Digital Marketing News in the Tampa Bay Area and Vestal New York.

Cheap Content, Beer Results

Yes you read the title right, I said Beer results.

In the process of transitioning one of our clients from a major national advertising firm, which I will not name, to our platform we had some over lap on content creation. If you have ever heard me speak about marketing strategy, you would clearly understand that Sun Sign Designs, Inc. as website development and online marketing firm believes that every message, in all channels need to have the mission of the company in mind. With that said, in this example, we were posting our bi-weekly custom content piece for our client in the coffee industry. When what to our amazement, there was a post recently published talking about national beer day. You have to be kidding me! After further discovery, I was hoping that the client posted this however, it was a national marketing firm claiming they understand social media and content creation.

Sadly, I have to admit, I have seen this type of “just put something up” mentality, or “as long as we are posting something people will check us out and come to our website”. Even more often, companies will pay (waste) a lot of money for exactly that, messages that have nothing to do with A) their strategy, B) their industry and C) remotely close to their mission. To bring insult to injury, the owners of these companies believe they are being taken care of and do not always check marketing companies professional work. And in my example got Beer Results.

Long story short, here is what I advise. Content creation is a small part of a bigger picture. Whether you use an advertising agency or do it in house, have a singular marketing strategy in place. This marketing strategy should be based off of research and analytics. Follow your plan, and deploy messages that can be repurposed to multiple channels. Your messages always should have the intention of making you and your company a “thought leader” in your industry. A very well researched, thoughtful content piece can go along way and bring the value you are looking for. Finally, hold your marketing company or personal responsible, reporting that shows exactly your return on investment and effort is vitally important. It is the ONLY way you will ever know how to adapt and become better at selling what you do.

As a business owner, if do not feel that your marketing department or company is explaining anything (strategy, planning, deployment and reporting) clearly or providing the results you feel they should, get a second opinion. Otherwise, you could be selling coffee, and getting Beer results.

If you would like a second opinion please consider my company, Sun Sign Designs, Inc. Our consultation is free.

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Blue Rooster Web Launches Brakes Plus Auto Service

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Blue Rooster Web, a product of Sun Sign Designs Inc, is proud to launch Brakes Plus Automotive Service Center’s website. This small automotive shop, located in Philadelphia Pa, needed a web presence to help generate more traffic to their shop in a super saturated auto market. Their biggest challenge was that their name insinuated that they only did brakes. With some minor tweaks to their image and a new tag line, we helped them illustrate that they did much more. Please check out their new site at http://www.brakesplusautoservice.com

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Sun Sign Designs Launches Java Joe’s Roasting Company New Website

We are proud to be a part of Java Joe’s Roasting Company’s evolution to a new perspective on how they do everything. With this transformation we have rebuilt there website and added many new features to streamline their process.

Below is the press release we wrote to cover their new launch. And please go to www.javajoesroasting.com to see their amazing products.

“8.1.2016
Java Joe’s Roasting Company is proud to launch their new website. The new website has taken a new form as a national e-commerce website with the vision of delivering the Java Joes Roasting Company brand of gourmet coffee to customers across the United States.

Java Joe’s Roasting Company back on May 17th, 2016 launched Fundraising Junction as the new brand that will forever handle coffee fundraisers. This launch then allows the new Java Joe’s Roasting Company site to focus on corporate clients, corporate promotions and party favor coffee (Lagniappe), and direct to consumer coffee sales.

Java Joe’s Roasting Company believes in quality of product and superb customer service. So if you are in the Binghamton NY area, and would like a tour of their factory, or would like to buy a bag of coffee, stop in and visit. I know you will be surprised and delighted.

Java Joe’s Roasting Company
Purity Per Pound (TM)”

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What Artificial Intelligence Means for Online Marketers

AI

Siri, Cortana… Assistant? At their annual I/O meeting this past week, Google entered the fray of AI Assistant software, a feature long offered by Apple with Siri and more recently by Microsoft with Cortana. By simply calling its service Assistant, Google may be pointing to an unspoken fact that a lot of tech bloggers have already noticed: they aren’t re-inventing the wheel here. Much like its competitors, Google Assistant uses voice recognition technology to have a conversation with its user, making everyday tasks even simpler, and allowing the Assistant to be the point of contact for the user with the internet. And this is the key takeaway for online marketers, especially given the fact that the largest search giant is in the mix: for your business and its website to reach consumers, you’re now going to have to also appeal to their robot assistants.

This isn’t meant to sound as intimidating – in fact, there are some advantages to working with machines. “Robots, unlike people, are consistent” writes Eden Ames. Once you’ve cracked the code for appealing to a particular artificial intelligence program, you won’t have to worry about mood swings or a random change in preference from the AI. And in many ways marketers are already familiar with working with robots from having to make content that appeals to Google’s algorithms, which have the technical complexity and built-in intelligence to put Space Odyssey’s Hal 9000 to shame. All of this is good news, as it means that much of the content that already works with Google will of course work with Google Assistant as well.

