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Content Marketing Part II

September 23, 2015 by anoadmin

September 23, 2015

In our series on Content Marketing, last week we looked at Using Analytics. We touched on how to see what your viewers are looking for, what pages they are viewing, and what content is either keeping them at your site or not. With this information, you can begin to build your Content Marketing Strategy.
Great Content is Customized to Your Audience

Now that you have your customer base and know what they are looking for when they come to your site, you can customize your content accordingly. For most small businesses, the important thing is to remember who your customers are and to make sure that you are sharing information that they are seeking - and, presenting the right information in the right way.

You want to inform your customers of what you have to offer. Don't forget, they are customers and potential clients, not business peers. They don't want insider secrets on your business niche, they want to know you are going to be the expert in what they are looking for.

You can use the information you've gathered about your customer base to plan your content specifically for your audience. You can share content in a way that your customers are looking for. What you share goes from "How to Build a Website for Your Small Business" to "The Top 10 Things Every Amazing Website Should Have." Which one do you think is more likely to get your specific target audience to read your content?

Great Content Solves Customer Problems

In creating your content strategy, think of the questions your potential clients may have and focus on the basics. Effective content will address your customers' issues and help them solve their problems. It provides simple answers to their questions, while building your reputation as the expert in your field. Share the services and features of your business in a way that convinces your customer that you can help them quickly and effectively.

Great Content is Engaging and Calls Customers to Action

Presenting your expertise in a way that involves your customer, draws them in and then inspires them to act is how you provide good content. Make your case interesting, compelling, and tell your customers why it is important to act now. If you leave them with nothing to do with the information you have provided, you are establishing yourself as a resource but not a money-making business. Compel them to use the information you've provided and tell them why it is important to have you help them reach their goals with your business.

Next week, we'll be looking at Content Marketing Part III: Why It's Important

Content Marketing Part I: Use Analytics

September 17, 2015 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

We are beginning a new four part series which will be centered around content marketing. This week, we are looking at how to use Google Analytics to improve your content marketing. Believe it or not, there is actually a way to make use of the information you gather from your analytics report – bounce rates, where visitors come from, how long visitors stay on your site, what pages they view, and what page they leave from. It can be difficult to know what data is important enough to track so you can maximize your small business website.

Give direction

So, you have a page or pages on your site that has high page views, but it also has a high bounce rate. On the one hand, the visitor may just be finding all they were looking for and therefore your page is valuable. But you want to take this a step further and give the viewer something else enticing or compelling to view, keeping them on your site rather than leaving right away.

Track Daily

By regularly monitoring your top pages of content, you can see what is trending and even go in to those pages and make changes that are more current or link to other places on your site to keep viewers on your site longer. An old blog post or a page about an old event can be updated to link to other relevant content that the viewer would find enticing.

Discover viewer intent

Even if you have a page with high views, if you see those are coming from keywords that make it obvious that the viewer is not getting what they expected from your page, you can change your content to better fit what a viewer is or isn’t looking for. Getting page views that aren’t relevant to what you are marketing doesn’t help your business. Make sure you have your content drilled down to attract the right visitor with the right information at the right time.

We at Old City Web Services are experts at getting your website content where it needs to be for optimal marketing of the website you have invested so much time and energy into. Let us help you wade through your Analytics report and get your content at its highest potential. Call us or email us today!

Next week, we’ll be looking at Part II of Content Marketing: Build Your Strategy

Promoting Your Website Part IV: Email

August 26, 2015 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

In Part I of our series about promoting your website, we discussed the importance of SEO. In part II, we looked at branding. And in Part III we looked at how to use Social Media to promote your website. Today, we are putting email up to the task of website promotion and will be sharing how email done right can work both alongside and for your small business website.

Ways to use email to promote your website range from simple to elaborate - and each will be effective in their own way. First, for your business email, have a signature built in that has a link to your website. Each time you contact a customer, they'll see your name and contact information including your website link and this will give them one more way to get to know your business better through your website.

In addition, you can take the larger step of creating an email newsletter. An email newsletter will include all of your clients' email addresses and you can reach out to them in a personal yet professional way to lead them to your website to create more business. MailChimp and Constant Contact are both well suited for creating and sending email newsletters.

