Website Marketing

Online Marketing Campaign

Online marketing campaigns are now a crucial part of business growth in today’s modern marketplace.  Contact the experienced online marketing firm, Directory One, at (800) 477-1324 to discuss your business needs today! With more than 20 years in business, we have had the privilege of assisting a large variety of businesses around the Houston, Texas area to succeed in their business marketing campaigns long-term.

Receive practical advice and expert search engine marketing assistance when you contact Directory One. Our client list spans across a wide array of industries and we will be happy to help you develop an effective SEO strategy to meet your individual business advertising requirements.

Online Business Marketing in Houston

As the fourth largest city in our nation, Houston is a huge source for commerce and is an extremely competitive marketplace for businesses attempting to grow and thrive.  The importance of developing an effective online marketing campaign simply cannot be stressed enough when discussing ways to maintain your current customer base, while increasing your consumer reach.

Discovering the many opportunities for exposure, branding and lead generation online can help you to retrain your focus to identify the new business goals and objectives you will have the chance to reach when targeting the large audience of buyers that are using the services of search engine companies such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Google still holds more than 65% of the search engine marketplace however and is an exceptional resource for marketing you company’s products and services.  You will find that in directing your SEO campaign to meet the Google standards, your new customers will also be contacting you via search engines such as Yahoo, Bing and the many smaller search engine companies that come and go through the years.

Houston Marketing Firm

Helping Houston businesses with their online marketing campaigns, designing and updating websites to match SEO standardizations and delivering diversified advertising and marketing plans to our client companies is what we do best as we thrive off of the experiences of success our clients receive when they increase their return on investment (ROI) by using the experienced SEO services in Houston, offered by Directory One.

Please call our SEO specialists at (800) 477-1324 to discuss your current website and online marketing campaign and find out how significantly your bottom-line can be impacted by using effective business marketing services delivered by Directory One today!

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By “Home” I am referring to your business’s “homepage.” While external social media sites are a crucial part of any social media marketing campaign, savvy business owners know that you can’t neglect the homefront / homepage. Here are three tips for identifying opportunities for interaction that may already exist on your website.

Tip #1 Create a site that invites conversation

You have likely heard that “content is king” and “conversation is queen.”  How about ensuring your content invites conversation. What do I mean?Review your site to ensure it isn’t speaking “at” your customers, but rather “to” them. Yes, there is information you need to impart; but you’ll encourage more interaction by crafting your message as if was part of a dialogue instead of a monologue. In addition to making your site more readable and engaging to users – using a conversational tone in your content also makes your subsequent invitations to interact more natural.

Once you’ve tweaked your content pages – consider adding an internal blog. An internet marketing company in Houston can help you add an internal blog (like this one!) if you don’t have one already. A blog serves many purposes – not the least of which is introducing you to your customers on a personal level. The comment section under your blog can also be a great place to encourage dialogue and interaction.

Tip #2 Encourage Feedback

There are many ways to encourage feedback, and the options you choose will likely have everything to do with what sort of business you’re in. Companies that sell products or services might encourage feedback with reviews and testimonials. A website for a railroad company on the other hand might not have any use for a customer review – but they might want to gain credibility in their endeavors to “go green” by asking visitors to supply “sustainable suggestions” in a virtual suggestion box.

Warning: many companies have the desire to censor customer comments and feedback. Don’t be tempted. You may occasionally find that a customer wasn’t 100% pleased with your product and service. Allowing them to communicate with you via your website allows you to respond and take action, developing credibility in the process. Also, keep in mind that one bad comment amongst dozens of great ones won’t damage your reputation – if anything, this too adds credibility by demonstrating the reviews are honest and real.

Tip #3 Create incentives for participation

Give your visitors a reason to participate in your website. Contests are a great way to do this. Think: a product-naming contest; or a contest for the best photo of your product being used. You might also create a rewards program for customers who become members on your site. The discounts don’t have to be huge – but it will keep the conversation going as they’ve now invited you to send them information about promotional events and discounts.

