About Peoples First Insurance

Since 1906, Peoples First has  served the York County community for all their insurance needs. They rely on their clients to spread the word about their positive experiences and most of their new clients find out about Peoples First  from community referrals.   Peoples First is recognized as one of York County’s most prominent independent insurance agencies.  You will often find their agents involved in local business events, participating in community fundraisers. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you researched what social media sites your target audience spends the most time on?     A lot of businesses have joined the social media marketing world and it is of great benefit to be present, but identifying who is using what medium is important.  According to a study conducted by the University of Maryland, nearly one in five small business owners are integrating social media into their marketing models.  A big part of using social media effectively is understanding your audience, much like traditional marketing methods that many of us are familiar with.

As a business owner you should have an idea of the general demographics of your ideal prospect.  Have you applied that logic to social media?  The paragraphs below dig a little deeper into who is hanging out where on the social media sites available on the web.

Where is your target audience hanging out?

According to The Nielsen Company, global consumers spent more than 5.5 hours on social networking sites in December 2009.  Compared to the 2008 study results, there has been an 82% increase of time spent on social media sites in one year.  Not only are people spending more time on social media sites, but a lot more people are using social media.  The greatest thing a small business owner can hope to tap into is where their target audience prefers to spend 5.5 social media hours.

Social sites

A few examples would be Facebook, Friendster, MySpace and Ning.  These sites can be broken down even further, MySpace tends to attract a lot of teen members and Ning has become popular for for connecting classmates and assisting is setting up reunions.  A recent study from Pew reported that 71% of the younger generation actively maintain a Facebook profile and 75% of the older generation maintain one as well.  Facebook seems to come out ahead of most social media outlets.  This site is relationship driven and people interact with people, groups and pages that they are interested in on a personal and social level.

Professional Sites

Some of the more commonly known professional sites are LinkedIn, FastPitch and Plaxo.  These sites can be used for business networking, job hunting and many people consider them to be lead generation vehicles a well.  These sites share the common objective of building a business community network and offer a means to strengthen and expand your business community.  Professional sites are fairly drilled own as far as member profiles.  You have the ability to execute very targeted marketing based on personal profiles and individual networks.  In addition, you have the ability to network and communicate with people that you have specific trade and business information about based on their profile.

Industry Specific Sites

Industry specific sites are are all too commonly overlooked.  Take the initiative to surf the Internet and find social media sites specific to your industry or industrie(s) that you serve.  An example is i-Meet, which is specifically geared towards event planners.  There is the ResearchGATE site that connects scientists and researchers for collaboration purposes.  Just to let you know how specific sites can be, check out veggppl.com, the vegetarian and vegan network.  The sites are out there, you need to determine who your audience is, what they are interested in and then look for the social media site that fits the audience.

Twitter Tweet

Twitter offers a lot of value for business owners and can be approached from different angles.  With real time search engine results, your tweets have a great chance of being found by people that are searching relevant content.  Some describe Twitter as a river of information that you dip into and dip out of at will.  People can follow you without the worry of email communication or a high level of commitment and Twitter is easy to use.  You have the freedom to create as many accounts as you want and followers are considered friends. Another advantage is that message boards or “tweets” itself can be viewable in public whether you’re friends or not, and you may include your URL as well which is a direct link to your site.

Twitter also has limitations.  There are  no applications rather than other sites like Facebook.  It does not offer groups, videos, blogs, ads, forums, and other unique and popular social networking menus.  Another challenge to Twitter is that the more you follow and the more followers you have the more challenging it becomes to manage information.

Despite the limitations, research dictates that Twitter is a social media force to be reckoned with.  Pew Internet studies suggest that 20% of 25 to 34 year old’s have used Twitter, with those 18 to 24 only 1 point behind (19%).   Online usage of Twitter is dominated by adults and has attracted far less teens to date.  Suffice to say, if your target audience is primarily teens then you may not attract prospects with Twitter.

Blogging

This is another outlet that relates to social media.  The beauty of blogging is you can create your own blog site or blog on your existing web site and target your content towards your industry.  The web is content driven and the more information and content you produce, linking back to your site, profile, etc, the greater web presence you achieve.  If you post a series of blogs with advice, input or content related to your product or service, interested parties will have an increased probability of finding you.  Another advantage of blogging is you can build a stronger community and attract prospects that are interested in content you publish relating to your industry.  If you want to start blogging, be sure to have the time, energy and creativity to commit.

Social Media Strategy

Best wishes executing your social media inventory and devising an effective and productive strategy.  Figure out where your audience prefers to congregate online and start a conversation with your prospects.  We cannot stress enough the importance of establishing a social media strategy.  Outline your long term plan and identify industry topics that you can speak fluently about.  Commit to a minimum amount of posts, tweets, etc that you will employ weekly to engage your online community.

