

Many companies and businesses in Las Vegas make the mistake of launching a website and thinking that drones of visitors will magically arrive each day. Not true. Just like a business card that sits in your pocket if you don’t hand it out to people, most of the time a website can sit out on the internet and if you don’t market that web site, people may not even know you or your business exists.

Here are some ways you or a professional internet marketing company can help market your business online:

• Launch a Website – if you don’t already have a web site you are WAY behind the curve.  Get one up right away.
• Search Engine Optimization – research keywords and key phrases that people would find your website during a search on a search engine and put those words and phrases into the copy on your website, make those same words links between your website pages and place those same words into your website’s site map.
• Online PR – There are many opportunities for online PR and Press Releases. For more information see my article on Press Releases for Your Las Vegas Business.
• Google’s Free Online Marketing Tools – here’s a list from wikipedia.org. Very helpful and mostly free.
• Pay-Per-Click Campaign – ever wonder what those Sponsored Listings are when you search on google, yahoo, msn or aol? That’s right, they pay. You can set up your own campaign, choose they keywords, set your monthly budget and start coming up right along side your competitors by setting a pay-per-click campaign.
• Email Marketing – Use a company like Constant Contact to set up an email marketing campaign. You can upload your list of contacts, choose a template and write your email newsletter, it’s easy and fun.
• Launch a Blog – Do you have a lot to say about your particular area of expertise or industry (like I do, hee)? Then launch a blog and tell visitors what you’re thinking and let them find out who you are and what your business specializes in.
• Banner Advertising – Consider buying space on a targeted web site that promotes your products and services. Set up a special landing page so you can track the results

One of the main goals of having your Las Vegas website out on the internet is to provide helpful and interesting information to your website visitor. This key face with help drive satisfaction for your customers and potential customers and if you have satisfied website visitors and customers, they will quickly become return customers who will stay loyal! They will even recommend your Las Vegas website to others.

Of course, the more traffic you have to your website from your satisfied customers, you can begin to collect their email address for email marketing purposes. An email newsletter is an excellent way to capitalize on your email list and communicate with your clients. With an email newsletter, you can send out relevant articles, tips, tricks and special offers that will help drive business.

Email newsletter marketing is a very inexpensive and effective way to help market your website, your company and its products and services. You can sign up with an email marketing company like constantcontact.com at a very reasonable cost. In your account you can choose from a wide variety of templates, upload an excel spreadsheet of your contacts, compose your newsletter, and click send. Make sure to include links back to your website! 

You want to make sure that all of the contacts you are adding to your email contact database are opt-in, which means they give their consent to receive email from you. If you collect email addresses with a consent check box, you are most likely covered. With an opt-in subscriber list, you are can be fairly sure that the email newsletters you’re send out are received, viewed and read your subscribers and not simply being deleted. 

The other side of the coin is that if you are sending out email newsletters to help promote your Las Vegas website and business and if you aren’t delivering relevant information or the information that your customers are expecting, you run the risk of having subcribers unsubscribe. 

Here are some tips for relevant and engaging email newsletter content:

• Make your newsletters fun and creative while still maintaining professionalism
• Add photos and links to your website
• Research what information your customers are most interested in and information that will help them solve business problems
• Write articles that are informational and engaging, but keep them short and sweet
• Keep the content varied and diverse, don’t over write about one topic or subject
• Put coupons and special offers in your newsletters

If your email newsletters subscribers can benefits from your well written newsletters, they will actually look forward to receiving them! Just don’t email them too often, you don’t want to annoy them!

Email marketing is a very cost effective form of marketing your Las Vegas products and services. There are various ways you can create an email campaign and various content options you can write about. Any way you look at it, email marketing can keep your company’s products and services in people’s minds and reminds people of your products and services and can lead to new leads and new business.

Where’s a good place to start?

There are many email marketing services available out on the internet. I’m most familiar with Constant Contact. Whether you’re looking to send an email newsletter, a high-impact email promotion, an email event invitation, an online survey, or build your email list, Constant Contact can help you get it done. 