If anything it seems that the current hype around artificial intelligence these days is coming from the very fact that it’s been labeled as artificial intelligence, with all its loaded connotations. Instead of man-hunting robots, though, we’re getting helpful and practical voice recognition technology, which naturally is coming as a letdown to the more whimsical members of the tech community. In addition to this seemingly incremental progress is the fact that once again consumers are turning to their phones to buy things and get tasks done. The trend in artificial intelligence further cements the worldwide shift towards mobile usage. This also means that even if Siri or Google Assistant links to your site from a request by the user, it still has to be appealing in the mobile setting for the person to want to stay there. Working with machines will only get you so far—the person still holds the wallet.

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Launches Fundraising Junction’s New Brand

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Java Joes Roasting Company, a small business in upstate New York called on us because, for a lack of better words, they had been taken advantage of by marketers for the last decade. They were in desperate need for an advocate who would tell it to them straight, and build them a true strategy that would guide them into the next few years.

Sun Sign Designs built them a road map to help them choose the right tactics, with the right message to move them forward. As part of this initiative, we started with their core business, Fundraising Junction, and re did their logo and their website. We helped them understand that educating the market to see that fundraising is really building community and the interactions which occurs in fundraising help better society as a whole.

Though they are just beginning their journey, we are proud to be part of the evolution. Fundraising Junction launched its new site on May 17th 2016 to service the nation with fresh idea’s about fundraising products. The core product being gourmet coffee, which I might add I am hooked on, proves that high end healthy products can be part of a fundraising campaign.

Please do them the honor and visit their site and if you do happen to choose them for your next fundraising campaign, tell them that Stephen sent you.

www.fundraisingjunction.com

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Mobile Development: Getting Your Content into the Hands of Consumers

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Mobile usage is reaching critical mass as the go-to method for people seeking new content online. And while we’ve spoken previously about the importance of making your webpage mobile-friendly, it’s worth looking at current events to see the effects of not being 100% prepared. We’ll also look at some of the clear benefits of building out a mobile platform for your business.

Yesterday Radiohead released their first album in five years on their official website, in addition to music streaming services. While the album is available for download from the Apple iTunes store today, many fans couldn’t wait the 24 hours for the long awaited arrival of the band’s work, and downloaded the music directly from the home site. At the point-of-sale, however, an interesting notice appeared: “Please note: Do not download [the music] from a smartphone, it will not work. Please use a computer.” And while this notice will likely not cause any real issue for Radiohead, who have 6 platinum albums in the US alone, your business might not be so lucky if it came with such a warning. The fact is, customers hate to see these kind of hurdles, especially if their go-to device is their phone. If your competition happens to have an easier way of access via mobile, customers may gravitate towards their business, leaving you in the dust.

But enough of the negative, what are the benefits of going mobile? Alluding to the Radiohead story above, having a strong mobile presence will boost sales. In the same way that the internet reached entirely new areas of people that your business could previously never dream of reaching, mobile marketing reaches people who aren’t necessarily logged in at home. It also enhances the customer experience overall – yes, customers could just go on to their computers to reach you, but why not make it that much easier for them, making everything smoother and offer a positive word-of-mouth experience? And finally, the ability to give tougher competition to your adversaries is an obvious selling point for the case of having a mobile presence. If you decide to take the plunge and develop an app or at least make your site more mobile-friendly, your competition will realize that your company is serious about succeeding in the market, and they may even kick themselves for not being so bold.

Mobile development isn’t for the meek, and you’ll need all the help you can get to compete in this field. That’s why you’ll want to reach out to Sun Sign Designs to help carry the weight for you. Reach out to us today!

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Optimizing the Internet of Things and Virtual Reality

We’ve mentioned the Internet of Things a few times previously here, and while the concept may be new it isn’t necessarily complicated. It follows the natural progression of the internet being used to link devices up that previously weren’t connected, such as phones, cars, televisions, etc. The Internet of Things appeals to the hearts and minds of our current culture as a bold technological step forward in the midst of uncertain economic times. While this current digital device revolution has been happening, another kind of movement has been slowly gaining its own steam, one that’s been tried often before and has met repeatedly with failure: Virtual Reality. And while the notable commercial flops of Virtual Reality has served as a warning to tech companies to not do too much too soon, the predominance of the Internet in our culture today has served as a gateway for the this oft-maligned technology to finally get some love. The combination of these two phenomena open numerous doors for savvy digital marketers, and we’ll explore these opportunities in this article.

