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Digital Marketing

To Be or Not to Be – Social!

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Content is arguably one of the most valuable marketing tools for any company. When you produce relevant and shareable content, you engage readers, build trust for our brand, products, and services while informing and inspiring people to new ways of thinking.

Investing in content marketing creates an opportunity to directly and articulately connect with customers and show them why they should choose to work with you over your competitors.

Once you’ve created that content, you need to get it out into the world. That’s where social media comes into play.

Sure, your product or mission may be cool and trendy, innovative and progressive, but what do you have to say as a company or organization? Why should people “like” your Facebook page or follow you on Instagram and Twitter? What makes engaging with your online presence worth their time?

Why Great Social Content Matters

1. Establishing Target Markets Drives Profitability

A good social marketing team will work with you to pinpoint your target market. When it comes to content, it is important to understand the difference between, “who would be interested in this?” and “who do I want to be interested in this?”. When your desired market doesn’t match with the content you are creating, innovation is key.

With an ever-changing marketing landscape, companies must actively look for new ways to reach their demographic. Establishing a true target market, along with collecting data on what those potential clients are drawn to drive profitability and ensures your content is reaching the people who are most likely to use your service or product and creating a connection with them.

2. A Concise Message Is A Message Well Received

Imagine you enter an elevator with the CEO of a potential investor in your start-up business. This is your shot! You’ve got two minutes to explain why your product or business is valuable and worth their interest. What do you say?

This exercise is understandably difficult. It is not an easy task to rein in all of your many creative ideas into one neat package.  However, in the realm of social media, this practice is important. When creating a company biography for Facebook, or writing an “About Us” section on your website, your message needs to be clear and accurate. When these sections are too long, or too vague, people get bored and stop reading! This practice is especially important for use on social media sites like Twitter – where your post-able word count is limited.

Filling your Tweets and Facebook ads with either unimportant or data-intense information can make customers hesitant and less likely to engage. Articulating a healthy balance of informative and interesting content is no easy task, but it is key to your social media success.

3. When Your Clients Feel Important, They Return

Do your content ideas consider the perceptions of your customers? As an owner or manager it can become difficult to detach yourself, seeing your product or business from the outside looking in. It is important to seek a new set of eyes, playing devil’s advocate with any points of disconnect between your company’s mission and what is really being conveyed to potential customers.

It is also important to consider how you can become not only a product provider, but a “friend” to your users. People are more likely to use a product or consult with a company (and people) that makes them feel happy, valued, and secure.

A great way to do this through retweeting or replying to user questions and concerns on your social media pages. Instead of just stating dry information, ask them questions, add some personality to your messages, and show your appreciation for their business. Clients are more likely to engage and be returning customers if they feel important and recognized.

“People want to do business with you because you help them get what they want. They don’t do business with you to help you get what you want.”
– DON CROWTHER (@DON_CROWTHER)

4. Keywords Make A Difference.

Social content cannot rely on creative ideas alone. It is necessary to also compile search engine research data – identifying rich and attractive keywords that will set your business’ content above the rest.

For example, popular hashtags help to link your specific postings to all other posts made under that same hashtag umbrella. If someone is looking for #GreenSocks and you happen to be a company that specifically sells #GreenSocks, you can locate this customer and reach out to them.

Identifying these keywords is essential to your success as they help to increase your online presence, allow users to more effortlessly locate you through search engines like Google, and it helps your customers to see the true value you bring to their specific needs!

5. Advertising Is Changing. It’s Time To Adapt.

Every day we are bombarded by billboards, commercials, and print advertising messages. Due to this over-sell, these types of advertising methods have become less and less effective. This is because customers have become bitter and annoyed by the repetition, and have therefore found ways to avoid them (such as recording their favourite show and fast forwarding over the commercials or by using ad blockers). It is then necessary that companies work towards developing new and intriguing ways to reach customers without unsettling or bothering them, and instead interacting and connecting with them.

One of the ways companies can draw business, without a forward in-your-face sell, is through (you guessed it) – social content marketing! People are more likely to read and share a blog article that they find value in and believe others will as well.

For example: Instead of reading why she should buy shampoo from XYZ company, Sally is more interested to read about,  “The 7 Benefits of Shampoos that contain Coconut Oil” – something that XYZ company specifically includes in their product! Then, when XYZ company shares this blog article, customers read about the benefits of this same shampoo, without feeling like they’re reading a direct advertisement.

“Think like a publisher, not a marketer.”
David Meerman Scott (@dmscott)

6. Consistency & Tone Create A Lasting Effect

Setting the tone for your social media plan is critical. If your brand is funky and hipster, then the lingo you use in your online posts need to mesh with this pre-established foundation. However, if your company is of a more serious or traditional nature, don’t be timid about fostering new ideas that will change up those potentially “dry” stereotypes people may have about you. Yes, your website may be full of important data and statistics, but your social media accounts allow for you to communicate important things with a bit more flare and edge – that’s what they’re there for.

