This is the post that will totally change your mind. You don’t always have to learn about marketing through practices or courses. Despite of the fact that practices makes perfect, but sometimes to learn the marketing strategy we only need to analyze our surroundings. Even we can learn it from the movies. There are lots of movies that contain a great marketing strategy that you can learn, only if you realize that it was there!

Therefore, we have selected some of the best marketing movies that you can watch to learn about marketing strategy. Please note that we don’t serve the download link here but only showing the trailer (courtesy of YouTube). If you want to have these movies, you can buy it from your local DVD seller.

Our selected top marketing movies

Best movie about marketing #1: The Joneses (2009)

Of course, this movie bluntly tells us about the marketing strategy! This movie tells about a fake family, the Joneses, which are formed to promote their clients brands and persuade their neighbor to buy that product. Demi Moore, Amber Heard, and David Duchovny will reveal you their tricks of how to indirectly convince people to buy a product.

On our personal rating, this movie has the score 10 out of 10. This is a must-see movie for you who want to study about marketing.

Best movie about marketing #2: The Social Network (2010)

Another good marketing movies for you who interested in marketing. An American drama film that tells about the history of Facebook, a famous social networking sites today. Learn Mark Zuckerberg’s (played by Jesse Eisenberg) marketing strategy to promote Facebook until it reach the top of popularity.

Our personal rating for this movie is 9 out of 10. Since this is a drama movie, it involves a lot of talk and may be boring for some people. But if you can get the point, you will learn a lot about marketing from this movie.

You can learn marketing strategy from the movies!

Well, that was our choice of the best marketing movies. If you disagree with us or you have a better movie for marketing study, you can share it in the comment form.

Do you have any idea of how strong the impact of SEO and social media in marketing? If combined properly, they’re very likely to be the most effective marketing in this era of technology. In comparison, social media marketing may be faster in bringing brand popularity, but we certainly cannot underestimate the SEO ability to generate profits. Of course it’ll be very nice if we can have both, the brand that is quickly recognized by the public and the maximum profit.

I’m assuming that you are already familiar with the technique of SEO and social media marketing because I won’t explain it here. You surely know that SEO is very tricky and needs a lot of trial and error. On the other hand, social media marketing is easier to do but still need your consistency. By running both simultaneously, it means that you are ready to give your time for the long process. But don’t worry, the result will worth the sacrifice. And once everything is established, all you left to do is monitoring the growth of your business.

Well, to save your time in reading, here’s how to integrating SEO with social media to boost your marketing.

Combining SEO with social media marketing

People log in to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to without having a specific mind about what they are searching, but they expecting something worthwhile as they get in there. Psychologically, this is a great opportunity for you to suggest them with something, moreover if you have a good relationship with them. Create a post containing a hint of your product or service. It will appear on their timeline or news feed. If they are interested with it, they will begin seeking for more information about it and almost certainly to perform a research with the help of search engine.

Here is where the SEO takes part. Assume that you already put enough effort on SEO and your website already becomes the top of the search result with the targeted niche, then the chance of people to find content is high. People that comes to your website through the search engine is to find for a specific product or service, and they already have a clear aim in their mind of what they looking for. So make sure you provide them with the information needed on the site and give them the ease of online purchasing.

That is how you exactly combining the benefit of SEO with social media marketing. Use social media to give people suggestion, persuade them to change their mind from “doesn’t need to buy” to “want to buy”. Then SEO is used to direct them to the information and purchasing your content.

Connecting SEO and social media

All the process has been explained above. It may look simple but however, it is hard to persuade people and make them interested.  The SEO technique itself is never easy since different search engine like Google, Yahoo, and Bing have different algorithm too in deciding which sites to be displayed on the first page. Despite of it, it is highly recommended to try marketing by utilizing a combined SEO and social media because of its potential to create brand awareness and profit at the same time.

Email marketing is all about relationships with the customer. You are going to deal with customer via email. The main objective is to gradually brand yourself as a professional on the subject as well as constructing a two-way relationship with all of your subscribers in order to make them become a loyal customer. It is important to know which subscriber that shows interests in your business because they will be your key to make profit. Therefore, you have to build a list of subscribers for your email marketing, specifically targeting the right segment, and then provide them with valuable content.

How to build the email marketing target list?

