Blog #9: Marketing Help

For this blog post, I want to go back to a post I made a couple of weeks ago and expand on it. The post I’m talking about is one that I wrote about the ways that both small and large companies could use social media to improve their marketing and reach more potential customers. In that post I concluded that social media is a great tool used by companies to level the playing field between large and small companies. This is because the use of social media is free, companies can control their image on social media (to an extent), and social media promotes word of mouth marketing, which, in my eyes, is one of the most effective ways to market.

                 

                  While I was on spring break last week, I had more down time than I normally do and was able to catch up on some of my TV shows. While watching TV, the same ad for a pretty interesting company kept popping up. This company is called Constant Contact, and founded by Gail Goodman in 1998. It is headquartered out of Waltham, Massachusetts, which, ironically, is the town where that the last college I attended resides in.

These ads proclaim that Constant Contact is a company that will handle all of the social media aspects for your company, so that you can take care of running the business side (watch an ad here). This concept is really cool to me because it seems like it would take some of the stress out of marketing for a company because they could let another company work to shed them on the best light possible all over social media.

Because I was interested in this company, I decided to take a look at their website to see some of the services they offered. Naturally, a company would have to pay a fee to Constant Contact because services like this can operate for free. Constant Contact, however, offers a free trial of their services to customers to customers, so that you can get a sense as to whether or not this will be beneficial to your company.

Some of the services offered by Constant Contact are your typical Email Marketing and Online Surveys. The company also offers more creative forms of marketing as well, such as EventSpot and SaveLocal. When companies use Constant Contact’s Email Marketing resource, they are able to customize their own creative email designs, manage your contacts and grow your email list, integrate these emails with social media, and track the effectiveness of these emails. The same customization is put into the online surveys because companies can design their own surveys and polls using templates, promote these surveys so that customers see them, and track the effectiveness.

I think that the EventSpot and SaveLocal options are creative. When using EventSpot, companies can promote and spread the word about events they are hosting and special offers, and then track RSVPs, issue tickets, and gather the preferences of attendees. The SaveLocal option is also pretty useful to small companies that want to reach their local community.

I believe that Constant Contact is a very useful resource to companies, both big and small, to help with their marketing. It provides was to get the name of your company out their without spending tons of money or having to give large percentages of your profits away. It also takes some of the stress out of designing marketing strategies while still being able to add some customization. Constant Contact is another way to level the playing field between large and small companies because you’re not sinking a lot of money into getting your name out their.

Visit Constant Contact’s website here.