Author Archive
A Mobile Connection to the Real World
by RgDesign (rgrauphics) on Jul.02, 2010, under Tech News
By Robin Neifield, ClickZ, Jul 2, 2010
When we think of mobile, for many of us the first thought is of smartphones and how they connect us to the Internet. But new business models are exploring how our phones can connect us to experiences both online and offline.
In May, comScore reported 234 million U.S. mobile subscribers while Nielsen just released a study that predicts that smartphones will account for more than half of the U.S. mobile market by 2011. Clearly, a lot of us are on mobile devices, smart or dumb, and more brands have noted and responded. EMarketer predicts increased momentum in mobile advertising of all sorts as marketers watch consumer adoption and fit mobile into integrated plans.
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Response Rates
by RgDesign (rgrauphics) on Jun.29, 2010, under RG Design Talk, Tech News
Larry Chase’s Web Digest For Marketers Read the full story here.
Below are six quick tips that will help you boost response rates right away. There’s one tip for each of six areas: Landing Page Optimization, Sales, SEO Marketing, Copywriting, Email Marketing and PPC Marketing.
1. Leave Your Landing Pages Up Longer
Users click on offers in newsletter ads and dedicated solo email messages in unpredictable ways. For example, they might not click on call-to-action buttons until many months after the time of transmission.
This means you should look at the response rates long after transmission. No need to obsessively watch them daily or weekly if the message went out months prior. But, do check in to see the increased number.
People will save an appealing offer. Or, they might bookmark the landing page for when they have more time. If you held a real-time Webinar, put a link to that event’s archive on your landing page for latecomers.
2. Unexpected Value-Adds Prevent Buyer’s Remorse
Give your customers and clients something more than what you promised them. Let them be delighted at finding the extra value, be it a gift certificate, or a bonus ad in a media buy.
WordPress on Blackberry.
by RgDesign (rgrauphics) on Jun.02, 2010, under RG Design Talk
Our first post on our new mobile app WordPress for Blackberry. We will keep this post short due to typing on a phone. We will write later on what we did to connect our phones to our blog. Will be back soon.
Hmm no seo fields, I wonder if that will be in a future update.
New Twitter Feed
by RgDesign (rgrauphics) on May.19, 2010, under RG Design Talk
We just got done setting up a new TwitterFeed feature on the blog and on the Twitter Account, the idea behind this is that Rg Design has now connected the Rg Design Blog to out Twitter Account. So hopefully… what should happen is… we can create an awesome post and then TwitterFeed will send it out to our account on Twitter. This is posting is basically a test to see how everything is running and to do some tweeking, not twitting but tweeking. So we shall see how this goes and then we will write on our findings.
Social Media Marketing
by RgDesign (rgrauphics) on May.18, 2010, under SEO Tips
5 Ways to Extend Social Media’s Reach
By Heidi Cohen, ClickZ, May 16, 2010
Read the full story at Click Z.com
Social media marketing is white hot. In response to this trend, many businesses feel that, at a minimum, they must have a Facebook Page to engage their prospects, customers, and fans. If you expect to improve your bottom-line results, you most likely need a broader, more integrated social media marketing effort.
5 Ways to Extend Social Media’s Reach
One approach is to take your social media marketing efforts offline. Five social media oriented tactics to accomplish this are:
- Hold live meetings. Just as social media provides a forum for individuals to interact and share information online, why not do so face to face. This is a great way to interact with customers by inviting them to test products, preview fashions, view demonstrations, or just give them a space to gather and interact. Online sites like Meetup.com and Yahoo Groups can help with the mechanics of arranging these events. This tactic works well for small businesses, hobby-related businesses, and not-for-profit organizations. Larger firms with a limited number of physical locations can use one or more local groups as incubators for new ideas or to partner with local distributors and organizations. Also, you can organize meetings that are inwardly focused to provide forums for your employees.
- Display customer photographs in frames or on an old-fashioned bulletin board. These can be displayed in your retail locations or at company offices. Think of it as a local version of your Flickr group. Alternatively, use a digital frame where images continually change. For example, Stew Leonard’s, which operates four supermarkets in Connecticut and New York, posts photographs of customers using their plastic shopping bags in fun and interesting locations. This tactic is useful for a wide range of businesses, large and small. Some ideas include scrapbook retailers showing photographs of customers’ projects, bridal shops presenting pictures of brides on their wedding day, travel tours sharing travelers’ photographs of places and each other, and dentists displaying close-ups of patients’ smiles.
- Gather customer stories about your services and products. Highlight these stories with appropriate photographs and display them in your physical locations or retail outlets to give consumers insights into your offering and company. This can be particularly useful for companies that create events like travel companies and not-for-profit organizations. It can also be used internally to recognize outstanding employees.
- Collect customer comments. Just as consumers review and rate a wide range of products and services online on sites like Yelp, why not collect their input at every touch point? To add personality, include the customer’s photograph. Then display selected comments in your stores and/or offices to support sales.
- Answer consumer questions about your products and services. Gather questions from consumers at every touch point including your retail outlet, website, or customer service center. These answers can be integrated into your collateral or highlighted in posters at your physical locations. One client of mine uses this format for a regular column in their local newspaper.