Prizes and promotional programs are options – but the main point here remains the fostering of a dialogue. In that sense, the incentive can be as minimal as recognizing they’ve made the effort to communicate with you. Did they leave a comment on your internal blog? Respond to it. Did they make a suggestion in your virtual suggestion box? Send an email thanking them for their thoughts. Think of it as part of the act of listening – you are nodding your head slightly, saying “I hear you – I appreciate your input.” You’ll be surprised (and inspired) by how far this small act can take you and your business in this new world of word-of-mouth marketing.

Questions about this or other social media marketing topics? Use the comment section below or eEmail me at jenn@directory.com and I’ll do my best to address your question in an upcoming blog. You can also consult a Houston social media marketing company today at 713.465.0051

Learn More:

Social Media Marketing: Getting Your Message Across “Socially”

Social Media Marketing: Why Just “Being There” Isn’t Enough

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Putting the “Social” back in Social Media

Social media has altered the relationship that has existed between companies and consumers since the advent of modern advertising.  Gone are the days of speaking “at” potential customers. Dialogue has replaced monologue and narrowcasting is replacing broadcasting online.

This shift creates great opportunities for businesses – but like any change, it has been difficult for some to adapt to.  Perhaps this is ironic when we consider that for most of human history, interaction between producer and consumer has been a social affair.  Initially it was technology that made it possible to target the many instead of the few – via newspapers, radio, and then television.  These platforms greatly increased reach – but eliminated the individual interactions. Now technology lets us to both at once: reach the many and interact with them.

Unfortunately for many companies embracing social networking – the monologue & broadcast mentality has become ingrained in the culture of marketing . Instead of doing what should come naturally (interacting with other people) there is a lingering focus on “remaining on message” in many social media marketing campaigns.

The trick is to envision your Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube presence as a virtual countertop between yourself and your customers .  On one side stands your company and its message, brand, products, and services; on the other side stands a potential customer.  Would you expect to be successful by assailing the potential customer with a barrage of bullet-points and brand messages?   Would you expect the customer – who has the option to interact with thousands of other companies at the click of a button  — to remain in front of you while you continue your pre-programmed, on-point, litany ?   Sounds like a losing proposition, doesn’t it?

While other formats continue to provide a viable place for your “broadcast” messages  – social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogs, etc… are not a viable home for this technique.  Your potential customers will tune you out and your carefully crafted message will end up as noise.  Of course,  interaction alone won’t lead to real results for your business either. A Houston social media marketing company can help you craft an effective strategy for remaining focused on your company’s strategy and goals while being effectively social at the same time.

Questions or comments? Leave a comment here — find me on Twitter @SMMJenn, learn more about me, or email me at jenn@newnectar.com

Social Media Marketing in Houston: Learn More

Social Media Marketing: Why Just “Being There” Isn’t Enough

Social Media Marketing: Avoiding Culture Shock

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RSS is a simple XML-based system that enables users to subscribe to their favorite websites in order to browse recent updates. The listings include headlines and opening sentences, giving you just enough information to determine whether or not you want to read more.

RSS History

It’s hard to believe that RSS has been around for more than ten years. According to Wikipedia, RSS was first introduced in the mid-nineties by Ramanathan Guha, while working at Apple Computer. Guha soon moved to Netscape, but it wasn’t long before the Netscape RSS team quickly abandoned RSS development, because it was deemed too complicated for what they were trying to accomplish.

The perception of RSS as too complicated, although still around today, is quickly evaporating. In fact for RSS users, it couldn’t be easier. All you have to do is choose an RSS reader and you’ll see right away just how easy it is. If you already have a Gmail or Google account, you may as well choose Google Reader

After you’ve set up your RSS reader, to subscribe to the Directory One Search Engine Marketing Blog for example, all you have to do is click the words RSS feed in the top right corner and select the reader you’re using. Choices here include Google, My Yahoo, Live or Bloglines.

