Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Well, we are getting close to wrapping up our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series and the year. This week we had our company and department wrap up meetings. We talked a lot about this year but even more about next year.

This year I, personally and professionally, made a few mistakes but with each mistake I make, I learn something. Making mistakes makes me better than I was before. We all make mistakes but what is most important is what we learn from them. If it wasn’t for mistakes, I wouldn’t be as confident that we were headed in the right direction.

Trying new things and failing fast in business

Try new things – My last job was run with the ‘this is how we have always done it’ mentality. New ideas were threatening. What if they didn’t work out?! Looking at them now 4 years later and things still seem about the same, except many of their customers have left. Of course you want to be dependable and stable but you also need to keep up with what your customers want, how they want information and knowing what is important to them.

Make mistakes early – If there is a new service, social network, product enhancement you want to try… try it early. Try it before the next guy does. Master it before everyone else is thinking about jumping on board. If it doesn’t work – you will know first and you can stop.

Trying something and failing can do more good than doing nothing – Don’t be paralyzed with ‘what ifs’. I am going to paraphrase (and butcher it) my friend Saul Colt says he doesn’t think we should listen to what everyone else does or says because everyone else is not remarkable. If you read the top 100 Twitter users’ posts about top 10 Twitter tips – you, at best, will be like them. To really stand out you need to be doing something different and better than the next person.

I am excited for 2012. I am excited to take what we have learned and apply it to making our company grow and I am excited, personally, to face on challenges and make some daring moves. I even look forward to a few mistakes I will have along the way. They keep me on my toes and make sure I am still growing as a person.

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Collaboration is one of those things that I usually take for granted working in Internet marketing. It’s like the opportunity to learn new things – if we’re not always learning new things and collaborating on a daily basis, there’s no way we could keep up with all the changes on the web. But it’s easy to forget just how much collaboration goes into every project, and how important it is to the success of the project as a whole.

Last week the design and development staff at Hall got together after work to talk about new things we’re interested in, what we’ve been learning recently, and bounce new ideas off each other. It’s something small, but it makes a big difference over time and helps us build better websites for all of our clients.

Something that most people don’t consider in choosing a company to build their website is what happens once the work is finished. The web is always changing, and there are always new ways to do things better and faster (translation: cheaper) – so what happens once your site is built?

Maintaining your site is like getting your oil changed

A pretty common method is to wait until your website is so far out of date that you have to start from scratch, and some people are confused in thinking this is the best way to get your money’s worth out of a site. In reality, it’s a lot more like never getting your oil changed on your car and then buying a new one when it dies. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to keep up with the scheduled maintenance and have a car that lasts?

One of the ways that we help our clients keep their websites from falling out of touch is by keeping them in tune with all the new things we’re learning. That means that the new things we’ll learn on a project next month will get passed on to all of our other clients with similar websites – even if their website was built a year or two ago. If they want to stay on the cutting edge, they don’t have to wait to rebuild their website from scratch – they can add in features over time to make sure they stay ahead of their competition.

Collaborating on a Drupal upgrade – Tim saves the day!

A few weeks ago, we had the task of updating a Drupal CMS site to the latest version of Drupal 7. Up to this point, there was no upgrade path for the main SEO module, which means all of the client’s SEO data would have been lost. In fact, anyone upgrading from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 would be unable to migrate their SEO data (sidenote: it is estimated that well over 7 million sites use Drupal). Clearly this was a big problem, so we sat down and Tim wrote an upgrade path and submitted it back to the community for everyone to use. This was a lot of fun for us to do, but also had a lot of residual benefit for other members of the Drupal community as well as our clients who will eventually want to upgrade to Drupal 7.

Collaboration is a great thing for us, because it allows us to get better at what we do, pass on what we learn to our clients, and it gives us a great opportunity to save time so we can make every website and marketing plan better than the last. After all, Santa wouldn’t be able pull his sleigh with out help from Olive, the other reindeer, would he?

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Are you using Twitter to market your business? Are you looking for new people to follow that will hopefully become future customers? Do you think people tweeting near you may, at some point, be your customers?

Why is finding local Tweets beneficial?

• Target nearby Twitter users to encourage them to come to your store
• Build Twitter followers and fans of your brand by connecting with them
• Keep up on local events and promotions that you should/could participate in
• Pay it forward by helping out a neighbor that is looking for advice, a product or just a good place to eat around town
• Connect with people who share your interests locally

There are a few ways to look for Twitter users that are near your geographic area.

Here are three:

1. Try using Bing’s fancy mapto see who is tweeting in your area.
2. Try doing an Advanced Twitter searchfor people tweeting about particular things within a given area.
3. Use Tweets by City to see who is Tweeting from your city or about your city.

Happy local Tweeting!

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Welcoming people has been a sign of respect and politeness for a long time. Businesses can do the same and welcome users who arrive at their Facebook page. Your wall is a great place for your visitors to hang out and interact with your company, but it isn’t necessarily the first thing that you want to show your new visitors.

Having a great Facebook landing page can help to engage new users from the very first interaction. Landing pages let you display engaging content, calls-to-action, incentives, interactivity, and so on. You can also detect whether the user is already a fan of the page or not, allowing you to create custom pages for fans and non-fans. This allows you to give your non-fans exclusive offers for liking your page.

When it comes to designing your company landing page it is much like designing for any website page, but there are some important factors you should keep in mind.

• Design your page with width restrictions in mind. Facebook pages must fit within a width of 520px. There are no constraints on the height of the page but you must keep in mind that people are most interactive above the fold. You don’t want to make the user have to scroll down the page to see the most important aspects of your page.
• Use your fan page profile picture to include more than just your logo. The profile picture has to stay within the dimensions of 180px wide and can be up to 600px high! It depends on your design and logo, but use the height to display important information about your business. Your profile picture is displayed on every tab, so it should be engaging, clearly display your business name and logo, include contact information, and be sure to include your web address- since Facebook should drive traffic to your website.
• Keep the design simple and engaging. You don’t want to have a design that is too busy or your main call to action will be lost. The headline should catch the visitor’s attention and let them know they are not a fan yet, and show them reasons why they should become one. This is a great way to display exclusive offers that only fans will receive, and that by becoming a fan you will continue to get important information and offers.
• Make use of the liked parameter. Include a secondary welcome page that only fans see, this is a great way to show exclusivity of becoming a fan. A great example of this is for ecommerce businesses. By displaying on your non-fan welcome page an offer, ex.) “Like us and receive a coupon for 15% off on your next order” Your secondary welcome page can be displayed right after the visitor has liked your page- displaying the coupon code for the 15% off their next purchase. This kind of immediate gratification will show the visitor right off that liking your page has benefits.

  

  BMW’s Facebook page is a great example of this. Most features are hidden to non-fans, which encourages visitors to like the page to see more.

A great fan page will not only encourage people to like your page – it will also effectively promote your brand and connect with readers on a regular basis. This is another opportunity to advertise your business to millions of FB users, so why not take advantage of it?

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!