Arsenal Football Club revealed its new online marketing strategy recently, along with its ambition to become the Premier League’s “Tesco Clubcard” through its fan membership.

The north London club will be placing its CRM system at the heart of the new internet marketing initiative, starting off by making it easier to become a member – with different levels of privilege depending on the level of membership paid for. This will effect access to priority tickets, online access to resources such as the Arsenal video library plus a new raft of special offers and promotions.

Speaking to Marketing Week magazine, Arsenal’s head of marketing Charles Allen said that “we are investing in a CRM system to register interests and passions so we can then send those people on appropriate journeys of affinity and provide access at an appropriate level.”

The main vehicle for the online marketing drive will be social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Currently it boasts 10.5 million Facebook fans and 1.5 Twitter followers. These will now be targeted with various special offers and membership options.

This handy video offers some small – but highly useful – tips for making the most of your SEO-based online marketing. As the host explains, small tweaks aimed at improving your SEO efficiency can be almost as useful as paying attention to the bigger strategies, since much of SEO revolves around competing with all the other sites out there desperate to clamber up the Google rankings. With large companies hard at work on the big picture, there is a lot of scope for sneaking through their defences with cunning improvements of your own. Let’s take a look at the five tips:

1. Include images – Try and ensure all images that you use work for your SEO strategy. To this end, when uploading copyright-free shared pics, change the filename, title and alternate text to match your SEO keywords. Doing this makes Google realise that the picture in question is relevant to the search strategy and helps it to show up on Google Images.

2. Decrease the number of the words in your permalink – by condensing the URL for your post and increasing its keyword density you will gain an edge over the competition, since your URL will be more SEO-optimised, and also easier to remember!

3. Consider a Google+ page for your website. Facebook fan pages are increasingly being seen as the excellent opportunity for online marketing that they are, but SEO-orientated marketers should also consider creating a Google+ page. Not only is this the premier search engine’s own social media page – and social media and sharing is becoming ever more important – but it is relatively new, and thus represents an excellent opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

4. Create a YouTube channel for your site. Videos, such as the one above, are good for SEO in their own right, but by creating a YouTube channel you can showcase your favourite videos and add links back to your own commercial site, making it all the more attractive to Google and other social media.

5. Tweak any affiliate links on your site. Ensure that these are ‘no-follow’ links, which tells Google, while crawling through your page, not to count these links when assessing the site for its algorithm. This keeps your SEO “juice” focused and sharp, and should push you a little further up the rankings.

Facebook fan pages are a key component of online marketing efforts in 2012, having been steadily growing in popularity over the past two years. Consumers like Facebook fan pages because they are an easy way to interact with their favourite brands, and internet marketing professionals love the ease with which a successful fan page can create connections, drive traffic and create conversions. The only problem is that with so many Facebook fan pages now in existence, it can be difficult to find the right one.

Here, then, are four online tools dedicated to helping users locate the right fan pages:

The Page Finder

This index of Facebook fan pages is generated by Facebook users themselves, and as you might expect is massive, with more than a million different pages registered. However, it is easily searchable, thanks to pages being organised by locations and tags, before being sorted in alphabetical and popularity rankings.

Fan Page List

Another site with a good system of sorting options, the Fan Page List also lists top brands to be found on FourSquare and Twitter. When it comes to Facebook, there are a vast number of pages indexed for brands and products, as well as for other categories – such as celebrities, sports stars, bands and much more.

Discover Facebook Pages

Created by Facebook itself, this browser organises fan pages based on the user’s location and categorises them via a range of options, such as Brands and Products, Companies and Organisations, Local Businesses and Places, People, Television, Movies and Music. Pages that Facebook friends particularly like show up when the user is logged into Facebook themselves.

Directory of Facebook Pages

Another Facebook creation, this site is an alphabetised directory of fan pages, people, apps and groups. For this resource it is essential to be logged on to Facebook, otherwise searches come up with lists of users rather than pages.

Google remains the undisputed king of the search engines, according to new research – news that will come as no surprise to online marketing professionals.

The study by Experian Hitwise found that Google controlled a massive 90.64 per cent of the search engine market, in a year where British consumers have used search engines 2.3 billion times in January alone.

Yahoo and Microsoft Bing slightly improved their market share, with 4.16 per cent and 2.98 per cent respectively, but Google was untouchable, despite taking a slight drop in search share compared to December 2011.

The implications for online marketing are clear, Experian market analyst James Murray pointed out.

“Search is one of the most crucial elements of online marketing and our data shows that search is growing, with nearly 100 million more visits going to search engines this January than last January,” he said.

As well as the likes of Google, social networks like Facebook, Reddit and YouTube are becoming ever-more popular in driving internet traffic to commercial sites, Experian said. Internet marketing efforts need to bear this in mind and make content that is easy to share.

For its part, Google is striving to capitalise on the lucrative social network market, with researchers finding out that in December 2011 in the US some 49 million internet users visited its new social network Google+, a 55 per cent increase compared to November.

