Turnaround Lacklustre eCommerce Sales in 3 Steps

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You started your eCommerce site to expand your revenue and your reach, but lately its not doing anything noteworthy and you have a sneaking feeling you’re just coasting. Sound familiar?

 

Having produced and supported hundreds of eCommerce sites across many industries in the last 10 years we’ve seen common themes for successful sites. What these companies do, and the tools they use, can be boiled down to three areas.

 

1. Automate Site Visitor Analysis

eCommerce sales conversion rates average 3% globally, so for those that don’t convert you can still capture valuable behaviour data that will help you convert better in the future.

 

Optimizely for A/B Testing

 

What your designer or developer thinks might convert better could be wrong. Remove the need for arguments by using Optimizely and find out what users respond to. Use that data again to inform future sales strategies on your site.

 

Kissmetrics for Building Ideal Customer Profiles

 

With Kissmetrics, you can leverage data to determine where your best customers come from, who your best customers are, and how to convert more customers on your website. The tool allows you to view revenue metrics broken down by traffic source as well as providing insight into what’s keeping people from checking out.

 

2. Intelligent Pursuit of (More of) Your Ideal Customers

Once you have a decent read on what brings repeat visitors and sales to your site you need more of those customers. An effective content marketing strategy paired with cost-effective advertising will help you do that.

 

GoAnimate Explainer Video Creation to Demonstrate Product Benefits

 

The engagement stats on using video versus any other content medium are undeniable and exponential in some cases. Building shareable (and if lucky viral) product content is best executed through GoAnimate because its easy, engaging and cost-effective. Adding these to your website, your YouTube channel and social media also gives you a baseline of shareable content that can be used and reused.

 

Tribe to Find Your Ideal Social Media Influencer

 

To achieve faster and more high profile exposure for your brand use Tribe to find your power middle influencer. Tribe puts you in direct contact with the 250,000+ Australians that have more than 5000 social media followers. Submit your campaign brief and influencers will bid for your business then you get to choose who you work with and how. Aligning with a rising star is a powerful possibility with Tribe.

 

Google Shopping for a More Targeted Ad Spend

 

Advertising with Google Shopping is a visual and cost-effective way to display what you sell, matching up head to head with your competition. Product comparison via Google Shopping is a standard starting point for most online shoppers so make it easier for them to find your products linking directly to your website where all your great product content and authority lives. Conversion rates from Shopping campaigns can easily convert at 3 times the rate of general Search campaigns.

 

3. Find Your Evangelists and Loyal Supporters and Keep Them Close

You’re now intelligently and actively courting your new batch of ideal customers, but make sure not to leave your loyal fans hanging. They’re the ones who interact regularly with your brand and provide unsolicited positive feedback so ask them to formalise that positivity and then reward them for good behaviour.

 

Reviews.io to Harness the Power of Positive Feedback

 

You have to work hard for sales, but getting people to say nice things about your products & service is harder right? Not with Reviews.io. 90% of happy buyers will provide a review and this software not only manages the entire review collection and distribution process but it will help you achieve the coveted Google seller rating faster than a manual review process which helps you save even more on your Google Shopping advertising campaigns.

 

Smile.io to Create and Automate Your Customer Loyalty Program

 

They’ve already given you positive feedback and referred you to others, now it’s time to reward them. Personal emails and one off discounts are nice, but scaling the power of positivity should be automated and delineated.  Smile.io is a powerful and cost-effective tool allowing you to create your own influencers, putting you in the driver seat of managing your online reputation.

 

From Lacklustre to Arse-kicker

 

There is a theme here:

 

  1. Automate data capture to create insight about what works
  2. Use that data and insight to spend wisely, attracting more of what works
  3. Get serious about capturing crowd-sourced data and insight to create a continous loop attracting more of what works
Creating your own eco-system of what works does take effort, but so does starting an online store in the first place. In the fastest moving marketplace your data collection and analysis methods must be sharp and evolving, but thanks to the growth in apps most of the hard work is now automated.
These ideas and tools will give you the power to choose how fast you grow and that is anything but lacklustre.

