I often write on this website and blog that Las Vegas businesses often try to market to the masses, which is a huge marketing error for any business or company in Las Vegas. To run truly successful marketing campaigns that are targeted and well planned, you should identify your target market.

Even with your target market in mind when running a marketing campaign, another successful marketing strategy and tactic that many Las Vegas businesses use is targeting zip codes. Targeting a zip code will enable you to reach a specific demographic in the Las Vegas valley or a group of potential customers close to the area where you do business.

By considering targeting a specific zip code, you can plan a mailing, door-to-door marketing, flyer, print, newspaper or internet marketing campaign and target zip code/s of your choice.

Resources to find Las Vegas zip codes and Las Vegas demographics:

• Zip Code Lookup – Yahoo! Small Business
• Las Vegas Zip Code Map – Henderson Zip Code Map – greatlasvegashomes.com
• Las Vegas Zip Code Map with detailed views – act4u.com
• Las Vegas, Nevada ZIP Code Map – hellovegas.com
• Free Las Vegas Demographics Report Available For Area Business Owners And Operators – lasvegasnevada.gov
• Las Vegas, NV – Neighborhoods & Demographics – neightborhoodlink.com

Many Las Vegas business owners are just finding out about Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and how it can benefit their Las Vegas website and while it is a relatively new way of marketing, the principles have been around for a long time.

What is search engine marketing (SEM)?

Search Engine Optimization is the biggest buzzword right now especially when you talk of promoting yourc company’s website. But did you know that Search Engine Marketing is another important spoke in the business marketing wheel? The first thing you should know is that Search Engine Marketing, SEM is quite different from Search Engine Optimization or SEO. With this being said, you will find a lot of business people treating SEM the same as SEO.

The first thing that differs between SEO and SEM is the perception of Search Engine Marketing. Search Engine Optimization works on the key words and key phrases and content of your website’s pages and how the pages need to be designed keeping Search Engines in mind and how they will rank on a search. Search Engine Marketing on the other hand deals exclusively with how you promote your website with search engines. It could be said that a Search Engine Optimization effort could be a subset of a Search Engine Marketing campaign.

Search Engine Marketing Techniques

Basically, any technique by which the visibility of a website improves with search engines is covered under the umbrella of Search Engine Marketing. Thus, from an aggregate perspective, you could look at techniques like Blogging, Search Engine Submissions, Social Networking, Viral Marketing and other techniques. You could also look at methods like Contextual Advertising and Paid Inclusion being subsets of Search Engine Marketing.

Contextual Advertising

Not many are aware of the complete workings of contextual advertising. Here’s an example to illustrate the concept. Assume you have visited a website A, which is in the Sports niche. When you visit the website, you could see some ads popping up from the site that deals with sports accessories or memorabilia dealers. Basically, you see an ad which is relevant to the context and the content of that particular website. This is how contextual advertising works.

Now, how does the business owner benefit from these ads appearing on their website? Simple, the ad appearing on the webpage would have a revenue basis tied onto it depending on certain actions being performed by the users. For example, a webmaster could get paid if 100 users click on the ad, and so on.

Paid Inclusion and Pay-Per-Click Placement

There are some search engines on the internet that are very popular (google, aol, msn, yahoo), so popular that business owners and webmasters are inclined to invest some money to get into the directory of these resources just so that they have the opportunity to get ranked on the first page as a “sponsored listing” so they can get the traffic and recognition of coming up on the first page of a google search, let’s say. This is where Paid Inclusion or Pay-Per-Click placement comes into play.

A web master or web developer can set up a paid inclusion or pay-per-click campaign to help promote your website (or if you are so technically inclined, you could do it yourself as well). You choose the key words you’d like to rank for, set a budget and run your campaign. The main objective of this is to have some traffic through search engines.

With the above knowledge, you should be in a position to understand that Search Engine Marketing is separate from Search Engine Optimization. One of the best examples of SEM at work would be to see the working of Google AdWords, which best symbolizes Contextual Advertising.