Your newsletter can feed your customers information about what your business is about, what's new, and attract them to your website to seal the deal.

Some important things to consider when crafting an email or newsletter to subscribers:

Make sure it's mobile friendly - you want to keep the customer engaged and to do this, both your email and your website should display well on mobile devices. They will delete the email, maybe even unsubscribe and if they get as far as clicking on your website from the email and your website isn't mobile friendly, they won't stay long. MailChimp now offers mobile friendly options in their templates.
Find a good information balance - you want to share information - drive traffic to your website and build sales. With too much information and too many choices, customers won't choose anything. They will be too overwhelmed to act at all and your email will be deleted.
Target the right thing to the right customer - The ability to reach potential customers in so many ways is enticing. Knowing who is reading your Facebook posts and how they respond to them, or who visits your website and what they do there are important - and so is knowing who is receiving your email: You can't predict all of these things, but consistency is key. If you are selling your 9-5 Monday through Friday business, don't send your email on Saturday when you can't be reached.

Promoting Your Website Part III: Social Media

August 19, 2015 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

In Part I of our series about promoting your website, we discussed the importance of SEO. In part II, we looked at branding. Today, in Part III we are going to look at how to use Social Media to promote your website.

Social media is a great outlet for driving traffic to your website and promoting your small business. Even if your social media presence doesn't lead to immediate direct sales, it is excellent for getting your name and brand out there to make it more familiar to potential consumers. Name and brand recognition are a huge part of promoting your business website, as we discussed last week.

Here are some tips for making the most of social media for promoting your website:

Diversify Your Social Media Presence: in addition to Twitter & Facebook, add an account with Pinterest, Instagram, or LinkedIn to give your business a more broad reach. Not only will you have a different audience, but these other channels will give you new opportunities to share things you might not on other Social Media outlets.

Connect Your Social Media Pages to your Website & Vice Versa: Make it easy for your website visitors to find your social media pages so they can follow them, and make it easy for people on social media to find your website from your social media account.

OldCity.com Website links to social media with buttons:

OldCity.com Facebook Page links to website:

Linking back and forth between website and social media accounts will drive traffic to both.

Build Relationships: The most important and fulfilling aspect of social media pages for your small business is to build relationships. Your social media pages are places for you to engage with your customers in a way you couldn't or wouldn't otherwise. Your social media profile makes you more of a person and less of a business entity - when you engage in conversation, answer questions, and offer services. Use this opportunity on social media to engage customers and drive them to your website for increased business.

At Old City Web Services, one of the services we offer is helping you to set up social media profiles to boost your business. Contact us at 829-2772 or email us today and let us help you get started on social media or improve your current social media presence.

Next week, we'll look at Promoting Your Website: Email. Be sure to check back!

Promoting Your Website Part II: Branding

August 12, 2015 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

Last week in our series about promoting your website, we discussed the importance of SEO. Part of SEO is knowing your brand and niche well enough to use the right keywords so that ultimately, your website is being promoted to its maximum potential. You can't do this until you have your branding complete.

Branding involves consistency and professionalism. You want your website, logo, and business actions to reflect a level professionalism that customers seek. Nearly everyone who is considering a business for services or products will look them up on the internet and the way you are branded needs to extend to your internet presence. Your brand needs to be consistent: your website needs to look as familiar as your shirts, business cards, and brick and mortar location.

Here are some tips for branding that will help you in promotion of your small business website:

Know Your Audience: When you are deciding on the look you want for your brand, it is more about what your customers will respond to than what you like. You have to appeal to a large audience - so, make it personalized to you but something a large amount of people will recognize and lean toward when choosing where to put their business.

Identify Your Competition: Know what your competitors are doing - this way, you can be consistent but unique.

Create a Unique Logo: The unique look of your brand is what will help you stand out, be recognized among the sea of competitors in your niche, and will bring new business as your logo and business name spread.

Build Your Website Around Your Brand: Your website is something that is key to branding. If a potential customer tries to find you on the internet and they come to your website but don't recognize it as your business from signs or logos or the feel of your shop that they are familiar with, they may not even know it is you. From colors and design to the warmth of your personality, you want your business to be expressed consistently through your website.