How to Protect Your Website & Brand from Hackers

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Tough to admit as digital marketers, but our website was hacked a few years ago. It was frustrating, time-intensive to fix and mostly embarrassing.

We hung our heads for a bit, but then realised our experience could actually benefit others. We had taken our website security for granted but the process of restoring our online reputation painted a clear picture of what we, and other WordPress sites could do to strongly discourage future hacking attempts.

While some of the information below is unique to our WordPress security service it is a strong guide for anyone needing to  keep their online reputation safe.

WK-Wordpress-Security

 

 

3 Website Stats to Make You Look Smarter and More Attractive

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A pool full of metrics and you dive in it…yeah OK, Kendrick’s real song was not about website metrics but the haze of interpretation can be the same in both cases.

If you’re anywhere close to digital, marketing or IT, someone is likely to have thrust a Google Analytics report in your face and asked, “Is this good?” Instantaneously they’ve pushed you into the pool full of metrics, your clothes are sopping wet and you’ve got to make the best of it.

No one wants to look silly but its really easy when you look at the volumes of website usage data you can track in Google Analytics (GA) . If you can count the number of times you’ve looked at GA data on one hand (or no hands) then these 3 statistics below will help you turn the inquisition into a conversation.

1. Site Visitors

This is the total number of unique visitors to your website for the time period of the report. Essentially, how many different people took the time to visit the website because they were interested enough in the content.

So what is a good site visitor number? This depends entirely on whether the site is being actively promoted but also what kind of traffic can be expected for the topic and the time period.

Websites that are likely to have less than 1000 visitors per month:

  • Sheep Farmers Union of Invercargill
  • Knitters Guild of Kalgoorlie

It’s always possible a global revolution is being launched from these places but you probably get the picture, hyperlocal concerns that don’t change too frequently for an already small user base.

Websites that should have much, much more than 1000 visitors per month:

  • Australian Bureau of Meteorology
  • You Tube

Extreme examples yes, but the point here is that sites that provide everchanging information and/or entertainment for a wide audience should be in the millions of site visitors per month.

Once you’ve had a look at the Site Visitor number on the report turn it around and start asking questions like:

  1. How does that number compare to last month, last year?
  2. Have you been actively promoting the site?

Timing is everything, maybe the website is seasonal like truffles or has a increasing visitor rate compared to previous time periods then the news story is better or more normal than you might think.

2. Bounce Rate

This one is really important. It represents the percentage of users that visited the site and did not proceed to any other pages.

A bounce rate of between 26-40% is excellent, 41-55% is average, 56-70% is below average, and anything higher than 70% is poor.

A high bounce rate (56%+) probably occurs for one of the following reasons:

  • What they thought they would find on your site was not at all relevant to the reason for their visit
  • What they found on the site WAS related to what they wanted, but it was not sufficiently engaging to stay
  • It took so long to load your website that they just clicked off because they got impatient

Ultimately if the website does not have interesting, relevant content or performs slowly once the visitors arrive then you could just be giving a lot of people a really bad experience. An important lesson for big and small organisations.

3. Device Type

As web designers we think this number needs more attention than it gets now, if only to illustrate the importance of flexible responsive design.

Broken down into Desktop, Mobile and Tablet, if you have a Mobile and/or Tablet usage of 25% or more than you must have a site design that rearranges to look good and flow well on mobile and tablet devices.

It has been over two years since Google declared that websites must focus on the mobile experience first, ahead of desktop, an edict no organisation wanting to grow can ignore.

Looking Smart, Sexy and Delivering Value

It might not be in your job description to understand Google Analytics but giving customers, including yours, a good experience with value-added information is going to keep them in your good sted.

Just like reading your first word or first book, digital literacy simply requires you to keep taking one step forward at a time, one topic at a time.

3 New Features Available For Your Next Mailchimp Marketing Campaign

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An email to your clients, consumers and other stakeholders is one of the quickest and most effective ways to send out a key message instantaneously, but when you’ve got hundreds of contacts to get in touch with, it can no doubt be quite an exhausting task.

