Author Archives: Kari VanNoy

Take Charge of your Online Reputation

Posted on by May 30, 2013

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5 Simple Ways to Help Manage Your Online Reputation

We live in a world where communication is near instant, word travels unbelievably fast, and if you’re not alert your online reputation can be trashed in nanoseconds. Many aren’t cognizant how vital it is to safeguard your online reputation. Cone Communications reports that some 89 percent of consumers regard online channels are trustworthy sources, and that another 80 percent have gone so far as to change their mind about a purchase after reading a negative comment or review. Further, your social media is where they’re talking about you. The Society for Communications Research reports that 72 percent said they research companies through social channels before making purchases, and that 59% use social sites to air their frustrations about your customer service.

5 Quick Tips to protect your online reputation

  1. Check your online reputation regularly – Google yourself and your company name as a minimum once per month. Create Google alerts to inform you if there are any mentions of your names or brand. Easy, free and necessary.
  2. Claim online real estate – If you don’t own your company’s domain name, or your personal one, make an effort to try and own these. Lots of damage can be carried out in your name otherwise.
  3. Be proactive on your social sites – Like your domain name, claim any Facebook, Google or LinkedIn pages that bear your name. In addition to that, make an effort to use them regularly.
  4. Deal with any detrimental content quickly – Do your very best to deal with negative postings and complaints expeditiously. Try hard to make contact with the poster directly, offline when possible, and see if you can handle their concerns. DON’T get in to a flaming match online. You’ll be the loser.
  5. Be mindful of what you post – Use your head when posting. If this can come back and bite you or your business later, don’t post it. Those lovely pictures of you and the crew tying one on in in the strip joint are best left out of your online world.

We live in a fast-paced, information driven world. Be sure you’re on top of it to successfully manage your online reputation!

Text Message Marketing

Posted on by May 28, 2013

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SMS Marketing – Reach People Where They Live – Their Phones!

Who would have thought that text messaging, which was generally the land of the pre-teens, would morph into anything as valuable and powerful as SMS marketing? In just a very short time, SMS (simple message service) has shown to be a proven alternative option to email marketing. Achieving more and more popularity, it’s challenging to find anybody who is not using text messages in one way or another.

Why SMS marketing deserves a serious look

Without a doubt, the main reason marketers are giving SMS a try is because of how folks are responding to texts. Reported by CallFire SMS text messages boast a 98 percent open rate as well as an eye-popping 83 percent are opened in the first three minutes of getting them! What’s more, marketing promotions utilizing text messages are being redeemed at 20 percent or higher, in contrast to traditional media such as coupons, newspaper ads, radio, or direct mail, that average redemption rates of a paltry two percent. CallFire also says that your ROI (return on investment) could be far greater than in traditional media. As an example, a campaign with a monthly cost of less than $30 to send 1000 text messages, and redemption rates of 20 percent or more, works out to be less than .30 cents per customer acquisition. Not bad.

4 Recommendations for successful SMS marketing campaigns

  1. Be certain to deliver value – Be sure that you’re not wasting their time! Give great value, whether you’re delivering a palpable offer or just directing them to somewhere where they can consume more great content. Deliver Value!
  2. Keep it short, sweet and personal – Personalizing your texts and keeping them friendly and brief is a good recipe for success with SMS. Something such as, “Hi Mandy, thanks again for shopping with us! We look forward to seeing you again soon. Show this msg to receive 20% off your next purchase at [STORE NAME & PHONE NUMBER].”
  3. Include a call to action – Make sure you ask for the action you want them to do. Saying something like “Text SaveNow to 123456 to get a 10% off coupon today” will set their mind to action mode.
  4. Track your results – SMS is awesome when it comes to measuring metrics. There are a variety of things you can monitor on your campaigns, from click tracking to who opened what. So make sure you track and measure your results, to properly plan the next campaign!

Ginger-Lime Grilled Beef Salad

Posted on by May 23, 2013

It’s Memorial Day weekend coming up, and that means picnics and grilling parties, right? Well, we have a great grilled beef salad to share today and it’s a favorite in my family. The beef has a wonderful flavor, and when topped on a salad, it’s a nice light summer meal. I hope you enjoy!

ginger-lime-grilled-beef-salad

Ingredients
1 lb top-round London Broil or flank steak
3 T. lime juice, divided
3 T. low-sodium soy sauce
3 T. vegetable oil
2 T. brown sugar
1 t. minced garlic
1 1/2 t. minced ginger
1 t. chili garlic sauce (or red curry paste)
1/2 head red-leaf lettuce (or mixture of lettuce, I like an organic spinich mix)
3 green onions, thinly sliced for garnish
1 c. basil leaves, sliced into ribbons (optional)

Directions
Place the meat into a sealable plastic bag. In a medium bowl, combine 1 tablespoon of the lime juice, soy sauce, vegetable oil, brown sugar, garlic, ginger, and red curry paste. Pour half the mixture into the bag with the meat. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons lime juice to the bag. Seal tightly, and marinate meat in refrigerator at least 4 hours or overnight, turning occasionally. Reserve the rest of the mixture in the refrigerator to dress the salad.

