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Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
Monday, October 24th, 2011
By Laura Shaheen
With autumn here and firmly entrenched, it’s time to give your company’s holiday marketing schedule some serious consideration. The holidays are one of the best times to reach your customers. Sluggish summer habits get a burst of energy with the snap of the cold and the thought of holiday parties and gift giving. Use this time wisely to attract more customers, and to better serve your current clients.
1.) Make plans: It’s easy to foresee using a fall and winter marketing schedule, but less clear cut to actually establish one. Plan for the holiday months early, and determine any promotions or discounts you’d like to run. Coordinate these promotions with your bursts of advertising or direct mail—haphazard planning in this regard has been many a company’s downfall.
2.) Utilize a direct mail campaign: Once you’ve run the numbers and determined which promotions or marketing you can afford to run, use direct mail campaigns to educate your customers. Consider synching your mailing campaign with promotional e-mails, blog updates, and social media promotion. The more cohesive, the better.
3.) Make your company website holiday appropriate: This doesn’t mean changing the company colors to red and green and posting a garish, bright holiday banner across the top of the page. In fact, we might recommend against such updates. However, talk to your graphics and web designers about sprucing up the company page with a few little holiday reminders. For inspiration in this regard, think Google’s mostly subtle logo changes. It never hurts for a few quick prompt about the holidays to jog a customer’s memory.
4.) Update website user-friendliness: It’s reasonable to expect higher website traffic in the fall and winter months, mostly due to the circumstances of the weather and events. For companies in the home repair business, you can bet things will start going wrong the day before a customer’s house party, or just when the temperature dips below freezing. Be prepared for an influx of web traffic by updating parts of the company website. If you’re in the retail business, is your shopping cart button prominent on every page? Is it simple to purchase from your company? The last thing you need is a lengthy product purchase process that allows customers to get distracted and put off buying. Consider utilizing wishlists or other interactive ways to encourage turning one time buyers in loyal customers.
5.) Utilize SEO: Like we mentioned in our previous blog on SEO, don’t be afraid to make your company as search-friendly as possible. This might include upping the number of blog posts, or changing the titles of your pages to include some more relevant search terms.
At the heart of the matter, all that this comes down to is effective preparation. Be sure that you’re ready for the changing weather and tides of consumerism. Have quality staff, effective promotions and proper schedules set aside. Such arrangements can mean the difference between coming into the holiday months blind and coming in prepared.
Tags: holiday, Marketing, PR, public relations, SEO
Posted in franchise, Marketing, Social Media | Comments Off
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
By Laura Shaheen
One of the more hidden aspects of marketing is SEO, and it’s crucial. You may read SEO and be tempted to bury your head in the sand, but we’re here to tell you that it can make a world of difference—and that it’s not as scary or time-consuming as it sounds.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it can be summarily described as the Google-ability of your company. There are a multitude of tips and tricks that can launch your website up the search engine ranks, and many of them just require a few quick tweaks to your existing practices. SEO has exploded in recent years, with books, papers, and professions being built around the practice of maneuvering websites higher up search engines. There have been some scandals, mostly with some companies abusing the system by flooding the internet with extra tags and claims for products that they don’t actually sell, or that doesn’t accurately represent their websites. For the most part, however, an SEO campaign can be a clever way to boost yourself above your competition, and it cannot be ignored.
To really begin to understand the web of SEO, it’s necessary to delve into the basics and work your way up. Search engines like Google rank pages based on a few secret formulas, but it’s fairly universally understood that more legitimate pages rank higher. For example, your unknown company blog will appear more credible if a legitimate page links to you, and thus your blog will rank higher. There are plenty of qualifications for legitimate pages. Some are simply established by age, some are established by popularity, some, like Facebook and Twitter, are megaliths in their own rights. The beauty of this is that you can link your Facebook pages to your blog or website, and Google automatically recognizes this as a more legitimate page than one with no links. Promote cross linking between all of your pages to encourage the flow of traffic and SEO optimization.
