Advertising & Marketing

Your competitors can teach you much about their best marketing strategies and tactics. Of course, they are not willingly going to take you by the hand and lead you down the yellow brick road to marketing OZ. But a good competitor analysis will reveal the advertising, marketing, media and promotions that work best for them.

If you're just starting a marketing program, adapting what your competitors are doing can save you money and time. Just adapt their advertising, marketing, media and promotional tactics to your business. Then track and test those tactics to siphon some of their magic to your business.

Are you constantly seeing your competitors ads in a journal targeting your market? Then placing an ad in that journal may well work for you too.

Are your competitors advertising on the same format radio stations? Maybe people that buy products like yours like that format and listen to those radio stations.

Do your competitors use social media? Maybe you should consider using it too. This type of competitor analysis can guide your advertising, marketing, media and promotional strategies.

Now don't just copy them. Do your own target market research to be certain that any advertising, marketing, media and promotional tactics work with your target market. The best way to do this is with market segmentation.

Before devoting your precious resources to advertising, marketing, media and promotions that your competitors use, determine that your target market responds positively to those tactics delivered through that media.

Every target market is different. Target market members use different media to get different kinds of information. If you know their first and second level media preferences, you'll know what media reaches them. If you know how they think and talk, you'll may able to structure marketing and advertising messages that will appeal to them.

For instance, generations prefer different media and different communication structure. Today's seniors, in the WWII generation, like getting information from newspapers. They trust them and are comfortable with journalistic style. On the other hand, Generation Y likes neither newspapers nor journalistic style.

Furthermore, your image and key message has to differ by target markets. So your brand and your message must be relevant to target market members.

Market segmentation research should reinforce what you learn through your competitor analysis. It will help you determine whether the advertising, marketing, media and promotions used by your competitors are appropriate for your target market.

By administering this kind of research, you can rest assured that your get a good return on your advertising, marketing, media and promotion investments.

Advertising Marketing And Pr

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

Also called web feeds, RSS feeds are a content delivery vehicle - a method of getting new content out on the Internet and sharing it with others.

Originally created by Netscape, the technology behind RSS is well tested. It's a format that describes different types of information. RSS feeds (or files) include some basic information about the content, such as the title, description, logo etc, and the actual content you want to deliver

RSS is a simple technology that allows you to easily get your new content updates delivered to your target audiences (subscribers, bloggers, journalists, employees, investors, other key influencers), websites looking for good content to publish, specialized search engines, directories and other online systems.

More than 20 percent of permission-based commercial email gets blocked or filtered before it reaches the inbox. (Source: iMediaConnection ) RSS on the other hand, gives you 100 percent guaranteed delivery. In essence, RSS is the key enabling technology that stands at the forefront of the new world of marketing and PR.

Syndication, enabled by RSS, is the process of making your online content available for republication by other websites and actively distributing that content to any website of relevance for your business.

It makes your content more visible online, and at the same time helps you to better conduct your business intelligence activities to quickly adapt to new market situations.

"Online visibility and online traffic are, quite naturally, of paramount importance to everyone and anyone marketing or conducting business online, period. While RSS may not be the key tool to improve your online visibility and traffic, its importance in helping you do this cannot be disputed," says Rok Hrastnik author of Unleash The Marketing Power of RSS.

Why do people use Feeds?

Like TiVO, with RSS you get only the content you want, when you want it. It can be pulled into your email inbox with a reader like Newsgator, you can install a desktop reader to keep your news content in a separate space or you can organize and keep it in a web-based service like Bloglines.

With the overwhelming amount of new content available online today, a system like RSS and feeds makes it possible to stay abreast of the news, information and research you need to keep your finger on.

There is no possibility of spam. You only get the content you subscribe to and you can organize it, file it and read when you are ready to do so.

Who is reading RSS?

Is this still a 'techie' application that most businesses need not worry about yet? Not at all. RSS adoption has moved way beyond that point.

Firefox, Safari (the MAC browser) My Yahoo, MY MSN and the personalized Google pages all offer an RSS reader. Earthlink just added one to their personalized pages. This means millions of ordinary people are using RSS feeds to gather and read their news and information online. And it's not only the 18 - 34 year olds. Even the AARP uses feeds to update their members.

A Yahoo! survey identified people who were RSS users by their clickstream, yet when they were asked about RSS 82 percent did not even now they were using RSS feeds! They just know they use the Add Content feature to read their news online.

Microsoft's IE 7 has a built in RSS reader and when this is released broadly it will be a tipping point. In the same way as the background technology of email (SMTP) is not known to most people, the acronym RSS will drop out of use as more and more people use the feeds in browsers and personalized pages. News feeds or web feeds will become a part of our everyday online reading experience.

"Even if it is something as simple as putting your press releases in an RSS feed, marketers will benefit from early exposure to distributing information via RSS feeds." Forrester Research

But don't restrict your content syndication to your press releases - a web feed can be used for any content that gets updated on a regular basis on your website or blog.

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Both Linda P. Morton & -- -- are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Linda P. Morton has sinced written about articles on various topics from Advertising Guide, Online Marketing and Writing. Want to learn about your target market?? Get a free report on a simple and quick process at Market Segmentation. Want more ways to improve your marketing? Get Morton's. Linda P. Morton's top article generates over 22200 views. Bookmark Linda P. Morton to your Favourites.

-- -- has sinced written about articles on various topics from . Sally Falkow is founder and co developer of PRESSfeed, an RSS service for marketing and PR use. She is co-author of The Power of Online Syndication in Public Relations. For more information on RSS visit. -- --'s top article . Bookmark -- -- to your Favourites.

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