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5 Ways to Launch an Effective Holiday Marketing Campaign

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Hosting

The post 5 Ways to Launch an Effective Holiday Marketing Campaign appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . For marketers, the holiday season truly can be “ the most wonderful time of the year “. However, without a sound strategy , the holiday can offer as little to businesses as it does to sandal-makers. And considering the very specific nature of the holidays, a little knowledge can go a long way. So what is it that makes the holidays tick? How can you as a marketer successfully market your product to consumers? Before even putting pen to paper, know that your strategy, your goals, your channels for engagement, and your tone will ultimately determine your potential for success.   1. Know Your Goal At the risk of traipsing into philosophical territory, what is your reason for the season? Before doling out cash for advertising and social media resources, consider what it is your businesses would like to achieve during the holiday season. Is increased sales your top priority? Is customer engagement the focus? Do you simply wish to associate your brand image with the good-will and holiday cheer of the winter months? In any instance, know what your goal is and stick to it. Base your goals around what would most benefit your organization. If your company delves into consumer goods, figure out how you can make lives easier during the busy and often hassle-filled holiday season. Financial planning? Engage your customers by associating your company with financial prudence and peace of mind in what are frequently fiscally tumultuous times. Tailor your content around the needs of your customers for the holidays and make your mark in the process.   2. Focus Your Efforts The holidays present myriad opportunities for marketing themes and targeted campaigns. Aside from the occurrence of Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Years, the commercial “holidays” of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday transpire through the season as well. Each instance presents its own distinct themes and opportunities for ambitious businesses, but losing focus can be a detriment. Avoid spreading your resources and your image too thin. Focus on one event and tailor your efforts to it. Consider what characteristics your organization wishes to espouse and build association with the event that most clearly promotes them. Consider the circumstances of the event, be they travel, family gatherings, shopping, or general celebration and tap into those when building your campaign.   3. Harness the Internet Even for small businesses, the Internet presents a powerful channel for customer engagement and dispersal of marketing materials, especially at a time when  large swaths of the population are traveling . Social media’s ubiquity presents a chance to market to customers checking in with friends or browsing family photos. Email and advertising provide the opportunity to offer holiday-themed deals for budget conscious shoppers. Build your media strategy around the unique circumstances of the season. Craft content for social networking including photos that are not only easily digested by busy consumers, but can quickly build a brand association that will drive sales during a commercial watershed. Email coupons to those on your mailing list and offer online deals for last-minute shoppers. In all things, consider the circumstances of the holidays and figure out how to best engage busy, mobile, and enthusiastic consumers.   4. Deck The Halls With the visual and social identity of most holidays well established, your job as a marketer is to tie your company in with those virtues. Engage customers on this basis by including holiday themed content that promotes sharing, like eCards or photos of cozy settings. Focus on permeating the market by highlighting how your customers identify with and benefit from your products around this specific time of year. Even commercial holidays can receive the same thematic treatment. Do you run a small business? Tap into the spirit of entrepreneurship for Small Business Saturday. An online retailer? Highlight the convenience and wide selection of your shop by tailoring your content and offers toward Cyber Monday. Each holiday event presents an opportunity to effectively market to the good-will and frugality of festive shoppers.   5. Be Delightful Regardless of the specific religious observation (or lack thereof) of holiday consumers, the winter season is about cheer. Families travel for joyful gatherings, happiness is a pervasive theme in all endeavors, and warmth and cheer seek to shut the door on cold winds and hazardous drives. Knowing that this sentiment represents the cultural milieu of consumers can make hay in the snowy months. Consider how your campaign inspires these same feelings. Focus on the happiness of the season and delight customers with a helping hand by any means necessary. Offer deep discounts, concierge services, loyalty bonuses, and customized thank-yous for holiday shoppers and spread some cheer of your own. Give generously of your holiday spirit, and be assured that that generosity will improve your image, your brand, and your sales. With a little knowledge, the holiday season presents a real opportunity for success. Consider what your company’s priorities are during the holidays and focus your efforts around the event that best espouses the virtues of your brand. Capitalize on the ubiquity and affordability of the Internet and theme your materials and your message around your event of choice. But above all else, be delightful and tap into the cheerful nature of the winter season. With a little care and attention, you too can have a very happy holidays indeed. Check out the fast shared web hosting by HostGator.com Continue reading →

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Websites For Beginners: 5 Tricks To Help You Succeed

