Brochureware is a term coined in the early web era that referred to static webpages that are produced by taking a brands printed brochure and repurposing it online. Put simply, its a digital version of a company’s brochure. We’ve come a long way since then with content management systems, ecommerce, responsive design and advanced web design with amazing functionality. So, why is it that professional organizations are still requesting brochureware? This is the question we aim to answer in this weeks podcast!

The post Brochureware Websites: The Pros & Cons appeared first on Trademark Productions.

Crowd funding, as its name implies, is a funding method by which a large group of people make individual monetary donations to invest in a cause, business model or project they wish to see successful. In recent years, crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe, KickStarter and IndieGoGo have helped to catapult the popular donation-based business model. As of April 2015, the number of launched projects on Kickstarter amounted to 222,533, with a success rate of 38.46 percent.

Whether you are a fan of crowdfunding projects or not, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a handful of products that were the result of one. Artists, humanitarians, entrepreneurs, engineers, and more have found large success from crowdfunding. But, how? What is it that makes a collection of people want to invest in your idea? Fortunately for you, we know the answer to that question.

Everything you need to know to get funded:

1. Develop Your Story

You’d be surprised by what people are willing to invest in with the right messaging behind it. We’ve watched a number of- lets just say, less than impressive projects get funded just because they had a compelling story or humorous messaging. We’ve even funded some ourselves. These projects reiterated the importance of good messaging, with fun videos and an enthusiastic personality you can even get potato salad funded …

2. Produce a Great Video

Once you’ve nailed down the messaging of your product, the second most important thing is creating an impressive video to go along with it. Videos give visitors a better idea of the project, the people behind it and why it’s important. An amateur video just isn’t going to cut it anymore. Your video is your pitch, so make it a good one. Think of your video pitch as a mini commercial, create an experience, tell a story and convey your key messages clearly.

3. Create a Marketing Plan

Just because you are on the crowdfunding platform doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get noticed. Make sure you have a plan in place before and after you launch your crowdfunding campaign. If you are below your goal how are you going to entice people to invest more? If you aren’t getting the intended response, what is your plan? If you are funded well over what you anticipated, will you be able to meet demand? Make a list of “what if” scenarios and work these into your marketing plan.

4. Communicate Often

Whether you’ve reached your monetary goals or not, communicate with your audience! The work isn’t over just because you’ve put your project out there. Matter of fact it’s just the opposite, the real work begins after the campaign has ended to ensure everyone gets what they’ve been promised. To keep your backers and potential backers interested it is important to keep them in the loop. People want to invest in you, they want to see their donation thrive, its up to you to prove to them that what they’ve invested in is worth it.

Lastly, I leave you with this … a glimpse into some projects we’ve funded!

• Spark Notebook
• StorkStand
• WUF
• Cards Against Humanity

The post Crowdfunding: How to be Successful appeared first on Trademark Productions.

Mobile Consumer Behavior

Everyone does it. You’re hungry for Greek, but you’re on the go and cooking is not an option. So, you pull out your smart phone and start searching for Greek food nearest you. Whether you are searching for a local restaurant, an oil change or a coffee shop, if those nearby businesses aren’t optimized for local search, it’s as if they don’t exist

Businesses have a lot to gain by beefing up their geolocation based mobile strategies- and even more to lose if left neglected.

A study on mobile search behavior found:

• 94 percent of smartphone users search for location info
• 51 percent visited a store within a day, compared to only 34% of tablet/computer searches
• 48 percent called a store
• 29 percent made a visit

Brands no longer have to rely on “foot traffic” to get noticed. Local searchers are ready to act upon their searches and have proven to do so. If you’re a local business owner and have yet to fully embrace the mobile consumer, you may want to start.

Essential to Your Mobile Search Strategy:

1. Mobile friendly website

A mobile optimized site is the key component to a successful mobile search strategy. It’s so important in fact, that Google decided to make it a ranking factor. If your site is not mobile friendly, Google will penalize you and your site will inevitably drop in search engine rankings. Read more about that here.

2. Local SEO

A local SEO strategy is the only way to ensure your potential customers are able to find you when performing a mobile search. This involves optimizing your website with specific location-based keywords and keyword phrases.

3. Web Business Listings

In an ideal world, you’d want to claim as many local listings as you can. However, the three most important listings are Google+, Yelp and Bing Local. Both Google and Bing have allocated the top of their search results to local listings when the query has local intent. As such, it is necessary to not only claim these listings, but also optimize them.

4. Optimize Social for Local

Believe it or not, social is an important piece to the puzzle as well. Consumers are using social on their mobile phones more than their desktops. A term coined “SoLoMo” meaning, social, local and mobile, emphasized the importance of the three and how they work together to impact consumer buying behavior. An active social page not only helps you get noticed, it improves recognition and credibility.

In order to take advantage of the mobile local trend, you must (at a minimum) implement the above strategies. With a full-proof local search strategy in place, users will be able to easily find your business.

The post Mobile: Location Based Marketing appeared first on Trademark Productions.

Google, in all of their infinite wisdom, provides website owners and online marketers with all (okay, a lot) of the information needed for online business success. There are abundant free tools provided by Google as part of this effort, but none more important than Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.

