Author: Think Webstore

Business strategy is more complicated than three simple steps, but you can encapsulate the basic movement of business planning by looking at it in three general phases.

Perhaps in the future we will look in deeper detail at some of the specifics in each of the three steps, but for now we will end our long stretching series with the final general step – Evaluation.

The earlier articles (for your reference) may be found here:

• Introduction
• Step 1: Formulation
• Step 2: Implementation

By way of review: the first general step in business strategy is formulating the strategy itself. The second step is then the process of implementation. Once you have drawn up a comprehensive plan and put it in place, the final stage, evaluation, is one of maintenance.

The Important Questions

Businesses cannot simply put a plan into place and expect it to run itself. As with any plan in any field, business strategies must be constantly evaluated. Some of the important questions to ask include –

• Is the plan effective?
• Is it proving suitable?
• Is it reaching the stated goals?
• How is the plan falling short?
• How is it failing?
• Are the people on the ground implementing the plan correctly?
• Can it be improved in any way?

Every aspect of the plan must be tracked and scrutinized. This will allow the business owner to make the necessary adjustments in strategy and implementation to fine tune the overall plan and make it what the boardroom envisioned. Just be careful – constant evaluation does not mean literally every day. A plan must have time to come together and have effect. Depending on your business, this could be anywhere between several weeks and several months.

Strategic Modification

Once you have allowed sufficient time to pass, and gathered enough data to get a good idea of the impact of your new business strategy, it is time to determine what, if anything, to modify. Again, this could run from one extreme to the other: from barely changing anything at all, to throwing the new strategy out in its entirety and beginning again from scratch.

If the plan was formulated properly, it should not need to be wholly tossed, but rather modified to one extent or another. No matter how much time and research and money and effort go into formulation and implementation, no business strategy is perfect. You can always find things to make better. Always. Be humble enough to see the holes in your initial plan, and then do due diligence to determine the best way to fix the problems.

This evaluation stage is never ending for a well run business. You should always be evaluating the plan you have in place, formulating ways to make it better, and implementing those improvements. So the general cycle repeats itself over and over again, and with each repetition, your business strategy is coming ever closer to meeting your initial goals (unless you determine those goals are the thing that needs changing!).

Final Review

Formulation – invest the needed time and money to evaluate where your company is now, set both short and long-term goals, and draw up a good strategy for achieving those goals.

Implementation – put your plan into action. This may require anything from new training to new products, and often requires new advertising and approaches to make this step successful.

Evaluation – use any tools and data you have at your disposal to determine how closely the implementation of your business strategy is matching the formulated vision. Tweak, re-implement, and repeat.

Dr. William R. Boulton has provided an excellent resource which comments on the steps of Business Strategy from a slightly different angle, and which is definitely worth your time – Strategic Analysis Model. [http://www.auburn.edu/~boultwr/html/strategic_analysis_model.htm]

In this third article of our business strategy series, we look at implementation of a new business strategy for your company. In our last article we explored the development of a formal strategy for your particular business. Once you have all of the details sorted out and the plan is finalized, the next logical step is putting the new strategy into action.

The steps in implementation can be broken down many different ways, but we will consider them in three large groupings – resources, management, monitoring.

1. Resources

Perhaps the largest piece in implementing a new business strategy centers around your organization’s resources. To do something new, you must have the resources to do it, and they must be put to good use in order to be effective. Some of the things which must be done might include: setting up a budget for the new strategy, allocating money for the implementation (everything requires money), purchasing or developing new technology, developing new products, training new and/or existing personnel, and managing time.

Good management of your resources is the foundation for a successful business strategy implementation. If you fail to set aside enough money or properly train people, for example, then your new ideas will fail because of poor preparation and resource control. Starting from the very beginning, be sure to carefully and wisely manage your resources in a way that undergirds success.

2. Management

Anything going on in the world of business needs management, and this is particularly true with the implementation of a new business strategy. When you have a new plan, newly trained people, new products and/or services, then you need highly qualified management to ensure that everything goes as planned. During the initial roll out of a new business strategy, there needs to be a clearly defined chain of command in your management structure.

When doing something new, there’s always the chance for things to go wrong, so there need to be people on the ground who can direct and fix as needed. Each person needs to be clear on exactly what their task is in the new structure, and management can help keep each person doing what their position requires. Having quality management in the field during the implementation stage of a new business strategy is critical, and can help steer your organization around unforeseen bumps in the road.