Let’s dive deeper. Static website content is not always great social media content because readers often look past it as “boring”. This is because website and social content often speak to different audiences and have different goals – information vs. engagement. Social media is built to encourage and sustain interaction (and get new leads!), so be mindful of how these helpful tools need to be approached in different ways.

What exactly makes social media content different, you ask? Its tone is consistently creative, often fun, “digestible” (straightforward and not jargon-heavy), and can include an image, infographic, video, or other media component. This type of engaging and creative work takes time, but this is time very well spent. When people see this type of interesting content being produced regularly, they are more likely to engage with the posts and return to see more because they enjoy keeping up to date with a brand that speaks to them.

7. Monitoring Results Increases Customer Satisfaction.

So, here’s where things get tricky. More important than having people engage with your social media accounts, you need to drive referral traffic back to your website – the centre of your digital presence.

Through website analytics you will be able to track how many new people have found your website, as well as how long they have stayed on the page, reading more detailed content and navigating the site to additional pages. Effective social media convinces the engager that you are a company worthy of their time and money and helps to lead them to your website in order to learn more.

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”
– JEFF BEZOS

It is important to monitor your social media engagement results, both the good and the bad. When your company receives a great review on social media, this information can be shared and celebrated across your different sites. When your company receives a bad review, social media gives you a voice to be able to communicate with the unhappy customer and to try to repair the relationship. Opening the dialogue and ensuring that a customers care is of the utmost importance shows great initiative and ownership to other potential clients. This response also tells the client that their opinion matters and that issue will be rectified in some way.

Engaging content is the foundation of any social media engagement strategy. “This is all great knowledge”, you say. “But I don’t have time to write it and I don’t know where to start!”. That’s where we come in. We can help source, write, and curate your content for social media sharing. If you are in need of new content for your websites and social media platforms, contact us today.

“Content is fire, social media is gasoline”
– Ryan Kahn

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Digital Marketing

5 Ways a Content Audit Will Revitalize Your Website

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Content marketing is all about creating and sharing information online in a strategic way to generate interest in your products or services, develop awareness for your brand, and build trust in you and your company. You can target the information and the way you share it to reach your ideal customers, whether they’re actively searching for you at that time or not.

Generally speaking, the content you share out into the world should bring readers to your website and make them want to connect with you and ultimately do business with you. If you want to engage them and keep them coming back, your content has to be relevant and current.

So, how’s your online content?

Having a comprehensive and engaging online presence has become key for successful marketing, but building quality content takes time. And time can change the relevance of content you’ve written in the past.

When was the last time you really looked at the content on your website? Is there outdated information on it? Are there holes in your content that you need to fill? Is your best content buried and difficult to find? Are you out of content ideas and looking for a way to re-engage? Do you know if your content is bringing visitors to your site and is it resonating with them when they do see it?

Enter content auditing.

A content audit involves reviewing and assessing the information on an existing website to identify flaws, errors, and areas for improvement and growth. An audit can revitalize your online presence by refreshing and re-organizing content, identifying new potential, optimizing search results, and preparing for the future by thinking ahead.

Refresh

Keep them coming back for more with updated content

A content audit will help to ensure your website’s content is up to date and relevant to the marketing goals you are pursuing. If you built your site years ago, and you haven’t worked on it since then, odds are you have content that has expired or is no longer applicable to your current services.

When performing a content audit, content marketers will take note of various ways they can help to refresh your individual pages by adding and highlighting new features, removing or updating outdated information, and looking for opportunities to amalgamate redundant or “thin” content. Search engines aren’t keen on lightweight pages that don’t provide value to users. Sometimes you can combine information from multiple pages to create one high-value page instead. Auditors will also review your content for any grammatical errors or spelling mistakes made by the original publisher.

Having a fresh perspective and a new set of eyes to analyze your content will help to fill in any gaps your content has, as well as to help develop a more user-friendly flow.

Organize

Good content is a good start, but it must be found to be appreciated

It is also a content auditor’s job to find new ways to improve the organization of your website content. You may have the best content going, so it may not be necessary to re-write the material itself, but readers must also be able to find it easily as they navigate your website.

Do you have a dedicated place on your website for blog entries or articles? Where can users access that in your menu structure? Sometimes minor adjustments to how you organize your information and even how you label it can make a big difference in how often readers find it, read it, and connect with you, generating leads for your business.

Discover

Mining for gold in your website content

The day to day of running your business probably includes countless conversations with your clients. They ask questions, and you use your expertise to inform and advise them. You probably don’t realize what a goldmine of content exists in your experience and your day-to-day interactions.

Your website and social media have the potential to have those conversations 24 hours a day when you have the right content. The content marketers who audit your site can help to identify opportunities for new articles and posts that will proactively share the information your customers and prospects are seeking.

These opportunities could include highlighting key advantages in your services pages, or it could mean coming up with new topics for your blog.

A good content auditor will also look ahead to consider all areas for potential growth, including new pages or articles to write, optimizations for your existing content, and opportunities to build connections within your content with linking strategies.