Posted on November 2, 2013 by Hosting

The post Websites For Beginners: 5 Tricks To Help You Succeed appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . When building a website, it’s important to begin with a clear focus and plan. When you have clarity about which direction you want to go in, it makes it much easier to set and achieve your website goals. In the article below, we’re outlining 5 tricks to help you succeed as you build your first website.   Target Your Audience In the course of building your website , you have to keep in mind who you’re doing this for. Your target audience should be clear in your mind. A grocery store near an elementary school will likely have a lot of parents of younger children as customers. If you sell products for aging citizens, then your audience will be the elderly and their caretakers. So who are you building your website for? What sort of content would be useful to them? Take some time and write out a profile for your ideal visitor. Imagine their age, gender, geographic location, income, and other relevant information. Use this profile to give your website a clear direction and focus.   Stay Up to Date There is no shortage of outdated websites online. Some come in the form of blogs that haven’t been updated in over a year, while others sport layouts and themes that were popular during the Clinton administration. An outdated website quickly loses credibility with its audience. Not only that, but the older a website is, the more outdated its technology. Keep your website up to date by keeping your content and information current. You should also stay on top of website trends that could affect your website, such as SEO and HTML standards. And speaking of SEO…   Be Findable Search engine optimization is more than just a set of tricks. In its purest form, SEO is a way to make your website easy for search engines (and ultimately people) to find. This is supremely important in that 91% of adults use search engines regularly when they go online. A lot can be said and has been said about the best way to go about optimizing a website, but there are a few core rules you should keep in mind. Fresh Content: Without content that is fresh and relevant to your niche or industry, your website can quickly grow stale. Search engines look for websites that are updated regularly, and use this as criteria for ranking. Your content should not only be fresh, but also unique and relevant to the rest of your site. In other words, stay on topic and be original. Take a new take on a subject whenever you can instead of writing just another blog post on the topic. Relevant Keywords: The keywords you use throughout your website matter. Find a keyword research tool and find out what keywords your customers are searching for. When it comes to keyword popularity, it’s best to aim for somewhere in the middle: Keywords that are popular but not too popular. That way you’re more likely to rank for search terms that aren’t as competitive. Include your main keywords in your title tag and URL, and otherwise as often as you can while still sounding coherent. Accessible HTML: Your site should be accessible to those with visual, hearing, and mobility impairments. Use an accessibility validator to test your website against currently accessibility standards, and modify accordingly. Making your website accessible to those with disabilities also makes it easier for search engines to crawl.   Be Relatable The Internet can sometimes be a cold, sterile place, which makes it all the more important to put a human face and feel to your website. Unless your website is of a strictly technical nature, always remember that you’re a human using a website to communicate with other humans. You can make your website more personable by: Using a conversational tone when writing and publishing content. Avoid excess industry jargon, big words, and overt sales talk. Creating an “About” page. This is especially useful if you work with a team. Create a mini bio for each member of the team that includes not only their role, but also hobbies, nicknames, and other interesting tidbits. Including contact information at the top of every page. By making it easy to get in touch, you’re creating trust with your audience.   Be Analytical If you were planning to just eyeball it when it comes to website traffic, there is a better way. Website analytics is a measurable method for tracking the success of a website. Whether you measure success by number of unique page views, monthly downloads, monthly sales, or newsletter subscriptions, you can see how well you’re doing by using analytics software to track your website’s progress. Among other features, you can also use analytics to see which pages of your website are most popular, and which pages people tend to exit from. This makes analytics software a valuable tool for tweaking your website for best performance. Google Analytics continues to be a great choice for those just jumping into the world of website analytics. It’s easy to install and user friendly, and also includes a bunch of great features like goal setting and split testing. It’s also very customizable. You can segment users into groups for easier tracking, such as customers from Milwaukee who spend $50 or more each month.   Your website doesn’t have to be one of those that eventually falls by the Internet wayside. As the old adage goes, when you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Putting a strategy in place ahead of time will give your website a much greater chance of success.   Have you picked a domain for your first website yet? If not, click here to search for and register your domain. Check out the fast shared web hosting by HostGator.com Continue reading →

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How to Choose a Winning Domain Name for Your Business