 

Email marketing platform Mailchimp allows businesses and e-commerce retailers to send marketing emails, automated messages and targeted campaigns in a straight forward way, and their continuous innovation in technology is allowing businesses to grow and gain more ground with their target markets.

 

The latest resources of Mailchimp allow you to communicate to your audiences faster, and here at WK Digital we can help you implement best practice email marketing so that you can run with it and utilise it for your business.

 

We’ve put together a list of the platform’s most recent features to show you not only how easy it is to use, but just how beneficial it can really be.

 

  1. Facebook ad campaigns

Mailchimp has taken a major step from email-only to marketing, now allowing subscribers to create beautiful Facebook ad campaigns. In the same familiar interface, you can produce an effective campaign strategy to match your branding style and target your audience.

 

Not having to spend time navigating through two different sites is one of the stand-out elements within this new feature. Also, because you integrate Mailchimp with Facebook, you’ll be able to track your return on investment, how many new customers you’ve gained, your orders total, the amount of people you’ve reached, and whether or not you should improve your marketing strategy.

 

Often it’s an easy decision for a business to advertise – after all, it makes sense to let the public know you exist. But choosing how and where to advertise can be problematic, especially when you’re a small business and your budget just can’t cater to the larger-fit costs of a broader campaign.

 

Mailchimp’s Facebook Ad Campaigns feature allows you to utilise the most popular social media platform in the world today, and target actual people. Other ad systems use cookie-based advertising to limit showing ads on a particular device or browser, but Facebook works quite the opposite. As most people access their Facebook profiles on varying equipment almost on a daily basis, you’re guaranteed to be seen.

 

  1. Integration to CRM programs

It makes sense for some businesses to integrate their email marketing component with a customer relationship management (CRM) application, which can make your three marketing components – contact lists, content and results – a lot faster and easier.
Mailchimp provides a connection to other websites and services, which you can plug in to your account, and they are so easy to use because there’s no need to learn about programming or coding.

 

The newest integrations, of which there are more than a dozen in Mailchimp, allow you to add subscribers, sync data, import content and see how successful your campaigns are. As an example, some of the integrated systems include Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Shopify and PayPal.

 

It’s a brilliant way to learn what your customers are purchasing and then progress to creating more email campaigns customised to their interests!

 

  1. Stylish and customised email templates

You can truly design an appealing email campaign with a large variety of Mailchimp’s templates. There’s a choice of three ways to go about it – working with a basic layout, a pre-built theme or a template based on the message you want to communicate.

 

One of the best things about this particular feature is that for e-commerce retailers, you can actually showcase and sell products this way. You’re not limited to what you want to put across, and it can be anything from presenting special discount offers to offering vouchers and special packages to loyalty consumers.

 

These features, plus more within the platform, is why you use Mailchimp as a primary email marketing service, but here at WK Digital, we can help you apply all of that and guide you. If it helps your business grow, then we are at the forefront of making that happen.

Small Business Grants

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$5,000 of Free Marketing? It’s NOT too Good to be True!

The Queensland Government’s Small Business Entrepreneur Grants Program will be back later this year, and it’s a very generous offer.

Small business owners can receive a grant of up to $5,000 (excluding GST) in matched funding for any program in the applicable categories that will help develop the business. If you’re not in business yet, that’s fine – the grant also applies to new ventures.

The best part is, the amount can be revised upwards to include any GST you pay on your marketing investment!

Where do we come in? Well, there are four major categories for which you can apply. One of these is for market research and market strategy development, which can help your business reach new customers and continue to grow.

If you’re looking to overhaul your existing branding strategy, or implement a new one, we can help, and the government will front half the money. The growing acceptance of the importance of digital marketing is reflected in the grant, with concessions made for social media and other digital marketing strategies.

So if you’ve been waiting for the right moment to burst onto the social scene with some serious bang for your buck – now’s the time to start planning for when they open the next round of grants mid-year!

 

How Does it Work?