Unfortunately, we find far too many new clients are using Google Analytics, but not Google Webmaster Tools. Or even worse, businesses aren’t utilizing either. Having both, and having them both setup correctly, is essential to the success of both your website and marketing efforts.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is a free tool from Google that allows businesses to monitor the performance of their website from a marketing and traffic perspective. This is an essential part of any online business or website as it allows business owners to understand website performance, user behavior, the ROI of ongoing marketing efforts and a thousand other pieces of key data. Analytics is a marketing professionals dream!

Google Analytics generates detailed stats about a website’s traffic, technologies used, site speed, traffic sources, conversions and sales. It’s possible to drill down into the geo-specific location, demographics and traffic sources of a websites visitors. All great stuff, clearly!

In leu of Google Analytics, there are several server-side analytics software suites that many businesses use instead, such as AwStats. It’s important to understand that this server-side analytics program provides some data on what files are accessed, site search terms, and other server, or website specific performance items, but it is not the same (not even close) to Google Analytics.

Google Analytics should be installed on a business website from the moment it’s launched live to the public. Be sure to also tie in event tracking on important calls to action on your website and goal conversion tracking too. If you are running an ecommerce site, Google Adwords campaigns or have Google Webmaster Tools setup, Please! For the love of Bob! Tie everything together correctly so that you have full-picture data on your website’s performance.

Implementation of the basic Google Analytics snippet takes about 15 minutes, but a little extra time should be used to setup goal and e-commerce tracking as well. In total, this should only take a couple of hours based on your website’s setup and what you need to track.

Google Webmaster Tools

On the flip side of the coin, there is Google Webmaster Tools (WMT), which is another free tool from Google, but allows performance monitoring of a website from the technical side, as opposed to the marketing side. Webmaster Tools will tell you important information like:

• How often does Google crawl the website?
• How many of our pages are indexed? How many are not?
• Are there any technical issues with the site? (On-page SEO issues, broken links, etc.)
• Are there any issues with Google crawling the site?
• What search queries are generating traffic and what is the average position?
• Who links to the site? How are they linking?
• Has the site been penalized, or is there another reason the site just “disappeared” from Google?

Setting up Webmaster Tools is easy and Google provides you with at least a few different ways to verify that you own the website and want to start to gather data on it. These verification methods include uploading a file to your website, putting a small piece of code in the html template, verifying through Google Analytics, or through the domain registrar.

Once an account has been created and verified, the next step is to upload a sitemap to WMT with all pertinent website pages. This provides some initial information about the website’s pages to Google, their importance and how often the webpages are updated. This should be done immediately (as soon as it launches) and updated regularly as the website changes.

The “Fetch as Google” feature is pretty cool and will help jump start a crawl in many cases too. Whenever we launch a new website at TM, or an important section of a website, we use this feature to start the crawling and indexation process. Of course, Google is smart enough to figure all of this out on their own, but a little help never hurt.

Webmaster Tools also provides the ability to notify Google of many website changes, including a change of address (if a website has been moved to another domain), the correction of issues and many more.

If someone ever suspects an issue with their site or Google penalty, Analytics and WMT are the first things we’ll ask for. Google is usually pretty good at informing individuals what is good or bad with a website- if that individual knows how to read the data provided.

All in all, the best tip we could give: Do the smart thing! Protect your investment (good websites aren’t cheap) and help your web developers have the information they need to succeed. Of course, if your website pros don’t have both Analytics and Webmaster Tools setup, it might be (is) a sign that you should be looking for a new internet marketing team.

I still need help!

For more information about Google Analytics, please visit: http://www.google.com/analytics/ or our team can always help with this too. You can reach our Analytics experts by using our contact page or calling the phone number above.

To learn more about Google Webmaster Tools, please visit: https://www.google.com/webmasters/

Contact TM if you need help with any of the above, or have any questions. We’re happy to help!

The post Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools – Understanding the Basics appeared first on Trademark Productions.

Two years have passed since Marc Bogoff, founder of Stockyard, served his first dinner in Pontiac, MI. Since then, news of Stockyard’s cuisine has spread through Metro Detroit like wildfire. In a 2013 article, Deadline Detroit writer Lauren Davies stated, “Marc Bogoff might be the best chef you’ve never heard of.” Fast-forward to present day, and Bogoff is a giant in the Detroit culinary industry, his passion and artfulness apparent in every handcrafted dish. Having spent time under Art Smith in Chicago, Bogoff’s drive to nurture Stockyard in Detroit is simple: “I wanted to bring remarkable food back to the place I grew up.”

Stockyard’s Supper Club quickly became a popular concept in 2014; diverse, impeccably served meals hosted at varying urban locations. Each dinner treats guests to a carefully designed five-course meal with the menu decided only days in advance. “It simply how I prefer to work,” mused Bogoff “I’ll go to the market and pick the freshest ingredients- whatever inspires me, I’ll create.” In addition to an unknown menu, each event location is kept secret, shared only at time of purchase to those expected to be in attendance.

The natural progression of expansion became the now-famous, Stockyard food truck. Serving artisan sandwiches, Bogoff spent most of 2014 hitting “every event imaginable” without a set schedule. Events and food truck appearances were announced on Instagram, sometimes only as they were happening, which enriched the air of mystery surrounding Stockyard. When asked what most contributed to Stockyard’s success, Bogoff stated that partnering with like-minded businesses sharing the same drive and ambition, such as Shinola and James Rigato- has really helped build a community of support. “In May, we’ll be hosting a dinner and James (owner of The Root Restaurant in White Lake, MI) is going to be our sommelier.”

Photo's courtesy of Stockyard's Instagram: @stockyard_detroit

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