Is your business website marketing strategy accessible to mobile users, do you need to rethink it?

Have you wondered how much emphasis you should put on the Mobile accessibility of your Website marketing campaigns? Bryan Rieger and the folks at Yiibu put together an excellent presentation called “Rethinking the Mobile Web: a pragmatic look at creating an accessible and inclusive mobile experience” which, for many business owners, does just that… Makes you rethink the mobile web. To some degree it might leave the humble business owner in a state of “OMG just when i thought I had started getting a handle on my SEO and SMM I now have to think about Mobile Web”

The takeaway I guess from all this is that while you may not end up spending a lot of time, money and effort on developing your mobile friendly side to everything web you do there is a need to at least consider the ramifications of not doing anything. How many of your potential customer group would likely use the mobile web to discover your business? Whether it is looking up your address and contact details from smartphone apps like Yellow Pages, searching for your location via Google Maps or simply product or service discovery using a search engine on their iPhone, Android or other smart phone.

It is important that every New Zealand business owner with a website that is designed to promote their business online gives some level of consideration to how accessible they are outside of traditional platforms such as Mac and PC desktops and laptops. It may be that you decide not to do anything to become more accessible but at least it will be a strategic decision not a “I don’t know what I don’t know” omission.

Admittedly this may leave you feeling a little overwhelmed but that’s where professionals like myself, WebsiteFuel and other marketing companies come in. Ask the company that looks after your marketing to sit down with you, go through your marketing strategies and look at how & to what degree mobile accessibility fits your business.

“Want to have a chat about where Mobile Accessibility fits within your online marketing strategies?

Call WebsiteFuel at SOHO on 07 849 0289 or email info@sohotech.co.nz“

Email Newsletters are Useless

Email newsletters to clients can also be a very powerful and effective form of marketing in your business when done right with the right tools and strategy.

There are three fundamental concepts towards creating an effective email newsletter which, when used correctly, can greatly benefit the reason you spent the time to write the email in the first place. After all do we not all want some level of ROI on time or money spent in our marketing efforts?

Firstly there is the system you use to create and send your email, don’t, and I cannot stress this enough, use Outlook for creating your email marketing campaigns. Why? Well the answer is simple; you cannot measure the effectiveness of it. A good email marketing platform will enable you to tap into very useful analytics around who read, who forwarded, who visited your website, Tweeted etc… Additionally with the Electronic Communications act it is very hard to be compliant.

Secondly it’s all about content, both the guts of it as well as how it is presented as this is a reflection of your business. With regards to content, while some times simply providing a specials email is sufficient to your marketing plan, some degree of personalisation both by addressing the recipient by name saying gidday and signing off as yourself can have advantages in how well the reader engages with you. After all we all like feeling special… Likewise presentation is so important, not to the degree that you either have to spend oodles of money getting a professional designer to create some awe inspiring piece of content for you each month nor the requirement of spending countless hours on it getting it just right. More that you use a nice easy to read font with defined headings and throw in some graphics (keeping them proportionally sized to retain a consistent feel) to liven up your email. A simple email newsletter that is pleasant to read will often have more impact than something convoluted with a stream of colours and different fonts. We’re all busy folks let’s make it easy to digest your newsletter.

Lastly, and this for me is a biggie, once your client has finished reading your email what do you want him or her to do? Do you want them to delete it and go on to the next email in their inbox or would you like them to take some action to engage with your company? Commonly called a “Call to Action” no piece of marketing should be without it and your email newsletters are no different. From call now to refer a friend, enter this competition and Tweet This, Read the article online or sign up for this the possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

Email marketing done right can be a fantastic tool for ensuring the “Client Nurturing” aspect of your marketing campaign works effectively. Use a professional email marketing platform, write great content and give your readers something to do.

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Ten Tips for Business Blogging

If you want to get found online a business blog is a great way to produce fresh content to improve your search engine rankings.  A blog for your business can develop a relationship with your customers as well as generating new sales leads.

1. You probably blog without knowing it

I see a lot of websites who regularly publish news and information on their website to keep customers informed of what’s going on. This is essentially great blog content and can be the foundation for the blogging aspect of your website marketing campaign.

2. What can you blog about?

Think about the things that happen in your business every day that you naturally tell people about. New products, industry innovations, events and awards, PR, articles written about your business, new staff, old staff, great staff, customer testimonials, common problems customers face and how to solve them. Every week there is bound to be something in your business that you could write about.

3. Don’t be a sales person

Rather than push your products or services engage your customers by giving them an insight into your business, the people in it and your expertise in the industry. Entertain, educate and inform your readers. If you write about your products or services then try talking about how they solve a problem.

4. Research

Don’t be afraid to check other successful blogs in your industry including those overseas to get some ideas on how to promote your business. Analyse your keywords, see what your competitors are doing and do it better.

