I was fortunate enough to spend some time working under the tutelage of one of the greatest sales closers on the face of the planet, Jim Callahan from Signtronix. It was fascinating to sit on the sidelines and watch Jim give a sales presentation; the potential client transfixed as if under the influence of some unseen ether. More often than not the recipient of a Callahan sales interview would become “happily involved” at the end, paying the deposit and signing the purchase agreement. I would laugh that the prospect, “just about broke his arm reaching for his wallet!”

You have to offer a great product, and a reasonable price point for sure, but those two elements are no guarantee of a sale. Jim used to say that to get to the money, “your presentation has to be more interesting than two Nuns in a knife fight!” If you hope to get to the point of purchase, you must provide an engaging presentation. This is true even if your communication vehicle is a website.

Here is a list of web elements to sharpen the blade of your website.

Video - The home page and key sections should offer easy access to video. Video should play on the page, not in a pop-up. Here is a good example - www.cabovillas.com - I also like the corner peel to grab attention.

Character Video – This is a targeted sales message that leaps off the page to greet a visitor. Ask Chris or Dave how to integrate this into your PPC landing pages, example - www.netrafic.com

Graphics, Flash, Photos – Professionally designed and descriptive graphical elements will keep your audience engaged. The Whistler / Blackcomb site is a great example - www.whistlerblackcomb.com

Great Content – Content is the cornerstone (still!) of your search engine optimization effort. In addition, people will dig in and start reading once you have their attention.

Clear Navigation – Confusing or hard to locate navigation causes visitors to abandon your website without ever finding the good stuff. The navigational element should be one of the first considerations when considering a design.

Concise Conversion and Contact Method – It is critical that your visitors can initiate contact from every page on the website. Not everyone wants to fill out a form – so alternate email methods, phone numbers, click to chat, and information downloads should all be available if applicable. Easy “click to bookmark” and “send to a friend” social elements are effective.

You don’t have to completely redesign your site to include most of these element. Its possible to add these items on the fly as budget and development allow. Unlike other web elements, these items can always be converted for use in your next website. Good luck with the fight, or as Jim would say, “Good Skills!”

Tags: flash, navigation, nuns, Video

Website owners have received the ability to customize the way their listings appear in the search engine results. In the past the only variables you were able to control were the title tag and the meta description. Hold on to your hat folks, Google has just introduced Structured Data Mark Up.

Marking up structured data allows you to define review ratings, product images, prices, business addresses, professional titles and more. The data is displayed using two standards; microformats and RDFa formats.

The new format is starting to appear in Google search results, primarily for restaurant listings. Sites such as Yelp quickly embraced the new display options.

EXAMPLE:

Sites that offer up directory and review results have the most obvious applications. But, like all other optimization options, crafty web designers and SEO’s will find unique and interesting ways of implementing these tools.

For a complete overview of this new twist visit the Google Marking Up Structured Data Page

Tags: Google, mark up

Google Search has added a set of tools to the search results pages, called Search Options. The Options tab is located just below the search term entry box. Clicking the options opens a panel of filters that lets the searcher drill down by media type, index time, results type, timeline and my favorite, the Wonder Wheel.

The Wonder Wheel tab opens your search in a graphical flash animation that offers up closely related search terms. Clicking on these related terms expands and defines your search visually, opening new wheels and spokes. Wacky Search! Check it out, watch the video!

Tags: Google, search optons

Twitter has become the hottest trend in Internet Marketing over the past several months and here at RightNow Communications we have spent hours studying its patterns and testing how the medium could help our client base.

I have found that for a singular business in one particular location, Twitter is probably not the best use of resources. The exception to this would be, of course, businesses whose marketing is so dependent on the internet, like travel and leisure products, whose traditional marketing channels have been forever changed by the internet. Certainly, manufacturers have already proven its power to connect with customers.

But for a business that serves multiple locations spread around the world this could be a very effective means of “value added” Internet marketing. It will drive targeted traffic to your site because we “tweet” for you on a consistent measured basis, it means we send out multiple micro marketing messages in a single day, dozens a week, perhaps hundreds a month, each targeted at specific product pages on your site. In your Google analytics they will show up as referrals from Twitter. You can have us concentrate on specific products or we will choose randomly.

There are three trackable tasks involved in building an effective Twitter Presence

1) Develop “followers” - the audience of people interested in what we have to say. These include people considering what you offer and perhaps just as important, people, like niche market writers and bloggers who perpetuate our messaging through the culture of the medium. If you have no “followers” you are basically shouting out on a street corner to anybody passing by. So developing a good audience is just as important as what you say to them. Our intention is to build a quality following audience for you that can be measured from month to month.

2) Daily “Twitter Stream” posting. We have found it is effective to post “tweets” throughout the day. In a perfect world about 1 every other hour from 8am to 10pm - or about 6-8 tweets a day. In many cases that would mean messaging about your business and the products, services and customers you represent.

3) Answering Questions and Customer Service. Many businesses use Twitter as a customer service portal where they can answer questions from customers and prospects as well as handle customer service issues in an expedient manner. When it comes to a complaint or a suggestion, I can have that on the desk of the right person at your business in short order, thusly taking care of a delicate situation professionally. It has been documented that this aspect can be very powerful for businesses. This reputation management aspect is a bit harder to track as some customer service communication is taken off of Twitter and so raw data becomes skewed. But the system does track number of CS oriented messages are received and sent each month.