There are a few very basic criteria you need to meet to be eligible for the grant. Your business must:

  • Have a business name registered within the last 4 years.
  • Have fewer than 20 employees at the time of applying for the grant.
  • Have an ABN and be registered for GST.
  • Be based in Queensland.
  • Declare if any owners or directors of the business are an undischarged bankrupt or insolvent.

So as you can see, this grant is literally perfect for any Queensland small business that is seeking to expand their digital presence in a massive way in one fell swoop.

Applications go through a basic assessment, and then the government will check back in on you in twelve months to see how things are going. The initial grant assessment covers things such as:

  • The extent to which the service will support establishment and development of the business.
  • The extent to which the service will enhance the owner’s skills and abilities.
  • Potential business improvements.
  • Value for money.

 

What Can You Do?

There is a whole world of options available to you with this grant. Working with WK Digital, we can help you:

  • Rapidly expand your social media presence.
  • Devise an impressive content strategy to attract and convert new clients.
  • Develop white papers and perform market research that will establish your business as an industry leader.
  • Build an AdWords campaign that will get your business in the top slot on Google for every major keyword that attracts sales.
  • Upgrade your website and improve your sales funnel to increase conversions.
  • Try out something new – want a chat bot on your website? How about unique landing pages for every single market segment you service? Or better yet, set up tracking across your social media and search engine marketing efforts?

The possibilities are endless. The beauty of this grant is that the government literally requires you to invest it in areas that will have a long term payoff for your business. It doesn’t get much better than that.

 

Start to plan now!

Applications for round 2 of the grant will open in mid-2017. There’s never been a cheaper way to take advantage of professional services and get some serious growth gains in a short time.

More details on the grants program can be found at https://www.business.qld.gov.au/starting-business/advice-support/grants/entrepreneur-grants

The time to invest in your digital presence is now. Here at WK Digital, we’re lucky enough to have some of the best digital marketing consultants in the business. We can set you on the right path to success today, with no more wasted time.

Want to learn more about your options? Get in touch with us now. Call us on 1300 796 711 or email info@wkdigital.com.au to discuss your ideas – you’d be surprised at just how much marketing progress you can make with a small investment.

The Top 3 Customer Loyalty Tools You Can Use Today

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Getting the most value out of every single customer is a huge challenge for every business. Very few organisations invest adequate resources into improving the customer journey. But for those that do, the payoff can be immense.

Customer loyalty is the cornerstone of success for many small businesses. It’s widely known that retention is far cheaper than acquisition. However, when it comes to retaining those valued clients, many business owners don’t know where to start.

Excellent customer service and a quality product simply won’t cut it in today’s competitive world. In order to keep your customers coming back, they need to benefit from doing business with you. This is where loyalty programs come in.

To save you some time and effort, we’ve put in the hours to find the best customer loyalty programs that money can buy. These may not be appropriate for every business, but they’ll certainly give you an idea of exactly what you need to do to get as much bang for your buck as possible from every customer.

Belly

Belly is one of the largest digital loyalty apps in the world. Integrating a huge array of features, it’s become one of the leading choices for small businesses across a range of industries.

Built on the experiences of thousands of small businesses, Belly emphasises data collection and personalised rewards systems to retain clients. Some of the top features of Belly include:

  • Immediate collection of customer info.
  • Simple, integrated email marketing campaigns.
  • Easy social media management (with a strong emphasis on customer acquisition and exposure).

Belly allows you to customise your own rewards programs to suit the needs of your customers. By using mass customer data, you can refine your rewards program to be even more effective over time.

Belly claims to increase customer visits by 54%, which is a significant amount for any business.

Spring Rewards

Spring Rewards bridges the gap between the online and the offline world. One of the standout features of Spring Rewards is the collection of credit card data, allowing your customers to transition between a physical presence in your store and simply shopping online.

Spring Rewards is a standout analytics platform. With real-time collection of spending data from your clients, Spring Rewards allows you to deliver customised incentives to existing customers, giving you the opportunity to increase the value of every single transaction.

