Sri Lanka is a great place to host your event...!!!!!!!!

Hello world, it has been a while since I wrote in my blog, Tic Toc Marketing Portal - Inspiring Marketers in the Modern Marketing Arena. So today I want to share something about I have experienced in my conference works. Today, Sri lanka has known as a number one tourist destination in the world. So, are we ready to promote Sri Lanka as a great knowledge sharing place in South Asian region as well?

You all may heard about the MICE tourism. When we extract the term MICE, it stands for Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions. Sri Lanka Convention Bureau (SLCB) has emerged to promote MICE tourism in Sri Lanka while ensuring that these events are conducted in a professional manner to the entire satisfaction of the visitors and delegates.

Currently I'm working at The International Institute of Knowledge Management(TIIKM), an institute that organizes the international research conferences to crate knowledge sharing platforms for researchers, academicians and scholars from all around the globe.  

Apart from the business sense these conferences provide an international platform to share and discuss new findings and new adjustments to practice in the real world.You can get a bit of a understanding about the importance of these kind of knowledge sharing events.

Let's take Marketing Management subject area. Per month, there are hundred of research conferences all around the world in related discipline. So how can we beat and stand out the competition and promote our conferences/events while giving more value to our participant's money. On conference organizer's side there are lots of work to be done. In this article I wanted to highlight some marketing practices use to hosting an international event while promoting Sri Lankan tourism. As we  operating in Sri Lanka we have to increase the awareness and the attention of an international target audience by applying the marketing practices meanwhile creating more value for them. Most of the organizers are using  both Online and Offline marketing practices to reach the target audience more effectively and efficiently. Branding comes to practice in differentiating the conference among others. To differentiate and promote the particular conference, we have to take few things into consideration. 

* Make the Online Presence more Attractive

Source: sergiocuradi.com

The easiest way to reach international audience is online media. People use internet and various social media platforms to information purposes. How can we reach out target audience through online media. Having a website with necessary content and information is one of the most important things Search engine optimization (SEO) and Search engine Marketing (SEM) has a big role to play here. That is the main point we have to take in to account when launching the event website. We can use social media(SM) for promote the event. But we have to carefully select the SM platforms that give the best results. For the events like research conferences and knowledge sharing event, Linkedin comes to first. Facebook advertising and Google+ can use to build awareness among our target audience. Keep in mind having a good online presence is not the only thing we can use. To attract Sri Lankan local audience, offline media are plying  a crucial role. (Ex: Local paper articles/advertisements, posters, brochures, etc.) 

to differentiate our event from other smiler events. Website should be user friendly and attractive to keep the visitors. Even we have a nice website for the event, how can we gain visitors who are interested.

Long tail vs Short tail keywords, Which is suited for you...???

 

This topic came to mind in few times back when I was researching about the keywords for the ICOM 2013. So I started to think about this LONG vs SHORT conflict. Keywords are the main and most necessary thing in the Search Engine Optimization. Without selecting right and relevant keywords, your entire SEO process will be a waste. So we should have a better knowledge in selecting keywords.

We can divide long tail keywords and short tail keywords based on their length (words). Normally short tail keywords are having one or two words when long tail keywords having three or more words. There is a choice between these two. What is the real winner? Long or short?

The decision is up to you…..

If you want to increase the traffic within a shorter period short tail keywords will be useful. These keywords get more visitors for your website. Only problem occurs when you use short tail keywords, you have to face a big competition in getting a good rank in search engines.

When we think about long tail keywords, they are less competitive than short tail keywords. If you want to target a specific group of people, it would be easy with long tail keywords. As these have low competition, the traffic will be limited. The visitors coming through long tail is more targeted. If you think as a searcher, you will get the idea. People are always trying to search what they want other than search common things.
We can get some ideas about short and long tail keywords using Google keyword tool.

It’s just a traffic estimation about long and short tail keywords. We can see the short tail keywords are having more traffic than long tail keywords. And also the bounce rate for short tail keywords are much higher than long tail keywords. People will like to stay on the website when their searches are perfectly matched with keywords that we used for SEO. When we come into PPC campaigns, these keywords selection is a crucial point than anything. We want a better conversion rate than the normal visits. In my point of view,

The short tail keyword is nice but the Long tail keyword is best....!

Difference between Facebook PPC and Traditional Search Engine PPC

PPC- Pay per click Advertising is most effective way to reach target audience nowadays. In earlier blog posts, I have been described you about how Search engine (Google) and Facebook use PPC in advertising.  Did you ever thought about the difference between Traditional Search Engine PPC (Google Advertising) and Facebook PPC..?

In terms of Keywords using in both Google and Facebook, we can see the difference. In traditional Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertising, people type what they are looking for into search engines. The words that they type are called keywords, and these keywords are what advertisers bid on for exposure.
In Facebook advertising, keywords are described people’s interests. These keywords describe who the person that Ad should appear to, instead of what those people are looking for. That’s why advertisers should focus on the difference between Google PPC Ads and Facebook PPC Ads.