Optimize

Making sure your content finds the people who need it

Content marketing differs from traditional marketing in the way that people tend to seek it out, wanting to consume it, rather than being pressured or forced to consume it. When someone ends up on your website page, it’s usually because they are searching for information related to what you offer. It is then content’s job to keep that potential customer on the page, convincing them of why they should do business with you and not someone else.

However, landing on your page doesn’t happen purely by chance – there is a reason people end up on your website and not someone else’s. A lot of this has to do with SEO or search engine optimization – the process of increasing the visibility of a website or webpage in search engine results for specific keywords.

Your auditor will use their knowledge of SEO and your target audiences and keywords to develop to optimize your content for the right terms in the right way. When done well, there is no “stuffing” of keywords – it’s a subtle blend of the right words, written in a way that users will want to read.

Content marketers also think beyond your website and search results to other ways you share your content. The topic and tone may be adjusted depending on whom you’re talking to and how you’re reaching them, whether through search engine results, social media sharing, or email marketing.

Plan For The Future

Think ahead

A content audit will not only benefit you in the now but will help you to better prepare for the future. Following the completion of your content audit, you will receive a list of recommendations along with a proposed plan to implement the suggestions into your website. It may result in a few content formatting fixes, or it may suggest adding articles or blog entries to your digital presence.

In competitive markets, it is essential that you look ahead. It is important to note that creating engaging content for your website shouldn’t be a one-off event. Content marketers can work with you to format material that can be consistently augmented and updated, such as creating a blog and posting a new content article every week or month. Allowing for regular content updates will keep your business’ online presence fresh, organized, optimized, and relevant as new trends continue to emerge.

Anytime is a good time to spring clean your website content. Let’s talk about your content concerns and put you on the road to content marketing success.

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Digital Marketing

Online Advertising: How to Use PPC and Social PPC

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Raising awareness, increasing conversions, and growing revenues – it’s your strategic goals that determine how and what digital advertising avenues you should travel along

Using pay-per-click (PPC) ads and social media advertising – aka social PPC – to raise your company’s profile and increase revenues can be highly effective strategies. However, knowing which is best for your campaign hinges on what your goals are, who you’re trying to reach, and what actions you want your targeted audience to take by interacting with your campaign.

Although PPC and social PPC advertising can be complementary, they each serve unique purposes. Think of PPC advertising this way: it’s a strategy to deploy to target a particular search term or woo people who are in the Zero Moment of Truth (the way consumers search for information online and ultimately make purchasing decisions on the spur of the moment).

Highly customizable, PPC ads can target Google’s search network, its Display Network, or both. What’s the difference? PPC ads used on Google search are fine-tuned to appear in results from searches users conduct that are tied to a topic or specific keywords. PPC ads placed on Google’s Display Network use text, images, and video and are more likely to appear alongside blogs, news articles, and websites. Each can drive conversion rates.

This short video will help you understand the differences between various Google AdWords campaigns:

PPC ads on Google search can entice someone to click-thru because they may answer the searcher’s query. Display campaigns, meanwhile, can drive conversions provided the messaging and incentives associated with the campaign are attractive to the intended audience.

Advertising on Social Networks

Social PPC is a newer advertising vertical that businesses are increasingly using to promote themselves on social media. And now, social PPC ads created on Facebook’s platform are not confined to the social network—they also appear on websites and apps. Other social channels such as Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram are also innovating to provide a more targeted experience.

Social PPC ads are effective at generating awareness by reaching large amounts of people in their leisure time – social media is still widely considered to be a recreational activity. But be advised: social PPC ads, like Google PPC ads, are not the “set and forget” variety. They require ongoing analysis and, sometimes, optimization to achieve your aims. Furthermore, social PPC ads do not necessarily require a landing page. Instead, they can link directly to a website or a mobile app. It depends on what your goals are.

Complementary but Different Strategies

Different types of advertising campaigns call for different tactics and channels. Here are four important points to consider when devising your digital advertising campaign:

  • Think mobile. Whatever type of ad you run, and the landing page or website it links to needs to be optimized for a slick experience on a smartphone or any other mobile device. Why? Because more people conduct searches on mobile devices than they do on desktop computers or laptops.
  • Choose the right keywords. For PPC ads earmarked for search results, relevance matters. Be careful you’re selecting the right targeted keywords, and that your ad’s content and the landing page content are unified in their messages. Be honest and transparent. Done well, your ad’s visibility will rise, and the cost-per-click will decrease.
  • Be socially active. To help ensure your social PPC ad campaign is successful, have active and fully completed profiles on the social networks where you intend to deploy the ad. On that note, as Facebook is the most popular social platform, you may wish to advertise using Facebook Ads. Facebook provides lots of options for how ads are created. They can be designed using images, videos, carousels of images, or be immersive using Facebook Canvas. Facebook also offers complimentary stock images for ads.
  • Use video. With each passing year, the importance of using video for digital marketing and advertising grows exponentially. An estimated 51.9% of marketers believe video provides the best ROI. More importantly, in the second half of 2015 mobile devices drove video ad impressions up to 49% from 38% in the first half of the year.