3. Monitoring

Monitoring is closely related to management, but is not necessarily the same thing. As a new business strategy is put in place, there need to be established ways to monitor this implementation, ensuring that every particular step is happening when it needs to happen, where it needs to happen, and how it needs to happen. This stage does not involve tracking the results of a new strategic plan – that’s for the next blog post.

Monitoring is simply the oversight needed to make sure the plan is being worked out in the real world according to the models and plans from the development stage. Sometimes this monitoring can be done by management, but often it needs its own department, reporting to management about progress and noting potential issues along the way.

As your organization implements a new business plan, it’s important to remember that consistency and involvement are key. Everyone has to buy into the new plan, from ownership to management to employee. If the chain breaks at any point, then the new strategy can falter and even fail. So as you prepare to implement the plan, take the time to make sure people understand it, can do it, and even get excited about it. After all, you’ve crafted this new business strategy to ensure the continuing success of your company – the people putting it into action need to be just as settled with it as those who put it together.

Next up in our business strategy series we have Step 3: Evaluation.

Today we return to the theme of Business Strategy, beginning at the beginning – the formulation of a company’s strategy. Without proper preparation, evaluation, and planning, even the best plans and strategies will fall flat.

To devise a strategy that will work for your particular business, you must approach the process with as much information as you can gather, and perhaps most importantly, with honesty. An honest evaluation and look to the future are vital in the formulation of a business plan.

There are three general steps involved in putting together a quality Business Plan: analysis, setting objectives, and finally the detailed plan.

I. Analysis

Whether you are beginning with a new business or formulating strategy for an already existing company or new product line, the first phase of the process is in analysis. You need to look at as many variables as possible during this initial phase. Break down your company in detail – internally, externally, situation, location, finances, past performances, etc. Break down your competition, as well as you can, in this same detail.

Study your market; study your industry; study the larger markets and trends. The ultimate goal here – to be able to see your company as it really is. If you have an inaccurate estimation of your company at the end of step one, then none of the other phases will matter. This is where the above mentioned honesty comes into play – an honest evaluation and analysis is crucial. We cannot stress this enough; take the time and use the resources needed to do this step properly.

II. Setting Objectives

Once you finish the analysis phase, you then have the chance to set goals and objectives for your business. Many companies try to set goals first, but then you have no idea how realistic or achievable your goals might be. Goal setting comes after analysis – you see where you are, and then you can make plans for where you want to go. Often, in analysis, companies find out things about themselves which are surprising!

Objectives will be formed in multiple ways: long-term goals, short-term goals, overall objectives (internally and externally), financial goals, etc. Often these will be framed as mission statements, vision statements, or company statements. So objectives will span several planes, including horizontal (over time) and vertical (building on one another).

III. The Strategic Plan

The objectives which you set in step 2, after a careful consideration of the information you gather in the analysis stage, should in themselves suggest a strategic plan. The plan itself merely provides the specific ways that you will go about achieving your objectives. What projects or programs will you implement to achieve your ultimate goals? If your company wants to increase sales, for instance, then your strategic plan will need to lay out exactly what steps you intend to take to increase your sales.

The strategic plan will be based on the analysis, which will have considered such questions as – what is your competition doing that is successful? what are you doing that you know is not working? what is no one doing? what has worked in the past? what are the markets showing for the future? You can then take the answers to these questions and decide what your specific company, in your particular situation, can do to achieve your objectives.

Final Phases

As you are in the final phases of fine-tuning your plan, there are three final questions to consider.

1. – does my plan make sense?
2. – is my plan feasible?
3. – will this plan be acceptable to all parties involved (employees, consumers, investors, etc.)?

Finally, keep in mind during this phase that your plan is not set in stone! As we will see in Steps 2 and 3, the plan will be constantly revisited and modified as needed. You want to put together the best plan possible, this is no excuse to cut corners early (which will inevitably derail your efforts from the beginning), but do not get caught up by the “myth of perfection” – the chances you will get every possible piece of your plan exactly right is somewhere near 0%, even with the best teams and analysis in the world. Formulate the plan with all proper preparation and caution, and then move forward.

Our next article will look at the second step in Business Strategy – Implementation.

After putting together a few blog posts on branding (here and here), we thought it might be helpful to look at the overall picture of Business Strategy. Branding is certainly an element of Business Strategy, but it is only one piece of a much larger and more complex puzzle.

Every business needs a strategy in order to succeed. As obvious as that sounds, many businesses either operate without a realistic or sustainable strategy, or they operate with no real strategy, or they operate with a seriously flawed strategy. Any of these mistakes will make it that much harder to have a successful business. A sound strategy will help you take your business where you would like it to go, and it will help you evaluate along the way so that you can make changes when needed.

