Monday
Positive: Office work has not filled inboxes yet

Negative: Consumers are in “work mode” and won’t be focused on non-work tasks

Best Practice: Send emails late Monday morning, after consumers have cleaned the weekend spam from their inboxes
Tuesday
Positive: People have organized their week, and can find personal time for emails

Negative: Emails poised for a weekend response may be too early

Best Practice: Use Tuesday for emails that request action during the workweek
Wednesday/Thursday
Positive: Consumers are planning their weekends and gearing up for personal time

Negative: Time during the workweek is running short, and requested action may be pushed     back to the following week, or even forgotten about

Best Practice: Focus leisure and weekend notifications during these key weekend planning days

Friday
Positive: Studies indicate fewer total emails sent compared to the rest of the week, increasing visibility among the myriad of other messages

Negative: Consumers hurry to leave the office early, and may not take time to view non-work related emails

Best Practice: Send emails early in the day to give consumers more time to take action.  An unopened email from Friday will sort to the bottom of an inbox on Monday, and is often discarded.

Digital Communications Agency

Many small businesses do some sort of offline advertising, whether it be radio, print, or billboards. Social Media Marketing allows a business to extend their offline sales pitch.

By including your Facebook Page or blog URL in your offline ads act as social proof, inviting potential consumers to see your community and increase trust in your business hence introducing potential consumers to your social profiles means they may join your community now and buy later. Not only can integrating online and offline advertising help the conversion process, but it can also help build your community.

Consumers now use the web to look for pictures and videos. The term “A picture is worth a thousand words” has never been truer. The good news is that it is fairly easy for a company to create and publish videos and pictures. Product pictures alongside office events will help high light your company culture. This not only helps convince others to work with you or to buy from you but it also helps your HR department recruit new employees too!

The use of videos help consumers by explaining complex concepts. You can show step by step directions which may have a greater impact than a well written article. Multimedia helps to break down the faceless business-to-consumer sales flow and will allow your company to appear friendlier. Use of videos and images will show your business is fun, you care about your employees, and most importantly, that you care about your customers!

For a small business, local search is very important. Being visible to consumers looking for a business in their area is extremely important. Get your site included in local business directories in order to help ensure that consumers find you. First, make sure you check your competitors. Where are they listed? Check their inbound links to check for business directories you can add yourself to and make sure your business has been added to Google Maps!

As businesses start to become more sophisticated with social media they are starting to leverage more online platforms. Don’t deliver the same message over multiple platforms instead tailor your communications for each individual site. By doing this helps the message spread but it keeps users from receiving multiple identical communications which could be seen as spam!

Community building is only the beginning of social media marketing. Using that community to drive sales and marketing campaigns is the goal of your social media marketing campaign. You need to excite your community creating contests or offer an exclusive discount. I would recommend you get contestants to publish an article and the one that gets the most comments wins, so the contest itself becomes viral!

In the wake of the global economic downturn, many marketers worldwide are shifting more of their budgets into cheaper, more-measurable categories and in most cases that means online marketing – Digital Media.

Most companies have found employing the services of a Digital Media Agency as given them a greater ROI and in a recent survey by the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) over eighty percent of respondents said they plan to invest at least as much in digital marketing in 2009 as in the previous year.

When asked if they were doing more digital work in the wake of the downturn, at least 36% of ad professionals said yes, and many expect to take on significantly more. The issue is many advertising companies and marketing companies are print specialists and do not understand the digital market.

My predictions for 2011 are that many marketing companies will again fail to deliver the sort of results that a Digital Media Agency can!

Using social media to market your business is an excellent idea, however don't plan on doing it yourself or getting your friend’s daughter to do it for free!

Social media marketing is cheap, but certainly not free. There are many free tools that can be employed in social media marketing including Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, alongside Digg and StumbleUpon. There are also Free blogging tools around too, like WordPress and Twitter. The fact remains that integrating these tools into a corporate marketing program requires time, skill and money.

Companies advertise these services and claim to be social media experts calling themselves Internet marketers, Social media marketers, Social media consultants, Social media strategists, Social media experts, Social media gurus and Internet marketing gurus!

Very few have actually created a successful Social Media Marketing campaign for clients using the tools mentioned. A successful social media marketing campaign integrates social media into the many elements of marketing, including advertising, digital, and Online PR.

Opinion and theory are no match for experience, hence the best social media marketers now have more than 5 years of experience incorporating interactivity, blogs, forums, user-generated content, and contests into online marketing. The best ones having created and run social media sites themselves!

Many companies have tried to do it all in-house. It is extremely difficult to achieve success as brands need a strategy, contacts, tools, and obviously experience—a combination not generally found in in-house teams.

The truth of the matter is no matter how great your product, service or idea is you need to drive traffic to your social media effort otherwise all you have is a tree falling in the forest, heard only by those standing nearby. Contact a company that knows about Digital Marketing and has experience in social media and then let them spread your word!