Using Industry Awards to Effectively Grow Your Business

In the current market where anyone can “publish” instructional materials on a website, educational publishers need to find ways to separate their products from the market and highlight their commitment to quality content. In this blog post, reprinted with permission from VerticalResponse, CEO and founder Janine Popick discusses why small businesses should enter industry awards.

If you’re running a small business today, congratulations! You should be proud that you’re  keeping the economy going. You should also give yourself a huge pat on the back for surviving and thriving. One of the easiest and most inexpensive ways of giving yourself that pat on the back is to apply for industry awards that you could be eligible for.

Lessons on Injecting Yourself into the Online Conversation

During the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing World Virtual Conference on Sept. 17, Tina Brown, author and founder of TheDailyBeast.com, gave the keynote address, “Engaging with Customers Where they Are, with Content they Value.” In addition to discussing her transition from the print to the blog world, she talked about what makes one blog’s content more valued than another’s. Here are highlights from her session.

Do micro-payments motivate people to make more purchases?

In this new blog series from AEP, “What’s Keeping You Up At Night?, experts offer their advice on the most pressing issues facing the educational publishing industry. AEP members may sign up for a free half-hour consultation with the experts for 30 days after their entry is posted.

The following question was posed to our current featured expert, Sameer Shariff of Impelsys Inc.

Q. Do micro-payments motivate people to make more purchases?

A. We are in global recession, budgets are in free-fall, and readers are becoming increasingly price sensitive. In times like these, publishers must experiment with different business models to discover what works best for them. One model that invites further exploration and experimentation is micro-payments.

To start exploring this model, publishers should first identify untapped market segments that are willing to pay a small price for a limited time access to content.

Mining Social Media for Market Intelligence

Janet Eden-Harris, Vice President, Marketing, J.D. Power and Associates, spoke at the 2009 AEP Summit about how publishers should gather information and interact with customers on blogs, chat rooms, and other forms of new media. Here are highlights from her session, “Mining Social Media for Market Intelligence.”

Using social media to gather market intelligence is about listening in on the conversation. Whereas the traditional method for gathering data was doing a survey—asking the customer questions and hoping they would answer back—new media marketing involves finding people who are already discussing your products or areas of interest online. The power has shifted to the consumers, and they want to tell you what they think on their own time and in their own way.

Digital Marketing Lessons from the Obama Campaign

Joe Rospars, a founding partner at Blue State Digital and New Media Director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, spoke at the 2009 AEP Summit about how he and his team integrated digital marketing into the campaign to empower the online voting community. Using three guiding principles and adhering to three main missions, his team mobilized over 13 million supporters through their website and digital marketing strategy.

As the first new media director for a presidential campaign, Joe Rospars said that the key was that his department was integrated laterally into the organizational structure. They were not lumped in with the tech department–they were editors, marketers, designers, and writers focusing on the online community. More important, they worked directly with the offline marketing group, making sure that their efforts supported each other.