This is what their website looked like before we started:

The areas we identified that were in need of correction were:

Overall Branding Consulting

Need for professional Logo Design

Need for Professional Business Cards

Need for a Professional Website Design that was easy to manage and properly search engine optimized by your favorite Atlanta SEO Company. ; )

So X8 Marketing went to work on the project and within 8 days had completely revamped not only their logo, but their business cards and brand new website as well. That was no typo. Yes, in 8 days we not only designed and delivered their logo, business cards and website, but had it fully operational with the client able to manage their own site from top to bottom.

Not only did we get their materials put together quickly, but they are now ranked #1 on Google for Atlanta Junk Removal which you can see right here on Google.

This is what the owner had to say about his experience with X8:

X8 did a wonderful job designing my website. I have gotten many compliments from my customers. My website is now number one on google and now beating the biggest competitor in my industry. I have noticed a higher call volume after my site was redesigned. I would recommend everybody that wants to outrank their competitors on search engines and people who also want a beautifully designed website!” – Cameron Zand, Advance Junk Removal

You can view their fully functional website here: Atlanta Junk Removal or take a look at the final product below:

So what about when your marketing needs to be redefined because your customer retention rates are dropping and your new business numbers are fading? Do you call your secretary to order more mailers?

As a business owner, you are going to face a lot of challenges and you will never have the time to do everything yourself. This is a lesson most of us are forced to learn within our first couple of years. This is why we surround ourselves with individuals who specialize in the different tasks we find valuable to our companies and none is more important than your marketing. Without fuel you have no fire.

Specialization is the key to maximization.

One of the biggest advantages of bringing in a marketing consultant is that they spend every day of their lives (the good ones) living and breathing consumer behavior. Your forte is in your trade, which is why you chose to be in it. Their forte is in theirs as well so it is generally a good idea to bring someone in who can help bring new ideas to the table that you may have never thought of. One of the most interesting things about hiring a consultant is that you will very likely have things pointed out to you that were right under your nose and you will most certainly end your first session with a “why didn’t I think of that” look on your face. It is very similar to taking a visit to the therapist, pointing out things you may have glanced over about your business but never really inspected. More importantly, these consultants have a large number of contacts in different media avenues which can save you a ton of money over having some advertising agency or salesman con you into spending too much on something that doesn’t work.

Getting the big picture.

It is quite easy for many business owners to get tied up in the day-to-day operations of their business and begin focusing on the specifications of their products and services instead of the benefits the customer receives. What begins to occur is that the owner can lose focus of what the consumer is really looking for. A perfect example is that a roofing company may become fixated on the technical aspects of their new shingle products but forget that what their consumers really have in mind is comfort, appearance, and lowering of utility expenses. Bringing in a marketing consultant can help to give you an outside and objective viewpoint that you may not be able to see from the everyday trenches.

Time is precious.

Can you afford to detract your time from day to day operations to take on another full time job of marketing your business? Remember, there is a big difference between working in your business and working on your business. Many of the tasks necessary may not even be incredibly difficult but they need an expert eye to coordinate. A marketing consultant can give proper direction over a fraction of the time it would take you to figure it out and simply take care of it themselves or advise one of your support personnel on what to do without wasting their time either. Resources are precious in business as you already know and there is no sense in wasting them.

Speaking of resources

How quickly can you effectively hire an actual marketing manager? More importantly, how much would that cost? The average salary of a marketing degree recipient straight out of college is typically $47,000 a year, the highest of all bachelor degree programs. I bet that $150 an hour for only a few hours a month with the consultant is starting to look a little more tasty now eh? Not to mention, a marketing consultant can get your project fired up and rolling within a matter of a couple of weeks which is much faster than you could even find and interview the proper candidates for a full time position, thus saving yet more time and money.

Put a ring on it.

Commitment is always a serious thing and when you talk about bringing on a full time employee for marketing or devoting yourself to it, you are taking on a serious commitment. Either way you are going to be spending time, resources, money and frustration on the project, yet it is necessary to continue growing your business. Or is it? The beauty of bringing on a consultant is that they can help you effectively, and in less time, but best of all… if you don’t like them, you can easily drop them without fear of losing tons of invested resources. Either they are good and you keep them, or they aren’t and you drop them without obligation.

The icing on the cake.

At the end of the day, every business owner spends their time weighing risk versus reward. The risk of bringing on a new employee or even worse, wasting a lot of your money on a campaign that fails, can sometimes be irrecoverable. What if you have a mishap and now no longer have funds to recover from the “oops” or worse yet, can’t afford any other marketing efforts? The best bet is to consider taking a look at a marketing consultant with a strong portfolio and a great sense of creativity to help put a fresh breath of life into your marketing campaign.

