Mar 15, 2017 | Apps, Apps We've Built, General, Uncategorized
Is A Small Business App For You?
Mobile Apps Should be Part of Your Marketing Mix
Apps? Really? Like Clash of Clans?
Perhaps not like Clash of Clans, but yes. With over two billion smartphones in the world today and each iPhone launch causing people to line up for days to get one, no one can deny the pervasive effect smartphones have garnered over the last few years.
And it isn’t going to change soon. With online habits moving increasingly from desktop to tablets and smartphones, more and more people look for and act on local information on their mobile device- whether it is reservations at their favorite restaurant, a ticket to their favorite team, or just what tomorrow’s weather will be. And mobile apps are increasingly how they do this.
Now through May 15th, our app prices have been slashed to as low as $397 for the development and only $97/month! This is a first-year saving of over $500! Click below to get all of the details.
So if you don’t have an app already, do you need one?
Probably, if not definitely. To date, there have been over 50 billion app downloads from the Apple App Store driving over $60 billion in revenue by 2018.
With increasing smartphone use, consumers increasingly are demanding constant access to information and data which can quickly only be delivered by apps. Using a smaller footprint and requiring fewer resources to run, apps quickly and effectively can answer this need. Apps give your customers the service they need!
Why Not Just a Mobile Website?
Though mobile websites are also a key element in a successful marketing plan, an app provides much more:
- Increased flexibility gives small and local businesses a competitive advantage over larger and more entrenched competitors.
- Connect with your customers anytime from anywhere, even if your brick and mortar location is closed.
- Apps improve internal effectiveness by letting them communicate, check inventory and other key functions.
- Apps are quicker than mobile websites in entering data, taking orders, and other simple tasks. The simpler placing an order is, the higher your sales will go!
- Apps are convenient. With consumers pressed for time, increasingly the fastest and easiest option wins out and becomes a brand standard.
- Apps are increasingly becoming accepted as a requirement for businesses of all sizes. Organizations without them may run the risk of being perceived as less responsive to consumer needs.
But Mobile Apps are Expensive, Aren’t They?
Yes, they can be- especially for the novice. At JVI Mobile we give you two options to create your own App. We empower you to create, edit, and manage your own apps for a variety of platforms including iPhone and Android through our own system.
But if you’d like a completely turnkey solution we have a special offer for Spring 2017. After consulting with you for your specific needs, we will build your App for you for $397 with monthly maintenance or only $97 (some restrictions apply). This deal won’t last long so contact us today!
At JVI Mobile, we are passionate about creating and growing awesome social relationships. Tell us how we can help grow or create your mobile app and grow your business!
Oct 12, 2016 | Social Media Management and Optimization (SMM, SMO), Social WiFi Marketing, Uncategorized
Quite awhile ago we ran our very successful 30 Day Social Media Content Challenge. It was a smashing success for us but more importantly for our clients. They found that the challenge removed the shackles which was holding back their success in social media.
As much as social media is in our every day lives in one way or another, it’s still insanely hard as a small business owner to manage both your business and your social media presence! If you’re like most of us, you struggle to find enough time to fit it all into the average day. The results usually aren’t that astounding as a result.
This is because we are taking shortcuts and not giving our social media profiles the attention they deserve. The big hurdle for everyone to get over? It isn’t how much time you’re investing, but rather the quality of the time spent on social media. We’ll give you a laser focus on what’s important.
Imagine the increases in traffic and sales you’d experience if you could repurpose just the time you’re already investing in social media and use it more efficiently.
With the help of JVI Mobile you work better, not harder; and all the while improving your social media presence and your profits!
To help you we are bringing back the 30 Day Social Media Content Challenge! Beginning October 31st, JVI Mobile will be guiding a group of small business owners through a very easy, practical, actionable program designed to help you post something new on your social media accounts every day and drive incremental results. This program will accomplish the following:
- How to post to social media
- Stay accountable to your peers
- Learn which networks work for your business
- Engage your customers
- Get you in the habit of doing this daily!