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Hosting

The post How to Choose a Winning Domain Name for Your Business appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . Location, location, location.  For domain names, as in real estate, having the right address can make all the difference. Web traffic, branding, expectations, and recognizability all can depend in large part on the digital storefront that is your domain name. Choosing the right domain name can be a daunting task, but here are some tips to help guide you in the right direction.   First Impressions Before customers see your layout, content, and branding, your domain name is the first impression they have. Convoluted strings of incomprehensible prefixes, varyingly successful attempts at niche humor, and over-acronymed domain names can all send customers packing before they even open the page. This means that several things must be considered when making the selection. The first is expectations. When a customer sees a name like billreducer.com, they have one expectation in mind: this website is going to help me save money by reducing my bills in some way. Choose a name that is going to let customers know from the moment they read it, what they are in for. If you run a company that provides office supplies, consider options like OfficeSupplies.com or OfficeNeeds.com, regardless of your company name. Both examples establish what is available at the site and hone in on the kind of customer you are looking for: individuals, whether personal or business, that are looking to purchase office supplies. Just as importantly, make sure your domain name sets expectations that you can fulfill. Choosing a domain like OfficeDreams.com suggests that your company remodels or redecorates offices, the word “dreams” suggesting a service instead of a product. Next, make the domain name memorable. Customers will find your website URL on flyers, newsletters, search queries, and other websites so making the address stick is key. Consider the domain Lifehacker.com. Potential visitors will look at the address and think, “how does one hack life?” The combination of life, a rather un-technical, haphazard venture, and hacking, a highly skilled, potentially sneaky way of shortcutting tasks, leaves a lasting and curious impression. Memorable domain names are often short, clever, and avoid trendy humor, hyphens or numbers. The longer or more complicated the domain name, the less likely it is to stick.   Establishing a Brand Intellectual Property (IP) has become a jealously guarded asset of many businesses, so your domain name should respect any potential copyrights. With the frequently nebulous nature of IP laws, you can never be too careful. In fact, in 2007, the University of Wisconsin pressured an Iowa school district over the similar shape of the two brands’ “W” logo. Research competitors in your market, paying attention to local, national, and even international firms, and consider whether or not your idea could be construed as a copyright violation. Once the legal considerations are taken care of, realize the opportunity that your domain name functions to brand your organization. Since most individuals will search for a company on search engines if they cannot remember or do not know the URL, your domain is displayed before the browser can even render your carefully crafted logo. It may be tempting to simply use the name of your business, but remember that domains act as a first-impression for your products and information. Consider what your domain says about your company, its goals, and its ways of doing business instead of whether or not it simply identifies your business. For this reason, make your domain name unique. If your goal is to make a lasting impression in those who glance at your organizations entry in search results, being one-of-a-kind is an asset. Avoid following trends in lingo or industry. Names like LOLshirts.com can make your business seem unprofessional while HTML4designers.com can leave you wishing you had given your address a little more thought. The key is to look at your competitors and your corporate identity, and decide what will make you stand out, for a long time to come, while respecting your integrity and company image.   Play the Game Internet search is based on a framework of keywords and phrases when indexing addresses and sites. For this reason, these rules should be respected when choosing an address. Moz.com recommends brainstorming keywords related to your organization and using these in shaping your chosen name. For example, a butcher’s shop might name meat, butcher, smoked, cured, savory, friendly, and service as descriptive keywords for his/her business. An appropriate name might then be SavoryService.com or TheSmilingButcher.com. Either domain respects the fact that search engines work off of such keywords when indexing and fetching information for users, while providing a description of what customers can expect in the process. Besides respecting the algorithms of popular search engines, your business should understand that good domain names come at a premium. The past several years have seen a veritable gold rush of URL purchasing for providers, meaning that most domain names you might want are already owned, therefore, and come at a price. An infographic by Domain Name Sales reveals that there are 138 million registered domain names on the Internet with only 5-10% of those in use. In addition, premium domains ran an average of $20,000 in 2011, including names like PersonalLoans.com going for a whopping $1,000,000. The important thing to remember is that your domain name is as much a part of your identity as your company logo and products. Think of your URL as your storefront; a chance to set expectations and brand your organization. Respect search engine protocols, copyright, and be prepared to make an investment in your company when you finalize your purchase. Remember, even with all the money you spent on marketing and advertising, a simple line of text could be what hooks your next customer. For more tipis on how to pick the right domain, click here . To search for and register your domain, click here . Continue reading →

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Inexpensive Online Marketing Tools You Should Be Using