Using Google or social PPC ads or both are worthwhile to amplify your brand’s message, raise awareness of a cause, or promote a product or service as part of your overall marketing strategy. As a general rule for all types of digital content, ensure your message is informative, concise, readable, and interesting. Monitor the results, and be prepared to make changes on-the-fly to ensure you’re reaching your target audience.

Get the best possible ROI you can with your digital advertising campaigns. Talk to us about how our savvy team of marketers can create, manage, and monitor your PPC advertising campaigns.

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Digital Marketing

What Is Your Strategic Marketing Plan?

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Knowing which direction to take your business and how to get there requires a comprehensive and actionable marketing plan

Digital marketing trends come and go as each year passes. Being aware of them and planning to take advantage of them to give your business’s revenue a lift is useful, but concerning your strategic marketing plan, you need to take a broader view and consider both short- and long-term goals and methods.

Your marketing plan is a detailed roadmap your company will travel throughout the year. It should encompass everything including who your customers are, what your content marketing strategy is, the marketing and promotions budget you will adhere to, the campaigns and tactics you will deploy and more.

Seven Essential Steps to Strategic Marketing Planning

Every business is idiosyncratic and requires a clear marketing plan pertinent to its overall revenue goals and aims. Although there is no universal strategy your organization can adopt and follow, there are a series of established and sensible steps you can take to create an annual marketing plan that will suit your needs:

  1. Establish a Practical Promotional and Marketing Budget. Your budget will dictate what you will be able to achieve monthly, quarterly, and annually. Promoting and marketing events, products and services, and your company’s philosophy on doing business costs money. If your company’s marketing budget is modest, you will need to be creative, and allocate funds to the most important initiatives you will plan throughout the year.
  2. Revisit and Refresh Your Customer Personas. Customer or buyer personas are representations of your different customer segments, both real and desired. To get an accurate picture of who your customers are, you will need data derived from existing customer surveys and interviews, as well as other sources such as Google Analytics or Facebook Insights. Broadly defining your ideal customer personas will help your team understand who your customers are, what their needs are, and how your company can help them.
  3. Understand What Your Differentiators Are. What does your business do differently than all of your competitors? What is your unique selling proposition? What are your core values and your company’s key messages? Knowing what’s distinct about your company, its products and services, how they apply to your targeted customer persona segments as well as the messaging you will use for various media types will help you prepare a well-rounded content campaign or editorial calendar.
  4. Detail What Your Marketing Goals Are. What do you hope to achieve in the new year? Determining what your marketing goals are should go hand-in-hand with what your business’s overall goals are. Is that an increase in sales per quarter? Be realistic and ensure your goals are precise and well understood by everyone on your team.
  5. Evaluate Your Website and Marketing Collateral. Does your corporate website look outdated? Is it awkward to navigate? And is it a responsive website? What about all of your digital and printed marketing collateral? Make it an annual exercise to reassess all of your marketing channels and properties and ensure they are targeting the right audiences, and parlaying the right messages.
  6. Review Your Sales Strategy. Do you have a comprehensive and flexible sales strategy with achievable sales targets quarter-over-quarter? Or are you flying by the seat of your pants and making it up as you go? Although it is an important part of a holistic marketing strategy, your sales strategy should focus on increasing sales and meeting your quarterly revenue targets. It should include details about the customer’s journey both pre- and post-sale.
  7. Define Metrics to Measure Performance. You can’t determine success or failure or shift gears if need be without data that validates what worked and what didn’t. Once you’ve identified the key performance metrics you want to track, and the tools and methodologies you’ll use to measure your success, host regular meetings with your sales and marketing teams to decide if any changes are required and how to go about them.

Once you’ve reviewed how your company performed the previous year, and upon completing these steps above, you should be ready to craft a practical marketing strategy for the new year that will help your company meet its objectives.

Does your business need help defining its marketing plans and achieving the goals you want? Let us help. For more than 20 years we’ve been helping businesses of all sizes and in various industries grow their online presences and revenues.

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Branding & Design, Digital Marketing

Why Writing Good Content is Important and How to Start

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From your company’s site search engine ranking to the number of quality sales leads you receive, good storytelling and valued content reaps reward

Whether your company’s digital marketing strategy is successful or not depends on one key element: consistently producing and publishing great content.

Online and offline, we are bombarded by an unending stream of corporate messaging and advertising wherever we look or go. Naturally, we ignore content that does not interest us or that we regard as hype.

Entertaining and interesting content that centres on your audience’s interests or needs, meanwhile, spikes engagement levels, builds brand loyalty and trust, strengthens your website’s organic search engine ranking, and lifts your sales figures.

