Whether yours is a small or midsize company, nonprofit, or public institution, if it’s not yet in the social-media space you should know up front that entering and playing in that space is going to take an investment of time and effort.

And even those organizations that have been tweeting and networking for a while should stop chasing social media without the following three essentials in place.

1. A Professional Website

Although some marketing experts claim that blogs are quickly replacing websites, most people will visit company websites to learn more about your products, services, or mission. Your website’s landing pages are also the destination point from external links in online news releases, published articles, videos, or any social-media entries and blogs in which you’ve posted a URL or other hyperlink. If your site isn’t ready for prime time, you can lose those visitors in seconds—and reduce the odds that they’ll come back.

Your organization’s website should have the following elements to attract and retain visitors:

• A professional and consistent design and look that are easy on the eyes
• Easy-to-read text
• The organization’s name and a clear explanation of what it does
• Menu options that are easy to navigate
• Contact information or contact links on every page
• Content that is compelling, informative, credible, authentic, and relevant— focused on the “customer” and error-free
• Few bells and whistles that take too long to load
• Working links

Although 63% of consumers and small-business owners turn to the Internet first for information about local companies, and 82% use search engines to do so, only 44% of small businesses have a website and half spend less than 10% of their marketing budget online, according to research from WebVisible and Nielsen.

Participating in social media can help your organization build brand awareness and possibly generate leads; but before you post links to your site (or landing pages) to entice target audiences with more information, ensure that your site has all the essential components to make it professional and functional.

2. An Understanding of the Social-Media Rules of Engagement

If you jump into the social-media space without a solid understanding of its rules and best practices, you may commit social-media suicide without even realizing it. There are certain protocols that will become evident to you as you read and observe others. Learn from them first, and you’ll avoid alienating your audience.

Here are some valuable rules:

• Know your online identity. “Knowing your online identity as well as letting others know up front who you are is important in establishing trust among the online community.”
• It’s not about you. Social media is about community; it’s not about what you do and what you market. Show interest in others and offer value, or others will see through your self-interests.
• Do not jump in and promote your products, services, or mission. Wait and build your reputation on the networking site first before you begin to promote anything. Contribute to the online community, help solve users’ problems, and develop friends and followers.
• Read and learn first. Observe users and get a feel for their interests, attitudes, and personalities. Take the time to “listen” and learn before delving into the community.
• Don’t mix business with pleasure. Keep your friends and family profiles separate from those that you use for your organization or company. Friends won’t care about your latest promotional effort, and customers won’t care what you did on the weekend.
• Be positive. Don’t say anything that will come back and bite you, and avoid getting defensive when someone says something negative about your organization. Take a deep breath and wear a public-relations hat when you respond.
• Go slowly. You don’t have to join every social-media site at first. Take it slowly, and establish your identity on the one or two sites where your target customers are before you take on more. It’s better to participate more frequently in fewer sites than infrequently in many.

3. An Understanding of Available Online Tools

It’s important to know the available online tools, particularly those for beginners and intermediate participants. If you are unsure of what’s out there, or what you can use - talk to us, and let’s know how we can help you.

Again, start slowly, using the tools that you find easy to learn. You can build on your knowledge and engage other tools as you become more proficient.

Although millions of organizations and companies participate in social media, many have overlooked the aforementioned essentials before taking the leap. If your organization hasn’t yet begun, take the time to develop a social-media strategy that will help guide your participation and content as well as build a foundation for better results. And if you have already been engaged in this space, evaluate how many of those essentials are in place. There’s always room for improvement.

In today’s economic times, it’s important to know your marketing is both timely and reaching the right customer base. Increasingly, real-time marketing technologies are helping small to mid-sized businesses nimbly adapt to the ebb and flow of consumer demand. Like the example above, Fishnet Media offer’s the ability to pinpoint marketing, providing more return on investment.

Real-time marketing has emerged as a way for small and medium-sized companies to more easily and efficiently keep up with larger competitors. Companies with smaller budgets and greater accountability, are looking to make each dollar work harder in today’s economy.

For the most part, our real-time technologies focus on mobile marketing, social media, and combinations of the two to reach customers.

Contact us today to learn how we can help you reach your regular customers, track potential customers by interest, attract customers by proximity, and get more out of your marketing dollars.

Where do you start, and how do you know if any of it’s working? Are you winning or losing your SEO battle, and if you’ve hired an (some other) agency to manage your search profile, are they doing all that they can? These are questions that anyone who manages a website should be asking. Below are a few easy tips that you can use to spot check your SEO.

Work with the search engine
Site operators can easily monitor their SEO performance by using some simple tools. For instance, Google’s Webmaster Tools - The tools will tell you what keywords you are ranking for, which keywords are driving traffic to your site, which pages are in the Google index, who is linking to you, and if there are problems on your site.

What does your link text say about you?

Are you the No. 1 website for the phrase “Next Page?”. If so, it’s because your linking to that phrase. When you link from one page to another, the search engines use the words in the link text to determine which keyword phrase to look for in the content of the page that the link is going to. You should be linking to your ‘apple pie’ page with the link text ‘apple pie.’ The search engines will confirm that ‘apple pie’ appears in the title, description, and body content of the page that you are linking to and award the page with rankability.

What do inbound links say?

You want all the inbound links you can get, but what really makes the difference is to make sure that the linked copy from the other website includes a term that people would naturally search for, rather than the name of your website.
Here’s an example: “A motorcycle website can identify key terms, such as ‘front end components,’ ‘discount exhaust,’ and ’seats.’ Then, the website can encourage outside websites, including blogs to link on these terms instead of the name of the motorcycle website. Over time, the website will start to position itself on these key terms and improve its search engine positioning.