Today we will look briefly at what we mean by “Business Strategy,” and also give you an idea of some of the upcoming blog posts that will relate to this larger idea.

Defining Strategy

Business Strategy essentially encompasses everything that your company does to reach its business goals. Even in a simplified definition like that, we can already see that multiple things are assumed, such as the notion that your business has stated goals which you are trying to reach in specific ways. Too many businesses try to jump into strategy in the middle; this almost always fails because strategy is a building which needs a firm foundation, and then is put together piece by piece.

There are three major stages of Business Strategy:

• formulation
• implementation
• evaluation

We will look at some of the aspects of each of these stages in upcoming articles.

Business Strategy Formulation

Formulation is the first stage of Business Strategy, and it is exactly what it sounds like – this is where you put together the actual pieces of your plan. When you sit down to formulate your strategy, you will review things about your business like identity and general mission, and you will also want to measure where your business is now. You can then take these pieces of information and reach a list of goals or objectives – once you see where you are, you can concretely talk about where you would like to be, and how long it will take you to get there.

Finally, in this first phase, you will come up with a plan, or strategy, for getting your company to achieve these stated goals. We could simplify this process by saying: In the formulation phase you figure out where you are now, where you would like to be, and how you would like to get there.

Implementation

The next two phases, Implementation and Evaluation, are a bit simpler to briefly talk about, but just as crucial to the success of your strategy. In the Implementation phase your company will be doing things like setting aside money for the plan, choosing people to be in charge of the plan, and deciding exactly how to put the plan into place. This phase also might include new training and organizing, and obviously integration into the already existing flow of company policies and procedures.

Evaluation: Final and Ongoing Step

The final step, Evaluation, is something you will then be doing on an ongoing basis throughout the duration of the particular strategy you have put into place. Evaluation simply means that you must see how well the plan is working, and is it bringing you closer to your stated goals, and do things need to be modified in order to work better. Quite often we need to tweak implementation because our evaluation shows us that some things could be better – and this is perfect! Remember, the goal is reaching company objectives, not just having a plan and sticking to it.

More in depth articles on each of the three phases will be coming soon, so if your business needs help with planning and strategy, stay tuned!

Next up Business Strategy Formulation.

Once you have made the investment to learn about your target audience, the ideas for branding imagery begin to be narrowed down. See our article ‘Business Branding’ http://thinkwebstore.com/business-branding/) for more general information on the branding equation. When the concepts for your company brand begin to become clear, it’s now time to bring in the design team. A good design team is there to receive your ideas about how you want to brand your company, and then take those ideas and turn them into effective communication.

Choosing Your Design Team

Choosing a design team is a very important part of the branding equation. If you are to be successful, the design team has to buy into your ideas, and you both have to be on the same page. That does not always happen! And when the client and the designers do not see eye to eye, then the work suffers.Take your time to choose the right design team. Visit them, interview them, look at their past work, test out some of your ideas to see their reactions – do your due diligence to try and find the team that will fit you and your project best.

Once you have found your design team, you then get to share with them your vision for the branding of your company. This conversation could include most anything: your company message, imagery you like or dislike, ideas you discarded along the way, your audience, information about your products and services…the more you can give your team in the beginning, then the better they can design. The designers then take all of the information that you unload, and they begin to turn your ideas into images and/or words.

Branding with a New Logo

The first piece to be designed for your brand will be your company logo. Your logo is the most central and foundational piece of branding design. Every other piece of advertising that you do will be based on the look/feel/color/energy of your logo. So your logo should definitely follow the rules listed in our last blog post – it should fit what you do, it should immediately convey a message, it should be accessible to your target audience, and it should be something which will immediately begin building brand recognition. Your logo will be on everything, so take the time and spend the money to have it done right! A well done logo which follows all of the “rules” is a powerful piece of advertising even when standing alone.

Website Design for Your Brand

The second thing to do is your website design. Again, this design will be based on your company message, your logo design, and also configured according to the branding philosophy that you have developed for your company. For many companies, the first place potential customers encounter them is on the web. This means that your website has to do a great job of representing your company. The design and content should both communicate and instill confidence in your visitors. You cannot be there when people visit your site! That is obvious. So make sure:

• that the site is consistent with your company image;
• that the design communicates your message and overall site content;
• that the site looks good (i.e. the design is professional and attractive);
• that your site is intuitive and easy to navigate;
• that the site answers the important questions people will want to know, and does it in a place and a way that is easy for the user;
• that your contact information is easily found on every single page of your website.