The best part about Spring Rewards is its simplicity. With very little requirement for training and a simple setup, anyone can start using Spring Rewards. However, don’t underestimate it – if you gather enough data and segment your audience accurately, Spring Rewards can be a very powerful tool.

 

Spendgo

Spendgo is one of the market leaders for true customer journey tracking. Designed to add value to every step of the journey, Spendgo is a fantastic tool for really getting the most out of every touch point you have with your customers.

Boasting closed loop promotions which can be highly segmented and customised, and top-notch reporting, Spendgo is the way to go for anyone who wants to ensure they aren’t losing their customers’ interest.

One of the more powerful tools available with Spendgo is highly customised outbound campaigns via SMS and email. Once you have a client’s data, any activity they pursue on-site or instore only adds to the high level of customisation you can achieve.

Checking Out

Choosing the right customer loyalty program can be incredibly difficult. At the end of the day, every business has different needs and widely varying customer bases. Understanding your clients and the type of rewards they desire is key to choosing the right loyalty software for your business. Ultimately, there are handfuls of valid customer loyalty programs you could begin implementing today. All you need is a bit of time for research and implementation, you’ll be thanking yourself for doing it – and trust us; so will your customers.

What Are CRM’s and Why Are They Important?

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A CRM or Customer Relationship Management system involves all the strategies, actions and technologies a business uses to handle their customer interactions and data. CRM software compiles information from multiple platforms and points of contact, into a single system database. We bet your head is spinning just from the concept of managing so much information. Aha! This is why you can employ a platform for the job! A cloud based CRM platform can be used singularly or as a package of multiple platforms that make up a provider’s entire CRM system. A business can use this technology to measure, analyse and improve their relationship with their customers. It sure is a handy tool to have in place for your sanity and ultimately your customers.

 

So Which Product Is Right for Your Business?

 

There are plenty of products available in the world of CRM and while we’d love to write the ultimate CRM guide, let’s just compare two of the leading SAAS (Software As A Service) platforms on the market currently. The Sales Cloud (Lightning Enterprise) package by Salesforce and Oracle Eloqua (Standard) package are two competing platforms and are both capable of impressive input possibilities, tracking and reporting.

 

Salesforce Sales Cloud manages the marketing, sales and customer support involved in customer interactions with a business. While, Oracle Eloqua is a marketing automation platform, which stores customer information and manages the lead generation process. We compared three key CRM components in each product to help you decide which software could be right for your business. Let’s dive in!

 

#1 User Friendliness

 

Both platforms offer multiple apps for mobile and email integration. Ease of use will really depend on your own preference for interface design. These products offer very different layouts so one of them should gel with your thought process and cognitive preferences.

 

If you appreciate a traditional and neatly designed interface then Salesforce could be your provider of choice. A user can move through tasks systemically. Though minor limitations may be found in the design of customisation of fields in areas like building reports and lead conversions.

 

Oracle Eloqua on the other hand has taken a more visual ‘mind-map’ design approach. This can be easier when building a program that can direct customers down different paths based on taking or not taking an action. But, if you aren’t comfortable with HTML coding this area may become complicated and require some practice. They do offer online training tutorials if you prefer innovative over traditional design.

 

Overall, you will need to take time to learn either software to get the most out of the technology and if you have a team that need to get on board with the CRM it’s a good idea to have them involved in the research phase too. After all, they will be the ones using it day in, day out.

 

#2 Sales Process Tracking

 

If you want to contain costs, both Salesforce and Oracle Eloqua offer a system of automated business processes and template emails that allow for easier customer direction and communication. Salesforce also allows access to more advanced sale forecasts and trends as well as customer recording and performance tracking through their Sales Cloud.

 

While Oracle Eloqua allows the user to personalise when organising campaigns to send to customers. The software provides important customer information and segmentation through tracking data like website visits and responses. This helps to build and manage more focused customer campaigns, and increase conversions and sales.

 

Although, according to technology review sites like TrustRadius and g2crowd there are also user concerns that the product’s reporting takes too long to set up and the data feedback received isn’t in-depth.  Important to note, users have access to monitor their sales tracking via mobile (on/offline) through either product.