Spray grill or grill pan with cooking spray and preheat. Grill steak until medium-rare, about 5 minutes per side, depending on desired doneness. Let rest, then slice thinly against the grain.

Combine lettuce, green onions, basil and add the reserved salad dressing. Toss to coat. Divide salad among 4 places and top with sliced meat and additional green onions. Enjoy!

Daily Deal Sites

Posted on by May 23, 2013

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Daily Deal Sites – Look Beyond What You Read

You’d think from all the hate that’s been written about daily deal sites, and the way they are all a thing of the past as a means to market your local business, we wouldn’t like them either. You’d be wrong. There’s an awful lot that goes into making daily deal sites enhance your local business, and a few well-publicized failures, shouldn’t be the reason to avoid the daily deal model. As a matter of fact, when you take a close look, the lion’s share of them “failures” had plenty in common, particularly a glaring misunderstanding of the best way to run a daily deal promotion, poor negotiation of their deals, and not keeping track of their new customers redemption and spending. Given that they had unbelievable fails in these areas, is it any wonder they failed?

So why all the hate?

The well-publicized financial and structural changes Groupon and LivingSocial have been going through are often cited causes of dislike. The press is only too quick to point out the unfavorable issues with some daily deal sites. They repeatedly point to things like spam complaints, a crowded marketplace of daily deals to pick from, “deal hoppers”, customers who hop from deal to deal and rarely become a regular customer.

3 Ways for you to help make Daily Deals work for your business

  • Understand the financials! – Be sure you clearly understand the numbers as far as your deal is concerned. Know your average sales volume and don’t exceed it with a daily deal. Negotiate credit card processing fees: most major daily deal sites will pay these!
  • Follow up with your new customers! – As many as 60-75 percent of these daily deal customers are trying you out for the first time, so it’s extremely important to have a plan to coax them back for a return engagement! Offer another coupon, or other incentives to ensure that you see them again!
  • Don’t go too big, too quickly – Start conservatively, so that you can learn the ropes and not be overloaded by the deals, and leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

Daily deal sites aren’t dead, you simply need to understand how to best use them for your business.

Marketing Automation

Posted on by May 21, 2013

5-13-marketing-automationUse these marketing automation tools to free up time and money

Are there just not enough of you? Are you feeling not only overwhelmed with the mountain of tasks that lie before you daily, but also more than a little afraid that things are slipping through the cracks? You’re not the only one. Because of the complexity and the sheer number of moving parts that go into online marketing in multiple channels these days, you absolutely need to employ some measure of marketing automation, or you may find it tough to compete. Let’s take a look at some real time savers.

Tools for marketing automation

There are oodles of great tools out there that you can spend your time and money on, for our purposes here I’m going to consentrate on three areas that can be gigantic time sucks and possess the most potential for return on investment.

Email autoresponder company – This is very likely the most vital piece to automate, for if you’re not utilizing an autoresponder to take care of your email marketing, you may as well not be doing it at all. Loading up your autoresponder with personalized content and marketing emails offers your customers and prospects the sense that they are being well taken care of. There are a many great email autoresponder companies out there, today some of the best are AWeber, GetResponse, iContact, and MailChimp.

Managing social media – Keeping your finger on the pulse of numerous social media accounts daily is not just a full time gig, but a hard one at that. You should utilize some sort of tool, and there are several good ones out there which allow you to keep track of mentions, shares, Tweets and even allow you to post to your social platforms. Look into HootSuite, TweetDeck and Buffer.

Automate tasks – As we all know there are many small tasks that require attention daily, or the entire house of cards may collapse! A few of the better tools to come down the pike in recent years are the development of task masters like IFTTT and Zapier. These tools, (similar in intent and application) can be lifesavers when it comes to automating tasks between two different services. Very handy, indeed!

Make sure to not let customer and prospects slip through the cracks with all your automation. Being there for effective customer service is a vital piece of business too!

