Marketing 4 - Old City Web Services

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!

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 I: Build Your Business Community to Build Your Business

June 29, 2015 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

The most important part of your business is the customer base you have, and ultimately the community that you build around your business. Sure, a customer is a customer, but loyal and long-term customers that form a community around your business are what will keep you running strong.

How to Build Community with Value:

Unfortunately building a strong customer base and community around your business isn't one-size-fits-all or a trick that can be done overnight. It takes a lot of time, a lot of patience and a lot of hard work on your part. But at the heart of building community is offering something of value. Value is something that holds worth. Something that is important to someone. Something that serves a purpose.

Value will be something only you know based on listening to your customers, seeing what they gravitate toward when they come to your business. Why are they there? What are they looking for? This is all about them and not about you. You may have your favorite room, product, meal or item in your shop, but if that isn't what your customers are after, you have to listen to them. Provide what they are seeking. Loyalty will come naturally.

Use Social Media to provide Value:

Value is something that you can offer regularly. With social media, you can build on your customer base by offering self-less ideas. Share ideas of people or businesses in the same niche. You don't need to just compete. Share others' ideas. Share others' opinions. Show you hear others and what they need and they will appreciate and respect you and your business and come to trust your brand for the honest voice you use with your community on social media.

Next Week, we'll continue discussing Customer Retention and social media when we look at Customer Retention Part II: Using Social Media for Word Of Mouth Marketing.

Tips for Creating a Compelling Website Landing Page

May 20, 2015 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

When you are getting started on designing your website, there are things you need to keep in mind about the first impression that a viewer will have when they arrive at your site. From the moment a visitor clicks on your website, you want them to be drawn in. Many businesses make the mistake of not creating a landing page for their website that draws a web viewer in, and keeps them there long enough to ultimately get that person's business.

Here are some tips for creating a compelling landing page that will help with this problem:

Show your product or Service - Make sure that someone who comes to your site immediately knows what your business offers. Do you sell products? Let them know. Do you offer a service? Make sure it is prominent. Your website is way more than just a nice design. It has to be informative too.

Explain Your Business - Don't assume the viewer knows your business inside and out. You eat, sleep, and breathe the work you do, they don't. If a person has to look around to find out what exactly your business is or what it does, you've lost them. Show them what you offer and explain who you are as a business and do it succinctly and with good design presentation.

More Images, Fewer Words - Speaking of design, while a website is more than just a pretty page, it has to be visually appealing. It also has to be easily skimmable. This is made possible with larger headings, bigger text, shorter paragraphs (if you have any at all) and larger images. The truth is, people don't read on the internet. They skim. Make it look good and make it informative and don't waste the viewer's time.

Does your website do these things or do you need some help giving your landing page a facelift? At Old City Web Services, we are skilled at giving you the best combination of all of these elements so that when a viewer clicks on and arrives at your site, they have the best experience possible. Give us a call or email us today! Call us (904.829.2772) or e-mail us today!

Tips for Building Your Social Media Strategy

May 6, 2015 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

Setting up social media accounts and posting to them occasionally is not a sufficient social media strategy designed for success. You have to have a plan and a way to implement it to find success on social media and to have that success result in positive results to your business success. Here are some tips for formulating a strong social media strategy and how to implement it for success.

1) Know who your audience is, what they want, and what attracts their attention. This takes research and experimentation. Drop ideas that don't work or get little feedback and keep going with ones that draw attention.

2) Social media is a vehicle of your overall business strategy not the entire strategy. Use it in unison with the overall marketing strategy for your business. Measure your social media results. Experiment with your marketing approach, your social offers, your choice of social platforms. Then measure again.

3) Before you build a profile on yet another social site, make sure that you have the resources (people and time) to post consistently and respond speedily to all customer and prospect activity. Measure the effectiveness of your choices with analytical tools for social media. Don't start a Pinterest board if you don't have the time to dedicate to it or it doesn't fit your brand. Don't spend too much time on Facebook if the majority of your followers are on Twitter and they continue to expand your reach. Put your resources where the people are.

