I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about what technology means to me. Is it to make my job easier? To get more done in the same period of time? Or do I just do it to feel like I’m connected to others?
I find myself using technology for number of different things – I communicate over email quite a bit, I research on my handheld and my desktop when I’m at work, I coordinate different people and events as well as publish what I do in my personal life and business ventures. Overall I think technology has a purpose and a place. With that said I feel it’s very important to put it down sometimes. To reconnect with the people around us, to build things out of the things in the real world, sculpture, painting or maybe even landscaping. The point is technology does have a place in our world and keeping the balance between the artificial world we’ve created for ourselves online and the real world we are living in and the people we interact with on a daily basis are just as important.
Overall I think we all have a lot to learn in managing our day-to-day lives with and without technology. We need to find ways to enhance what we do without becoming dependent on any one thing. Becoming technology neutral is something we should all strive to practice more. Find ways to utilize technology without being used by technology. As we go into the holiday season take time to handwrite a thank you to someone. Drop it in the mail or better yet create your own thank you card. Take the time to think about the message, find a picture that relays some kind of emotion connected with your message. Take it to a quick serve printer or big box store and then use that to once again connect with your friends, family and coworkers.
Google offers a lot of very good tools to maximize your advertising investment and best of all, many are free or very low cost.
One of the most underutilized and most impressive tools is Google’s “remarketing” tool. When used correctly, this application has the potential to help you reduce your pay per click average cost as well as your cost per click.
Have you ever clicked on an ad from a website and after doing so, the same ad you clicked on appears on other websites you visit, such as Facebook, Google, etc.? This action is called remarketing.
As an advertiser, when you use Google ad words you’re essentially bidding for a word or a phrase used on your website to help you gain a higher ranking on a user’s search results page. When you use retargeting or remarketing, the tool embeds a cookie onto each user’s device to preempts the advertisements they see. This means for just pennies on the dollar, your ad can be seen at the top of the list for that user as they travel to multiple sites around the web.
Once installed, the application will assist in promoting your business for up to 90 days at an average cost between $.25 and $.50 per user. To check it out visit google.com
Sales and marketing — two words that work hand-in-hand in any business. No matter how great of a marketing department you have, if your sales department can’t close the deal or know how to process and take advantage of leads, you’re spending good money after bad. In the same token, a really good sales department that can’t get enough leads to keep your team busy is costing you money, time and a lot of aggravation.
Start by assessing all of your marketing and advertising efforts. Break it down by media market like online versus outdoor versus print. Try to track your lead generations to the marketing efforts you’ve done. Figure out how many leads you get from anyone of the media market sources and figure out how much money you’re spending in that market to get those leads. What you’re trying to assess is your lead cost to generate one lead.