Marketing

One of our favorite platforms is website design. The internet is an interactive, 24/7, living and changing extension of your brand. Personally, almost every buying decision I make involves a web search for reviews, pricing, coupons or location. A business without a web presence is rarely considered an option.

Our small group can build your brand and a cohesive image from the ground up—carrying it through from print to website design—start to finish.

The sites designed by Serif Group consider the user experience and are easy to update. We put the tools in your hands to do that. No more nickel and dime billing to update a phone number, photo or calendar. Unless you’d prefer to avoid the hassle, of course. We maintain several client sites and social media campaigns.

There are tricks of the trade to get a website to appear high in rankings when people search the web. This is called SEO (search engine optimization). The Serif Group has these skills, and the efforts to optimize your website can be as simple or vast as your budget allows.

Sample website design

Check out some of the sites we’ve done both branding and website design for, and let us know in the comments what you think.

• Shaun Ring Photography
• Atchison Heller Construction Company
• Metaformers Enterprise Software Solutions
• East of Elm Real Estate

Ready to move forward? Give us a shout!

Tiger Woods responds to Fan’s video on youtube.

If there was ever a way to get your message out there efficiently and cost-effectively, viral is the way to go. the folks at EA Sports knew this and either contrived this whole experiment or were on their toes to respond the way they did.

Here are some other interesting links:

• Top 150 Marketing Blogs
• $3,000,000…the price for :30 on this year’s Super Bowl
• FTC gets rid of Robocalls

Social Media Jumpstart

With a background and a passion for graphic design, I often share in the joke with other designers that knowing how to use the software doesn’t make you a designer. Sometimes you can pass as a designer because you pleased the person who hired you, but your design may not have worked effectively.

What’s a designer to do? Nothing, really. All we can do is educate our clients and the public on the value of good, professional graphic design. Although your customers may not ask for it, they react to it. And if done with good commercial sense, your business will benefit from it.

When it comes to social media, many of the arguments are similar. Using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for business does make you a social media marketer—but it doesn’t necessarily make you an effective one. Knowing the tools will help you be an effective social media marketer.

And while knowing the tools is an important aspect of social media marketing, using good engagement practices and solid marketing principles will go much further than knowing how to upload a link to your Facebook page. Fortune 500 companies and small mom-and-pop corner stores alike are using these social platforms to reach new and existing prospects. But are they doing it effectively?

Sales Pitch

So I had to be going somewhere with this, right? Yes, I admit this is a sales pitch, but my pitch won’t be for everyone. After all, my personalized session for social media consulting is an on-site session—here in Lexington. For those reading this who aren’t willing to travel in for the on-site session, I encourage you to look for a marketing agency in your area that can help you navigate the tools of social media, and educate you on the best practices. Or, contact me and we can organize a Skype session.

And for those of you who live here or are coming to Lexington, Kentucky in the near future I hope you would consider scheduling a time I can advise you on using the social media tools effectively and introduce you to best practices. Find out more information about my social media jumpstart session.

A day or two after writing my previous post about the upload trick for a Facebook page, Facebook’s recently updated iPhone app’s newest feature gives page admins the ability to update from their iPhone and even post pictures. I had been investigating that problem for a few days and had no success finding any other blog or forum that had an answer.

I consider myself a novice blogger, a little too ADD to concentrate long enough to establish my point in writing. Combine my creative randomness with my perfectionist nature, and it’s nearly impossible to write. With practice, I can only get better.

Facebook pages are like nesting dolls. Everytime I think I figured it out, there is something new. My latest interests are polls, the new @ mentions in updates and SMS (texting) with Facebook.

SMS with Facebook

Did you know that someone on Facebook can become a fan of your page without internet access? I didn’t until I started investigating the page’s customization features. To become a fan of my company’s Facebook page just text ‘fan serifgroup’ to FBOOK (32665) – standard text rates apply, but the service via Facebook is free. Status updates from our ‘serifgroup’ page will then come to your phone as SMS messages. Of course you can always opt out of this feature, but you will still be a fan until you reply ‘unsub’ to FBOOK.

I find this extremely appealing for companies who want to capture a younger crowd who use text as a key communication platform. Build your fan base and nurture those fans into another channel whether it be email or an existing text campaign.

I noticed that you need to have activated the mobile feature on your Facebook preferences to have it reconcile who wants to ‘fan’ a page, but if someone is in the ‘texting’ target, they have probably already done this.

Polls

As a design and marketing firm, we like to do a little informal research on what people think about projects we’re working on. Since we have a handful of fans on our Serif Group Facebook page we thought we would ask their opinion. We looked into a few polling apps for our page and found two different apps that had what we wanted, but only if we could combine them. We want to be able to add a Poll tab or even a url link to a poll that has the ability to use images in the questions. The one we found has the ability to use images, but it is only available as a box in the boxes tab. The other one is limited to text only, but integrates well into a page. If I could develop a poll app that could combine the two, it would be a great tool for any fan page.

Facebook @ mentions

There has been a lot of talk about how Facebook has copied Twitter by using the @ feature to mention people. I don’t get it. Although Facebook did use the Twitter @ symbol, does Twitter own exclusive rights to that symbol? Didn’t email own that first? The most common element of the new feature is the ability to reference others and have it appear in their stream. Although this was an inevitable maturation of the product, I’m not convinced the Facebook developers got this idea from Twitter–but that’s just my opinion.

Seth Godin calls it interuption marketing and Steve Yastrow calls it ‘Brute Force Branding” Steve was a speaker this morning at the ExactTarget conference. He is the author of two books, the latest being “We. The Ideal Customer Relationship.”

Some thoughts from Steve Yastrow:
We get more than 5000 branding messages. How many actually work? Not many can cut through the clutter with brute force. Yastrow says that we need to use brand harmony-an overall picture that prospects experience from your brand, thus creating an image of your brand.

Most marketers think that they are the ones who brand the company. But it is the customer who brands the company. It is not what is said, but what is heard.

Yastrow says that the goal for marketers should be to create a customer relationship that is an ongoing conversation in which your customers never think of you without thinking of both of you. Not two. We.

More from the conference later.