Posted on October 23, 2013 by Hosting

The post Inexpensive Online Marketing Tools You Should Be Using appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . Whether you’re a lean startup or a budget conscious behemoth, there’s nothing wrong with saving a couple dollars, especially if it’s on something as important as marketing. But with plenty of snake-oil salesmen and low-quality services out there on the Internet, you want to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth. Here are five affordable tools to help you get the lay of the land when planning your marketing strategy.   Survey Monkey Cost: Free up to $65/month Survey Monkey is an oldie but a goodie. The service has been around since the nascent days of the Internet and its continuing adaptation and development are just accessories to the fact that it performs one basic task extremely well: collecting customer feedback. From real-time results to random assignments for answer order, even seasoned marketers will find exactly what they’re looking for. Plans come in an array of prices. The free option offers the most basic tools (of course), but upgrading to the “Select” or “Gold” plans offers enhanced security features and unlimited questions and responses without over-burdening your bank account. The “Platinum” plan even features the ability to customize the appearance and branding of surveys and utilize your own post-survey redirects. With even more add-ons like audience targeting , what’s not to love?   Census.gov Cost: Free While querying your existing customers can be useful, brand new companies (and even established names) can always benefit from understanding the clients they haven’t made yet. This is where the US Census comes in. From information about median income to population distribution to detailed facts like computer and Internet use, there is no shortage of useful tools to help paint a picture of potential customers. But the Census doesn’t just document people. Detailed information about industries, employment, trade, and so on can help your business understand the greater context of your market. Between these exhaustive statistics and a bevy of research articles on the data itself, there’s no question that, whatever you’re looking for, you’ll probably find it here. Did we mention it’s free?   Technorati.com Cost: Free Blogs play an integral part in shaping the cultural and consumer habits of the connected public. Keeping a finger on the pulse of trends, commentary, and discussion is never a bad idea. After all, statistics have stories to tell, but people are more than just numbers. Technorati is another tool that you can use to shape your marketing strategy. An exhaustive directory of nearly 1.5 million blogs, the site acts as a search engine designed to scour the medium specifically. Additional tools, like the choice between searching posts and topics, viewing top tags and sites, and the annual Digital Influence Report , which covers the state of social media and online marketing, it’s no wonder why site has remained relevant for so long.   Google Trends Cost: Free It’s no secret that Google indexes its data, but the NSA isn’t the only organization benefiting from this fact. Google Trends takes the billions of online searches per day and breaks them down by category, top hits, and geographic region. As if this wasn’t helpful enough, the service even prepares graphic data and customizable reports using the Explore feature. But the real strength of Google Trends lies in the name: Google. Utilizing the most heavily trafficked search engine on the web provides instant access to the behaviors, thoughts, trends, and interests of a cross-section of the population that would otherwise take a huge amount of money and time to survey on your own.   SEC.gov Cost: Free As we mentioned earlier, knowing your market isn’t just about knowing your customers, it’s also about knowing your competitors. With government mandated filings for publicly traded firms, posted in plain view for all to see, the SEC stands as a veritable gold mine of information. Two primary items drive the usefulness of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s postings. The first one is comprehensive annual and quarterly reports in readily accessible PDF and HTML formats. The second, however, is probably the most attractive for time conscious tycoons. XBRL (short for eXtensible Business Reporting Language) meta-tagging of vital financial statistics ensures that data can be cataloged and presented in quick-reference, easy-to-understand tables. The combination makes for an insightful look into competitors, risks, and market trends.   Social Networks Cost: Free Just as widespread in use as search engines, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ provide a unique opportunity for research. Besides being heavily-visited and free distribution channels for content and product announcements, the services stand as one of the most potent methods of rapid-fire data gathering on the Internet today. While surveys and census data can provide powerful insights, social networking exists in a space where people are encouraged and happy to communicate and provide feedback. The ability to simply click in a comment box, fire off a response, and hit enter, all in a matter of seconds, means an outlet for customers, and a steady stream of intel for you. Creating a comprehensive picture of your market is no easy task, but with some low cost options at hand, the job becomes a little easier. Remember to combine information from all sources and get whatever value you can out of each service. At the end of the day, you’ll have a better understanding of your target market, and you’ll save some money in the process. What other inexpensive online market research tools do you use to shape your marketing strategies? Leave a comment for us below! Continue reading →

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Happy 11th Birthday, Snappy!

Posted on October 22, 2013 by Hosting

The post Happy 11th Birthday, Snappy! appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . Snappy turns 11 today!  Now that Snappy is officially a tween, we’re celebrating by offering domains for just $2.95 per year and all new hosting plans are 50% off!  This offer is good today only, because Snappy will only turn 11 once!  Help us celebrate by using coupon code GATORDAY and pick up that new domain now! Continue reading →

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