I hear these guys are strong Atlanta Marketing Consultants. ; )

2.     Credibility

3.     Usability

4.     Conversion

5.     Aesthetics

Now we all know that there are a lot of elements that go into an effective website. We are going to go over a few quick tips to help you better design your own website, or select a web designer that can adequately fulfill your needs to make your site a formidable business tool instead of a stagnant business card.

1.     Visibility – Your website needs to be easily found by search engines and potential customers. This means your domain selection is vital. Make it something easy to remember and communicate to other people when giving them your web address. Do your keyword research before beginning and think about possibly using those keywords in your site address. Make sure that you apply keywords in your meta descriptions, h1 and h2 tags, as well as your actual url names in order to effectively appear in search engines. There are many tricks that a professional can show you to best optimize these pieces for top Google rankings.

2.     Credibility – More importantly than getting new traffic to your website, is what they are going to see when they get there.  You need to make sure that your site has authentic and correct information, a professional and clean design, and certainly, NO TYPOS! That is the quickest way for a customer to see that you don’t pay attention to detail.

3.     Usability – Many people don’t think about this aspect when they get wrapped up in creating some beautiful website design but you must remember; there is a compromise between photo size and loading time. Be sure that when you are oohing and ahhing your audience that you are also taking into consideration how long it takes them to get there. People are less patient than ever and if your page is taking more than 5 seconds to load then you best believe they are getting their virtual fill at another internet pump.

4.     Conversion – One of the most overlooked aspects of a website. If you don’t already know what “above the fold” is then you can just about bet this paragraph is pointed at you. “Above the fold” is the term for the section of website real estate that people land on without scrolling or clicking anywhere. That means it is the first viewed section of your landing page without any movement. Type in your URL and don’t touch anything. That is what we are talking about and you better make sure that you see a strong call to action, a reason to use you, and an easy way to contact you all right there in that space or you can certainly bank on failure. The exceptions to this are specific strategies where you are attempting to get people to view a particular page, or an instance such as a photographer where design and aesthetics are your selling points and therefore trump the typical call to action on the front page.

5.     Aesthetics – Last but certainly not least, don’t forget about the aesthetics of your website. Some people say don’t judge a book by its cover but webpages are most certainly the largest exception. Your ability to properly place yourself in the mind of a consumer is often almost totally dependent upon what they see when they get to your site. Make sure that any photographs are professionally taken and be sure to “clean around the edges” of any graphics or images. Remember, a potential customer will pass judgment on you within the first 15 seconds so whether you think it’s fair or not… you better make it look good.

So whether you are tackling your own website design and search engine optimization or selecting a professional web designer to do it for you, make sure you ask yourself and them these questions before diving in. Remember, when you aren’t talking to potential customers, your website is… what is yours saying?

With apologies to an apparel company FUBU whose name stands for For Us By Us, it’s almost as if Google could be rebranded “FHBH” thanks to its ranking practices relating to E-marketing links. Links are the most important E-marketing elements of search engine optimization because SEO lead Danny Dover says that Google assumes they are created by humans for humans.

1. Quality content. Dover says that Google really likes the E-marketing idea of links because, humans create them generally; which means they’re—in theory—harder to manipulate. And Google sees links to a given website as votes. So something like The New York Times is going to get a lot of votes, a lot of links, because it has valuable content that real human beings are reading and linking to. The same thing goes for any site. And the place where it gets tricky is, once a site gets a lot of links, links that it passes out are worth more than your average blog post. A link from the Times is going to be much more helpful for you than a link from Joe Schmoe’s blog.”

2. Inbound links are more important than outbound links. So it’s critical to determine if incoming links come from quality E-marketing sites.

Briggs says that Google developed the ‘nofollow’ attribute as a way to combat spam. “Adding this attribute tells Google not to follow a link. A link with the ‘nofollow’ attribute is meant not to pass PageRank value. Use ‘nofollow’ when linking to untrusted content, paid links and links added by user-generated content.” Here is one post of Top 100 Forums With DoFollow Signatures, which can help your E-marketing effectively.

Briggs also pointed to these scholarly papers on combating “web spam” for background regarding untrusted content and influencing trust.

3. Relevant content. “Once you know the needs and wants of your customers, deliver it to them via rich content; whether that be information, widgets, videos, blog posts, flow charts, etc.,” say Beatty and Gullaksen. Then ensure that the portable E-marketing content contains optimized links back to the company site. Also, they say, syndicate the content the company creates to the “appropriate social communities, blogs, power users of social networks, customers, etc.,” as well as having it on the corporate site.

4. Use outbound links to make friends, gain attention, influence trust and gain some ranking benefit. This work can result in later links to the company site, he says. One caution is that don’t chase the ‘celebrity’ sites. Target the mid-tier and small sites, because they’re more likely to notice your link and the traffic you send.