4) Choose and use a social media management platform like Hootsuite to coordinate all of your social accounts and RSS feeds from one screen, schedule posts. This will make the time spent on social media more organized and efficient and eliminate wasting your time.

5) Have one employee dedicated to the job of social media. This will streamline the message, give your brand a familiar voice, and will keep things simple and less confusing. Having someone posting to social media for your business who doesn't know the answers to the questions in #1 above will be worse than having no social media presence at all.

6) Be helpful, while promoting your business. Share useful information. Don't small talk and don't clutter people's lives and social media streams with information that doesn't help them or you. As with any marketing effort, your social media postings must have the ultimate goal of gaining and retaining customers and increasing sales.

Does this sound confusing or overwhelming? How can we help you understand social media better? Give us a call or email us today! Call us (904.829.2772) or e-mail us today!

Feeling Invisible Online? 3 Tips for Being Seen on the Web

April 15, 2015 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

You have a website, social media pages, and send out a newsletter or emails to your clients on a regular basis. Yet you still aren't getting the results you'd hoped for, the online sales you are seeking and the social media response that is warranted after all the effort you put in.

There are plenty of times that as a business owner you can feel like you are doing all you should but you still feel like you are talking to a wall at times and you just aren't sure that the online world is giving you the results you expected.

Here are 3 tips for no longer feeling invisible on the internet:

Update, Update, Update: Keeping fresh content on your website will not only keep your online audience interested, it will keep search engine ranking up. You have to be high in search engine rank to be found and once you are found, you have to give visitors a reason to come back. Keep a blog, post updates about sales or specials, or simply update photography and content so that your page is always fresh.

Keep your social media updates compelling: Great photography gets shared more than anything on social media. Share a photo that will stop a web surfer in their tracks, compel them to click and read more, and to share what they've read afterward. More people will find you and continue to share, and your online presence will become more visible bringing you the results you hoped for when you set up your Facebook and Twitter pages.

Add social media share buttons on your webpage: Adding buttons to your website that not only take people to your social media pages but that make it easy for them to click and share your website and the content on it is a top way to get people sharing and ultimately seeing your business online. Providing a special or a deal for social media shares only is another way to encourage users to spread the world about your business online.

At Old City Web Services, we specialize in optimizing your website and training you in social media so that your online presence is optimized to its maximum potential. Call us (904.829.2772) or e-mail us and we will be happy to offer our services!

Mobile Marketing in 2015

March 18, 2015 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

The most important thing business owners are going to need to focus on in 2015 is mobile website optimization. Whether you already have a mobile strategy in place or you're just now putting together a website and monitoring your mobile statistics, the statistics are very clear-mobile is going to be bigger than ever.

Did you know that over half of all mobile searches lead to a purchase? And that 50% of millennials use their smart phones to research products or services while shopping, and 41% have made purchases using their phones? This makes it incredibly important to focus on mobile marketing in 2015.

Here are some things to do to make sure you can capitalize on this area of your client-base:

Build an App or Custom Mobile Site - When a customer is using your mobile app, 46% of them are less likely to shop your competition. If you have them honed in on your business' site, they are more likely to spend their money with you. Unique clicks are 15% greater on mobile optimized websites. This makes it money well spent for you to have a custom app built or a custom mobile website created to enhance the customer's experience with your business.
Optimize for Tablets, Too - Tablets have become and are continuing to be extremely popular as users are on the go but want more function than just their smart phone. Looking at your site statistics will show you how high the mobile user rate is and how many of those users are tablet users. This alone should be motivation enough to optimize your site for tablet screens.
Create Call-To-Action Buttons - when users come to your site on a mobile device, they are there for a very specific reason - they want your phone number, your location, your sales and deals, maybe a coupon, a menu. Make all of these things extremely easy to find so the user can get the information quickly and easily. This will keep the customer around because their experience on your site was a pleasant one.

Optimizing your mobile website in 2015 is a project that will bring immediate results to your business. We are happy to help with creating a mobile site that will be highly functional, aesthetically appealing, and easy to use for the mobile web viewer.

If you'd like for us to help you in taking your business to the next level, call us (904.829.2772) or e-mail us and we will be happy to offer our services!