However, there is an even bigger benefit to starting now and developing this habit through November.
You have the opportunity to massively increase your holiday sales numbers!
Let us take the confusion and the stress out of your online social media presence. We’ll cut through the chaff and show you quick and simple tools for maximizing the return on every minute you invest. Included are best practices and shortcuts to power your results to new record highs.
Ready to learn more? Getting started is easy. Click here and you we will guide you from there!
Keep in touch with us!
[activecampaign form=14]
Jun 20, 2016 | Clients, General, Uncategorized
Have you given much thought to building a local brand for your small business? If you’re like a lot of business owners, you haven’t. You spend your days wearing many different hats, handling everything from accounting to ordering to marketing. If you don’t have a dedicated marketing person, then brand building might be a low priority – but it shouldn’t be.
The truth is that even if you don’t have a website, online store, or social media presence, you have an online local brand. Recent research shows that 80% of consumers research brands and products online before making a purchase. With that in mind, here are some tips to help you build a solid online brand for your business starting today.
Tip #1: Make sure your listings are consistent
The first thing you need to do, even if you don’t have a website, is to check out your listings online and make sure they are consistent. Your name, address and phone number – also known as your NAP listing – plays a big role in how easy it is to find you online. Even if you have a professional website, inconsistent NAP listings can affect your rank on Google and other search engines. To give you an idea of how nitpicky these things are, keep in mind that even something as simple as having “Ave” on one listing and “Avenue” on another can be a problem. Pick the format you want and then stick with it.
To ensure that you catch everything, do a Google search and then check specific listings that you think might be relevant. For example, even if you have never claimed your listing on Yelp, you might have one there. The same goes for Google My Business and local business directories. It might be time-consuming, but make the effort to go through and claim everything.
If you search a promising directory and find that your business isn’t listed there, find out how to get it listed. Citations, even if they’re just a listing of your NAP, can help to build your online profile and attract people to your business. Keep in mind that it may take a few days or even weeks for your new or updated listings to appear.
Tip #2: Optimize for mobile users
2015 marked a turning point in “online search”. It was the first year that mobile searches outpaced searches done on desktop computers, a trend that is expected to continue going forward. Combine that statistic with Google’s recent “Mobilegeddon” update – and the promise of more such updates to come – and there is no denying that you have to make your business easy to find for mobile customers if you want to succeed.
If you have a website, then the best option is a mobile-responsive design – one that automatically detects the type of device being used to view the site and adapts accordingly. Such designs ensure that mobile users won’t have to scroll horizontally to read your content or have to deal with trying to hit a teeny call to action button on their screen.
It’s not enough just to make your site accessible on mobile devices. You also need to do user testing to ensure that your pages load quickly and respond well to user activities. Mobile users are notoriously impatient, and a page that takes more than a few seconds to load will likely see a high bounce rate. If you have a WordPress site, making it mobile-responsible should be easy. All you need to do is choose a mobile-responsive theme for your site. However, if you want a more detailed overview of what is required to get your site mobile-ready, click here.
Tip #3: Network your local brand with other local businesses
The #LoveLocal movement is gaining traction online as a way of encouraging people to buy from local and small businesses. One way to build your local brand and reputation is to take the time to network with other small business owners. They know better than anybody else how difficult it can be to keep a small business afloat, and they are often very eager to refer customers to other local businesses to keep the community thriving.
Consider visiting Townsquared and seeking out other entrepreneurs and business owners in your area. You can establish yourself as an authority, learn about other local companies, and even build partnerships and referral sources.
Tip #4: Use social media effectively
There’s no denying that social media use is high – and getting higher every day. If you aren’t already using social media to build your local brand, then it’s time to get serious about it.
A well-thought-out social media strategy can help you connect with existing customers and attract new ones. People love to connect with their favorite brands, but it’s important to remember the “social” in social media. Nobody is going to follow you on Facebook or Pinterest in the hopes of being hit with a barrage of aggressive sales pitches. Your social media content should follow the 80/20 rule. 80% of what you post should be interesting and relevant content that provides value to your followers, and only 20% should address your specific products and services.