Building a target list doesn’t mean randomly put any email address to the list. The marketing management theory has explained us to give positioning to a product in such ways that make people feel the need to purchase it. The same thing applies for email marketing as well. So, it is best to have subscriber that willingly subscribe to your newsletter, because it means that they are interested in your business content and feel the needs to keep in touch with the latest updates of the business. Here are some ideas for you to find subscriber that are willing to receive your email marketing:

1. Utilizing business network
Business network has always been the first choice to find potential subscriber candidates and personally build relationship with them. In a specific business network, it is easier to choose the target because all of the subscriber candidates supposed to have interest in your business content (Of course, that’s why they are in the same business network as you). For example, in a meeting, people usually exchange business cards. You will have their email, so take this as a chance to offer them the latest updates of your business via email. Make sure they permit you to send your email newsletter.

2. Trade show, seminar, and event
If they pay to come to your show, means that they are really interest to the business. It is a great chance to collect their email address by using guest book and ask their permission to send regular email.

3. Using sign-up forms or product shipping forms
Make sure you include the benefit of signing up for the newsletter subscription. According to one of the marketing management elements, which is differentiating, you have to convince the subscriber candidates of why your newsletters are more valuable than others. When they are agree to subscribe, ask them how often they would allow us to contact them.

4. Website or blog
Include the newsletter/updates subscription form on your website or blog, so customer can follow any new updates on your content via email.

List segmentation for email marketing target

Segmenting and targeting are two elements that cannot be separated in marketing management. So all you have to do after building the target-subscriber list is dividing them either by demographic or interest (segmenting). Then you can send email with relevant and valuable content to the specific target (targeting) based on how you divide them. With this way, you will be able to meet your customer needs and wants, as well as improving your sales result. And that’s how you do your email marketing.

Many marketers are now doubted the success of email marketing since many people always ignore their email. In fact, if it can be used correctly, it can be a very strong marketing technique. Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways in direct marketing. It allows the customer to communicate with the marketer/seller and develop a relationship based on value and trust. However, if it done incorrectly, marketing via email may lead to the collapse of product image. To avoid this from happening, marketers must often practice in using email as their marketing tool.

Important elements of email marketing

Not having enough experience in using email marketing may cause your email to be ignored or blocked. In order to make sure that the message sent to its destination, some of these important practices should be considered:

Subject lines
People may say “don’t judge a book by its cover”, but in fact, who among you who wants to take a risk to buy a book that has a cover that is not interesting - unless you already know its content - ? The same thing applies to the subject line for email marketing as well. Be specific in your subject line so it will sound both interesting and convincing. Don’t make it too long or too short and use the capitalization of each word correctly. Avoid using the dollar sign ($) and repeated punctuation so your email is not marked as spam, either by the system or by the recipients itself.
Wrong example: “[TODAY ONLY] Order our products now for only 10$ - FREE SHIPPING!!!!”
Right example: “Get 25% off and free shipping for all our products today”

Text body
Nowadays, most of the email clients are able to display the HTML messages. There are numerous benefits of sending your promotion-mail as an HTML message. But the problem is when the customer turns off their HTML viewer on the email client or it doesn’t support the version of HTML that you used. Based on this reason, you should consider of creating the text version of every sent email. Or, upload the HTML message to your website and give your customer the link in your email.
Example: “ Dear customer, your monthly newsletter is now available. However, your email client doesn’t seem to support HTML or the feature may be turned off. But, you can read it online at http://yourwebsite.com/thismonth/newsletter.html ”

Timing of delivery
Each individual has their own professional time to handle email. If you’re sending emails to a company or firm, it is advisable to send out an email marketing message between 9 am – 3 pm on Tuesday – Thursday. Why? Because Monday is usually a busy and hectic day so there is almost no time to open a newsletter email, and emails are often ignored in Friday prior to weekend. But if you are emailing a personal customer directly, the ideal time is between 5 pm – 8 pm on Friday – Sunday because they are very likely to be online over the weekend and have more spare time to read your message.

Frequency of delivery
As well as the timing, managing the sending frequency of the emails is also important. It is better to send a high-quality newsletter per month than a daily but low-quality newsletter. Or, let the customer itself to decide which mailing frequency that they prefer, by giving them the choice on the sign-up form.

Personalization
Improve open rates and response rates by adding some personalization to your email marketing. Make use of the mail-merge feature on the email clients.

The best practices for email marketing

These practices will be useful for you, along with the experience you gained by interacting with customer via email, it will minimize the possibility that your email is ignored or blocked by the customer. The best email marketing practices may lead to the growth of your subscriber list as well as building a strong relationship with them resulting in increasing on sales.