Think about it. You’re a consumer, too. When you’re online, what grabs your attention? Content and messaging rife with corporate jargon, spelling errors, and poor grammar? Or content that clearly and succinctly addresses a challenge you face, is educational, or useful to you in some way?

Can You Tell Your Customers’ Story Effectively?

Fifteen seconds. According to digital content analytics company Chartbeat, that’s about the average length of time visitors to your website spend reading your content.

And don’t be coaxed into thinking if someone socially shares a link to one of your webpages or blogs that they read it first. Some social sharers do, but many don’t. A joint study by researchers at Columbia University and the French National Institute revealed, “though social networks commonly measure a story’s popularity in shares, researchers found that 59% of all links shared in their sample went unclicked, and presumably unread.”

But here’s more promising news: data from the Pew Research Center finds smartphone users will spend an average of one to two minutes reading news articles provided they are well-written and of interest to them. Additionally, having a mobile-friendly website goes a long way toward attracting and retaining mobile-based audiences.

Nevertheless, it still presents you with a formidable challenge. And if you’re still reading this article, consider you need to be able to produce impactful, compelling, and SEO-optimized content that is of interest to your intended audience for a broad range of digital and print properties, including:

In light of the above, there are other important factors to weigh. Can you tell your target customers’ story well? Can you write concisely about how your company and its products and services solve people’s problems? Do you have the time to do it on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis consistently? And do you have the bandwidth and know-how to track the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts?

Admittedly, that last one was a trick question. Determining how strong your content’s performance is (the return-on-investment) at increasing your sales leads and revenues is no simple feat. Why? Because content marketing is a long play, and you need to decide which metrics are important to track.

For example, many companies and publications are taking a different approach to online measurement. By switching from solely tracking the number of pageviews and click-thrus to including time-on-site and other attention-focussed metrics, their goal is to try to infer which content resonates with their audiences most.

Good Storytelling Creates Value

Good storytelling stirs interest and creates meaning, fosters contemplation in its readers, and in turn, becomes valuable to your intended audience. But not everyone is a natural storyteller. And not many business owners or leaders can commit the time to writing engaging content for all of their company’s marketing needs.

You need to be able to weave a compelling tale; to sell without selling. In short, you may need to hire a ghostwriter, aka an anonymous writer, to tell your customers’ story (and subsequently yours) to the world.

Some of the world’s most important literary works were written by anonymous writers. And the practice of hiring a professional writer to write on another’s behalf is as common today for everything from business books to marketing collateral to thought-leadership articles, blogs, and company websites.

But you’re keen to write your company’s content yourself. Okay, what do you need to do? How much time can you commit to writing? And how do you go about writing stories and marketing content that appeals to your existing and prospective customers intellectually or emotionally? Try these tactics:

  • Find the right topics. The notion of brainstorming with others is dead, and besides, there are no guarantees it will work. Does that mean you need to dismiss collaborating with a group of people altogether and go it alone? Not necessarily. Conferring and working with trusted sources to come up with important topics and an editorial calendar, or to discuss how to approach writing about a particular subject can produce great results. Most importantly, think about your customers and the questions they have for your company. Arrange to have an informal discussion with one of your longtime customers to get their thoughts if you’re uncertain. Or tell a story about how you failed at something – reading someone else’s account of how they mucked up badly, but who ultimately learned from the mistake and went on to succeed never gets old. You can also create a list of what are referred to as “evergreen topics”. Evergreen stories are based on broad subjects that have lasting appeal like why content marketing is important.
  • Manage your time efficiently. Just as you would plot the tasks involved in conducting any other aspect of business, build an executable schedule that divides up the work you need to do, and don’t waver from it. As you begin to write, different things will occur to you, so allow for lots of revision and editing time.
  • Research your topic. Once you know what to write about, hop online and find statistics, as well as the supporting or opposing points of views of others and link to them (or cite them accordingly). Depending on what your topic is, and if you can’t find useful sources to cite, you can always get help from a librarian in your community.
  • Write your first draft. Ernest Hemingway is famously quoted for allegedly remarking, “The first draft of anything is shit.” Whether he uttered those words or not, there is truth in the sentiment, and it is this: don’t get emotionally attached to the first draft of anything you write. Let it ferment in your head. Read it aloud. Have others proofread it for errors. Get the feedback of others you trust, and don’t be hurt by their constructive criticisms, mull them over. Then revise your first draft – and second, third, or fourth drafts if necessary.

Any literate person can write, but writing well is hard work, and you need to be damn good to attract and retain an audience, especially online.

It takes a significant amount of time to adequately research, write, edit, and produce good content for different media types and audiences. You need to discover what your brand’s voice is, determine your writing style, and commit to the craft on a daily basis.

In her 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, American poet, author, and civil rights activist Maya Angelou wrote, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” I couldn’t agree more. But sometimes, you need a professional writer’s help to tell that tale effectively and generate the reaction you desire.

Are you ready to tell your story to the world? Drop us a line and tell us what your content marketing and storytelling wants and needs are.

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Digital Marketing, Web Design & Development

My Website Is Live! So Where Is It?