Be Consistent Across All Channels: Your social media channels, website, print designs, and other items that you use to promote your business - from t-shirts to bumper stickers - need to be consistent. Use the same colors, the same logo, the same tagline - to keep people knowing what your brand is. This will not only provide a feeling of longevity for your business, but also a professionalism that all customers seek when choosing a business to patronize.

We at Old City Web Services are experts at helping you formulate your brand for your new business beginning with your logo and extending to your website and other channels of promotion.

Next Week, we will be looking at how to use Social Media to promote your website and build your business. Make sure you check it out!

Promoting Your Website Part I: SEO

August 5, 2015 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

The next 4-part series we have is going to focus on how you can take the website you have now and promote it, maximizing it's potential and making the most of it for your business.

Today, in Part I, we are discussing Search Engine Optimization, more often known as SEO.

The foundation of promoting your website is having it positioned in web search result rankings. SEO is what works in the background of your website and plays a vital role in how successful your website will be.

How do you, as a small business owner, use SEO to promote your business?

Set Goals: in order to do this, you need to determine the main purpose of your site. Then you can target customers, which will help you define the audience that you are trying to reach. Then you can pinpoint your competition for that audience which will help you determine what your goals for SEO will be. Your goals can be in relation to your own business - to increase your online sales leads, or in relation to your competition - to rank higher than them in search engines. Or you may have branding goals - to dominate the search rankings for a certain term closely related to your brand.

This brings us to Keywords: You, as the owner of your business, know a lot about what words define you and the services you provide. But you also need to know what others think of and what words they will use when trying to find your niche. The combination of what you know and what internet viewers are looking for, will help you to make the most of keywords to keep your business promotion strong in search engines.

Remember that SEO is your website's Way of Life: Everybody knows that for your body to be healthy, it has to be maintained constantly - regularly eating healthy and getting exercise. The same is true for your website. You can't just go for a 5 mile jog and call it good for life. You have to keep it up. You can't just set up your website and leave it. It has to be regularly maintained and tweaked to keep up with growing needs and requirements on the internet.

Next week, we'll discuss more about branding and branding goals for promoting your website in Part II of this series. Be sure to check it out!

Why You Shouldn’t Have a Website that Uses Flash

July 29, 2015 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

Websites using Adobe Flash often are visually appealing and artistically elegant, yet they end up causing many issues both for the website owner and for the website viewer. With the many options now available for building attractive websites today, Flash has proven to be outdated and a headache for all parties involved. Websites that have Flash have issues for multiple reasons:

Information embedded in Flash is often invisible to search engines - Search engines do their job by scanning content - text, tags, headings, titles - to appropriately rank sites for their keywords. Content embedded in Flash is difficult to recognize and makes it much harder for search engines to read. This leads to missed opportunities for ranking.
Lack of consistent cross platform support - Flash is only supported by certain browsers and operating systems and regularly needs updating to work properly. Today, if web viewers have to make an update or download something new just to view your website, they will go elsewhere and find the same information much more easily.
Some users disable Flash to avoid Flash based advertising - Do you know what this means? It means they are not only going to avoid seeing advertising, they are going to avoid seeing your website content. If they come to your site and all they see is blank space where you have Flash content, your site will look broken, incomplete, and unprofessional.

A web viewer might see something like this, instead of your content:

The content you put time and effort and money into doesn't work and asks the viewer to jump through hoops just to see it. Nobody is happy and you may lose customers because of it.

So...You've got a website that uses Flash - what can you do?

There are several strategies available for solving Flash problems on your website. Content can be changed to not use Flash, and Flash navigation can be remedied in a relatively short amount of time by Old City Web Services experts. Let us evaluate your site's specific issues and give you the best options for optimizing your site and making it much more user friendly for both you and the viewer.

Customer Retention Part IV: Share Your Knowledge

July 15, 2015 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

In this series about Customer Retention, we have looked at Customer Retention: Building Your Business Community to Build Your Business, Customer Retention Part II: Use Social Media for Word of Mouth Marketing and Customer Retention Part III: Recognize Your Customers. We are wrapping up the series with today's Part IV in which we'll discuss sharing your knowledge to retain customers.

One of the things any customer can end up feeling frustrated by is that they don't always know the ins and outs of whatever it is your business does. They have to trust that you are doing the best job for them and that you aren't taking advantage of their lack of knowledge. One thing that can help in this is to actually proactively share your expertise with them.