Certain industries and businesses are better adapted to some social media sites than others. For example, if you sell an aspirational product that lends itself well to being photographed, especially if your product appeals to women, then Pinterest is a great choice. Facebook is still the most widely-used social media site, and the most versatile. Instagram and Snapchat are highly visual and tend to lend themselves to marketing to young people.
Whatever sites you decide to use, make sure to post regularly and always keep your brand in mind. The voice you use on social media should reflect how you want people to perceive you.
Tip #5: Stretch your ad dollars by focusing on paid social media advertising
Finally, if you’re on a tight budget and don’t have much money for advertising, consider using your dollars wisely by advertising on social media. Ranking for top keywords on Google can be difficult, and the competition (and the cost) is high. Social media advertising is very affordable and versatile. You can target your ad so that it reaches one of two groups: your followers and their friends; or a chosen group targeted by demographics and interests. Research shows that users are most likely to make a purchase when they have repeated exposure to a company or brand. Every time a user sees your ad, it increases the likelihood that they will eventually buy from you.
Advertising on some social media sites is still rolling out and not available to everyone, but Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter all have well-established programs. You can run a Facebook ad for as little as a dollar a day, and they provide free analytics so you can see how your ad is performing.
The bottom line is that you have an online brand. Whether you are managing it properly is another question. By using the tips provided above, you can claim your online brand and build it into something that accurately represents your business – and you.
At JVI Mobile, we are passionate about creating and growing awesome social relationships. Tell us how we can help! We’ve got a crack team literally at your fingertips!
If you haven’t already, check out our Digital Marketing Assistant. It’s a brand new Facebook Group we are offering where you can get expert help and ready access to the JVI team will all your digital marketing concerns and questions!
May 20, 2016 | SMS Marketing, Social Media Management and Optimization (SMM, SMO), Social WiFi Marketing, Uncategorized
Every local business should have a mailing list to use for email marketing. However, convincing people to sign up for your list may be a challenge. Most people get dozens of marketing emails each day, and some are reluctant to add yet another email to the mix. The question, then, is how you can convince potential customers who visit your site to sign up for your mailing list. One common answer is creating something called a lead magnet – a freebie that entices people to type their email address into your opt-in box.
What Is a Lead Magnet?
In case you are unfamiliar with the term, let’s start with a quick explanation of what a lead magnet is. A lead magnet is a free item that you offer to new leads if they sign up for your mailing list. It’s called a magnet because companies often advertise the lead magnet as a way of getting people to visit their site. In other words, it attracts customers the way a magnet attracts metal. Once they are on the site, they learn that all they have to do to get the lead magnet is sign up for your mailing list.
A lead magnet can be almost anything you want it to be, but the best options for local businesses are digital items that can be immediately downloaded after the customer opts in. You want the process to be as easy as possible.
Why You Need a Lead Magnet
Maybe you don’t have a mailing list and you’re wondering why you need one. Local business owners sometimes neglect email marketing as a resource because they think it’s a waste of money. However, the fact is that email marketing is still one of the most effective – and most affordable – forms of internet marketing. Here are some reasons that using a lead magnet to build your list makes sense:
- Email marketing offers a low-cost, easy way to stay in touch with your customers on an ongoing way.
- Email marketing is incredibly versatile. Here are just a few ideas of ways you might use email marketing:
- To announce new products – for example, you might make a short unboxing or how-to video for a new product in your store.
- To share valuable information with your customers – one of the best uses of email marketing is providing value to your customers, which creates a sense of obligation.
To offer enticements to get customers to visit your store – examples include promotions, coupons, and special events.- To encourage customers to spread the word about your business – if you make a point of offering worthwhile information, some of your customers will share your email with their friends and family, thus increasing your reach.