RevenFlo is here to help if you need someone to navigate the Internet web waters with you.

Every executive, business owner, and high-functioning knowledge worker typically represents two brands: the one they work for, and themselves. Establishing personal expertise is paramount to the success of both.  Short of merely achieving notoriety, expertise in a topic or field demonstrates YOU as being both a thought leader and someone the public should turn to for answers.  Investors and venture capitalists have repeatedly asserted that they prefer a “B idea and A management team, to an A idea and B management team.” Short of an Ivy League M.B.A. or Ph.D. in your field of work, how do you establish both credibility and expertise on the web today? Read the rest of this entry »

Join Jason Broadwater on February 24, 2010 from 6:30-8:30pm at the Institute for Entrepreneurship to learn more about cost effective strategies to create and maintain a web presence.  How do you get your website to rank high on search engine result lists? Today a web presence is a necessity but to be valuable you must know how to utilize and market your website effectively to boost your business.  if you are curious about search engine optimization, register and learn best practices for small business.

You must register to attend-please call 704.330.4223 or visit: http://cce.cpcc.edu/e-institute

If you are interested in having a RevenFlo Team member speak at your event please contact us at: info@revenflo.com or call 803.328.6033

Revenflo’s Chad Smith is teaching a class, Create a Facebook Site for Your Business, on             “Technology Tuesday” at York Technical College. The class is February 23rd 2010 from 6:30pm until 8:30pm.   This event is sponsored by the Entrepreneur Network at York Technical College. You must register in advance, to do so please call: 803.325.2888. The class is located at York Technical College campus, Building C-lab C 116, Rock Hill, SC 29732.

David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR had a good rant posted on his blog about this the other day. There is a growing sense of frustration among web marketers who find themselves repeatedly stonewalled by executives asking “What’s the ROI?” or making grandiose statements such as “I can only commit $X funds if you can guarantee that I’ll see Y% return.” Yeah, yeah, we get it. You’ve got to CYA. Here’s what you’re missing out on though: Read the rest of this entry »

Social media marketing is a cornerstone of RevenFlo’s monthly Web Marketing Management program. We encourage our clients to dive into the world of social media as a way to engage their clients in conversation that revolves around their needs and buying tendencies. Read the rest of this entry »

Jason Broadwater will be a guest speaker at South Pointe High School Career Day in Rock Hill, SC.  The career day is being held on Thursday, March 18th from 8:30-12:00pm at South Pointe High School.  Students will have an opportunity to choose speakers who work in a career field that interest them and attend brief sessions to learn about a specific career or field.

Jason Broadwater is available to speak on a variety of topics including but not limited to:

Web Strategy and Planning, Web Design and Development, Marketing and Management, and Web Maintenance and Training.  Both Jason and RevenFlo are available to consult with small to medium sized businesses.

In today’s business climate, business’ are increasingly expected to have an online presence.  An increasing number of business owners are incorporating online marketing when they allocate dollars for marketing efforts.  The possibilities for online marketing are constantly evolving and can be highly effective in attracting prospects and promoting a brand.  In many cases, small businesses are putting more marketing dollars towards online marketing campaigns that incorporate social media, pay-per-click campaigns and website overhauls than more traditional advertising mediums. Read the rest of this entry »

The New Year is finally here and, I don’t know what it is, but something just feels different about 2010. Everyone at Revenflo is super excited about 2010 and the possibilities that exist. I wanted to start the new year off right with a new small business-focused approach to creating content – one that addresses the core questions and opportunities about marketing on the web. I plan to make this a weekly series about marketing and the web, so if there are specific topics you want me to cover, leave a comment and I will put it in the queue.

There has been a major shift in web marketing during the past three years, brought on largely by three factors:

• Search Engines – Whether it’s Google, Bing or whatever comes next, let’s face it – most people think of that box with a blinking cursor in the middle of their screen AS THE INTERNET.

• Content Creation – Businesses are now pumping out blog posts, email newsletters, video, tweets and such for a new connected world

• Social Media – Facebook has blown up the world, and it only gets bigger from here…WAY BIGGER.

These three factors quantify How, Why, and Where people are spending their time online, and should also define – wait for it – HOW YOU SPEND YOUR MONTHLY MARKETING BUDGET.

But how do you do that? I’d like to present the six most effective tools to spend your marketing budget on, and give you an idea what percentage of that monthly total each tool should consume. It’s a sliding scale, and the precise percentage will vary between business model. But hese numbers will give you a rough idea of the cost and/or importance of each tool.

Here, then, are 6 real-world, start-tomorrow suggestions on HOW TO SPEND YOUR MONEY.

