Your Website is Your Marketing Hub

Your company website is now arguably the most important piece of marketing material you have. If you hand a prospective customer a business card or flyer, chances are they will check out your website before visiting your shop, store or professional office. For businesses that don’t sell online, a good website is a place that helps drive phone calls, email contacts and foot traffic.

Key Components to Website Success

There are a number of things that websites need to help your business succeed.

1. Search Engine Friendly – If you want to get found, the site must be designed with good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques and the ability to make changes to more than just the page content.
2. Attractive Design – If your website looks professional, customers will gain trust in your services.
3. User Friendly – The website should be easy to navigate and well organized so visitors can find the information you are providing.
4. Mobile Friendly – More and more Internet users are viewing your site on their smart phones or tablets. Components of mobile friendly include avoiding the use of Adobe Flash (Which doesn’t work on Apple mobile devices) and responsive design (the site reorganizes content for display on different screen sizes. This blog/portfolio portion of our site uses responsive design) or a mobile site.
5. Provide an infrastructure to collect leads – You must have a way to track website visitors, create landing pages for Google AdWords or other Internet advertising, create forms to collect data, push out confirmation emails, download sales content (flyers, brochures, white papers or other files), and much more.

Why free and low-cost site builder tools fail

1. Not Search Engine Friendly – This is probably the biggest failing of free and low-cost websites. They typically are not indexed well by search engines or have things built into them that ruin the chances of your company being found. We once reworked a site for a client that had used a template set up for another type of business. The template included meta-data that sent signals to search engines it was really a different kind of business. It is never good to send confusing signals. Many builder tools won’t let you make other important changes, like those to page titles, meta-descriptions, etc. Even if they do allow it, most people who set them up don’t know how to make these changes or what to change them to for good Search Engine Optimization.
2. Non-Professional Design – Many site builders provide some basic design, but then the user has to fill in the blank canvas of the screen. This often leads to poor quality in the overall look of the pages. Additionally, it can often lead to inconsistent page design. We’ve seen sites where all the pages have different background colors for no obvious reason. The majority of these sites also lack attention to detail in things like font choices and spacing.
3. Lack of data and lead production – The majority of self-builder sites we’ve seen don’t include a lot of functionality you might want, like sending a new prospect a thank you email after they fill out a form on your website. Many won’t even provide you with a form to collect data. Often there might be problems with adding an analytics package to your website, creating a site map for search engines to look at, or a variety of other back-end details that you can do with regular hosted website, but not with one built by a builder tool.
4. Few are Mobile Friendly – This might be starting to change, but the vast majority of sites built with builder tools have no mobile friendly aspects to them.
5. No Scalability – Builder sites are typically designed for small websites, so if you want to keep adding content to your site over a number of years, they are not a good fit.

Can You Afford Not to Have a Professional Website?

The key reason companies use build-it-yourself websites is that it fits their budget. Free or just a few dollars a month. However, the real question is can your business afford to not be found in search engines, give those customers that find you a poor experience and go without collecting important leads. Investment in one of your key marketing tools will pay off for years into the future.

The post Why Have a Professional Website Designed and Not Use A Builder Tool? appeared first on The Mayoros Agency Advertising Blog.

The Good

Tide’s excellent football related commercial, combined football, humor and a touch of reality.

Audi’s Prom commercial which ended in an unexpected way.

Budweiser’s one hit…among many misses during the game.

and the cinematic homage to farm life for Chrysler Group’s Dodge Ram pickup trucks.

The Really Repulsive

Only one commercial belongs in this category. Go Daddy’s “Perfect Match” commercial. If you missed it, consider yourself lucky. Find it if you must at USA Today, but its so repulsive, we won’t be posting it here.

The post Super Bowl Ads: The Good, The Bad, The Really Repulsive appeared first on The Mayoros Agency Advertising Blog.

It’s not difficult to spot Flash on websites that use it extensively because when you enter the website it may give you a loading screen. Finding Flash being used in smaller doses, such as for a slide show, might take more than a basic visit to your website…but it won’t be that difficult.

In any web browser, there is an option to view the source code for the web page your on. This might be under a view menu, tools menu or the like. In Google Chrome, it is under developer tools in the View menu. For Safari, you have to open preferences and go to the “advanced” tab, then enable the develop menu. From the develop menu, you can view source. In Firefox you can find this under Tools, then Web Developer. In Internet Explorer, you can find this under the view menu, or in developer tools.

Once you’ve got the source code open (not exactly a pretty site) you can run a search on the page for .swf, which is the extension for Flash files. If you find some results, you’ve got Flash content.

Alternatively, you could load your site on an iPad and look for gray boxes where your photos or other content should be.

The post How to Find Flash on Your Website appeared first on The Mayoros Agency Advertising Blog.