- Using a lead magnet helps you encourage a particular cognitive bias – sort of a mental glitch – known as reciprocity. Most human beings feel a need to return the favor when they get something free. Offering a lead magnet makes your customers feel a sense of obligation to you because they know you’ve given them something valuable without charging them a dime. Once they have accepted a freebie from you, they are more likely to become paying customers than they would be otherwise.
As you can see, there are some significant benefits to using a lead magnet to help grow your email list.
How to Create an Irresistible Lead Magnet
Deciding you want a lead magnet for your website is the first step. The second is deciding what form the lead magnet will take, and then creating it. Let’s start by talking about some good options for lead magnets.
- Remember that digital products that are available for immediate download are the best choice. Don’t make your customers wait to get their freebie – give it to them right away.
- One common option for a lead magnet is a short eBook. Sometimes people think that books have to be long, but the truth is that the average length of non-fiction books on the Kindle bestseller list is only 10,000 words. A free book can be even shorter – sometimes 2,500 or 3,500 words is plenty.
Another popular choice for a lead magnet is a tip sheet or hack sheet. It seems like you can’t go anywhere on the internet these days without coming across a list of hacks for everything from household chores to organizing your desk at work. People seem to love them, and creating a good hack sheet doesn’t take long.- If you offer a business-related service, one very good lead magnet option is a free template for a particular kind of document.
- A video or series of videos is another option, although creating videos is certainly more costly than making written content. The downside of a video is that it takes time for your customer to consume.
The most affordable and easily accessible options are short written documents that customers can download immediately.
Now let’s talk about how to create your lead magnet. If you have a business that lends itself to tips and hacks – for example, the owner of a kitchen supply store might do well to offer a list of cooking hacks (or kitchen storage hacks) to potential customers – then that’s a good way to go because it doesn’t take long to create.
If the majority of your customers are looking for information, then writing a short eBook might be the answer. Don’t get intimidated by the thought of writing a book. If you feel you can’t do it yourself, you can always hire a freelance writer to do it for you. Just brainstorm some potential topics for a book, keeping in mind that you want things that are going to be compelling and interesting to your potential customers. For example, a sports equipment store might offer a short eBook about how to prepare for ski season or a buying guide for parents whose kids are signing up for the local soccer league.
The key with any lead magnet is to think about what your customers want, and then to find a way to give it to them. When you start, it might be helpful to think about your target customers and who they are. After that, you can reach out with some social media advertising to let people know about your awesome new lead magnet and why they need to get it.
Lead magnets are an effective and inexpensive way to help you build a mailing list – which you can then use to attract new customers and grow your business. As long as you focus on providing value with your lead magnet, and target your ads wisely, you should have no difficulty attracting people to your opt-in page.
At JVI Mobile, we are passionate about creating and growing awesome social relationships. Tell us how we can help! We’ve got a crack team literally at your fingertips!
If you haven’t already, check out our Digital Marketing Assistant. It’s a relatively new service we are offering where you can get expert help and ready access to the JVI team will all your digital marketing concerns and questions!
May 10, 2016 | General
Does your business appear on Google’s first page when potential customers search for your chosen keywords? If you’re not at the top – or near the top – it can be frustrating. There is plenty of evidence to show that very few users venture beyond the first page of results when they do a Google search. In fact, they’re more likely to refine their search than to move on to the next page.
Fortunately, there are quite a few things you can do to help your website rank on the first page in 2016. Here are the top five.
#1: Google’s first page is more about authority than keywords
It’s still important to use keywords in your web content, but the days when high keyword density was the key to ranking on Google are long gone. In fact, your keyword placement is not nearly as important as the overall authority of your site. Google’s algorithms are very sophisticated, and they no longer rely on keywords in a title or H1 tag to determine if a page is worth visiting. Rather, they focus on contextual meaning and look for expected words to rank pages.
For example, it used to be that if you wanted to rank for a keyword such as “Best Legal Services” you’d have to use that keyword three or four times in strategic places to have a chance of ranking. Now, if you talk about competent legal representation, Google can tell that your page is relevant to the keyword even if you don’t use it more than a couple of times in your article.