There are many more things we could say about website design, but if you’ve followed through the general branding steps and the proper logo steps, then you’ll be applying those same concepts on your website design.

Content Drives Traffic, Leads and Sales

The next thing you can do, once you have both a logo and website design, is begin designing “light content” pieces. This includes items like business cards, letterhead, social sites, print/online ads, etc. All of these are important for getting your company out in the public eye. No matter how small we think an item might be, a business card, for example – the same rules of design should apply. If the only advertisement a person sees is one that does not represent your brand well, then all of your effort is wasted. So take the time, and the resources, to ensure that each of your design pieces properly represents your brand to your potential consumers.

Finally, you can design your “heavy content” pieces. This includes things like brochures, booklets, packets, etc. We also recommend hold off on these heavy content designs, if possible, for a very practical reason – once you have printed something, it’s done. And it’s expensive. So we often suggest that people massage and revise their core content on their website, where reviews and revisions are much less costly. Then, once you feel good with your brand presentation on the website, you can pull from there to populate the heavy content design pieces.

Branding for Success

Branding, as we have said in these last 2 posts, is critical to your company’s success. Design, or the actual execution of your company’s branding ideas, goes hand in hand with this success. So if you are beginning a new company, or revamping an existing one, take the time and the effort at the front end to develop quality branding and designs. These things will be in front of the public constantly – you will not regret the extra time spent at the beginning to help develop a proper image for the long run.

Let’s begin with what seems to be a self-evident statement: good branding is of vital importance in the growth and success of your company. Though this statement seems obvious, if you look around at the “branding” of so many companies, there are certain things that have been entirely overlooked or ignored in their branding process. Today we hope to cover some basic, general things that should be considered when considering your company image.

In General

To stand out in the increasingly competitive modern market place, businesses need effective, well-executed branding strategies. This does not mean relying on tricks and gimmicks, but rather, developing branding that is accessible, attractive, meaningful, and memorable to your customer base. We build relationships with brands, so your image should be one that people can build that relationship with. This, of course, requires research; you must know your target audience, and what types of imagery will best connect your business with them. Remember – your audience is NOT everyone! No business is marketed for everyone. Know your business, know your niche, and build your image around that knowledge.

A Few (Vital) Rules to Remember

1 – Your company image, or brand, must fit what your company actually does. Sometimes quirky branding works for companies, but it more often backfires. The general rule is to brand your company in a way that reflects the actual products/services that you offer, making it much easier for your audience to effectively identify you, and begin to build a relationship with you.

2 – Your brand should also say something which is immediately recognized by your audience. Again, sometimes the “can you figure this out” branding model works, but not usually. One of the general rules we often give clients is quite simple – your branding should answer your customer’s first question. If people see your image and still have to ask “what do you do,” more often than not, you have already failed.

3 – Your branding must also be accessible to your audience. You do not have to choose a tired cliche to make this work! (In fact, cliche fails as often as the meaningless quirky option.) Find something which will connect your audience intimately with your brand and with your product, and then run with it.

4 – It is VITAL that you remember this final “rule”: you are not Coke. You are not Apple. You are not Toyota. These large companies have a brand recognition level that most of our small to mid-sized companies could never even dream of, and this recognition means that they get to do things which simply will not work for the rest of us. Coke, for instance, can run a long commercial about whatever they would like, stick a Coke logo at the end, and the branding has worked. This type of “content-free” branding will not work for the rest of us. So as you are zeroing in on your actual branding imagery, remember that your branding will be used to market your business, and that the primary form of marketing campaigns (for most of us) involves content. Your branding will be a huge part of the time-intensive process of building the relationship between your brand and your consumers that will help your company succeed.

Now that we have covered some of the basics of business branding, our next article will look at how to incorporate your company image into the actual designs that your business will use to reach your public.

What

There are so many ways that businesses today can reach out to their audience – television, radio, print, online ads, public space ads, etc. But there’s one type of reach that is growing both in popularity and influence, and also seems to be doing a particularly good job of connecting businesses to potential consumers – blogging. Blogging is one of several forms of marketing that can be lumped under the term “content marketing.”

Blogging has been popular for quite some time, but until recently it was mostly used by individuals. Over the last several years, business have more and more realized that blogging can also be a great tool for them to use. People will take the time to read good blog posts, so if a business can figure out how to properly use this medium, it can be a great asset in their overall marketing strategy.

How

There are some simple things to keep in mind in order to make your blogging campaign a success. People have become very good at ignoring direct advertising, so that’s not how blogs are approached. The ideal is to create and nurture a relationship with your reader. This is how blogging became so popular to begin with – the writers developed relationships with their readers, and therefore the reader (potential client) wants to stay around to continue seeing where the story might go. This is also the model that a successful business blog will take.

