Interactive Marketing Agencies are a little different than what people think they are.  They do not only handle your advertising online, but they also help with tasks such as brand strategies, overall marketing strategies, PPC management, content management, conversion optimization, social media, and pretty much any task that relates to running a successful business online.  Agencies can be a breath of fresh air to an online business, but you have to manage your expectations for the agency.

Agencies of any size and type are not miracle workers.  They can only provide services to companies that have realistic goals.  While they can provide great services to revamp your whole business, you need to know where you want to take your company.  You need to have an established goal and vision for where you want the interactive marketing agency to take you.  If you contact an agency without having these goals in place, then you could be disappointed in what the agency accomplishes.

Agencies are usually really good at communicating what they are doing, so you need to make sure that you are on top of your own goals and milestones.  I would recommend that you have the marketing agency help you create realistic milestones for your specific business and website.  This way everyone will be happy when each mark is met and you are not mad for expecting more.  Remember that managing expectations is an important aspect of running any business, so make sure you do it for your internal resources as well as any external resources.

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My short answer to this question is no to search engine submission services.  While there is quite a bit of information on the web that would tell you that if you don’t submit your site to search engines, then you will never receive traffic.  These such statements are actually comical and tend to be created by websites that provide search engine submission.  Don’t let these companies trick you into thinking that you need them.  Search engine submission is a very old way of getting search engines to look at your site.  Webmasters do not use these services anymore because they do not work and the large search engines do not really accept submissions anymore.

If you are looking at search engine submission and you think that a service is going to submit your site to over 1,000 engines or more, then you need to leave the site immediately.  While there might be thousands of search engines out there, there are only 3 that you need to worry about.  Google, Yahoo, and Bing are the big three and are the only ones that you need to care about.  I will let you know that Yahoo is now using Bing’s results for their search engine, so you really only need to worry about Google and Bing.  There are many free search engines submission services out there, but don’t even waste your time.

The best way to get your new website into a search engine is to get links pointed to your website.  The best links that you want to get would be on websites that are relevant to your website.  There are many great link building services out there that could help your website receive quality links.  I would recommend that you join a good webmaster forum such as DigitalPoint or V7N for great services and tips for the help on your new website.  DigitalPoint is a great forum that has many different link building services out there that you can get for very little money.

So, if you have a new website that you want to get into Google and Bing, then check out some quality link building services to start the process.  Leave the search engine submission to people that love to waste money and time.  You should also join Google’s Webmaster Central and Bing’s Webmaster Toolbox.  With both of these free services, you can enter your website information, get your website verified, and then submit a sitemap of all your website pages.  This is also a great way to get your website included in the search engine’s index.  If you do not have a sitemap, you can create one for free up to 500 pages with XML Sitemaps.  Good luck to everyone that is just starting a website and congratulations on your new venture.

If you have thought about getting into social media, but just haven’t done it yet, 2010 looks like it is the year to start.  With more and more people jumping onto social networks and following their favorite retailers, everyone should start getting a piece of the pie.  A lot of companies have created new positions for social media in order for everything to be properly tracked and accounted for.  It is easy for customers to post negative things about your company and you want someone or a team to be on top of that and provide real time action for those negative comments.  This shows that you are dedicated to customer service and only Social Media provides that instant fire fight capability.  Without it, you resort to trying to resolve issues the old fashion way.  As more retailers and businesses join the social media ranks, it will become the mainstream way to handle customer service issues and the most cost effective.  There have been some companies that have eliminated their phone staff for social media experts.  This method does not work for everyone, but it can work for some.

If you are already participating in social media, how can you improve on it?  Does your company provide exclusive deals via twitter or facebook?  Do you offer product reviews via Youtube?  Are your company updates visible to your followers and your groups?  There are many ways to improve how you use social media, so think outside the box and use this medium as a way to improve your relationship with your customers.  If you have the capability, it would be wise to assemble a team to improve your social media usage and increase its power for your company.  2010 is the year of social media, so jump on board and control your company’s brand a little better.

The basics of retargeting are as follows.  You place some special code on your website from services like FetchBack or Retargeting.com.  These companies offer retargeting as their main service to companies.  Once you place this code on your website and a visitor comes in, they are tagged, like a cookie for your analytics software.  FetchBack and other services have a large network of sites out there that they advertise on or have partnerships with.  Most of these are large sites like CNN and many others, some in the millions.  If the visitor to your website leaves your site and then goes to one of the sites in the network, then they see an ad for your company on that website.  A lot of companies use this to leave exclusive offers for the retargeted customer.  This has been proven a very effective method.

The reason why this works is because your customer might not have completed your goal, whether it be a sign-up or a sale, for any reason whatsoever.  It could be that they didn’t like your price, or wanted to research more.  This retargeting will then put your back in front of the customer and usually the cookie will continue to work for a couple of days depending on the company, so your customer will keep seeing your ads.  This can help you push your marketing message to them at any point in their buying cycle.  Doing this will greatly increase your conversion rate because the customer remembers your site and knows you have what they want.

There are many companies out there that do not have this type of marketing being used as of yet, but should really think about it.  Most companies that utilize this type of software usually see a nice increase in sales and conversion rates.  You have to be smart in order to keep the original visitor from going to a competitor to shop and Retargeting does just that.  If the company that you work for or own is not using this strategy, then please check out it out as an effective method to boost sales.