And, while the direct ranking benefit of outbound links appears negligible—one of his colleagues once measured it at 5 percent for a particular site—Briggs quotes Matt Cutts  of Google’s Webspam team as saying parts of Google’s system encourage links to “good sites.”

5. Despite what some think, outbound links to quality sites don’t hurt SEO. All of the engineers I’ve talked to at the search engines say that wanton use of outbound links leaking SEO juice is not actually what happens; you don’t lose juice, you just pass on juice. And juice isn’t really a finite resource; it’s something that we came up with to measure websites on the Internet.”

Effective SEO for your E-marketing sites is very crucial, that can get more traffic for your site to boost your E-marketing. Hope all the above proven ways can help you at utmost.

Where to advertise?

How much to spend?

What kind of demographics should I target?

However, one simple thing many forget to do, is track where their actual customers are coming from and more importantly, where they are not. Why should you care about tracking, you may ask. If you’ve got customers coming in the door, then who cares where they come from? Your wallet should care for starters. It’s about optimization of your marketing and therefore optimization of your business. Let’s look at a simple example.

50% of your budget goes to Advertisement A

50% of your budget goes to Advertisement B

80% of your customers found you because of Advertisement A.

Get the picture?

Obviously, you are wasting a lot of money on B and you should start placing that money into A and therefore maximize your potential customers. Well, if you were tracking you could see this, but more importantly, you might see that customers coming from Advertisement B have a value 5 times that of A. Thus, it would in fact be more beneficial to place your dollars with B. Another important item to understand is tracking those who don’t become your customers. If you have something hanging in your teeth that scares people, don’t you want somebody to tell you its there? The same concept applies in business. You can’t necessarily see from the eyes of the consumer and you might be pushing customers away for any number of reasons that you haven’t thought of. Maybe they don’t like the color of your product, or maybe the packaging is faulty? These are often simple things to fix but if you don’t know about these things then you can’t fix them. It doesn’t hurt to ask.

This, ladies and gentleman, is called optimization of marketing strategy and you can’t optimize anything if you don’t have information to work with so here are three rules to remember when marketing your business:

Rule #1

Ask EVERY SINGLE CUSTOMER where they came from and how they found out about you, not to mention why they do or do not like you. This is huge!!!

Rule #2

Make sure you are actually compiling this data and REVIEWING IT!!! Data is useless without analysis.

Rule #3

ADAPT your strategy accordingly with what you find. Only the strongest survive, and in business this century, that means the quickest to ADAPT!!!

Even more simply, we’re gonna break these down into three easy to remember steps:

COLLECT

ANALYZE

ADAPT

By following these simple rules you can help your business to gain more customers by using the proper promotional techniques and waste less by avoiding those that are not working. Remember though, you can’t do either of these without TRACKING!

Good Luck!

Pros

The pros to having a personal fan page come in two forms, friending and tagging. In friending it is easier to pickup followers because you can simply add “Mutual Friends” every day in order to expose your brand. The only problem with this is that it could be considered intrusive. The second good thing about a personal page comes in the form of tagging people in photos. Facebook only allows you to tag people in your friends list, hence if you have a business page and the admin isn’t friends with the people being tagged… they can’t tag them or your business. Hopefully Facebook will address this in the future.

Cons

Friend limit – You are limited to only 5,000 friends on a personal page, if you plan on doing social media properly you’re going to need more room than that!

Search Engine Optimization – Google and Yahoo index fan pages NOT personal pages. So with a personal page you are losing almost ALL of your search engine benefits which is a huge perk to social media.

Professionalism – Your brand is not a person and therefore should not be represented as one. If you want your business to be viewed as professional then you need to make sure that you appear that way… even in social media.

Tracking – Business fan pages allow you to track the interactions you are receiving to your page specifically. This is huge in your marketing campaign because it allows you to see what is working and what is not. Next we will talk about how tracking is one of the most important elements of acquiring new customers.

Future Problems – As the developers of Facebook help the site become more intuitive, they will allow the missed abilities that businesses need. They will also eventually begin to tighten restrictions on those in the wrong places. When that day comes or when you grow too large, do you want to be the one trying to convert 5,000 “friends.” This also creates segmentation of your target market causing you to have to update in multiple places and have a harder time showing your true following.

The Verdict

It is easier to accrue “friends” using a personal page earlier on but as you begin to grow you will very quickly start to see the drawbacks to this approach. Remember, trying to do something the easy way is no excuse for doing it the right way and you could be saving yourself a lot of headaches down the road. To stay on top of what is happening with Facebook changes, check out their actual blog here. Now lets get to work on getting more customers!