Create content which is interesting, helpful, relevant, and valuable for your reader. Readers engage with content that provides meaning, so as you write posts around the various services you provide, be sure to give specific information and address specific questions. Give your audience something that matters. This type of content helps build the relationship because by providing information and being helpful, you are becoming their expert in your particular field. Then, when they need the services you provide, they will come straight to you, their expert.

We always hear “create shareable content,” and above is how you do that. Content which is meaningful and important is much more likely to be shared by your audience with their friends, co-workers, on social media, etc. Sharing is crucial, because this is really how you get the word out; this is how blogging works. And if you figure out how blogging works in general, then you can fine-tune it to work for your company.

Why

The obvious answer to “why?” – because it works! A well done blog connects with potential consumers and clients in a way that almost no other medium can do. Content marketing (like blogging) is also part of many types of online marketing such as social media marketing (with people sharing great content), SEO (Google ranks great content), PPC (you need great landing pages for high quality scores), and inbound marketing (great content is what drives your traffic).

We have used our own blog as a way to do a bit of research into this notion. For example, in the first 90 days of our blogging (inbound marketing campaign), with just 2 posts per week, we have seen an increase of 28% in overall number of visits to our website. This kind of increase is amazing, and can be attributed entirely to following the above “rules” about how to manage an effective and impactful blogging campaign.

Our current ‘blog series’ has been about online advertising and marketing. So far we’ve done a brief survey of different forms of online advertising, and then we narrowed the field to look at pay per click (PPC) advertising generally, and Google AdWords specifically. These are only a few of the approaches a business can take to online marketing, and today we’ll take a look at another widely used and very effective form of online advertising – Email Marketing.

Email Marketing has been around for a long time, and it is a proven and efficient way to market products and services to potential consumers online. With the web moving toward a more personal, semantic experience, companies are also looking for ways to advertise more personally to individual consumers. Email marketing is personal because it arrives in someone’s private email inbox, addressed to them and containing information which is (hopefully) relevant to their life.

High Return on Investment (ROI)

From a practical business perspective, Email Marketing also has incredible return on investment (ROI), averaging more than double the amount actually spent. Of a group surveyed by Marketing Sherpa, the overall reported ROI from Email Marketing was an astonishing 119%. Organizations which sent fewer than 100,000 emails a month reported even higher ROI, 139%.

For a little better idea of the value and influence of Email Marketing, in this article from Marketing Land, they do a little bit of marketing comparison – only organic search accounts for more customers than Email Marketing; customer acquisitions from Email Marketing are dramatically higher than Facebook and Twitter combined (6.84% vs <1% combined); email is also more likely to be shared with friends, accounting for 50.8% of new visitors referred to companies by their friends.

Key to Successful Email Marketing

The key things to remember in Email Marketing is 1) keep your content valuable to your potential clients, and 2) don’t overwhelm your consumer base. Provide people with valuable content in your emails, content that helps establish you as their expert, or their “go to” place – this kind of content helps cement the relationship between your brand and your client. Just be sure not to go overboard, constantly filling up people’s inboxes with meaningless emails. Let this proven form of Marketing work for you and your company, and you’ll be happy that you did.

In upcoming posts, look for overviews of additional forms of online marketing. Diversifying your marketing approach by incorporating some of these various forms of advertising will pay big dividends in the end, if done correctly.

As the internet marketplace has exploded in popularity and revenue, businesses are gradually moving more and more of their marketing and advertising budgets into online marketing. To effectively use that money, business owners need to understand advertising on the internet – what it is, what it isn’t, what it can and can’t do, and especially what forms of advertising are most effective for reaching their target audience.

We can subdivide online advertising into many particular categories – search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), email marketing, local online marketing, banner ads, social media optimization (SMO), online video marketing, pay per clicks ads (PPC) like Google Adwords, and others. So here is a brief touch on many of the different marketing types available for your business to attract customers online:

Online Marketing Categories

– we’ve already looked at the basics of SEO in two articles here on our blog (here and here)

– email marketing is a great online marketing method, with tons of research showing effectiveness, and many resources showing how to best use email marketing in your industry. We plan to do an article on this in the near future, but until then, a good resource to get started with is this Search Engine Watch article.

– local online advertising is more important than ever before because of people using their mobile devices for search, and the up and coming semantic web. A good article on this can be found at Search Engine Land here.

– banner ads, though considered by many to be fading in effectiveness, can still be used successfully by many businesses. A good resource to get started thinking about them is this Resource Nation article.