With mobile marketing becoming such an important facet of online marketing efforts these days, it is important to remember some of the ‘golden rules’ in this fastest-growing of areas. Here’s five top tips to help anyone planning a mobile internet marketing campaign make the most of it:

1. Make it short, sharp and punchy! Since mobile devices such as smartphones are most likely to be used on the move, and many possible transactions will take place during public transport journeys or waiting in a queue, it makes sense for online marketing campaigns aimed at mobile users to be divided into “bite-size” portions, making it easier for the potential customer to read and digest the content. If a marketing drive drags, the bustling mobile user will lose interest.

2. Ensure the personal touch. Because mobile phones are uniquely personal – they are far more “part” of the person using them regularly than computers or even laptops – they are perfect for tailoring online marketing campaigns across a wide variety of personalised platforms, such as social media giants Facebook and Twitter, SMS and email. A canny marketing strategy realises this and concentrates on being accessible, personal and fun.

3. Include video content where possible. People like watching video clips on their smartphones – and even more so, people like making films on their smartphones. As part of your campaign, encourage potential customers to make their own videos and post them on your website directly from their handsets. In this way, the campaign helps to create its own online “community” or a small-scale social network of its very own, instilling brand loyalty and encouraging participation in further promotional events.

4. Use mobile marketing as part of an integrated campaign. When mobile marketing techniques such as SMS form part of a comprehensive online marketing drive encompassing an optimised website, blog posts, SEO and PPC campaigns, the results can be spectacular. To make the most of this, make sure your site has campaign-specific landing pages for all of your mobile banners.

5. Tie your campaign in with other popular features among mobile users. Owners of smartphones and tablets use them all the time to receive news reports and gossip, weather forecasts, information about local events and sporting updates. Try to bundle some of this content with your own campaign, offering extra mobile content, money off coupons or other incentives. This tactic is especially effective for local businesses seeking to expand their local customer base.

photo credit: oberhkev

With the New Year upon us, many businesses – especially brand new small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) – may well be looking at the whole concept of online marketing for the first time. Although they may already have an online presence such as a website or a profile on a social network such as Facebook, this is far short of the massive potential for new business and increased profits that the world of internet marketing can offer. Here, then, is a guide to getting the New Year off to a flying start with a basic plan for an initial online marketing campaign:

1. Consider Your Goals. A business owner needs to work out exactly what an online marketing campaign is intended to achieve. These goals are often the same as a traditional marketing campaign’s – generating new leads, increasing your revenue stream and boosting customer service.
2. Draw up a rounded strategy. Planning is essential for the success of any campaign, from the business to the military! Good online marketing companies will discuss what resources and tactics are available, and which fit your business model and will help you to achieve your goals. Make use of them.
3. Learn on the job. Don’t just leave it to the professionals – learn the basics involved in internet marketing yourself, so you are better placed to track the success of the campaign and offer suggestions. One move might be to learn the rudiments of blogging, or social media such as Facebook and Twitter in order to make a personal contribution.
4. Draw up measurable objectives. Without proper benchmarks for success, you won’t know whether your campaign is working, or working to its full potential. A few benchmarks for success, such as a set number of new customers registered online over a period of time, or new followers on your Facebook fan page will help you and your online marketing consultants to tweak the campaign to make it even more effective.
5. Ensure you have a realistic budget. Although resources will never be infinite, sadly, it is worth making a sufficient investment to fund an effective online marketing campaign and to hire a competitively-priced company. There will also be ongoing costs associated with websites, for example, such as keeping content properly updated, upgrading the site’s features as new technology (such as flash animations) comes into play, and routine, day-today site maintenance.

photo credit: thomaswanhoff

Online marketing will continue to evolve in 2012 – that is the one thing that all commentators can agree on. The sector is still busily growing, and such a technology-driven sector cannot help but change pretty fast, considering the ongoing innovations in IT and media.

While the general thrust of marketing strategies remains the same as it ever has, internet marketing is different because it marries tried and tested attitudes to marketing and advertising with the frantic world of online technology, and all the constant upgrades and developments that it entails.

This means that next year will inevitably see new online marketing techniques emerge and a new focus on existing methods.

One such technique which has already mushroomed in importance in 2011 is mobile optimised merchandising, thanks to the vast increase in the number of consumers with smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. This trend is only set to continue and accelerate next year, and so the online marketing team that ensure their company’s or clients’ websites are optimised for use by these devices will be able to hit the ground running on New Year’s Day. Another wise move by any online marketing enterprise wishing to take advantage of the mobile devices revolution is to sell clients subscription services where appropriate, whereby customers can subscribe to a regular newsletter, special offers, vouchers – or whatever best suits their business.

We all know that regularly updated site content – especially on blogs – is essential when it comes to maintaining your position in the search rankings, but fewer companies are yet aware of the vast potential for consumer interest in the field of video content, although online marketing experts have been pushing video content for several years now. Next year video content is set to greatly increase its internet marketing potential, as more and more people watch online videos via their tablets or smartphones. When videos combine product information with genuine entertainment, then their power to attract new customers and strengthen relationships with existing ones is incalculable. With social media sites such as Facebook and Google+ making it easier to embed video than ever before, 2012 will really be the year that video goes viral!