Website Management

Posted on by May 16, 2013

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5 Easy Ways to Spruce Up Your Site

Just like your home, your small business website also requires a yearly spring-cleaning. It’s very easy to let things slip, and the consequence of that could be a decline in traffic, reputation and ultimately sales. This can be a rather insidious way for you to lose traction with your website, as you don’t necessarily see it taking place. But it’s very real, and can have very real results.

So in the spirit of prevention, here are 5 ways you can make a positive change in how your sites appear, operate and prosper.

  1. How fast do your pages load? – You have under 10 seconds to load your page or the majority of people will exit and head somewhere else. Some reasons for slow loading pages are too many images, pages built mostly with Flash, and errors in your site code. This is something you want to check on, as Google will penalize your site in the search rankings if your pages take too much time to load.
  2. Old products, programs, links lurking – You should definitely remove any old product, programs and links that are no longer applicable. Nothing says your page is stale and dated more than your PDF download from 2008 that’s not only dated but unavailable. Dead links and 404 pages don’t help your search rank, either.
  3. Old content and images – Likewise cull out stale, no longer relevant content and images. Your old pictures from your company picnic in 2007 might not be considered fresh content, and that is what people and search engines both want!
  4. Social media – Make sure that your social media buttons not only link to your current social media sites, but that you are up to date with them. Pinterest and Instagram are later entries that might not be displayed in your social buttons.
  5. More fresh content that rocks – There’s nothing you can do to help in this respect more than to inject a fresh dose of new, relevant to 2013 content! If you have content on the first page of your blog that is more than a month old, you definitely should be more active with your content strategy.

Break out your virtual broom and start sweeping. Your visitors will thank you!

Easiest Way to Boost Your Social Media Mojo

Posted on by May 14, 2013

4-13-three-ways-to-increase-social-engagementTop Social Media Tips – How to Engage with Ease!

Long, long ago in an internet far away (roughly a year ago) it was not too difficult to rank your site’s pages in the search engine results. All you had to do was optimize the pages, have good, original content, and to gather a vast variety of backlinks to your pages.

Ahh, the good ‘ol days.

Google, in their quest to create a more relevant, social collection of search results, has made the game a bit more intricate. In addition to being sure we are still doing most if not all of the above tasks, social signals now are playing a vital part in the Google search results algorithm, the formula used to determine where our pages rank in the search stratosphere.

So exactly how do we create these “social signals”?

So how can we do this without tearing out all of our hair? Listed below are three easy methods for you to quickly increase customer engagement, grow your audience, and boost word of mouth regarding your business.

  1. Utilize visual media – However you slice it, the majority of us now would prefer to watch than read. Regardless of whether we are driven to this by a lack of time or the fact that it’s simply easier, that is the state of society nowadays. Backing that up, Facebook reports that pics and vids attract 53 percent more likes than text alone.
  2. Do it later in the day – Customer engagement by way of likes, shares and follows, are occurring later in the day, according to this infographic. (See, you wanted to check it out, didn’t ya!)
  3. Be quick to respond – Getting visitors to respond to you is hard enough: don’t leave them hanging! Make sure you develop the practice of responding to comments, tweets and status updates as soon as possible. You’re looking to engage, not find a way avoid this!

Don’t be like Freddie!

Professional golfer Freddie Couples was asked once why he never answers the phone. His reply was, “there might be someone on the other end.” Don’t be like Freddie! Engage with your readers!

e-Newsletter (surprising effectiveness)

Posted on by May 9, 2013

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How to use an E-newsletter to engage your list!

To a lot of people, the e-newsletter may seem like a relic of a bygone era, a time when we used painfully slow dial-up Internet services like AOL and “surfed” the web using Netscape. In spite of becoming a little long in the tooth (in Internet years), the e-newsletter is still an exceptionally powerful marketing tool your business shouldn’t ignore. E-newsletters remain an excellent medium for engaging customers, building authority and driving sales. The Direct Marketing Association says that every $1 spent on email marketing creates $40 in revenue. Aweber tells us that 77 percent of small business owners report that email helps them increase revenue.

Not your grandmother’s e-newsletters anymore!

Don’t be buffaloed into thinking that your e-newsletter must be as bland and un-sexy as those you’ve made the mistake of opting in for. Here are some eye-catching examples of e-newsletters that rock! Also, ensuring that you’re not just selling, but engaging your readers with useful, compelling content. Kayak, for example, isn’t just about telling you about the latest travel deals, but rather getting you salivating on the thought of travel and fun. Additionally, they go out of the way to engage their readers.

Quick tips for an engaging e-newsletter

Here are some tips for writing an E-newsletter that gets opened and acted upon!