– SMO, social media optimization, is a great way to advertise online, and falls outside of the ‘norms’ that most companies focus on, so it has even more potential as a largely untapped resource. SMO will help get traffic to your website, but you have to be sure you have good landing pages ready to make the conversion, turning your ads into dollars. We’ll be looking at this more in depth in another article, but here’s a good place to begin getting your head around SMO in this Social Media Today article.

– Online Video Marketing is a great way to boost traffic for one simple reason: people love videos! Figure out a way to use video in your marketing campaigns, and you’ll immediately have the upper hand on many of your competitors. This Social Media Examiner article gives great advice for using online video marketing.

Pay Per Click

And finally, pay per click (PPC) advertising. PPC is an outstanding way of bringing in clients and customers for your business. PPC is scalable, allowing you to spend just as much money as you can afford to spend. You simply set up your ads, set your budgets, and let the software handle the rest. Then, as revenue grows, you can increase both your budget and your business.

We’ll be discussing PPC more in depth in our next post, so stay tuned!

Semantic Web and Semantic Search are both terms which are getting a lot of attention in the online world, and particularly in advertising. At their essence, both of these terms refer to the notion of an individual’s online experience being tailored, or personalized, particularly for them. The web is moving from being a place of generic information to a place of answers, where who you are plays a central role.

Semantic Search is Personalized Search

So, Semantic Search is a personalized form of search – semantic search tries to understand exactly the information you’re looking for so that the search can answer your question. This differs from the traditional search operations of the past, which primarily sought to match your keywords with keywords in web content, thereby giving you a list of sites that you might be interested in. Everyone who typed in the same keywords would see the same results in this older search model. Semantic Search is now providing us with meaningful, personalized results that have the goal of actually answering the questions we ask. The author of Google Semantic Search, David Amerland, says of the semantic web, “It marks the transition into a new phase of the Web, where we stop searching and start finding.” (http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2013/07/23/semantic-web-big-data/)

What does this semantic search actually look like in practice? Let’s say a person searches: “What’s the best Sushi restaurant in New York?” A semantic result to this question would take into account information about what the searcher’s friends consider to be the best Sushi restaurant, what the best reviews are saying, and what the critics have said. The result would be tailored for the searcher. The results may not contain the keyword, “best Sushi restaurant in New York,” but given Google’s understanding of the intent behind the search, the answers given would better answer the question asked. Depending on other factors like the time of day and the searcher’s exact location, the results may change from information about Sushi restaurants to perhaps reservation numbers for places close by.

Understanding the Semantic Web

Because of factors like those we saw in the example above, it’s very important for business to understand the semantic web, how it functions, and what their place is in it. Any business can show up in these searches, regardless of whether they have a website, how old they are, or if they are ready to be seen by everyone. Even with very little or no online presence, the semantic web can drive new customers to any business. The data on every business is constantly growing, so one big thing businesses can all do to ensure best results in the semantic web is making sure the information about them online is current and accurate.

The web is becoming increasingly personalized every day – by understanding the semantic web, businesses will ensure they are positioned to make the most out of this development cycle. However, understanding is only half the battle. To really engage the semantic web, businesses need to know how they can take advantage of the semantic web.

Check out our next post! We outline exactly how businesses can take advantage of all that the semantic web has to offer.

Native Advertising

There are so many new buzzwords in business and advertising – content marketing, SMO, inbound marketing, B2C – and today we’ll take a look at another of the quickly rising stars in advertising : Native Advertising. This is a particular approach that we have used here at Think Webstore since the beginning, and now it is apparently catching on in the larger advertising world.

What Is Native Advertising

The principle behind Native Advertising is actually quite simple – write a story about your industry or product (or your client’s industry), and use this story not only to inform the public, but also to advertise your particular product or services. The term ‘Native Advertising’ signifies that these ads seem like part of the usual content of the publication, hence native, but they also work as subtle yet effective ads for business. These stories can certainly be used online, but often are most effective in actual publications, in magazines or newspapers. Native Advertising is catching on nationally, but we have found that it is particularly useful on a local level.

What Native Advertising is Not

There are a few distinctions to make when thinking of Native Advertising – it’s not exactly the same thing as Inbound Marketing, and it’s definitely not Advertorial. Inbound Marketing has the main purpose of driving the potential client to contact with the business, whether through website, phone calls, etc. While all advertising has that as a general goal, the finer point of Native Advertising is the attempt to connect with potential consumers by providing them with true and useful information in the context of a publication that they know and trust; to become an expert for your reader.