At the end of the day, both the techniques increase the visibility and page rankings of your company’s website within the search engines.

Email marketing for your Las Vegas company or business is a very cost effective form of marketing and advertising and can help you keep mindshare in your client’s minds and help find your business new leads.

A professional email marketing services company in Las Vegas can help assist you in desinging a template for your email marketing campaign, help you import your contacts and can train you on how to write your own newsletters, send them out to your database and track the results of your efforts.

In general, you can sign up with a company, like constantcontact.com, and starting at $25/month (cost depends on the size of your email database and the frequency you send emails out to that database), you can communicate directly with your clients and customers from your email database and inform them of:

• Latest company news
• Timely articles, tips and tricks
• Changes in your product and services offerings
• Key management changes
• Specials, promotions and bargains
• Keeps your company in your customer’s mindshare

Coupons can act as advertisements for your business, but advertisements that lead customers straight to your products–and which make them pretty inexpensive. Nearly 90% of consumers claim to use coupons, and during the past several years since the onset of the recent financial crisis (as well as rising cost of fuel), online coupons alone rose almost 40% in popularity. E-coupons are a brilliant way to stay ahead of the curve of internet commerce, but if you think coupons may be the next marketing move for your company, there are plenty of ways to make your already innovative coupons more effective.

E is for Email, E is for Effective.

A great way to gain followers of your business and regular customers is through opt-in email mailing lists. People will get news about your company, your products–and they won’t forget if they are hearing from you once a week or so. What does this have to do with coupons, you ask? If you make it so your coupons are only available in the newsletter, you can keep customers’ attention to your business: customers who really need your coupons will also be updated about your new location, the midsummer sale and your business’s philanthropy and community services. They can forward your coupon to friends, even also print out emailed coupons to bring into your store. If you are going to require coupon recipients to sign up for your newsletter, though, you should try to always offer at least one coupon (even a small one) in every issue.

How Much Off?

Make it clear to your customers that the coupon is worth taking the extra time to use by showing them just how significant their savings will be. A good way to do this is, for less expensive items (under, say $25) do not give a percentage off, give a dollar amount: say “$5.00 off!”, not “20% off”. For more expensive items with considerable savings, percentages are fine.

Don’t forget that you can also use coupons for “buy one get one”, rebate and other types of great deals.

Team Up.

This is especially easy if you have total control of your web store’s design and transactions. You can use coupons to cross market with other businesses willing to partner with you in a joint marketing campaign. Find a business that offers a complement product to the one you are promoting with coupons. Give access to the online coupon for their product on the page where you sell yours, and have them do the same.

Another way to use third parties as a great coupon marketing tool is to get your company onto “coupon-clipping websites”, where businesses post coupons for customers to print off; some popular coupon sites are Groupon.com, where businesses post coupons and deals on Facebook, Twitter and other microblog newsfeeds for customers to clip for themselves, repost and forward to friends; CouponClippingMom.com, a blog style site where coupons for various businesses are shared as individual posts (best for chain, not local businesses); and CouponCabin.com, which offers online and printable coupons (separately from each other) for businesses ranging from the local to national scale. You can link to them on your own website, blog, or online store, and customers across town or beyond the sea will be able to find them.

Looks Matter.

You want your coupons to be as eye-grabbing and attractive as they can be. Make them stand out but remember that visual, non-verbal assets of graphic design can say just as much as the words you lay over them. The coupon’s overall design should be clean, not cramped with too much or vacant with not enough information. Noticeable colors are great as long as they are not an eyesore, and large, bold fonts work best, though the most pronounced words should be the ones that will first grab attention. Some of the most effectively designed coupons feature a cleanly drawn, realistic illustration or a photograph of the product being offered.