#2: Pay attention to bounce rates and the time spent on your page
Another surprising SEO development for 2016 has to do with an evaluation of whether your page is providing visitors with what they need. In addition to crawling your page for keywords and context, Google also pays attention to what people do after they leave your page as a way of determining if your page is an authoritative one or a waste of time.
For example, if a visitor searches one of your keywords and clicks on your page, Google looks at how long they stay. A visit of several minutes might indicate that a user is engaged with the content on your page and has found what they want. However, if they spend several minutes on your site, return to their list of search results via the dreaded back button, and click on another site instead, it’s a good sign that your site did not offer what they needed.
If you have a high bounce rate, a good way to improve your search ranking in 2016 is to make sure that your site provides the answers to the questions implied by your chosen keywords.
#3: Optimize your website for mobile users
In 2015, mobile searches on Google outpaced computer searches – and that trend is likely to continue. Google has placed a great deal of importance on mobile search as evidenced by their Mobilegeddon mobile-friendly update in early 2015. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, now is the time to get on board.
Fortunately, most businesses can switch to mobile-friendly or (ideally) mobile-adaptive sites with little trouble. Sometimes it’s as simple as switching the template you use for your site. For example, if you have a WordPress site, they have a huge library of templates available, many of which are mobile-adaptive. You may have to do some fine-tuning of your site to make a new template work, but it’s worth the work to get it done.
The beauty of mobile-adaptive sites is that they work by configuring to the specific mobile device being used. Mobile customers tend to be an impatient bunch, and they are unlikely to wait for a slow-loading page or scroll horizontally to read your content. If you take the time to optimize your site for mobile users, it can do more than anything else to improve your search ranking in 2016.
#4: Stay away from content that’s too short
It wasn’t that long ago that blog posts of 250 to 500 words were considered the norm. Short and snappy was the rule of the day, and the assumption that people wanted short content led to a glut of short articles that were light on value and meaning.
That has all changed. Truthfully, the trend toward lengthy web content has been happening for a while, but this year it has really become the rule rather than the exception. Research shows that web users are far more likely to engage with content that’s in the 1,000-1,500 word range than with short articles. Why? Because they want valuable information, and – with rare exception – it’s hard to convey that in just a few hundred words. Of course, you can offer a top 10 list that’s only 500 words long, but you’re not going to be able to explain why items are on the list as well as you would if you wrote a longer article or blog post.
The reason that Google is placing so much emphasis on length is that they want to make sure they are sending people to pages designed for humans, not search algorithms. If you’re worried about publishing long content, remember that you can make it more readable by breaking it up with subheadings and images.
#5: Make sure the user experience is front and center
In a way, this last point is a summary of everything that has come before it. Each one of the above points come back to one thing: user experience. Old-school SEO focused on tricking Google’s algorithms – to the point where many websites were far friendlier to computers than they were to human beings. More and more, Google is concerned about ensuring that their search results are leading users to sites that answer their questions. They want users to feel good about the search experience, something that’s unlikely to happen if they end up on a site that’s not mobile-friendly, or is packed with keywords but contains no real value.
There are many things you can do to test the user experience on your site, including split-testing individual components on your page. However, the best thing you can do is to do what you can to answer key questions that are implied by your chosen keywords and make sure that your site is easily viewable by any user, on any device.
Ranking on Google’s first page is always a challenge. Regardless of your niche, you will be facing some fierce competition. It might sound odd to say this, but the best way to rank is to forget about trying to rank. Don’t worry about algorithms and SEO tricks. Instead, focus on making your site a place where potential customers can find exactly what they need. If you do that, the search rank will follow.
At JVI Mobile, we are passionate about creating and growing awesome social relationships. Tell us how we can help! We’ve got a crack team literally at your fingertips!
If you haven’t already, check out our Digital Marketing Assistant. It’s a relatively new service we are offering where you can get expert help and ready access to the JVI team will all your digital marketing concerns and questions!