 

#3 Pipeline Management

 

The Salesforce Sales Cloud offers a collaborating forecasting tool. This is a handy feature to turn on as it forecasts any opportunities for your business. The system analyses the data presented and predicts a forecast based on the end date of the opportunity. It’s also designed so that a sales representative can maintain a clear view of the status of an opportunity. There are nine opportunity stages listed in the system. This keeps the data clear and simple for everybody involved to read – even those of you who swear not to be linear thinkers.

 

Oracle Eloqua takes a different approach and focuses on tracking web activities throughout the sales cycle.  The system uses lead scores to identify and prioritise sales opportunities within the CRM as a way of forecasting for the business. Basically, Oracle has the ability to understand and report the customer engagements and pathways on your website which provides valuable insight for marketing and sales teams to collaborate and direct highly targeted campaigns.

 

Which Product Offers the Best CRM Components Overall?

 

It’s important to remember that no CRM is perfect, so consider what you need and the interface you prefer to use. Understand what your ultimate goal is for the CRM and be sure to include the feedback of your team. Another good idea is to seek the guidance of other business associates. Ask what they use, what they recommend and what they advise you avoid. When you leverage off the insights of others you will find that you will gauge a more holistic view of what your business needs and what it doesn’t.  Don’t forget, all CRM’s require some customisation so factor in how much time you will need to put in, to get it running the way you want and you’ll be able to narrow your search criteria even further. Take into consideration all of these factors and you’ll be closer to implementing the CRM of your dreams.

Choosing keywords for your website optimizations

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The first thing about choosing strong keywords for your websites search engine optimization (SEO) is to know what your potential client or customer is searching for that you can offer them. When a person comes to your site based on a particular keyword, will they find the items, goods or services they are seeking?  If not, you are leading them down a path that will come to a disappointing end for everyone. What are you offering that’s unique to your business?  How can you get people to come to your site for something very specific that they will be delighted to know you offer?

 

How do you do it?

 

Start by experimenting with search terms you think are your strongest possibilities.  When you enter them, what comes up? Are there lots of ads for that search term and what is the competition you have regarding those terms?

Ex: If you are a dentist, try Googling the search term dental care followed by your zip code. Location based key phrases are best with most brick and mortar businesses. If a lot of other dentists come up in that search, you are competing with those businesses for a piece of the pie using that term.  This can be costly if you are using a service like Google Ad Words as you will be competing with some of the bigger businesses for that piece of the pie.  If you have a specialty and can use search terms that are more specific to what you specialize in, you might be able to get great traction using terms about that specific service. Ex. Best tooth whitening in Orlando might be a little more targeted than best dentist in Orlando.

It’s not just about key words, it’s about key phrases.

 

What are the best tools to use and do I have to pay for them?

 

You can hire a professional SEO service, but be cautious. There are many companies that are great at this but many that are not as experienced as they profess.  Get references.

Google offers a few free tools that can be helpful. Google Key Word Planner, Google Trends and Key Word Tool io, are free and can give you some good information.

There are tools you can pay for that can be more in depth but costly.

Term Explorer and Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool are excellent products but can run as little as $35 a month to nearly $500 a month depending on what you choose.

 

How do you know when the keywords has too few clicks to not choose it?

 

It can simply be trial and error. Keep a watchful eye on it and if a key word or phrase is not bringing clicks to your site and more importantly conversions to sales, ditch it.

Remember that the sole purpose of key words is to bring people to see what you have to offer and get them to buy something, be it goods or services.

 

Instagram for business – should we use it?

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Instagram might not be for everyone but it’s a very powerful social media platform, especially for millennials.  Research shows that Instagram drives more engaged traffic than any other social media channel, including Facebook.

Instagram gleans more return customers. If someone buys something from you and then follows you on Instagram, statistics show they’re more likely to become repeat customers, which is how businesses survive.

Our world is visual, and “a picture’s worth a thousand words.” Most people have a great camera built into their phone. That alone can be a fantastic business tool.