5. Know your audience

Who are your customers, what will they want to hear about and what will make them keep coming back to your website to read your blog? Blogging does take some effort so it is important not to waste it. Often finding a small niche within your industry can create a significant difference if you are in a highly competitive online arena.

6. Design Less

Try not to get too bogged down with the design of your blog. Use your logo and brand colours with one of the pre designed templates. Blogs are about content, the look of your blog helps but your first focus should be on generating content.

7. Optimise

Use the right blogging platform so you can optimise each post with keywords and descriptions. Having a blog hosted on your domain rather than a free blog often provides better options for optimising your blog for search engines. Blogging to nobody soon becomes tedious so if you don’t get found it will be hard to stay motivated.

8. Promote

Marketing is about coverage and blogs are no different. Think of your blog as your own PR central. With all that valuable content, re distribute it across the web to places such as Twitter, Facebook, news and article sites and LinkedIn. If you post a PowerPoint presentation, pdf or Word document consider posting to SlideShare.

9. Capture, Convert and Nurture

There’s generally one primary reason a business will start a blog; to make more sales. Give your readers something to do once they have read your blog. This could be as simple as subscribe to your blog feed, signup for your email newsletter, register to download something, register to receive specials via email and so on. The key here is to capture the reader to become a lead by inviting them to give you some contact details. It’s your job then to convert them into a customer and you will only do this if you nurture your leads through the process.

10. Don’t give up to quickly

Give yourself at least 6 months before deciding on whether a blog is working for your business. Establishing a new blog can be hard as it has little or no content when you start so there’s not a lot to attract existing customers or to reach out to potential new readers. After 6 months you will have a good amount of content and a better idea of how it is performing as an additional sales and PR tool.

TIP:
Have a strategy for your blog so that you have a clear objective of what results you need to measure. Know who you are blogging to, why you are blogging, and what the measurable goal is for your blog to determine its success.

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Accountants on London helping local Waikato businesses

Local Accounting firm, Accountants on London have just announced a new initiative to help local Waikato SME business owners promote themselves in this on-going tough economic climate.

“Hosted on London” is the name of this business community initiative, which simply put, provides board-room facilities for small workshops and seminars to local business owners.

The concept is to assist local business’ by providing this fabulous facility at little or no cost.

Hosted on London’s new initiative is called “Free 4 Free.”

Jane Evans, one of the directors at Accountants on London says, "We’d like to give back to and support our local  community therefore if a local business owner wants to put on a free workshop or seminar for their existing or prospective clients and use Hosted on London to do it, then we'll cover the cost and let them use our boardroom for free".

Alternatively, if the workshop being held has a registration cost to its participants, then there is a nominal cost to hire the boardroom.

The most dynamic part of this initiative is that this offer is available to any Waikato SME business owner – meaning you don’t even have to be a client of the firm!

Hosted on London is located at Accountants on London, which is on the ground floor of the Vazey Child building at the river end of London Street.  The room can hold up to 15 people comfortably and comes fully equipped with white-board, tea/coffee making facilities and data-show projector, making it the ideal environment to host a small workshop or seminar.

Business owners interested in having their workshop or seminar at Hosted on London should contact Jenny Cross the Business Manager on 07 838 0119 or by emailing jenny@aol.org.nz.

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Use your iPad to play video and music files from your computer

I love a multimedia enabled house and StreamToMe just adds that extra layer of coolness for your iPad. I use StreamToMe on my iPad in my gym to keep me entertained while on the bike, it's a good way to stay on it for a decent amount of time without getting bored looking at the wall for an hour.

The StreamToMe app was very easy to setup and even though the tech specs recommend a Core Due Processor I am running it on a fairly old P4 3.2Ghz processor and its fine albeit a little slow strating the "on the fly" conversion and the limiting of resoltuion to 480p. If you have a fast computer you can stream at 720p which does make a difference.

Music streams nice and fast even with a large library and unlike some streaming apps it will play the entire album when clicking on a song. Additional to browsing a music folder iTunes integration is setup by default and loads all your iTunes playlists, although you do need to restart the streaming server on your PC if you want to update your playlists.

All in all I found that this was a pretty robust and stable way to deliver music and movies to my iPad. For $4.19 it is a must have for anyone who has an iPad and a music or movie collection on their PC or Mac. note for this review I was streaming my personal family movies.

You can get StreamToMe for the iPad from StreamToMe and the Windows or Mac ServeToMe app from Projects With Love

Overview:

The StreamToMe application lets you use your iPhone or iPod Touch to play video and music files — in a wide variety of formats without prior conversion — streamed directly over WiFi from your Mac or PC. If you connect the video-out cable for iPhone/iPod, StreamToMe can play through your TV, turning your iPhone/iPod plus Mac/PC into a home media center.