#1 Get a NEW Website…

listen, before you go any farther…make sure you are in a fully scalable system that allows you to publish content and alter your site on the fly. If not, it will take much longer for you to respond to changing factors in your industry…making the whole endeavor that much harder. It you are using a Content Management System (CMS,) then go to step 2.

#2 SEO – search engine marketing

In the plain terms that I like to talk about with tactics, there is no other place to start the conversation, because its where everyone else is starting – at least for the near term. In the coming years this will start to change, as businesses begin to receive rankings and referrals from social media, but for now SEO is the top of the heap, and the best bang for your buck. Think about it, if you don’t show up on the first 3 pages of Google, Yahoo or Bing then your website has no chance – and I do mean zero – of producing for you. Spend 40% of your money here.

#3 Blog Posts, Press Releases, Written Content for your site

This goes hand in hand with the first two recommendations. We can do so much with written content and the search engines love it. Google ranks you on many factors and almost all of them revolve around written content creation. So here is what you should do, from the very beginning: hire a company that can help you get this process under control. It would be great if you could take some time to write. It really isn’t that hard and the process can be quite relaxing after you get the hang of it. But, ask yourself, will you actually take the time to do it? Likely about half as often as your best intentions. But that’s not bad if you have a company taking up your slack when you have an important golf trip or need a mental health day at the beach. You see, Google doesn’t care about your golf trip…just that your website is producing regular content. Spend 20-25% of your money here.

#4  Automated Email follow-up

This is a fairly new concept, and it differs from just pushing out an email newsletter. It is client-specific, client-tracking, client-metrics, client-strategy, and it has just recently come down to an affordable price. Don’t contract with a vendor, pay thousands of dollars to license software, and then pay a butt-ton of monthly fees – there is a better way!

Monthly services like Infusionsoft are affordable and downright easy to integrate into your daily workflow. Get this, you set up campaigns and not only can your track the campaigns but also THE CLIENT or PROSPECT! How amazing is that? But you must strategically work through the process: creating the content, capturing your client education and buying process, and constructing a campaign. That is where you are going to spend the most money…after it is created then you will just need small tweaks and updates and an administrator can perform. Spend 10% of your money here.

#5 Social Media

In 2009, many well-known brands and large businesses stepped up to the plate, spending significant money on social media. Small businesses are just starting to get their feet wet with this form of media. One big thing to consider here is the message you are promoting. To really make a dent in social media you need a strategy and some tried and tested methods that will produce the type of conversation that works in social media. So keep your spending moderate until you are able to hammer out the details and the framework of your campaigns. The great thing about this medium is that with a little time and budget its a very meaningful way to connect with your sphere of connections. Spend 10% of your money here.

#6 Video

Video is changing how we interact with the web. Youtube is the second largest search engine. Video hardware is getting better and cheaper. More consumers are migrating to high-speed internet connections, and those speeds keep increasing. All of this is leading us into a time when business will use video to communicate regularly with clients, be it training, demonstrations, interviews, product reviews, promotion, and so on. Revenflo is delving into this area as we speak. We have an appointment later this month with our Revenflo videographer for an interview style session. Our approach will be to produce regularly scheduled, informal 3-5 minute segments of video interviews (during one video session) with the owner of Revenflo, Jason Broadwater. Spend 10-20% here.

We want to know what you think and what questions you have. Take a moment and let us know.

In today’s world of blogging and the web each small business has an opportunity for a voice in the marketplace. There are great blogging software applications such as Wordpress, Blogger, Joomla, and Drupal to mention a few that are free to use, three of those four are considered open source. That means that developers work on the application to invent, maintain and innovate the product for free so we can use it to get your message out to the world. 

So here you are sending out your message to would be followers, clients and participants (your community) and you have no data to tell you if your time is being well spent. Your first step would be to hook up analytics software (Revenflo uses Google Analytics, its free and packed full of info!) to see how many visitors are coming to your site each month. This will give you a good indication of how many visitors, which search terms, and overall engagement with your onsite content.

If your website is built in one of these content management systems they come with RSS built into the system. This makes it easy for visitors to subscribe to your information, each time you publish a new post it is pushed out from your site and can be subscribed to by your community in a  feed reader or aggregator. There are many of these on the web or you could also have the feeds come straight to your email inbox.

On-site analytics will give you great information about incoming visitors to your website but it will not give you the information about the outgoing content or RSS subscriptions broadcasting from your website. To track this data you will need a service like Feedburner, this is a Google product that monitors all of your outgoing feeds and gives you the ability to understand the behavior of your subscribers.

Tell me how you are tracking your website traffic or if you have questions about Feedburner or Google Analytics.

RevenFlo was hired by Tuttle Company commercial developers located in Rock Hill, SC. A website build in a open source content management system is planned, with staff training, and monthly search engine optimization.