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What you need to know about how Google indexes your website

After the Frogs push the Big Red Button and a client’s brand new website goes live, it’s only a matter of time before the client calls and asks why they can’t see their beautiful, new site. It’s not that the site isn’t there; it’s that the Internet, like all technology, works in mysterious ways. Or maybe it’s not so mysterious if you understand a couple of key technical concepts.

When dealing with any kind of technology, particularly the types that are related to the Internet, patience is definitely a virtue. For reasons we’ll get into shortly, it can take up to 48 hours before everyone online will be able to see your new website.

TTL and DNS and caches, oh my!

There’s a common perception that when a new site goes live, it creeps out over the Internet like pond scum over a lake until it’s completely covered the cyber-ether. Not that we want to compare your awesome, new site to pond scum, but that’s the general belief out there as to how the Internet works. It’s not reality, though.

Not to get too technical, but there’s a concept called Time To Live (TTL) (that’s “live” as in “live on stage” or “going live,” not “live” as in “I live in an expensive condo”). TTL can take up to 48 hours, although some Internet users will be able to see your new site much sooner. The reason has to do with domain names and server addresses.

Think of your domain name like a licence plate and your server like the licence plate number. Someone out there wants to find you on the Internet. They punch in your domain name, but their browser doesn’t know where it is. Your browser has to check with the Domain Name System (DNS), a vast database of all the domain names out there, to get your server’s coordinates. Servers are, of course, found on the Net by a string of numbers, also known as your IP (Internet Protocol) address. Then the DNS tells your browser what the domain name’s server numbers are, and voila, that someone has just been pointed to your website.

Because this takes a few seconds to do (ever notice when you first visit a website that it takes longer to load than subsequent visits?), computers store the information in a DNS cache so the browser doesn’t have to keep pinging the Internet Powers That Be each time you want to visit a website. The cache stores the information for whatever the tech guy has set it to, or more likely, the default of almost all DNS systems, which is – you guessed it – 48 hours.

With changes in servers, this means it’ll take up to 48 hours before someone can find your new website.

Flushing the cache

There is a little trick that will empty your DNS cache so you can instantly see your new website. A DNS cache flush requires some serious technical knowledge, but the Frogs can walk you through the process if you find your patience is wearing thin.

The Google problem

Another question related to websites going live the Frogs often get asked is, “Why is my site not listed on Google?”

If you think 48 hours is a long time to wait, consider that Google may not find your new website for six to eight weeks. Google attempts to query the whole internet every day, which is an impossible task. So it takes them a little bit of time to come around to your neighbourhood, knock on your door, and start spidering your website.

Spidering is a technique used by search engines to spread out across the Web to find every site out there. The main way it does this, though, is by finding links on pages it already knows. A brand new domain name isn’t likely to be linked anywhere, so it can take Google quite some time to find it. There are no links or pathways that lead to your website. Add to that that Google adds a “cooling off” period to make sure you aren’t a spammer or nere’do’well, and your website might take months to get indexed. In fact, new sites will take longer, where older sites will get picked up much faster.

While it’s usually best to let Google find your site through spidering, there are sometimes reasons that clients need their new sites to be found as soon as possible. New domain names can be submitted to Google manually, but even then, it takes about a week before Google gets around to checking it out. Keep this in mind when formulating any marketing plans that revolve around a new site.

Not sure if your site has been indexed yet by Google? Try This!

Go to www.google.com and type in “site:www.yourcompanydomain.com” in the search field. If your site appears in the search, then congratulations! …you’ve been indexed! If it does not, you have a little while longer to wait. Sorry! Try sending Matt Cutts a box of chocolates or something to see if he’ll come around to visit sooner.

Another Tip: Try having another website link to you. Oftentimes we find that this speeds up the process a bit as well, as it creates a pathway to your site from another site that Google has already indexed.

Patience is a virtue

It would be nice if as soon as the Frogs pushed the Big Red Button that everyone could suddenly find it and you’d have a million visitors instantaneously, but the reality of the Internet is that everything takes time.

For a variety of technical reasons mentioned above, your website will not be instantly found by visitors or Google. Have some patience and take some advice from Douglas Adams: Don’t panic.

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Digital Marketing

6 Things to Do before You Relocate Your Business

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Changing business locations demands thorough preparation in both the physical and digital worlds

Businesses relocate for a multitude of reasons including the need to accommodate more employees as a company grows, to save money on the cost of a lease, and to serve their customers more efficiently. But what if your customers can’t easily find your new office online, and as a result, in your community?

While relocating your business can be exciting, a successful move requires a lot of planning including making sure Google, Bing, and other search engines aren’t serving up outdated or duplicate location information about your company. Unfortunately, search engines don’t make it easy to sort out such matters.

With local search being a vital driver of new and repeat business, there’s a lot at risk if search engines and your digital properties have incorrect information. Improper or outdated location information can also be a detriment to your website’s search ranking.

