Fresh fruit in St. Lucia crafts market

 MARKETING is always an expensive thing, if you pay others to do your marketing they need to be paid, and when you do your own marketing, it is even more expensive.

Most of the costs for your own marketing are  hidden costs, and the largest  hidden cost is your personal time.  Today most marketing is within the online environment,  where SOCIAL MEDIA is the largest consumer of your time.

When you take the time and actually do a proper costing, you will be supprised at the true costs of your online marketing.   The first thing that you need to do, is calculate  what your personal hourly rate is. Then work out the time you spend plotting your online marketing, and include the following, as well as all others that come to your mind when compiling the list......

Product or service research
Target market research
s
Data collection and related image research, followed by image selection

Image preparation  and related issues
Copy writing then adding any specialised HTML CODE which you may know about.
Next is the review of your online content before it is finally published

Once you have a true reflection of the work done and the true time consumed to accomplish this marketing, then multiply your hourly rate by the time consumed discussing and implementing the necesary actions to fulfil the purpose, aims and objectives of that portion of your marketing.  Now when you are an amature and still learning how these things are done, how  will it take you to accomplish tasks that profesionals, who know all the tricks, and have many tasks preplanned and pre completed, take hours to do?

That is why it is always cheaper for small businesses to out source their marketing.

Todays post is actually all about marketing the fresh produce, mostly fruits such as bananas, pine apples, advocado pears, guava dillas and other fruits in season, which are sold at the St. Lucia village arts & crafts market in McKenzie street across the road from the Avis car hire office.

There is a very large selection of arts and crafts at this market.  The pics here were all taken earlier when discussing the online marketing for the many ladies who sell their wares at this open air market space.

Thanx for reading my blog post

Enjoy and remember to share this further.

Do you use hash tag marketing ?

Hash tag marketing for the tourism industry associated with the recreational use of the Elephant Coast beaches, with a primary focus on the mtubatuba municipality and the iSimangaliso Wetland Park.

DO you use hashtag marketing for your business?

If you answered no, then you need to think clearly about why not, as hash tag marketing is a truly powerful online marketing tool.

So here is why you should use hashtag marketing for your business.

Hash tags can be purpose generated, and product specific.  This is good for events, where the event name, and perhaps year for an annual event would be your hashtag, and brands where the brand name will be your hashtag.

hashtags are such super powerful creatures within the SEO or Search Engine Optimization industry.

Hashtags are easy to use, how ever they do require some careful planning, which will involve a number of different folks each focusing on a different area of your marketing.

One must remember that there are three distinct areas of Search engine Optimisation which each need to be run as stand alone sections, which are integrated into the whole.  these are

1) #IPSEO or InPage Search Engine Optimisation is all the stuff contained within the HTML code of the page, and includes but is not limited to  a number of high end technical tactics such as schema markup and EXIF data and many simpler tactics such as adding alt tags to images, and including title tags along with many others.

2) #OPSEO or Off Page Search Engine Optimization is all the supplemental online marketing such as content marketing, Search engine marketing, social media marketing and all the rest of them online marketing tactics which  most folks think is out side of the SEO space.

3) OLSEO or Off Line Search Engine Optimisation, is the most important aspect of any SEP campaign, as this is where you introduce your desired search terms, along with their semantically similar terminology to your intended target market audience within the online marketing environment.

Most folks think of OFF LINE MARKETING as seperate from online marketing, but today we have things like hash tag marketing, which is where online and offline marketing are married and act as a single combined marketing effort.

this is where #FUFISM based marketing can really be seen to be working.