But how do you subscribe if the RSS reader you happen to be using is not one of the choices listed? Simply copy the feed URL at the top of of the Subscribe page and you can easily add it manually to your reader. I, myself, use Pageflakes because of the way it looks.

I first became intrigued by Pageflakes after checking our blog stats one day and seeing 46 referrals from Pageflakes alone. Pageflakes is so easy to set up that really all you have to do is go there and sign up for a free account. Then return to the blog or website you want to include and subscribe.

But enough about RSS history and how easy it is to use. There are certainly enough RSS articles around for that. In fact, here’s a link to a whole website of them appropriately titled Article Directory for RSS Related Articles.

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Let’s face it. Most of the good domain names are long gone. Certainly all the two, three, four, and five letter, single category words, like books, for example, are long gone.

I myself have long been an advocate of saying exactly what you do and where you do it in your domain name, which certainly explains why many of the ever-growing Directory One companies, for example, Around Houston Web Design and Houston TV Commercials have the domain names they do.

All is not lost, however. There are three domain research tools out there that can still help you find that perfect domain name.

• Instant Domain Search
• Domainr
• Brand Gopher

There’s even a branding agency, called Brand Bucket, that will essentially make one up for you from a word or two that don’t even exist yet. You know the kind of domain name I mean, like google, yahoo, or twitter, for example.

There’s obviously still an interest in domain research as indicated by a recent post on Winning the Web entitled, “The Incredible Value of an Exact Match Domain Name,” that made it all the way to number one on Sphinn this past Tuesday.

“Today I want to go over exact match domain names and explain to you why they’re so valuable. In case you’re not familiar with the term, an exact match domain name is basically a domain that contains only the targeted keyword for a business. For example, InternetMarketing.com and SEO.com are exact match domains.”

In fact Cellphones.com is little more than a parked page filled with adwords, but it still receives thousands of visitors every day because of type-in traffic. And “in the recent past, CreditCards.com sold for $2.75 million, Business.com for $7.5 million, and Sex.com for $14 million.”

Now why didn’t I think of registering any of those fifteen years ago?

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by Herb Firestone
Marketing Coordinator

Directory One introduces “ala carte” website marketing pricing that adds SEO, content development, link building and PPC management to our already existing fixed-cost website marketing packages and custom website marketing plans as determined by individual client needs.

Directory One, a Houston, Texas, full service, website marketing company, now offers clients a unique opportunity to improve their search engine rankings, increase sales and ultimately improve their ROI. Today the company announced “ala carte website marketing pricing that includes search engine optimization, pay-per-click management, content development ranging from press releases and videos to article and web page copywriting, along with directory link building.

“In this day and age the most successful website marketing companies are the ones that embrace the fundamental principle of social media marketing, namely listen to your clients and respond to their individual needs” said Philip O’Hara, Directory One founder and chairman. “It’s our role at Directory One to simplify website marketing pricing from vague and non-specific to 100% specific service-based products.”

Even as recent as last year, Directory One was one of only a handful of search marketing companies that actually published search engine marketing prices on the web. In fact, most search marketing sites still don’t, even today. In this day and age of instant gratification, Directory One doesn’t see the need to require prospective clients to trade their email address for a price quote. As a natural extension of publishing prices on the web, Directory One now offers website marketing “ala carte” pricing in addition to traditional fixed cost packages and custom SEO marketing plans.

Whether in-house or agency based, through Directory One companies can now:
• Evaluate their current search marketing efforts through Directory One
• Supplement those efforts with individually priced SEM services as needed
• Implement a completely new custom search engine marketing campaign

According to a study by eMarketer, a leading market research firm, companies spent $8.6 billion on search engine advertising in 2007, and are projected to spend nearly double ($16.6 billion) by 2011. Directory One is expecting to attract both local and national clients just beginning to allocate resources to online search marketing as well as seasoned SEM veterans with this new, “ala carte” pricing structure,” according to Marketing Director, Herb Firestone.

For a free, no obligation SEO website analysis simply fill out and submit the brief form on the Directory One website marketing home page.

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