The Office Relocation Checklist

There are six important things you should do in advance of your company’s moving day, including:

  1. Change your physical address online including on your site’s “Contact Us” page and anywhere else your former address appears
  2. If possible, maintain your current business phone number
  3. Ensure all your digital and printed marketing collateral are updated
  4. Notify your customers, business partners, and suppliers
  5. Switch the addresses on your social media profiles
  6. Inform your bank and credit card providers of your new address

It’s also critical to know what former business was occupying your new office location, and ensure Google knows that the former business has closed. And don’t forget to update your office address listing on your Google My Business account.

Don’t let the excitement associated with moving to a new office become a frustrating experience because your customers can’t find you online or on the street. Treefrog’s digital moving package eliminates the risk of missing any necessary steps across all of your web properties and with all search engines.

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Digital Marketing, Web Design & Development

Is Your Website Mobile-Friendly?

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Mobile device usage is more prominent today than traditional desktop computing. If your site doesn’t provide an enticing mobile experience, you will lose business

Are you reading this article on a mobile device? If you are, then you already know what the No. 1 benefit is of visiting a website that is responsive: you can easily view, navigate, and interact with it regardless of the computing device you’re using.

That’s the gist of what’s known as responsive web design. Whenever someone surfs to your website on a mobile device, the site automatically optimizes its appearance to conform to the size of the screen accessing it. For sites that feature e-commerce capabilities, a responsive website is all the more important given m-commerce (mobile commerce) is gaining traction year-over-year. For instance, during the 2015 festive holiday season stateside, consumers’ mobile sales (58.9%) trumped desktop-based sales (41.1%). From a global perspective, consultancy Research and Markets forecast the mobile wallet market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 34.58% by revenue through to 2020, and that one of its key drivers will be high m-commerce transaction volumes.

“The future is mobile computing – smartphones and tablets are just elements of it. The industry is on the verge of a whole new paradigm.”
– THORSTEN HEINS

Regrettably, Statistics Canada data shows a dismal 19% of Canadian companies have responsive websites. According to research conducted by technology and networking solution provider Cisco Systems, responsive web design has become increasingly important as the amount of global mobile traffic now accounts for more than half of total internet traffic. Moreover, the number of global mobile devices that connected to the ’net in 2015 grew to 7.9 billion, up from 7.3 billion in 2014. Of those estimated 563 million new mobile devices, smartphones accounted for most of the growth.

Think about that for a moment. In all likelihood, your customers and potential customers aren’t visiting your website using a laptop or a desktop computer, but a smartphone or a tablet.

Why You Need a Responsive Website

There are four primary benefits of having a responsive website:

  1. Increased visibility. When it comes to local searches, 50% of consumers who do so on a smartphone visit the business within 24 hours, and local mobile-based searches lead to more sales (18%) than non-local searches (7%).
  2. M-commerce is the future. Currently, mobile phones are the most widely used computing devices on Earth. As more people access the internet via a phone or tablet, more people are using them to purchase goods and services. Additionally, solution provider mporium (formerly MoPowered) estimates 30% of mobile shoppers will abandon a transaction if the shopping experience is not optimized for a mobile device.
  3. It will juice your SEO ranking. In the ongoing effort to up or maintain your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) ranking, a responsive site has to factor into the equation. Google favours responsive sites. In fact, responsive design is Google’s recommended design pattern.
  4. A lack of speed kills. Page load times and streamlined experiences on mobile devices are extremely important. According to a Google/Ipsos study, an estimated 29% of smartphone users will immediately switch to another site or app if they can’t find the information they want or if the site loads too slowly.

Interested in knowing what percentage of your website traffic is mobile? Call us for a complimentary review.

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Digital Marketing

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

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101 Information

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential for having a prominent web presence and attracting more visitors to your website. People primarily use search engines to find what they need on the web, including your products and services. You need to be visible on search result pages in order to be found by prospective clients.

SEO is about maximizing the quality of your web pages on multiple levels so that they can be properly indexed by search engines. Search engines have a variety of criteria they look for in a website. Google’s search ranking algorithm changes over 500 times a year, to give you an indication of its complexity.

Ultimately, search engines are looking for the best answer to a searcher’s question. If your site provides the best answer, and it is also technically sound, and if several other websites are linking to it as an authority on a given subject, your changes of ranking will be higher than a site that has none of these things going for it.

The SEO Process

There’s no way to summarize all the intricacies of SEO in a single post. That would be like fitting War and Peace onto one piece of foolscap. The following general tips can help you to attain higher organic search engine raking and maximize traffic to your website.

Determine the best keywords to win relevant traffic. Keywords are the words and phrases that people use to search for information, so you want to select terms that are specific to your business, and write content to reflect those terms so that people can find your pages.

Create original, quality, useful content for all web pages. Use your keywords naturally and with an appropriate density (i.e. use them in a meaningful way; search engines don’t like overstuffed keywords). Including keywords in page titles can also be advantageous to your ranking. If your content is good enough, then other sites may even link to it, and these backlinks can be beneficial to search engine ranking.