You can share tips, tricks, tutorials, and ideas with your customers. This not only establishes you as an expert in your field, but builds trust with your customers because you are showing them you aren't afraid for them to learn and know more about what you do.

At Old City Web Services, we implement our expertise everyday when we build and design websites for our customers and help them maintain their online presence. We also share our knowledge, by providing training and information for our clients to take with them after a project is complete so that they don't have to rely on us entirely. We offer a service that helps our customers save money and that builds a relationship of trust.

Sharing information doesn't always have to be so in depth. You can offer quick ideas and tips on your social media pages or offer face-to-face knowledge with your clients. You are the expert and you want your customers to rely on you for that, but you don't want them to feel taken advantage of. If you charge for your expertise but build trust by sharing it too, your business will blossom and your customers will remain loyal.

It is 10 times more expensive to gain a new customer than it is to keep an existing one. This series has focused on keeping customers happy, encouraging them to spread the word about you because of their satisfaction, and building trust with them. Putting efforts toward keeping existing customers will prove beneficial in the long run.

Customer Retention Part III: Recognize Your Customers

July 8, 2015 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

Two weeks ago, we looked at Customer Retention: Building Your Business Community to Build Your Business and we ended with the importance of using social media to add value for your community base. Last week we talked about Customer Retention Part II: Use Social Media for Word of Mouth Marketing. Today, in part three we are discussing Customer Retention through recognizing your customers.

Not only is it important to build your customer base and to get those happy customers talking about your business, but it's very important to make sure that you are recognizing and appreciating your customers for being loyal to your business.

It's a competitive marketplace, keeping and building a loyal customer base is vital to maintaining and growing your business.

Customer appreciation programs are often used to expand these relationships and make a customer a loyal one. If designed properly, customer appreciation can result in positive customer reviews spread through word of mouth and social media sites, as we discussed last week.

One of the most important factors in customer loyalty leading to great reviews is providing quality service and products. Programs that reward loyal customers to show appreciation are also required.

Some ideas for showing your appreciation for customers in your efforts to retain them:

Provide a free gift or service to long-term loyal customers
Recognize customers on social media for their brand loyalty. Truly, often, just saying "thank you" and meaning it goes a long way.
Check in with customers who have given you their contact information. Make sure they continue to be happy and see if there is anything else your business can do to meet their needs.
Setup a loyalty program that includes a freebie or special after a certain amount of purchases

All of these are easy to do from a customer service standpoint and can be incorporated into your online presence well.

Promote your special for long-term customers on social media. Post on your website that you have a loyalty program, use social media to thank the people who have made your business what it is today.

Next Week's Installment Customer Retention Part IV: Share Your Knowledge will focus on how sharing your expertise with your customers will keep them coming back. Be sure to check back and see how to continue building your customer base and retaining customers.

Customer Retention Part II: Use Social Media for Word of Mouth Marketing

July 1, 2015 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

Last week, we looked at Customer Retention: Building Your Business Community to Build Your Business and we ended with the importance of using social media to add value for your community base.

This week we are going to continue discussing the importance of Social Media as you work on customer retention, only this week we are discussing how social media's word-of-mouth marketing will increase because of and expand your customer retention.

Social media sharing is a powerful way to grow your business. Again, this is something that doesn't just happen overnight. You have to start with being a trustworthy brand, have a message of value for customers, and then those customers will help as you put forth your efforts to spread the word about who you are and what you do as a business on social media. Customers who trust you will share that with their friends and family.

How do you make this work?

Ask customers to check in on your social media page when they arrive in your business to share where they are
Ask customers to review you on your social media pages. Be a company and brand that makes customers want to tell people they know about you - whether it is a great deal they got, the smile you put on their face with your customer service, or what a great experience they had while you served them.
Share with customers how much you appreciate them on social media and they will return the favor. Everyone loves to share where they are and how their experience is going when they are happy - having social media presence will allow them to do so while promoting your business as well. You are providing an outlet for customers to share the good and the bad and this builds trust with customers, which builds loyalty and results in customer retention.

We will discuss this more in next week's installment - Customer Retention Part III: Recognize Your Customers. Be sure to check back and see how to continue building your customer base and retaining customers.