Any articles written for such publications not only have to be helpful, but they also have to pass editorial muster to make it into print – the articles have to be real. Native Advertising is also not Advertorial writing. Advertorials are thinly veiled ads that purport to be articles – these types of “articles” would never be published in the types of quality places that businesses would want Native Advertising to appear.

How It’s Done

The success of Native Advertising lies wholly in the article you write. There are some ‘rules’ that we follow here at Think Webstore to help ensure that our articles work for our clients:

1) The article must be true. Native Advertising ties into a company’s content marketing here – you must provide your audience with information that is both true and valuable. This gives people a reason to read your article, and to share it with others. An article that’s not true and valuable will fail every single time.

2) The article must tell a story. People need a story, something to give shape to the article. Popular storylines include things like ‘David vs Goliath,’ the little guy taking on the big guy and winning, or if you are operating locally, then the ‘local success’ story is always a twist that works.

3) The article must then subtly incorporate the company for which it is being written. This can typically take the form of an ‘expert quote;’ the company (or company rep) is quoted within the context of the article as an expert on the topic. Immediately this gives credibility, and as people read the article, they have an expert at hand to go to. This is one of the reasons that Native Advertising works particularly well on a local level.

Now It’s Your Turn

Not everyone is equipped to do their own Native Advertising, but it is an approach that works for just about any business in just about any industry. Perhaps you have someone in the office who can give article writing a shot? Let them do a bit of research, and see what they come up with. But be very careful – a bad article can do much more damage than good! There are also companies out there who specialize in exactly this type of advertising, and your best bet (for most companies) is to find someone to help you strategize and carry out some Native Advertising for your business.

Native Advertising is like getting an advertisement in front of a potential consumer, and having that consumer read all about you, and they don’t even realize that ‘advertising’ has just happened! You become their go-to expert in your field, and there’s no greater achievement than becoming the expert for your public. In our over-saturated media culture, there’s no better way to get yourself in front of potential customers.

With the variety of tech options exploding around us, businesses have an increasingly amazing array of ways in which to communicate with both their consumers, as well as other businesses and Google Hangouts for business tops the list of options. Two of the newer modes of tech communications are Google Hangouts and Hangouts on Air (HOA).

A Google Hangout allows people separated by distance to actually gather together in an online video chat. The Hangouts are designed for direct communication between different parties, and are not actually broadcast live over the internet. But, HOAs can be recorded and later posted online for other interested people to view.

Google Hangouts for Business Features

There are many useful features of HOAs, and we’ll cover some of the most important ones here. The video conferencing can accommodate up to 15 total people from anywhere in the world. Gathering that fill of 15 can be done either through private invitations or a public option. A nice feature is that you can join the hangout via an Android or Apple phone (though you can’t start one from a phone, yet). Once you have your gathering, the HOA allows you to use multiple cameras per person, upload documents to share with others in the hangouts, do screen shares, watch YouTube videos, and even use text chat among the HOA members.

Your HOA also provides you with a great SEO opportunity. You can title your video (keyword pickup), increase follower count on G+ as people watch and interact with your video, and the comments left during a live HOA are seen as social signals by Google, thereby increasing the chance that your video will rank highly in search. You can also write additional content to accompany your video, which adds to the total SEO value of the event.

Videos can now be filmed in full HD, and you can drop your videos onto YouTube for even greater exposure, especially through views. People are not so much looking for a polished video coming out of an HOA, rather they are looking for good quality content. Content becomes the key, and if your content is solid, then your HOA becomes a great asset for your company and a great resource for your customers. At the end of the day, any attention your HOA video receives can be used to your benefit – especially to drive people to your social channels, and ultimately to your company website.

Hangouts for Business Uses

In addition to the general “boosting of SEO,” Google Hangouts can be used for many practical purposes. Since you are able to gather many people on the live video chats, Hangouts are great for business meetings and even light consulting work. You can connect with other businesses and even clients who are anywhere in the world, and since you’re actually able to see and talk in real time, the meetings still leave you with the sense of having actually met and interacted in person. You can also record educational webinars, and even focus on a bit of self-promotion by holding press conferences. People typically enjoy having a video to watch (over just a large block of text), so recorded Hangouts and HOAs are great at attracting users to your website, and perfect for relaying important and relevant information to them.

No matter what your initial purpose may be, it’s worth your time to experiment with this great new technology from Google. Choose a purpose or two, record a few HOAs, and test out how they work in your specific industry and with your particular audience. If you have other specific questions, there are many articles out there to help you craft and use Google Hangouts to your greatest benefit. The technology is there – smart business is taking advantage now, isn’t it time your business does the same?!