  • Talk as if you’re talking to a friend – Customers are affected by a friendly tone, and are far more likely to engage.
  • Encourage communication – Give them every opportunity to respond and specifically request it!
  • Be specific and don’t ramble – Keep on topic, and don’t be boring!
  • Offer useful content – More than anything, offer content that’s fresh, useful and that resonates with your list.
  • Don’t be afraid to use emotion – Writing with emotion is powerful and is almost certainly going to stir others as well, promoting more engagement.

Don’t settle for simply autoresponder messages! Create a meaningful and useful e-newsletter today!

Reputation Management Tips

Posted on by May 7, 2013

4-13-five-reputation-strategies5 Powerful Online Reputation Management Strategies You Can Count On

Think your online reputation doesn’t matter? Think again! According to a study by Erik Qualman of Socialnomics.com, nearly three-quarters of respondents say they trust the info provided by total strangers online. Further, some 80 percent of consumers have changed their minds about buying a product after reading a negative review online, and over 84 percent say they find online product reviews to be a trustworthy source of information.

This leads to one simple reality: when those negative reviews or complaints appear, (and they will!) you need to take them very seriously and take countermeasures to reduce the negative effects!

Let’s look at five proven strategies to do that.

  1. Look at your brand’s search engine results regularly – Check your company’s name in Google at least once a month. Google Alerts is a good idea to tell you when there is any conversation regarding you, your company name or your important keywords. Make sure you look beyond page one, as damaging entries may be lurking there on their way higher.
  2. Deal with negative content ASAP – Do your very best to contact the individual that posted the content in question as soon as possible, especially if they are an unhappy customer. Do your very best to take care of their concerns in a positive manner. Don’t enter into a public tussle with them! You won’t like the outcome.
  3. Optimize your pages with your company name – Ensure that your company’s name is prominent in your optimization, specifically in keywords, tags, and titles. The more of your site’s pages that bear your name, the greater number of chances Google will see your site as the authority for this keyword (your company name) and rank you higher, particularly because most negative content won’t have done any SEO.
  4. Create more content channels with your brand – You can use free blogs like WordPress.com, Blogger.com or even subdomains of your own site for this, along with your social channels such as YouTube, Facebook, and Google , will help keep the company name prominent. Post fresh content to these channels also, so they hold on to their search positions.
  5. Ask for reviews – Your very best choice for an effective online reputation management tool is to ask your best customers for reviews. Don’t be pushy, but encourage and even reward reviews. This is also your best source of social proof!

Follow these tips to keep your good name! Trust us…you’ll be glad you did.

Facebook Advertising Secrets

Posted on by May 2, 2013

4-13-five-tips-for-facebook-imagesHow to Use Facebook Ads to Gather Leads and Sales

Facebook ads are among the fastest, easiest and most effective do-it-yourself platforms for getting traffic to your offers, building prospect lists, and for practically any other objective imaginable for your website. Ad campaigns are extremely simple to set up, include excellent targeting tools, and can be online in minutes. There is one factor to understand, however, when it comes to obtaining the best results and return on investment: That is finding the most effective images available. It has been shown that imagery is 70-89 percent of the success or failure of a Facebook ad campaign. Let’s have a look at some useful tips for obtaining the most from your Facebook ad images.

5 Great Image Tips for Facebook Ads

Creating an ad that produces a real impact and statement for your product or services is a matter of standing out from the rest. Listed below are five ways to do just that!

  1. Use very high quality stock images – As your images will end up very small, be sure you’re purchasing from a reputable resource. Fotolia and iStockPhoto are two of our faves. The XS size of available images will undoubtedly be fine, as even these are going to be cut down to the size of a postage stamp (110×80 pixels).
  2. Crop to deliver impact – Crop your photos closely to focus on the key aspect of your ad. Cropping faces from the eyes to mouth is the most impactful technique for riveting people images. Also, be sure that your model’s eyes have life. Whenever using product images, get close!
  3. Choose eye-catching colors – Using bright, visually arresting images is going to do wonders for your click-thru rates. Too many people opt to blend in with the pervasive Facebook blue, and thus consign their ads to a form of “banner blindness”.
  4. Choose attractive images – Unless you are going for a certain statement, choose the most attractive photos you can find. People are attracted to beauty. Period. This is not to say that sometimes beauty can’t be trumped by cute, funny or outrageous.
  5. Use humor whenever you can – All of us love a good laugh. If you have the opportunity to inject humor into your ad, don’t miss it! It will undoubtedly result in a higher clickthrough rate!

For some terrific illustrations of these ad-image principles in action, check out this great article at Search Engine Watch.