April 27, 2012 - Posted by Amy Rose Brown
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Your website reflects your brand and philosophy, and is the greatest online marketing tool you will ever have. Well, it can be the greatest online marketing tool you’ll ever have – if you’re doing it right. If you’re doing it wrong, you could be presenting an image of yourself or your company that differs greatly from how you’d like people to see you. What does that mean?
If you have an awful website, you’re going to lose customers.
How do you know if your website is awful? If one or more of the following applies to you, you may be in trouble:
Some English teachers out there may cringe to read this (cover your eyes if you must): a cornerstone of interesting blogging is writing in a conversational, relatable style – which may occasionally mean bending the rules of grammar a little bit. Like using sentence fragments, for example. However, there are some mistakes that are just plain unforgivable, and may even cause you to forfeit some customers. These include, but are certainly not limited to:
You don’t need to be a grammar expert to run your site’s content through a spell checker, although remember that spellcheck only catches misspelled words that aren’t words – not misspellings that cause you to use the wrong word. In all cases, you should be proofreading carefully. If you are, you may not run into these problems at all.
A site doesn’t necessarily need to be flashy or cost a lot of money to get the job done. A good site design is easy to navigate, nice to look at, and – at the very least – fully functional. If your site looks like you signed up for Geocities in 1996 and haven’t touched it since, you’re probably doing yourself more harm than good. Check out some examples of bad site design, and then reevaluate what your site looks like.
We’re only going to say this once, so pay attention: do not put anything on your homepage that blinks, pops up, says “Congratulations! You’ve Won!!” or makes noise. There is not a single Internet user out there who associates a noisy pop-up ad with anything legitimate.
Even if your advertising doesn’t literally scream at people, you still shouldn’t have so much of it that it starts to crowd out your message. Site advertising should be secondary to content.
Keeping your site updated with company news can help potential customers learn more about you – unless you haven’t updated your company’s news for two or three years. Along with ensuring you update site content on a regular basis, you’ll also want to test functionality of all links and site features. When you allow your site to fall out of date, it will appear as though your company has also fallen behind the times.
Need some help with your website? The Marketing Zen Group can help you with your website copy and design. Contact us today!
April 24, 2012 - Posted by Amy Rose Brown
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Even if you don’t own an iPhone, Android, or Blackberry, chances are at least one person in your home or office does – after all, 35 percent of American mobile phone owners possess one with smartphone capabilities. Beyond their normal calling and texting functions, most smartphone users consume data on a daily basis – through gaming, app downloads, and Internet browsing. If you haven’t started marketing to mobile users, you’re missing a major market segment. Following are five of our dos and don’ts of mobile marketing.
You don’t want to make a smartphone user struggle to make your site appear in the right dimensions on their screen, especially when many other sites are already optimized for mobile viewing. Effective mobile sites take into consideration the average smartphone screen size, don’t overload the user with graphics and information, and don’t require horizontal scrolling or zooming. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile viewing, the user will quickly move on – potentially to one of your competitors with a more user-friendly mobile site.
Remember that whatever you’re asking your audience to do, they will be doing on a very small screen. You want them to read a marketing pitch? Keep mobile landing pages concise. You want them to fill out a contact form? Keep the form’s length as short as possible – typing on a smartphone can be a hassle, which means your customers will easily tire of filling in the blanks. Remember: keeping your length down is no excuse for forgetting your call to action.
Users need an enticing reason to participate in your mobile marketing. Get creative and make it fun for them – it’ll pay off in the long run. For example, QR codes can easily be integrated into a mobile scavenger hunt for your customers. Offer specials for people checking in to your location on Foursquare or Facebook, like a free dessert or promotional item.
If you’re planning to integrate text messages into your mobile marketing plan, ensure customers are aware of how to opt out of your messaging, and that this opting out is very simple. SMS can be a useful marketing tool, especially for those cell phone users who haven’t yet upgraded to smartphones. The same rules apply here as they do for email marketing: don’t bombard your customers with too many messages, and don’t send unsolicited offers.
Mobile applications have become the backbone of the smartphone user experience. Many major companies across a wide variety of industries – including federal student loans and Girl Scout cookies – have developed their own mobile apps, available for user download. Consider whether or not you think there would be an audience for your mobile application were you to develop one. If you think so, start talking to some mobile developers about the logistics.
Need some assistance jumpstarting your mobile marketing campaign? The experts at The Marketing Zen Group can help. Contact us today! Have any mobile marketing tips? Leave us a comment to let us know!
April 20, 2012 - Posted by Amy Rose Brown
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We’re currently experiencing a start-up boom – you may have noticed that every time you get on the Internet, there’s another story about a new social media this or an up-and-coming mobile that – many with a focus on fashion, photography, or other forms of creative expression. There are only so many waking hours in the day, so how do you decide which sites and apps are worth checking out? Take a deep breath, and then read our list of four sites and apps we consider worth your time.
Even if you don’t personally use Instagram you’ve probably heard of the smartphone photo application, which Facebook recently bought for a mere $1 billion (yes, that’s “billion” with a B). The popular app was limited to the iPhone platform from its launch in late 2010 until earlier this month, when an Android version was introduced. Many brands, particularly in ecommerce and fashion, have embraced the platform as a way to visually communicate with their audiences. Remember: a picture’s worth 1000 words, which can come in handy when you’re trying to submit to Twitter’s character constraints.
You must know what Pinterest is by now – even we’ve extolled the virtues of the image-sharing site. Pinterest has quickly risen to success, and its clean and easily navigable site design has played a big hand in that.
It’s too bad your Facebook News Feed doesn’t look like this – instead, you’re stuck with endless scrolling and an overwhelming amount of information. Or what if your new Timeline profile could be organized into this format?
Well, it can. Above, you can see our CEO Shama Kabani’s last three Facebook updates arranged in a Pinterest format. If you quickly find yourself overwhelmed by the number of updates you see from your friends and subscriptions, this is a clean way to scan everything.
If you have an idea for a movie, book, video game, or another creative endeavor, but you don’t have the funding — that’s where Kickstarter comes in. Their model of fundraising has been called “crowd funding” and the concept is simple: ask a lot of people for a small amount of money. If you don’t reach your set goal by a specified date, the bank accounts of those who already pledged money aren’t charged. Some Kickstarter-funded projects have gone on to be wildly successful, including the Printrbot (a 3D printer), an iPod nano wristwatch, and films that have showed at major festivals, including Sundance and South by Southwest. So if you have a big idea but not such a big reserve of cash behind it, Kickstarter could be just what you need to – well – kick-start your project.
Ecommerce sites have made the latest trends available to basically anywhere the post office delivers. But certain retailers may fall behind: namely, the boutique owner. By nature, boutiques are local and often eclectic, but many haven’t adapted to online sales – which means the boutique owner misses all the potential business of the fashion-conscious shopper who lives hundreds of miles away and can’t just stop by. But with Shoptiques, your inventory is available to a whole new audience. Shoppers can browse by type of clothing, or by city and neighborhood instead.
Is there a site or app that you think has major potential? Leave us a comment to let us know!
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