Tag Archives: Advertising

Grow Your Business Organically

A lot of SEO companies market how they will promote your business online using Internet marketing and online advertising techniques, but Watershawl noticed a gap between where promotion stops and business begins and so we used social media management to not just promote your business, but grow your business.

Digital Marketing Strategy

We’ll work with you to create a comprehensive strategy to marry your business brand, vision, values, products, and services with traditional outdoor, radio, TV, and yellow page advertising alongside social networking and social spaces like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other technologies like apps for the iPhone and Android phones.

SEO is Not Enough – Content Marketing

It’s no longer enough to have a top-ranking website in Google if your web site is not converting traffic, your story is not consistent, and you are not creating lasting relationships with customers. Watershawl can help you to do all three with content marketing.

Social Media Management

We are excited to offer social media management to help your business organize and streamline their marketing efforts with a consistent message that is in-line with their mission, vision, and values. We believe so strongly about this product that we would be happy to take you out to lunch to show you how it works in a one-on-one session. Are you interested in learning more?

1. Be consistent.

In all of your ad messages and styles including business cards, letterhead, envelopes, invoices, signs and banners, use a consistent branding image. This means using the same fonts, colors, taglines, or mottos. This means either using dots, parenthesis, or hyphens in between phone numbers, but not mixing them.

2. Use the vendor as a resource.

Newspapers, radio and TV stations, yellow pages, and full-service web design firms are all helpful in producing the advertising that you will be running with them, but be sure that they are listening to you. Often times your vision can get skewed through the lens of the other companies eye. Make sure what they produce matches your brand and identity.

3. Appreciate referrals, but don’t depend on them.

While traditional word-of-mouth referral advertising has been around a long time, it can fall short of being able to attract the number of customers needed to be successful in business. This is why it is imperative that you business have some other sort of supplementary advertisement, but remember – you are your own best promotional tool. If you don’t believe it, no one else will either.

4. Promote benefits rather than features.

A benefit can be defined as, “The emotional satisfaction your product or service provides, or a tangible performance characteristic.” Have you ever heard the expression, “Sell the hole, not the drill?” Make sure you are promoting the end-result, not what will get them there. In this way you are almost selling them their own success.

5. Know your competitors.

Sun Tzu, author of On the Art of War, wrote the now famous line, “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” Your competitors may not exactly be your enemies, but knowing everything about them is just as important as knowing everything about your own business. One popular tool for this is Keyword Spy, which allows you to see what key words your competitors are using on their website.

Currently there are many social websites that have created a platform for you to speak directly to and with your current and future customers.  There are also many tools that help manage this relationship, pushing the same content out to all platforms at once, or changing it slightly using built in rules.  There are no hard and fast rules for the Web 2.0 landscape because it is all still so new, but what we can do is look to those businesses who are having success in these new areas.

We measure success by the three methods, “know, trust, buy.”:

1. Brand awareness. (Does the customer know you?)
2. Brand favorableness. (Does the client trust you?)
3. Increased sales. (Does the client buy from you?)

Blasting your message out to one or as many social media sites as you can will help get your brand more noticed, and so achieve more awareness, but you also need to be genuine.  The best Internet marketers make sure to engage with the customer and not just try to sell them something at every turn.  The medium lends itself to this sort of engagement and turning down the opportunity to do so may break the trust, or the brand favorableness.  Once you have established both the know and the trust, then the customer feels free to buy from you, but there is value to both brand awareness and brand favorableness even if the one who you are impressing does not buy.  Once the goodwill is out there, the person you engaged with may refer you to someone else.  Like the butterfly flapping it’s wings, even the smallest twit on Twitter may lead to a hurricane sale on the other side of the world.

An Indianapolis dentist has begun using Twitter to reach out to his patients in a way that he has never done before.  “I didn’t even know what Twitter was until I started using it,” said the dentist.

Twitter is a micro-blogging service founded by some of the same people who made blogging accessible to millions through Blogspot. The catch is that each blog entry is limited to 140 characters.  Users can post from their cell phones, email, directly on the site, or through third-party applications or websites.

Our client now has 623 followers and is one the top-followed dentist in Indianapolis according to the Twitter directory, Wefollow.  A follower is someone who opts-in to hear what you write or “tweet” about.  We have seen traffic to their website coming from Twitter so we know it is working as a promotional tool.

How can we help you promote your business online or around Indiana?