Is it really worth your time?

 

It’s hard to say how you should spend your time marketing your business.  Marketing is a science and, with the onslaught of social media platforms, it’s only become more complicated. If you offer goods that are visual in nature, where images can be very impactful, Instagram is can work.  Marketing is about one thing, engagement.  How can you engage an audience? We live in a world where everything is moving so quickly, to keep up with it, you have to be fast and visual.  Can you get them to your website, store, or event to see what you’re selling with strong visuals and content?  If so, Instagram is worth your time and efforts.

 

How does your small business tell a story if you don’t sell “sexy” products?

 

Everything can be sexy if you approach it from the right angle. If you’re selling orthopedic shoes to senior citizens, show a sexy older woman rocking those shoes.  You can make your small business look just as important as the big guys with well thought out images that tell who you are and what you’re selling.  Sexy is subjective. Sexy can be getting the right product to the right people at the right price.

 

Do we have to post everyday?

 

Yes!  Engagement is tough.  People are fickle and the 20-40 year- old Instagram user is no exception. Post at least once a day.  With Twitter you might need to post 8 to 10 times a day to stay current.  With Instagram, a couple of pictures with short, pithy, content can do the trick.

 

Hashtags – are these just a gimmick? How do they work?

 

Hashtags are not a gimmick.  They’re keyword phrases.  If someone’s searching for something and uses a phrase that turns up in a hashtag, that search will lead them to you. Hashtags can take on a life of their own. The hashtag, #Nevermypresident,  is getting a lot of traction from the people that don’t support the incoming president. Searching that hashtag will bring people with that mind set together.

 

When is Instagram better for my business than Facebook?

 

Instragram is better for reaching a younger audience. Facebook has moved toward an older demographic where Instagram and it’s visual connection to the phone garner a much younger crowd.  If you’re product or services are aimed at the under 40 crowd, Instagram is a must.

Artificial Intelligence on the web

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Using artificial intelligence, with a complicated algorithm of logics and code, companies employing this method can create a website in minutes.  WIX claims they are testing the use of this software in their builds. Using this technology, WIX, like other DIY website builders, can save a great deal of time and money, but will the end results be what the client needs and likes?

 

Here’s how it works:

 

You’re asked a set of standard questions to determine the nature of your business and what kind of website you would need to build. This will determine the layout, design and content as well as overall branding that should work best for your situation. Neither you nor a team of web developers (actual people) need to code anything.  AI does it for you from design to organization and you can focus on what content you think will best grab your audience. If that feels like magic, it almost is.

 

Can a small business use it?

 

Yes, but probably through working with a bigger business like a WIX or GRID if and when they bring this technology to the public.  It’s a costly endeavor and not fully proven. There will be issues with using AI to create websites. The art of customizing a site that really reflects the personality of a business could be lost in this kind of programming not to mention a lot of programming jobs that pay the bills of human beings and their families but it could save time and money for the end user.

 

What are chat bots?

Chatbots are a hot new trend
Bots are simple artificial intelligence systems that you interact with via text. It can be something as simple as asking what the weather will be like in Portland Oregon (rainy, most likely) or more complicated like seeking advice on your internet connection issues.
A Bot might handle things that would usually require a phone call, web search, or mobile app. Things like banking, making reservations, movies times, games, can all be handled by a Bot.

 

Which chat bots actually learn from user interaction?

 

Bots with Machine Learning have an artificial brain. They understand natural language, not only their programmed commands. Every time they converse with actual people, they get “smarter”.

When they crash, they re-program and learn from their previous mistakes. This happens as they interact more and more with people. This is how they differ from normal computers that can only solve problems they are programmed to solve.  AI means artificial intelligence so Bots continue to learn and evolve.

 

What are the trends for 2017 that everyone can use?

 

AI will be a hot topic in the coming year. As we move into the new year and beyond, AI will provide new technology for the home, office, hospital and more. Perhaps the next time you go to your favorite restaurant, your order will be taken by a bot and their website will have been built by AI power.