Meta matters

If you’ve ever wondered why some websites have a full-blown directory in the Google results and others offer only a lonely link, the answer is in the meta data. Marketers need to be cognizant of what story that information tells a prospective visitor to your site, and that means entering useful copy in your site’s meta data that will inspire the user into actually coming to your site to hear more.

Ask about relevance everyday

If you’re not asking about relevance, you’re definitely failing at SEO. Much like a credit score, no one knows exactly how specific factors affect rankings. But as a general rule of thumb, always ask yourself: What more can I offer the users who I want to attract? How can I be the most relevant website on a particular topic? This means an abundance of informative content, and a diversity of content that a user might be interested in. Don’t just load your site down with text. Make sure to include PDFs, videos, and even links to outside resources that would be helpful for your users. Do anything you can to make your site extremely relevant and useful for a visiting user, even if that means providing links to outside resources. This will rank you higher in search engines.

98% of all new technology purchases begin with a key word search; make sure your offering is at the top of these searches.

To learn more about the current state of your site, or if you’re looking for SEO help - Contact us today.

However, there is a great opportunity to be successful during these rough times and (to no surprise) it demands creativity. So tune up your traditional marketing approach and try some of these strategies to show value in your event program:

• Measure ROI today
  In order to institute metrics quickly, most marketers advise hiring a company familiar with how it is done. Some methods include polling attendees before and after a show via e-mail or surveying attendees during a show.
• Ramp up your pre-event marketing
  One method is to have the thought leaders and speakers who will be giving presentations at the event help spread the word in advance. Have them connect to attendees through social networking or via the Web to give a preview of the types of useful information they will be providing those who attend.
• Think digital
  Aside from the fact that digital events provide a significantly greater opportunity for measurement and attendee tracking, they also tackle the travel problem, since Web-based events make it easier for attendees to choose your event over other, non-Web-based ones.
• Where do your customers network?
  Find people where they gather on a daily basis. In many cases this means using social networking sites.
• Maintain an open mind
  Be willing to make changes. Marketers that create true value in their event, target exhibits directly to attendees based on their emotional and personal as well as professional needs. And they use metrics to prove ROI should weather the financial storm and come out the other side with a new set of tools for successful marketing.

If you’re looking for help with your next event, look no further - Contact us today.

After seeing one of our past client projects, Everactive came to us to help create a simple, but professional website which would portray that they are a professional, energetic company - something none of their competitor websites has. Taking their previously established logo design, we created this website so users seeing it for the first time would get to understand what Everactive does quickly and easily.

Learn more about Everactive.

Staying in touch with your customers is an important element in any marketing campaign, whether online or off. With Fishnet Media’s Reel It In, we make the process of using email marketing very simple while giving you the most advanced features available from any email marketing system.

From big picture to close-up Our reporting makes it easy to zoom right down to the subscriber level and see a timeline of exactly what they did with your email. Take this a step further and see your lifetime history with that person. Which campaigns did they open, what links were they interested in, how many times have they forwarded my emails? All this and more is at your fingertips for every subscriber in your account and is updated in real-time.

Which email clients are they using? The hardest part about designing emails is making them look great in the dozens of email clients out there. Our email client report makes that a thing of the past by showing exactly which email clients your subscribers are using. When you combine this report with our design and spam testing service, you can generate screenshots of exactly how your design looks in all these email key clients with a single click. Save yourself time and frustration by only focusing on the email clients that matter.

Pricing

Only pay when you send.

Reel It In’s pricing structure couldn’t be more simple. There are no setup fees, no monthly fees and no hidden fees.

For each campaign you send with more than 5 recipients, you pay a flat delivery fee of $10.50 plus 2 cents per recipient. Any campaigns you send to 5 or less people are free of charge.

Let’s say you’re sending an email newsletter to a database of 2,500 subscribers. To send this newsletter, you will be charged $10.50 plus 2 cents for each recipient, $50 in this case, making a total of $60.50. All prices are in US dollars.

Design and spam tests are $15.00

We also have large volume discounts if you wanted to pre pay for all your partners, then allocate credits to them - saving you money

Designs

Get a great-looking design. You have 4 design options with your Reel It In account. Pick the one that best suits you. Each and every option will get you a great looking email every time.

Use a generic design template.
Choose one of our free design templates and don’t pay a cent for design. Our templates are simple, clean and ready to go the moment you create your account.
Free

Customize a design template.
Get your company info and your logo onto one of our generic templates. For only $299, this option gets you a level of customization without a large investment.
$299

Use your own design.
Already have a design you’d like to use for your email template? No problem! We’ll take your design and convert it into an email template and load it into Reel It In for you to use.
$450

Get a custom design.
You get a completely custom designed email template ready to go in Reel It In. Our professional designers will turn out an email that you are sure to love.
$599

Contact us today to learn more.

Continuing our great relationship with Matter Communications, we completely overhauled their website with a new design and new content. The website is intended to be a highly informational website for Mattter and what they do for their clients.

More about Matter…

Enterasys Networks turns to Fishnet Media for all of their marketing communications needs - from email campaigns to collateral, from product photography to product launches - Fishnet Media continues to deliver with results that speak for themselves.

More about Enterasys…

1. Keep your messages simple
2. Test and optimize
3. Support campaigns on your homepage
4. Try out the latest technologies
5. Remember “searchability”

And no matter how “creative” your creative is, if you’re not taking ROI into consideration, it’s likely your competition is. So now is a good time to start.

If you’re looking for help with your next campaign, look no further - Contact us today.