Email Marketing and Online Surveys from Constant Contact make it easy and affordable for you to connect with your customers or members. Review their website for more information and details.

Where to find an Email list to market your email newsletter to?

A great place to start is with your current address book (from Microsoft Outlook or any comparable address book or email software). If you look in the help menu, there should be instructions on how to export your address book into a text delimited file that you can then import into your email marketing software, like Constant Contact.

You can also have a professional web developer put an email newsletter sign up form on your website’s home page in order to encourage visitors to sign up for your newsletter.  There are services online where you can also purchase email lists for marketing purposes.

What information can I include in my email newsletter?

• Helpful tips, tricks and inside information
• A special offer or discount
• Your full company information and contact information
• An article on a timely topic relevant to your business
• How you will solve your particular customer’s problems through using your services
• Special events or announcements

Las Vegas business owners and companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each year on their marketing efforts.  Unfortunately many smaller companies don’t even have a marketing plan or strategy in place to help guide them and judge the results of their efforts.  Many times, it seems like money wasted.

Put on your Marketing Strategy cap!

There are numerous highly effective marketing strategies that can help you grow your Las Vegas business that can help you refine your marketing efforts. Just takes a bit of time, thought and research to figure out a plan. Here are some suggestions:

• Identify Your Target Market – Who buys your products and services and why? How old are they, are they male or female, conservative or liberal? How do they think and feel?
• Market to Existing Customers – Your existing customers are your most valuable resource. Be aware of what services you’ve provided to them and anticipate if they need additional products or services. They aren’t always aware of all of the products and services you offer. Help them, they already trust you.
• Niche Marketing – What customers or clients do you currently have where you deliver the best results and generate the most revenue? Many marketing experts agree this is one of the simplest and most effective ways to generate business.
• Provide Free Information – Providing potential clients with free information, facts, resources that will help them solve their business problem and save them time and money is a valuable strategy in getting your foot in the door for a prospect to become a client.
• Maintain Communications – Keeping in touch with present and potential clients is personable and keeps your name and company in their mind throughout the year. You can send postcards, mailers, email newsletters or call them on the phone to check in.
• Customer Referral Campaign – Offer an incentive (gift certificate, free services, etc.) for your existing loyal customers to keep your services in mind with the people they already do business with. They can act as sales people for you and you should do the same for your Clients as well.

There are many ways of promoting your company’s name on the internet. You could work on good SEO strategies or you could also optimize your website with relevant keywords. All these can be termed at best, “indirect marketing” of your website as it does not directly. By this, what we mean is you do not directly influence the traffic to your website.

Promotion of a website, however, should always have a good mix of indirect and DIRECT marketing efforts – and email marketing is an excellent direct marketing effort to help bring traffic to your local Las Vegas website. With this technique, you can send an email to a group of people (a mailing list) telling them about your product and services offered through your website.

Here is why email marketing important:

• Direct approach with customers – In sending emails, you could literally ask people to click on a link to your website. This is one of the best things for your website because it will help increase the number of hits on your webpage – which also impacts the Search Engine rankings of your webpage. 

• Exposure to new customers – You could purchase a list of new potential target customers and introduce your company’s products and services.  

• It keeps you in your customer’s mindshare – An average print ad does not really make a registered impression in the viewers mind until it is viewed at least 12 times.  By the same token, the repetition of customers seeing an email promoting your company over the course of a year, let’s say, keeps your company and website in their minds and even if they are not in need of your services the moment they read your email newsletter, you keep your name in their mindshare.
   
• Email marketing is very timely – If your business is affected by what’s in the news each day or if something in today’s news headlines has an impact or can provide you with an opportunity to promote your company’s products and services, there is nothing more timely than an HTML email newsletter in your customer’s email box the next morning.
   
• Helps directly drive sales – Your website is offering a special offer or promotion, or you are selling old inventory on your website storefront.  An email newsletter would allow you to instantly promote your offer or draw people to your special product offers.

Email marketing can be best done if you have a good list of email addresses. You could either build your email list from your current contact list or you could buy one. Remember, your email list should be focused to your target market, your target client, if you really want to make your efforts count.