Tips, thoughts and topics on marketing for small to medium-sized businesses in Michigan and throughout the world. Contributions by Chris Slocumb, Casey Frushour, as well as other members of the Clarity Quest team.
Make your marketing dollars go farther with free marketing tools we use every day. Our video blog post below highlights a few of our favorite freebies.
The Small Business Administration will host a seminar next month in Ann Arbor covering use of Google free tools and advertising campaigns for your business.
February 12, 2009 Courtyard Marriott 3205 Boardwalk 8:00 am - 10:00am A light breakfast will be served
Register by calling Sarah Miller at sarah.miller@sbam.org or 800-362-5461.
Are your Powerpoint presentations putting your audiences to sleep? Check out the slide:ology website. There's an interesting blog post on presentation trends to watch in 2009.
A microsite is an individual web page or group of web pages which are used to support, enhance, or supplement the primary or parent website. The main difference between a microsite and the parent site is its focus on one main topic or theme compared to the broader scope of the parent site. Often, microsites are used to target new markets or to create focused content for niche audiences (sometimes geographic specific). Offering companies a chance to add value to their brand by informing, entertaining, engaging, and interacting, microsites can also be optimized with keywords for better search engine rankings and click through rates.
1. Choosing the size and scope of your microsite is very important. How large and in depth your microsite is may very well depend on your resources and budget. You could simply make a one-page microsite that acts as a great landing page for a pay-per-click campaign and links back to the parent site or it could be a fully functional, self-contained mini website with its own contact page and e-commerce engine (if you are selling products). Adding user generated content features such as forums, enabling comments, and file uploading should also be considered at this stage.
2. Deciding on a domain name depends on several factors. If the product or service is something not normally associated with the parent brand, then it may be best to consider a secondary, non-branded domain name. Keep in mind, however, that branded URLs generally produce higher click through rates. You may also consider sub domains (microsite.yourcompany.com) or sub folders (yourcompany.com/microsite).
3. The microsite’s topic, information, and call-to-action should be compelling. Once you get a visitor to the site, you should provide content that guides the user down the path you have planned. That end goal could be filling out a form, calling a number, downloading a white paper, making a purchase, or simply clicking over to the parent site. Tracking these goals is crucial and can be done easily with a product such as Google Analytics.
4. It’s important to consider how to tie the brand into the microsite. It could be as simple as placing the brand’s logo somewhere on the site and having multiple links back to the parent website. Using a similar color scheme and design style as the parent site can also help to create brand recognition. For smaller brands, the microsite may act as a launching pad to introduce the brand to a new audience.
5. Microsites can and should be optimized for search engines. Take advantage of the focused content you are presenting by using topic-specific keywords and key phrases throughout your microsite.
6. If you build it, they will come... but only if you promote the site. Once your microsite is launched, be sure to let everyone know about it by utilizing your internal email list, PPC campaigns, social networking sites (Facebook, Digg, Reddit), and industry-related blogs.
Online Videos can truly differentiate your products and services from the competition because Google, Yahoo! and MSN give videos top ranking. In addition, visitors stay on a web page with video content over 50% longer than pages without video. With today’s video recording and screen capture technology, it’s easier than even to make and syndicate videos. Here are some tips for creating and distributing professional quality videos.
1. Determine whether you are going to shoot live video with a camcorder/camera or simply voice-over screenshots of a presentation. For software demos or voice-over presentations on a PC, we use Adobe Captivate and Microsoft Powerpoint. For the MAC, we recommend Keynote and Screenflow.
2. Create a script and rough storyboard. This will allow you to determine timing and will make it easy for the participants to quickly record the sessions.
3. Use a high-quality microphone. For voice-over of screen capture or software demos, we use a Snowball microphone by Blue. It’s only $99 and delivers great sound quality. Another popular model is the Audio Technica 2020 USB microphone. For videos, you will probably want the participants to use lavaliere microphones or at least attach an external microphone to your camcorder.
4. Eliminate noise in the recording environment. No room is 100% silent so record your voice as loud as possible, keeping your voice signal many decibels louder than the ambient noise of your room.
5. Keep the digital compression as high as possible for the best video and audio. For audio on the web, use a 22.5 Hz sample rate, 16 bit mono or stereo at 56Kbps. For video, save as AVI uncompressed for editing purposes, and then upload to the web in FLV or WMV format.
6. Optimize your video for search engines. Use keyword phrases in your video titles and descriptions considering as this is how the search engines will index your video. Most videos show up in Google’s result pages within 1-2 hours of submission.
7. Distribute your video efficiently. Rather than submitting your video to every online content site, use Traffic Geyser (www.trafficgeyser.com) . For $99 per month, you only upload once to the service and it automatically distributes your video to the most popular social networking sites in minutes - saving you hours of manual submission.
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