Continuously add new and fresh content. Encourage visitors to come back again and again by giving them something new to read. Post multiple articles offering information about your products in a way that informs and educates. This content increases your site’s depth and expands potential visibility of your primary keywords.

Don’t forget the Metadata. Create unique, informative Meta Tags and Meta Descriptions for each page, so that you entice searchers to click on your page from search results.

Create on-site links. Make sure you have sufficient links from your content text to relevant pages throughout your website. This helps users find pages they may not have seen otherwise, and it helps crawlers identify authoritative pages on your site that are linked to often.

Navigation matters! Have a solid architecture to facilitate easy understanding and navigation, so that visitors and search engines can easily move around your site and find what they are looking for with as few clicks as possible. Adding a site map to your website is also recommended.

You should also submit the site map for your content-rich site to search engines or directories to make them aware of your site.

Professional search engine optimization (SEO) strategists use various tools to monitor ranking performance. As the search engines keep changing their search algorithms, SEO strategists have to be on their toes all the time, constantly monitoring the keywords and reworking the information, analyzing your website to keep it competitive in ranking results.

Among all other forms of marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) is integral in getting traffic to your website. Combining SEO engineering and quality content is the best path to ranking success.

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Mobile App Development

4 Ways to Make Money with Your Mobile App

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Deciding which monetization model best suits your branded application depends on many factors

Like the moneyed prospectors who raced northwest to the Yukon’s Klondike region in the late 1800s in search of fortune in the form of gold, the modern equivalent of the gold rush may be the desire of businesses and independent developers to create a new revenue stream via a mobile application. But like the Klondike gold rush, not everyone will end up hitting the jackpot.

Conceivably, finding a way to make money from a mobile app is similar to the plight of social media marketers to generate sales through the use of compelling content, in that it comes down to a question of user engagement.

There are different ways to generate revenue through a mobile app. Deciding which model to adopt and what to charge your targeted audience may be the most taxing call you will need to make. But here’s food for thought: according to research by Statistica, the most profitable option is the in-app purchase. In 2012, global in-app revenues were an estimated to be US$2.11 billion and are predicted to rise to $36 billion by 2017. However, the in-app model may not be the lucrative windfall for all types of apps, with about 15% of smartphone users making such a purchase.

Four App Monetization Models to Consider

In general, apps have four major channels available for generating revenue. Determining which model you should employ depends largely on the type of app you have or intend to build, and what your expectations are for user engagement:

  1. Charging to download it from the Apple App Store or Google Play.

    Provided your app offers something of value to your customers, then you can monetize it by charging people to download and use it. However, you should also know that Apple and Google will take approximately 30% of every sale or download, and the cost you can affix to your app must be based on either Apple’s or Google’s pricing scales.
  2. Using mobile ads banners and offering an ad-free version of your app.

    Instead of charging your users to download and use your app, you can sell advertising space in it like many newspaper companies do, and subject your users to mobile ads banners within the app. You can also charge your users for an ad-free version of the app, but know that Apple and Google will take 30% of what you charge your users for an ad-free version of your app.
  3. In-app purchases.

    While allowing your app to be downloaded for free, in-app purchases are purchases your users make inside of your mobile app. The items they purchase could be to access additional features of the app, or for virtual items to use within your app. For instance, many gaming apps provide in-app purchases so their users can buy special characters or abilities within whatever game they’re playing. It is currently the most successful way of making money with an app. You should also be aware both Apple and Google will take 30% of all in-app purchases.
  4. mCommerce or mobile commerce.

    Whereas we refer to selling products and services online as “eCommerce”, selling goods or services via a mobile device is known as “mCommerce”. The good news with mCommerce is neither Apple nor Google will impose a 30% cut for whatever products your users buy via your app. However, a mobile app with mCommerce functionality also requires a backend server for things that can’t be done solely on-device, such as sharing and processing data from multiple users, or storing large files. You will also need a payment processor to facilitate debit or credit card payments.

Other App Economic Options

There are a couple of other options to consider for your app: the freemium model, and the use of a paywall.

The freemium model is often found on gaming apps such as the wildly addictive Candy Crush, which allows users to play for free, and offers gamers the option of purchasing in-game features or an interruption-free version of the game. You’re not obliged to purchase anything in this game, but it will impose a short-term time-out on its users after they hit certain game milestones. For gaming apps, the freemium model has proven to be the most successful type to date, suggests data from mobile marketing and engagement firm Swrve.

The other option – one that’s typically used by newspaper and magazine publishers to generate subscription revenue – is the paywall. Similar to the freemium model, paywalls let users access a fixed amount of content for free before restricting access, and asking them to buy a subscription. The problem with the paywall model is unless you’re in the publishing business, it may not apply to your company or industry.

Are you curious if your business should create its own mobile app and how to monetize it? Zap us. Our knowledgeable and talented development team can bring your mobile app concept to fruition.

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