A key similarity to both these concepts is that they’re both in the beginning stages of development. While the idea of Virtual Reality has been dated back to the 1970s, the lack of widespread success in any version of the technology means that in functional terms, it’s still relatively new. This means that the fields are wide open for any smart company to take advantage of the situation, the way that Facebook did with Social Media. Broken down to its component parts, Social Media brings reality (images, stories) to the internet. Using this comparison, The Internet of Things brings the internet to reality, in the form of physical objects. And Virtual Reality brings the user into an immersive experience, combining artificial reality and the connectivity of the internet into a completely new environment.

While the concept of the Internet of Things is helped by the current prevalence of iPhones and Smart TVs, Virtual Reality may seem a more far-fetched idea for a business to build a marketing effort around. But one only need to look at the overwhelming success of video games, whether on console, computer or the “freemium” games on digital devices, to see the potential of the full Virtual Reality experience. You don’t want to have your company become the equivalent of the record labels who rejected The Beatles saying that guitar-groups couldn’t be successful in the 60s. You need to open your mind to whatever technology could give you the edge in the always competitive landscape of business, and both the Internet of Things and Virtual Reality could be your ticket to the top.

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Social Responsibility in the Age of Click Culture

How much of the internet is our responsibility to keep clean of garbage? In a new book published this month called Disrupted, journalist Dan Lyons relates his story of working at a tech startup, along with telling how he employed and witnessed many of the marketing techniques that we’ve discussed on this blog – email marketing, working the social media channel, SEO, etc. all in the name of lead generation, which is another way of describing getting prospective customers to click on your call to action. From the way he tells it, it’s not a pretty sight, and he has found allies in this particular cause. While his supporters acknowledge that as a business model, online marketing is a solid marketing replacement for media advertisement campaigns, they believe it pollutes the screens of users and generally makes the Internet a worse-off place overall. Since we here at Sun Sign Designs have been touting many of these techniques, we feel that it’s worthwhile to dig into the gist of Lyons’ argument in order to speak to his complaints and enhance everyone’s efforts in this space.

The main charge of this critique is that all of these techniques are being done in the name of lead generation. This is a bit of a paper tiger argument, because if you’re in business, new customers and sales are essential to your revenue stream no matter what your platform. There is just no way around the fact that there will be cases where your marketing efforts aren’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea. We do agree, however, that your content and technique management should be tastefully done. If you automate your processes to the point where your prospects are getting the equivalent of spam every week, then you should take a look at what you’re actually offering in this space.

Every business effort is going to have its own equivalent of the sleazy used car salesman, the one who sees dollar signs as soon as you step within 10 ft of his territory. Our techniques are tried and tested, and when ethically employed, they work and will bring new customers to your website. It’s up to you as a business to know where to draw the line and not abuse the effectiveness of the techniques to the point where your customers are fed up with your overuse of the internet.  Restraint is a valuable quality in a medium where one is able to deliver nearly unlimited content at the touch of a button.

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Launches Clean Earth Septic Service Website

Today we are proud to launch Clean Earth Septic Service website as part of the Blue Rooster Web platform.

clean-earth-septic

www.cleanearthseptic.com

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Steps to Maintaining a Dynamic Digital Marketing Strategy

One of the biggest temptations when creating a strategy is to assume that it’s complete the moment you implement it. Your team can then focus on the actual execution of the components of the strategy along with maintaining its operations, right? Wrong. For business, it’s hard to imagine the circumstances where this would ever be a good idea. The demands of your customers, innovations of your competition and just the role of dumb luck will force you to modify your strategy in real time. Given that a typical business strategy can have many component parts, you’ll need to choose your battles in order to be successful in strategic modification. In this article we’ll go over some primary areas where you want to spend your focus.

All businesses depend on their clients and customers for their revenue and profits, and your strategy must account for their needs. Given the connectivity of your businesses, random events that impact them will always affect you, so it is essential that your strategy has a built-in client industry awareness so you can anticipate potential effects. It’s also important not to grow too attached to any particular aspect of your strategy because it may be rendered obsolete from a particular request or refusal from your client.

You can’t go wrong by focusing more on the content of your online marketing. From a strategic blueprint standpoint, content is the equivalent of the bricks to your building. You can use all the special affects you want to draw people in, but if you don’t have relevant content they’re going to wonder what the big deal was and leave disappointed. The keyword here is relevant: understanding changes in the industry will keep you ahead of the game and allow you to delight your customers with killer content.

Good communication, both internal and external, seems to be that elusive goal for all businesses to achieve, and for your online marketing strategy this couldn’t be more essential. Whenever there is a change to your strategy, all relevant parties should be made aware. Clients will need to know if there will be changes to their service levels. Employees will need to know if they’re doing the right work. Being able to trust your own company, vendors and contractors to execute when required will allow you to communicate with your clients with confidence, particularly when another strategic modification is required.

Understanding strategy is more than drawing up a plan and seeing if it will work – good strategy requires dedication and expertise. Sun Sign Designs knows all about that, as we make strategy the key to the services we provide to our own clients. Reach out to us today to learn more!