In that same vein, having links and references on your page will also optimize your SEO. Another way to increase your visibility is to make sure the titles of your pages reflect your company succinctly. The Google search spiders don’t look at website pages as we do, they scour the HTML and plaintext, and therefore they won’t be impressed by your fancy images, but they will scan the first few words of your titles. Titles that reflect your business will be turned into keywords and your page will be more accurately discovered in Google.
Tags and keywords are another way to increase your SEO. At the end of each of your blog posts, having descriptive keywords and tags not only organizes your site for your visitors, it provides the search engines with a way to classify your page. Make sure you have a variety of tags—for example, this blog post might have the tags SEO optimization, social media, marketing, small business optimization, franchising, etc. Be sure not to overtag, as search engines frown upon it. If you overtag your website with inapplicable terms like “shoe shopping, free dental work, and Leonardo DiCaprio,” you may find yourself booted out of the system and back to square one.
SEO is a wonderful tool because it allows you to exert a finer degree of control over where your website appears on the internet. The tips above are simple, yet effective tricks to move your page up from page 234 of Google to perhaps page 10—and more advanced research can lead you to page one, and the multitude of profit potential that exists in such a place.
Tags: franchise, franchisee, Marketing, PR, public relations, SEO Optimization, social media
Posted in franchise, Marketing, Reputation Management, Social Media, The Dwyer Group | Comments Off
Wednesday, September 28th, 2011
By Laura Shaheen
If you spend any time at all on any social media, or perhaps if you have opened a newspaper, or even if you simply exist, you’ve most likely heard about the uproar regarding all of Facebook’s new changes. Coming within days, Facebook will be unleashing their most radical change yet—and this one, unlike many other small changes, may be enough to give you pause.
Though it’s been occurring gradually, Facebook has become more and more attuned to you as a user. In fact, Facebook now has its own smart lists on your profile, where it groups your close friends, coworkers, and schoolmates together with absolutely no input by you. It is alarming that Facebook is becoming more intelligent by the day, but that can be attributed to the marvels of technology. Soon enough, the shock value will be gone and we will wonder how we survived without it. That is not the issue. However, the new Facebook that will be released soon does have ramifications, and they are implications that need to be addressed not only on your own personal profile, but for your business as well.
Recently, Facebook has already made some changes—there is a real time feed along the side, along with the intelligent groupings akin to Google+’s Circles features—but the real change will occur in a few days. Facebook Timeline.
Facebook Timeline is being met with both roars of approval and cries of outrage. It is, for sure, one of the most dramatic steps Facebook has ever taken and it’s a big gamble for founder Mark Zuckerberg. Previously, once your post or status has disappeared down the newsfeed, it was unlikely you’d ever see it again. Facebook Timeline is looking to change that. Along with revamping the general design of Facebook, including adding a massive photo banner at the top of each profile, Facebook Timeline will allow you to go back throughout your entire Facebook history. Your older material will be there, and you will have the chance to edit and add to the timeline, effectively creating an online scrapbook of your time on Facebook. Your past will be clearly laid out for you—and everyone else on the internet—to follow. Privacy settings will remain, allowing you to keep things private, however people change drastically in just a few short years. For professionals, it is crucial that you take a look at your old content and make sure that what you might have posted as a college senior five years ago isn’t something you’d be ashamed for your new boss to see.
With this ability to look into the past, employers now have a swifter and more deadly tool to weed out applicants in interviews. Though Facebook has not released information about how this new timeline will affect business fan pages, there is much to chew on in that arena as well. With the whole of your business’ past spread out on a page for anyone to see, it is imperative now more than ever that it be monitored frequently and that every post is one that you’d be proud to have a customer see. Employees are now under the microscope and must also scrutinize their pages and past to make sure everything reflects well on them as a person and them as a business professional.
Facebook Timeline is going to be the story of the day in the coming weeks, that’s never been a question. What is a concern is managing your previous history with your current situation in life and managing your business’ page.
Now, more than ever your social media presence is vital. If you’ve been pushing your social media presence off, it’s time to get back in the saddle and manage your brand before your customers form their opinions without you.
Tags: Marketing, PR, public relations, The Dwyer Group
Posted in franchise, Marketing, Reputation Management, Social Media, The Dwyer Group | Comments Off
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