Proximity marketing refers to localized wireless distribution of advertising or promotional content. A localized marketing campaign can be distributed via a traditionally localized broadcast, but it is more common for advertisers to target specific devices such as cell phones or tablets that happen to be in an area. Locations of devices can be determined through a few different methods including cell phones being in particular cells, Bluetooth or other wi-fi devices being in range of a transmitter, or Internet devices with GPS enabling them to receive data from localized servers. Proximity marketing communications can be targeted to a specific group of people in a specific area such as a tourist hot spot, and they can be time specific as well as location specific. Some popular uses of proximity marketing include media distribution at events such as concerts, distribution of information about local facilities, and social applications such as the popular Four Square app.

Bluetooth-based proximity marketing systems have proven to be especially popular. These systems generally involve setting up Bluetooth broadcasting equipment that sends information to Bluetooth-enabled devices in the area. Users will get messages and advertisements in the form of text, audio, or video messages sent to their devices. The only caveat to using Bluetooth-based marketing is that many Bluetooth users often have their devices either powered off or not set to “discoverable,” which makes them unable to receive signals from marketing systems. Many advertisers have solved this problem with “calls-to-action,” or using traditional advertising such as posters and television monitors to tell Bluetooth users to turn on their devices.

A GSM-based system can also be effective in proximity marketing. This allows messages to be broadcast to all mobile users in a specific geographical area, although the accuracy of this method can vary from one location to the next. This system is often used not only by advertisers to get the word out on a product, but by government agencies and emergency services to convey important messages.

One innovative use of GSM-based proximity marketing was employed by the UK shopping center Bluewater. Bluewater used a GSM system to track shoppers through the center via their cell phones to monitor what they are buying. The info take from this has been used in market research. Shoppers also received specific special offers and coupons over their mobile phones as they were shopping.

Now that practically everybody has at least one mobile device on them at all times, proximity marketing has proven to be very effective in advertising and marketing. Users received special offers from stores when they happen to find themselves nearby, coupons can be sent to users instantly by phone instead of by mail, and up-to-date news reports can be sent to cell phones and computers about nearby events. Proximity marketing is the wave of the future, and while it will probably never replace traditional advertising methods it is a surefire way to get the word out on any product or event.

Social media marketing is one of the hottest topics in the online advertising world right now. You hear people in Las Vegas throwing out all these buzzwords in reference to the marketing medium. You’ve heard of people raving about it and attributing it to their businesses’ successes. So how exactly does it work? Why are people praising this form of advertising? How can a business use it to take their sales revenues to another level?

You can find the answers to these questions and more through the following three benefits of social media marketing:

Awareness

From a consumer’s perspective, you want your information and updates right away. You want to hear what’s going on as they’re happening. While newspapers and television broadcasts have been the norm, these same companies in Las Vegas have been utilizing social media to get the information to the masses in a much quicker fashion. These news companies resort to tools such as Facebook and Twitter to keep audiences updated right then and there in the moment.

For more sales-oriented businesses, these social media outlets can be used to announce seasonal sales, arrival of new items or services, and also coupon codes to entice consumers to check out their site and make a purchase.

Social media marketing is quite powerful, and when companies are constantly informing their consumers with valuable information and services through these outlets, then the consumers create a bigger buzz amongst themselves.

Networking

The groups of people gathering together in these online hubs are the fuel for social media marketing. If people of similar interests and intentions were not involved, this online revolution would not exist.

As a result of recent events or news for particular niches, people will want to discuss about this amongst fans of these niches. Word spreads through forums, wall posts, and blog comments. Really successful social media marketing campaigns experience this viral effect, and the best part of it all is the price tag of this type of marketing – it’s free.

Business Leads

The buzz created through the people interested in that particular niche can turn into leads or traffic towards a business’ site. The potential for sales increases the more a product or service is talked about.

As long as discussions amongst peers in a niche continue, then there should be a steady flow of traffic to these business sites. It is up to the businesses to maintain the content on their social media outlets in order to keep the traffic flowing. More consistent traffic equals more consistent sales.