Brandon Sauls met with the Brunswick County Chamber of Commerce in mid December.At the meeting, Sauls was asked by the board to chair the Marketing Development Committee for the chamber.
Working under the President, Cathy Altman, Sauls hopes to be able to increase the traffic to the chamber website and therefore increase awareness for the area which in turn will boost over all leads.Brandon will be working not only on the online marketing and branding but the overall marketing and branding for the Brunswick County Chamber of Commerce.
(Read the rest of this article at the following article source link for the full story)
A September 2009 MarketingProfs survey of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers found that the marketing tactics most often used on social sites are not necessarily the best ones.
The most common marketing tactic used on Facebook was attempting to drive traffic to corporate materials through status updates, followed by friending customers.
But the most effective tactic for consumer-oriented companies was creating a Facebook application, which was done by less than one-quarter of total respondents. Both B2B and B2C companies also reported surveys of their fans as effective; fan surveys were the third-most-common tactic attempted.
Unsurprisingly, buying ads—even targeted ones—was the least effective type of social media marketing overall.
Like those on Facebook, marketers using Twitter were also most interested in increasing traffic. Driving…
(Read the rest of this article at the following article source link for the full story)
Americans looking back at the end of a decade have little love for trends such as reality TV, they are generally positive when evaluating the most basic technological and communications advances that have affected their lives, according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
Respondents had the overall best view of cellphones, which 69% claimed were a change for the better. Sixty-five percent said the same of both e-mail and the Internet.
Other, more advanced handheld devices, such as BlackBerrys and iPhones, were also relatively popular, though one-quarter of respondents thought they were a change for the worse. Unsurprisingly, younger adults were more likely to be positive about the rise of smartphones, while users over 65 were more evenly split.
Online shopping was slightly less likely to be seen as a good development, at 54% of total…
(Read the rest of this article at the following article source link for the full story)
Your content might be too rich, and it might take too long to download
Where an analytics tool will know whether a particular tag loaded, a "sniffer" will know many more details about the situation
Armed with load time data, your next task is to break the news to everyone on your web team
It’s like the Swiffer commercial, where an old sponge-mop is outside a window, peeking in at a housewife who has moved on to better mops, while "Love Stinks" plays in the background. The old mop is trying to win her back, even going so far as to hire a Mariachi band to court its perfidious ex-partner.
In this case, you’re the sponge-mop.
We’re talking about site-abandonment, and especially early abandonment — the kind that leaves you feeling like a toddler dropped off at a nunnery, and you never know why, though you spend your life trying to find out.
Digital marketers, especially those who rely on…
(Read the rest of this article at the following article source link for the full story)
Put your site and your marketing efforts to the test.
So you’ve had 2,567 visitors this month and only two sales online.What’s going on?You’re doing SEO, PPC, and other offline marketing tactics.Your results should be more, right?Yes.They should be more.So, let’s take a look at what might be causing this slump of proportion of sales per visitor.
Back to the basics.Whether or not your site is booming or dragging, do you know who your customers are? Are you targeting the right audience?In the past couple of years, buyer’s behavior has really shifted.They have more control then ever, more information thanks to the internet, and are much more cost conscience because of the recession.So take an immediate look at your buyer from the last year and also look at their buying behavior and cycle.What’s the sex, age, average income?Where do they live?When…
(Read the rest of this article at the following article source link for the full story)
It’s been a busy end to the year and the momentum is rocking into the New Year. We’d like to take the time and send out a big Thank You to all of current customers that made 2009 such a success and look forward to working with you in 2010.
Here’s some things we’ve worked on in December, 2009:
AeroFlow Healthcare is the a provider of home respiratory and mobility equipment. They came to ICND to help them update their website’s look and feel and promote their products online. ICND created a newly designed website that broke down their target audiences and allowed them to view information pertaining to their needs.
In addition, ICND is developing an online Sleep Apnea survey and starting a search engine optimization campaign Spring of 2010.
New Website Launched: Baxley & Smithwick
Baxley & Smithwick Attorney’s at Law selected ICND to design them a website to allow them to have an online…
(Read the rest of this article at the following article source link for the full story)
In December, 100,000 brick and mortar businesses in 5,000 cities who had claimed their Local Business Listings got snail mail from Google in the form of Favorite Place stickers, with instructions to put them in their windows and use them to promote their business.
Included on each sticker is a bar code that some smart phone users can scan to pull up Local Business Listing information, including coupons, on their phones. Outwardly, this appears to be just another bribe that Maps is offering to get businesses to claim their listings. In reality, Google could be testing any number of things relating to smart phone use, mobile search and local businesses. It’s worth noting here that Google encouraged Local Listing Ad advertisers to link their ads to their Place Pages instead of to their websites because the Place Pages render well on small screens and contain all of the information a mobile…
(Read the rest of this article at the following article source link for the full story)
Bing released an enhanced page preview feature during November with a different interface and more focus on structured previews. For example a search for Carbon Credits is shown below, when you hover your mouse pointer over the search result an arrow pointing to the right in a gray box shows up, moving your mouse pointer over the arrow itself pops open a layer with a preview of text on the page.
In some situations, like the result from Wikipedia above, a site search box is also shown. We’ve observed many different variations in what the Bing preview will display. They all typically show some text content, but may also feature a list of popular and/or deep links on the site, site contact information, they may even show pictures if it’s a Facebook page.
Some of this information can be useful to know, for example popular links show what Bing/MSN have tracked to be popular pages users view after landing on the page. We have to assume they are getting that data from the MSN…
(Read the rest of this article at the following article source link for the full story)
Is it Holiday Greed or a User Interface Improvement? Yahoo’s November 24th update to their Search Assist drop down features new smart search links that signal an even greater push to drive traffic to their own properties than before. With this new change, when you type in a keyword like mail, Yahoo takes the opportunity to intercept the traffic and drive it to one of their pages as shown in the example below.
For queries like NASDAQ stock symbols, the drop down even displays current stock prices right in the drop down. So far this feature is not in use on the Yahoo.com home page, but it is showing up at other subsections of their portal such as Yahoo News and Weather. While it might be a nice traffic builder for Yahoo Properties, it certainly is a heavily biased feature that interrupts search before the user even gets to the search engine.
Can you imagine the impact something like this would have if every time you went to the Google home page and started to type in a query, a…
(Read the rest of this article at the following article source link for the full story)
Do you own a local business or are you responsible for promoting one? Google has recently upgraded their coupon center for local businesses, but more importantly, you can now get these coupons to show on mobile devices. Now admittedly it may seem a little strange at first to walk into a store and show them a coupon on your phone, but this is still a great way to get business for your local clients.
For example, let’s say you’re visiting NYC for the holidays and you have a terrible craving for their Brooklyn style pizza. So, you punch up Brooklyn style pizza on your 3G phone and up pops 10 different ones, but yours has a coupon for buy one large get one free. This is how you can beat out the local competition for you or your client. Simply login to your Local Business Centeraccount and then click the Coupons tab and then Add new coupon.
Then fill out the form.
This will allow your ads to appear for both print and mobile, and that’s it! Say goodbye to the local…
(Read the rest of this article at the following article source link for the full story)
Subscribe