Features:

	Files do not need to be pre-converted to an iPhone/iPod/iPad size or format — the ServeToMe application converts the files to an iPhone-friendly format on-the-fly, so a single touch will start playback in as little as 5 seconds. Play, pause or seek through the file as though it were converted and copied onto your iPhone/iPod/iPad.
	Can play a huge range of video and music formats including MP4, AVI, MOV, FLV, MPG, MKV, MP3, AAC, WMA and WMV formats.
	StreamToMe will work at DVD resolutions over local WiFi but can adjust the stream quality automatically to play smoothly from a remote WiFi or 3G location.
	The TV out cable is supported so you can connect your iPhone or iPod Touch to your TV to use your Mac or PC as a wireless streaming media center for your TV.
NEW!	New in version 2.0: Thumbnails for movies files, album artwork for music (including while playing), subtitles (SRT files, SSA files, embedded SSA in MKV files, MOV text tracks), continuous and random play modes (instead of single file at a time), sort options including folder flattening (view whole collection at once) and more!

Tech Requirements:

The StreamToMe application requires:

• any iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch running iOS 3.0 or greater


• Either:
  
  
  
  • an Intel Mac running Mac OS X 10.5 or greater
  
  
  • or a Windows PC running Windows XP SP2 or greater (including Vista and Windows 7).
  
  

• A 1.8Ghz Intel Core Duo or AMD Athlon II CPU or faster is required (must support SSE3). PowerPC Macs are not supported.


• a WiFi or 3G network connection between your Mac and your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch


• UPnP or NAT-PMP must be enabled on all routers for non-local access (remote WiFi or 3G)

A 2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo or faster is recommended for 480p and higher video resolutions.

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Hitting the Mark(et) with your online campaigns

[caption id="attachment_345" align="alignleft" width="257" caption="Getting the right start for your campaign"][/caption]

So you are thinking about a specific campaign to attract new customers to your business through your website...

Where do you start?

Once you have clearly defined the goal into an easily understandable statement like "we want to get 15 new customers on board in two months because we have projects completing and need to get back to capacity" then it's time to give some thought to both what remarkable content needs to be generated and what online mediums would best suit the successful outcome of this campaign.

This is where knowing your target comes in because before getting all fired up and simply getting the campaign started we need to look at exactly who it is we are marketing to which will define the type of content and to a large extent the mediums to use. It's not really enough to simply say that "my target market is any small business in this particular area that requires a refined business plan and assistance in the implementation of that plan (let's use business planning and development as our core projects).

First of all to create content to that audience would inevitably miss the mark for a selection of that market and may hit the mark for others but the most likely outcome would be fairly diluted content that tries to fit all profiles but lacks the punch required for high level conversion later in the sales process. This is where creating a marketing persona can deliver real value both in generating a guideline for content and distribution channels as well as often providing a deeper insight into what your target market really looks like.

So let's say we are looking at delivering a service to clients that revolves around redefining business plans and delivering results through on-going coaching for a three month period, who is my target market and what sort of marketing persona could I create?

The first question would be what is the industry or business type, so in this case I will suggest businesses providing professional services to other businesses, perhaps in an environment where their clients are relatively high value and low turnover volume.

Now what age group am I going to look at for these business owners? Understanding that my business is about redefining business plans then my client age in the above industry would probably be under 38 from an assumption that established successful owners probably have a fairly robust plan. Additionally I might also assume that they are over 25 due to the nature of being a company who is dealing with high value clients may require the credibility of someone who has a proven track record.

So what are the frustrations of our potential client? Perhaps it's about being time poor, difficulty in client acquisition or a need for some solid on-going PR. And lastly what is their family situation? Are they married or single, in a relationship or have kids or a combination? For this group I am going to suggest in a relationship, possible married with a young family.

Now I have a real target to market to.
A 25-35 year old professional possibly with young children whose business has been operating for several years but is struggling to enjoy free time due to time spent finding new clients while working on existing projects because they don't have enough public exposure through PR.

This now starts to define the type of content you could create to this person because you probably have an idea of what would motivate this type of person. Additionally you would be able to gain some good insights as to what media channels this person consumes and what calls to action would drive this person to make a decision. All in all you now have a more robust framework to base your campaign on.

"While this is a quick hypothetical scenario there are more questions you can ask yourself of your marketing persona as well as some good resources on exploring this process further but even in it's most simplistic form as illustrated above it will provide a great deal of benefit towards the successful achievement of your campaign goal"

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Google Apps update: Print your spreadsheets with more printing options

via Google Apps blog
Thursday, September 16, 2010

With the power of the cloud, you have access to and can share your files from basically any device without needing to print out anything. We understand that there are occasions when you still need to print, however, and that’s why today we’re happy to announce two new features for printing: selection printing and gridless printing. These two new options allow you to not only customize your printouts, but also save ink in the process.

With selection printing you can print a highlighted section from your spreadsheet. The new option to not print the default gridlines is valuable if you’re trying to print a handout or trying to save ink. You can access these settings via File > Print.

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