“Content Marketing” has recently become a major focus for companies working to most effectively use online marketing for their business. The first question is the most obvious: what is meant by the phrase ‘content marketing’? Basically, this means that you use your online content not simply to convey information to your reader, but you also shape and mold this content to make it a major factor in the marketing of your goods or services – and a major part of what content marketers are after are more prominent rankings in Google.

There are some simple rules and suggestions that we can follow to help our content work most effectively for our businesses.

The Content Marketing Quality Factor

Quality content is needed for several related reasons. High quality content is helpful to your reader, which means that they will spend the time it takes to actually read and understand what you’ve written. Having readers stay on your site to read your content also reduces your bounce rate, which is good for page rank in Google.

Quality content is not something that you can just throw together at a moment’s notice. The quality comes from deep research, wide expertise, and is presented in a way which is both authoritative and instructional. If any of the pieces are missing, the quality value of the content, even if very high, begins to be reduced.

The Quantity Factor

New content is regularly needed to continue helping search rankings. Google has a “freshness bias” within their search algorithm, which simply means that new content tends to rank well. If you are constantly putting out new, quality content for your business, then you’ll be doing a great deal of content marketing correctly just in that.

User Experience

We all want our readers to have positive experiences when interacting with our material. This serves both to help develop continuing relationships with consumers of our materials, and Google also positively weights sites and pages that seem to provide users a good experience.

Making Content Work for You

Once you have quality content ready to share with the world, now it’s time to make sure that content works to its maximum potential. Do good keyword research, know the keywords that people are searching for, and make sure to pepper your content with these specific keywords. Try not to only mention important keywords, but make sure that your content gives people answers and information about those topics; if you fail to do this, people will begin ignoring your material as essentially useless.

Time

Making content marketing work for you and your business requires determination and dedication. Throwing out a bit of sloppy material a few times a year will do nothing positive for your marketing efforts. Rather, you need to be consistent in putting out quality material, and following the guidelines above to make sure your content works for you. An editorial calendar can help you stay on target, and spreading out the writing among several good writers can also help keep you on goal.

Content writing is work; there are many people out there who do nothing other than write this type of content marketing material. But you know your business and your industry – so who better to put together content than the experts!

As we’ve seen, all of the pieces come together in content marketing. If you create quality content then that is good for your reader; what is good for the reader then becomes good for you again; and all of this interaction is good for marketing, especially rankings in the dominate search of our day, Google.

Go – create good content!

It’s time for Think Webstore to start blogging! We have touted the benefits of blogging for your business, some of our own employees run very nice blogs, and now we’ll begin our own ‘blogging campaign.’ These new, twice weekly postings will (we hope) have three effects:

Blogging for Results

1 – we’ll make use of blogging, as do many, for Search Engine Optimization/Social Media Optimization (SEO/SMO), just like we suggest others do.

2 – to provide a small study on the effect of regular blogging for traffic to the website of a local business.

3 – the more important point for most of our readers, we’ll begin sharing from the wealth of information that we have gathered from years of our own experience, research, and individual specializations.

Our Approach

To track the success of this campaign, we’ll be gathering some basic metrics up front, and watching these metrics in the coming months. Here’s what we’ll be tracking:

• Website Traffic Increase (overall traffic)
• Search Traffic Increase
• Referral Traffic Increase
• Direct Traffic Increase

This is something of an experiment to see if a local, small business can increase website traffic by blogging twice a week. There have been a couple recent studies of a similar nature, but these took a more radical approach.

The first of these studies consisted of writing 50 posts in 25 days, so not twice a week, but twice a day. The second study, predicated on the first, decided to up the game even further by posting 150 times in 50 days. That’s a staggering 3 posts per day.

We decided to take a less radical approach, one that we think most small businesses can manage with a little organization, and some persistent work. Our 2 post per week goal will be supported by two writers, and an editorial calendar. Obviously we’re not expecting to see the dramatic traffic increases seen in these other two studies, but we would like to provide a base metric for others wishing to understand the effect consistent content production can have on traffic.

Topics

Some of our posts will be one-offs, like this one, and others will grow to be parts of series on various subjects that might interest our readers. We plan to look at topics from Content Marketing to Branding, Social to SEO, and Responsive Design to Business Strategy. We offer quite an array of services here at Think Webstore, so our topic choices promise to be varied and interesting.

Please feel free to leave us comments on Facebook or Google+. Especially valuable would be this – what topics would YOU like to see us blog on?

See you with another post on Tuesday – Topic 1: Content Marketing.