There is no long term contract to get started. We charge a monthly flat fee to do all of the above for you:

Build an audience

Create a daily Twitter Stream

Answer questions and pass along customer service queries to your office or the provider office in question for swift response

Monthly detailed reporting

Watch Your Brand Name and Market Segment Keywords

In today’s business market, Twitter provides yet another means of getting people to your site through outreach. What I like most about it is only people interested in specific offers we tweet actually click to visit the very specific pages containing the offer on your site. An extremely powerful targeted means of marketing niche products like yours.

As we develop this effort we will even be able to reach out to your customers to ask them what products of theirs they would like us to push. Bolstering soft periods and filling up specific times as the opportunity presents itself, ie. Last minute specials, etc

We hope you can take advantage of this while it is still so new! We are in front of the pack with this once again. The fun thing about Twitter is it can be collaborative as well. If you have staff that have time to contribute we can teach them how with highly specialized monkey see, monkey do methodology!

Web Page: Social Media Marketing

Posted by Chris Tucker

Tags: SMM, social media marketing, twitter

A long time ago, (1991) in a far off place, (here, then) the internet was played out on BBS boards and travel agency offices in a DOS world. They really didn’t know much about each other, but there they were, none the less; seeds of today’s internet. On one hand, the airlines were delivering their product to consumers through the travel agents. On the other hand, a community of like minded citizens was forming for every kind of interest with anybody who could get their TRS80 hooked up to a telephone line.

Somebody came up with the bright idea to create WWW and soon thereafter http. As the phenomenon gathered momentum, the folks from the BBS world bemoaned the encroaching commercial onslaught on their beloved communication tool and, well, travel agents… are hard to come by now and treated as a nuisance by the airlines today.

I don’t need to tell you what went on between then and now, because you’ve hopefully been here for this part of the story! So, lets fast forward through trillions of dollars of online commerce and a googol worth of forum posts to find yourself at the doorstep of the end of the first full decade of the internet. Whew!

For those purists that thought that communication and collaboration would take a back seat to finding a size 6 pair of red shoes…how wrong you were! Today we can join a community of red shoe wearers and the size 6 group will tell you which ones will work out best for you. We didn’t let the wheels of commerce get in our way of collaborating! Instead, as humans, we found a way to micro niche the heck out of every facet of life.

So, I ask you this. If you are a business in today’s’ hyper-informed world, are you in on the conversation? You might think you are. But it can’t hurt to get a check up! Here is what it takes:

Web Site - Seems simple enough. But do you have a site that fits the needs of your customer? Is your information and pricing easy to find. Is it easy to get my questions answered? It better be because I’m in a hurry and those that make it “plain as day” win.

SEO - Have you had your site optimized so that it can be found on the search engines? Do you allocate some effort each month to grow that asset? Some have and some haven’t - and - some haven’t done it right. If all sites were optimized, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out of a job. We could also throw a subset of PPC and media buys in here. These tactics are all designed to attract people to your offer.

After you have these two basics down you are ready to get into the meat of today’s marketing. I call it “the conversation”.

Blog - Step one is blogging. This is good for so many reasons that have to do with the two basics above. But more importantly, it enters you into the conversation going on out there (or is that here?). You become a voice about what interests you. In time, you may even become recognized as an “expert” which can be worth some hefty bonus points.

Social Media - One of the latest acronyms to know, hands down, is SMM. Social Media Marketing is the art of conversing and collaborating with an agenda. After all, everyone has an agenda. So, why not use yours to grow your business? Beware, though; when you start conversing dynamically in the social world it’s very easy to shoot ones foot. Social Media Marketing is also the fine art of listening. It is not about shouting that you have the best red shoes. That is for other people to decide. Your job is to provide information, instruction and a level of intelligent compassion when you start walking around the streets of Facebook, Twitter, Technorati and the gazillion of other large and small places where business can interact smartly with their customers and potential customers.

Many people will not engage in the conversation for fear of doing something stupid or looking bad. Still others will put it aside for lack of time. If you join either of these camps you lose the opportunity to be “in” on the conversation going on around you. The conversation is like a fresh garden in need of cultivation every morning. So get out there and “make it a great day!”

Tags: social media marketing, travel, web 2.0

Howdy and Happy Easter!

I have received a crush of questions regarding Twitter this week. Here is the straight tweet, and an Easter offer.

First The Offer – Let us create your Twitter Channel for Free!

Q:Why do I need a Twitter Channel?
A: Branding - Register you Brand before someone else does.

Q: When do I need to Twitter?
A: You don’t, but we can help guide you if you choose to start tweeting.

Q: What is Twitter again?
A: It’s instant messaging on steroids. You send & receive text messages via the web to groups that you choose, or choose you!

Q: How do I get going with Twitter?
A: Call or Email us and we will take care of it for you – No Charge!

Q: Who are you going to charge for this?
A: Nobody – We are picking up the slack for the Easter Bunny.

Whats included in this Easter Basket:

This offer applies to past and present clients of RightNow Communications. We will register your Twitter account, create a custom background with your logo, add your photo, and populate your profile details.

Q: Really?
A: Yea, really – don’t you believe in the Easter Bunny?

Contact Us Via Email - tweet@netrafic.com
(this email address expires on May 1)

Tags: Social Marketing, twitter