1. Slow loading speed
2. Poor indexing on search engines
3. Inability to create bookmarks for interior pages
4. Accidentally leaving the website by hitting the back button
5. There are alternatives which work better and don’t require as specialized of a programmer saving you money

Best Reason: A Large Number of Potential Customers Won’t Be Able to View Your Content

The best reason now to dump Flash is the growth of Apple products in the marketplace. A recent eMarketer study predicts that by the end of 2012, 53 million Americans (that’s 1 in 6) will own iPads, none of which display Flash. In addition, eMarketer expects iPad ownership to double by 2015, when nearly one-in-three American’s will own an iPad. Not to mention the 30 million iPhones and a lessor number of iPod Touch’s that won’t display Flash.

It’s time to move out of the early 2000′s and invest in updating your website with HTML5 or javascript techniques that provide a great experience for your customers.

Need help finding out if there is Flash on your website – check out our related article “How to Find Flash On Your Website”

The post The Best Reason To Replace Flash programming on Your Website appeared first on The Mayoros Agency Advertising Blog.

• 47% of users reported they used the Internet above any other source to find information about local businesses, according to The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and Internet & American Life Project.
• There are numerous reports and surveys that suggest for many business types, phone book advertising is no longer providing a large volume of leads.
• Internet advertising is more flexible and can potentially outperform phone book advertising if done correctly.

Here is some quick math to think about.

How much are you paying per lead?

If you are paying $1,000 per month for a larger phone book ad and getting only 10 calls per month, you are paying $100 per lead. Even very competitive search engine pay-per-click costs don’t approach $100/click. Many local search engine campaigns average less than $5/lead. If your cost per lead in the phone book is reasonable, then keep it, even if it isn’t generating lots of leads. If not, consider cutting back on your phone book ad costs.

Options for changing your Phone Book Advertising Plan.

1. Cut back the size of your ad for a year and see if it makes a difference in lead generation. Don’t worry about losing your position in the book. If your competitors are paying attention they’ll be reaching the same conclusions you do, if they haven’t already.
2. Go from full color to spot color or no color. You can calculate whether this has the potential to pay off by re-calculating your cost/lead if the number of leads you get stays the same as last year, or declines a bit.
3. Dump the display ad entirely. Try a bigger “box” listings in the directory, which grabs attention in a different way than display ads.

How to spend the savings?

We suggest you take any savings from cutting back your phone book ad and roll it directly into Internet advertising. Search engine ads will help bring in those customers that you’ve been missing. Setting up your own campaign and managing it requires a lot more work than signing a new contract with the phone directory company, but you don’t have to do it yourself. Hiring a professional manager handle your Internet advertising campaign will make it simple and improve your results.

The post Should I keep my Phone Book Ad? appeared first on The Mayoros Agency Advertising Blog.

Controversy is nothing new to Super Bowl spots, but usually its because of some type of over-the-top stunt involving women. This time it is political. Judge for yourself whether there is a political message behind the Chrysler “Halftime in America” ad.

Missed a commercial everyone else is talking about at work? You can find them a little easier thanks to AdAge.

The post Super Bowl Ad Recap 2012 appeared first on The Mayoros Agency Advertising Blog.

• Newcomers to the Super Bowl ad picture this year: Century 21, Dannon and Relativity Media (a movie studio).
• Last year’s VW commercial with the Star Wars theme was the most-watched Super Bowl, and for that matter, ad viewed on YouTube in 2011.
• Ad previews are becoming more popular with a number of brands showing off versions of their Super Bowl spots on their websites or Facebook pages.
• Kia is going a step farther in previewing its commercial. The car maker is showcasing its ad on the silver screen in 18,000 theaters across the country this week.

The post More Super Bowl Ad Preview 2012 appeared first on The Mayoros Agency Advertising Blog.

• Nielsen reports that prices for Super Bowl ads are up 13% to 29% from a year ago and first quarter spots went for a premium of about $100,000 since more people remember/watch the ads early in the contest.
• Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? Seems Farris is back (if not in name) in Honda’s new commercial.
• The chimps are back for CareerBuilder
  from CareerBuilder For Employers on Vimeo.
• This year’s game could really go to the dogs.
  

Watch for more before the big game!

The post Super Bowl Ads 2012 appeared first on The Mayoros Agency Advertising Blog.

The study only surveyed college students and under 30 workers, so there is a lack of perspective of what life was like without Internet access or mobile phones.

The survey also shows how important digital connectedness is to those under 30. More than two of five college students (40%) and young employees (45%) said they would accept a lower-paying job that had more flexibility with regard to device choice, social media access, and mobility than a higher-paying job with less flexibility. Take less money to read Facebook posts and Tweets all day?

Is your business ready reaching out to this group of consumers in a way they care about?

The post More Than Half Say There’s No Life Without Internet appeared first on The Mayoros Agency Advertising Blog.

A side note here. Our pick as one of the best commercials during the 2011 SuperBowl was Chrysler’s “Born of Fire” 2-minute mini-film commercial. It just won an Emmy Award and has picked up a number of other awards since it first aired last year.

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