5 Ways to Increase Your Offline Social Media Efforts’ Effectiveness
In addition to enabling your organization to get physically closer to your prospects and customers, these social media tactics are a great addition to your marketing. Here are five ways to enhance your offline social media:
- Integrate your live social media marketing efforts into your overall marketing. This helps build your brand and reinforce your efforts across channels. This means that each of these social media tactics must support one or more of your marketing goals.
- Spread the word about your offline events through various online tools. This includes e-mail, social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and social media press releases.
- Leverage your marketing and corporate communications to promote these offline social media efforts. Use your website, current social media efforts (such as blogs), in-store signage and flyers, and packages to promote meetings, gather photographs, collect stories, receive comments, and get questions.
- Share content from offline social media efforts online. This can be done through public online social media platforms like Facebook, blogs, Flickr, and YouTube, as well as company digital platforms like your website and e-mailings. This is a great way to provide new content that engages and helps users.
- Remember to get permission to use customers’ photographs and other content they are sharing with you. Recognize that parents may be reticent to display photographs of their children so consider alternatives such as pictures of children’s drawings or projects.
5 Ways to Measure Offline Social Media Efforts
As with any marketing program, assess the success of your effort in terms of how well they’ve achieved your goals. For these offline social media efforts, some metrics to consider include:
- Number of people involved. Depending on your initiative, this includes the number of people who register for an event, the number who actually attend, or the number of photographs, stories, comments, or questions submitted. Also, measure the reach of your initiative in terms of the number of people who heard about it via word-of-mouth.
- Track sales related to these offline social media efforts. Consider offering special promotions to participants to encourage purchasing.
- Monitor costs of offline social media efforts. While many companies consider social media to be virtually free, it has related marketing and human resource expenses.
- Determine the usefulness of input received. Do prospects and customers appreciate your products and services? Are they providing creative ideas that you can use to improve either your marketing or your product offering? Are there product or customer service issues being surfaced that need to be resolved?
- Assess the effectiveness of online content created by these efforts. Does it help engage prospects? Does it help consumers use your products? Do prospects and consumers like them and find them entertaining?
As social media marketing evolves, marketers must continue to test new ways to apply these techniques to different aspects of their businesses. More and more, this translates to integrating your online and offline efforts to better engage with your customers, prospects, and fans.
Photo of the Day – Baby Fingers
by RgDesign (rgrauphics) on May.07, 2010, under Photos
Check out our other photos at RgDesign Photography.
Download wallpapers of these photo here:
1920×1280 pixels
1533×1024 pixels.
You can contact us for a specific size for your desktop here.
And now onto the fun photos!
Total Pages vs Indexed Pages
by RgDesign (rgrauphics) on May.07, 2010, under RG Design Talk
I got into work this morning and thought to myself “How many pages does www.rgrauphics.com have?” then it lead into another question “How many of my pages are indexed?”. So I started to do some research on locating how many pages we had indexed with in Google. I have always known to go to Google and search my own website (i.e. www.yourdomainname.com) and it will display all the pages that Google has indexed.
RgDesign results had 9 pages with 82 results.
OK GREAT I have 9 pages within Google, but when I go to my Google Webmaster Tools > Click on your site > Site Configuration > Sitemaps with 165 pages total with only 49 indexed.
MSN Webmaster Center says that we have 83 pages with no blocked content.
Yahoo Site Explorer says we have 111 pages indexed
I did some research on the net to try to locate some tools for finding out how many pages you had on the web vs how many total pages you have. I have come to find out that you have to take these answers with a grain of salt.
SelfSEO – just type in you url and it give you results of how many pages are listed in Google, MSN Search, Yahoo, All the Web and AltaVista. Mixed results here also, here are our results.
Google – Not Available
MSN Search – Not Available
Yahoo – explorer
AlltheWeb – web
AltaVista – 111
So I guess my question to everyone out there…
- Are there any good tools to use to track and identify this information?
- Is this information useful?
- How can it help with SEO or Marketing?
I am sure there are quite a few more questions……so what are those questions? Anyone?
Landing Pages for eCommerce
by RgDesign (rgrauphics) on May.05, 2010, under RG Design Talk, SEO Tips
Executive Vice President & Co-founder, ion interactive
View the video on ION Interactive’s website here
Great information on how to handle what pages you send your clients to via PPC or AD Campaign. Tough to control organic results but it allow you to really think about the content on the site and how it can drive the call to action.
Photo of the Day – Thailand Flower
by RgDesign (rgrauphics) on May.04, 2010, under Photos
Just got done uploading a bunch of new photos to the photography site. This time we concentrated on a few destination photos. Thailand photos were provided by our good friend who took a trip there a year ago. Come by and check out some of these AMAZING photos. Here is just one to peak your interest.
Click here to check out all of the photographs from Thailand.
Photo of Day – Trees
by RgDesign (rgrauphics) on Apr.30, 2010, under Photos, RG Design Talk
Been so busy around here almost forgot to do our postings. Been working with the photography site off and on for the last couple of days making sure everything is still working. Had some issues but got them worked out. We have added quite a few NEW pictures under the water fall section and now we have moved onto our photos of Trees.
I know I know how exciting, but I think we have some great shots of Autumn in Rocky Mountians, a fresh snow fall on a Pine Tree, Sunsets through trees and more. Here are a few of the Trees we have on the photo site.