Integrating the Content Marketing and the Digital Marketing

Marketers who are practicing Digital Marketing should have to highly consider about Content Marketing. Even though content marketing hundreds of years old, its importance remains consistently in most of the marketing campaigns. In this blog post basically I wanted to explain little bit about content marketing and how we can integrate content marketing with our digital Marketing campaigns.

What is Content Marketing..??

"Content marketing’s purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior. It is an ongoing process that is best integrated into your overall marketing strategy, and it focuses on owning media, not renting it."

--Content Marketing Institute

Creating and sharing more valuable and relevant content is the easiest way to attract right customers and that helps to increase customer loyalty. Today's customers are looking for valuable information for there queries. If it's not there are moving out from our sight. In digital Marketing, marketers should highly concentrate about the content that they deliver to their customers. As a example If we own a web site that relating to a product we have to properly arrange our website content to match our customer preference. If it is cluttered with irrelevant advertisements,unwanted information customers will confused. That may lead to move away new customers and withdraw existing customers as well.   

Integrating Content Marketing and Digital Marketing

In present scenario, people are more rely on the internet. They surf internet for finding relevant information about any kind of product that they interested. Marketers are trying to take the customer attention through internet using various methods. In this attention grabbing competition, marketers should consider about the content that they going to penetrate to their customers.

How to target a Niche Audiance through Facebook Adverts

As Marketers we are highly concerned about niche segments in our target audience. For digital marketers there are plenty of ways to target niche markets through various online marketing campaigns. In this blog post I selected Facebook Advert campaign and going to explain you how the things done in Facebook Adverts to target niche market.

Why we should advertise on Facebook...??

 

Considering how popular Facebook is nowadays, it's very easy for one to think/believe that all web users know what Facebook is. Facebook is an online social networking service/site where people can create a personal profile, connect with people and share with them. Additionally, users can create or join common interest user groups and connect with other people who share similar interests with them.
So this platform is a better place for marketers to do advertising. Facebook advertising is an interactive way to target niche audience in the market. Facebook allows advertisers to target a specific group of people based on age, personal interests and more. Facebook can even comb through user profiles to place your ads only on pages that mention a specific keyword.Here are some benefits from using Facebook Adverts.

Choose between PPC and CPM payment methods: Facebook allows advertisers to purchase ad space on a click-based or impression-based fee structure. This allows we to tailor our ad campaign based on budget and other preferences

PPC campaign via Google Adwords

In my previous blog post I have given you a brief description about the search engine optimization in Google. There is another important part in online advertising. That is called as a paid advertisement. In this blog post I’m going to give you a brief description about how is the paid advertisement work in Google. We use methods like Pay per clicks (PPC)/Cost per clicks (CPC) and Cost per impressions (CPM) for the Google paid ads. Google Adwords is the tool we are using to advertise in the Google.

Google Adwords is Google’s paid online advertising model that uses a bidding system for our advertisement to appear in the top of the search result relating to any particular keyword. 

When we advertise we tell Google what keywords or phrases we are interested in. When somebody searches on these keywords Google displays relevant advertisements. If our advertisement is displayed or someone clicks on this advertisementwe have to pay for the clicks or impressions we got. 

Recently I’m doing these kinds of campaigns to target our target customers around the world. Here I only mention you about one campaign I did recently to the International Conference on Hospitality and Tourism Marketing-2013 in Sri Lanka. This is an academic and research conference which is held in this October. 

Our target audience: (especially Asian, Middle East, Europe, Oceania and Australia) Researchers, Educators, Top Manager, Practitioners, PhD students, MBA / M.Sc. Students.

First of all we have to identify what are the most relevant keywords those gain more traffic to our website. So we have to do a keyword research. For that we can use keyword tool in Google Adword.

According to our research we can identify what are the most relevant and suitable keywords for the campaign.

Then we are moving to create the Ad campaign. Before that we have to clarify daily budget, our target audience (GEO/Language targeting), ad delivery preferences and Start/End dates of the campaign.

Short Article on Search Engine Optimization

Today, I’m going to give you a quick look about a hot topic in the Digital Marketing. Nowadays people are using search engines when finding any kind of product/service or web site through internet.  There are billions of web sites for one particular product/service. So how is that product, going to be the popular and first in the search. In that time, Search Engine Optimization comes in to practice.

What is Search Engine Optimization…..???

Search engine optimization (SEO) involves designing,writing, and coding a website in a way that helps to improve the volume and quality of traffic to that website from people using search engines.More visits to the web site may translate into a higher number of customers for the business. Search traffic therefore contributes significantly to online marketing success and business growth.

There are two types of search results

•      Organic Search
•      Paid Search(PPC/CPC)

You can see clearly in this image how the organic search and paid search are appearing in Google search result.

In this blog post I’m only talking about the SEO related with the organic search. When we are talking about organic search, it is a free thing.  To get a good ranking in organic search result there are few things that company should have to consider. If that web site contains fresh, authoritative, and keyword-relevant content may rank high for specific keywords at no cost. Mainly, some factors contributing to high search ranking can be shown as follows. We should also have to consider these when doing SEO.