MH1 Web Design Blog

Many of our small business customers have yet to try Twitter. Although this micro-blogging technology offers some useful tools for companies of all sizes,  some stay away because of the strange, silly name or because they just can not find the time to learn more. There are benefits for small business to reap with Twitter. Not all companies use it the same way. Let’s see what it offers small biz — one-man shows to companies too small to carry a marketing director or department.

Once you sign up for your free Twitter account (using your business name), you create a profile with links to your company website, description, and contact information. You can search other businesses or people across the Internet who are also using Twitter. You can follow them — meaning you receive every tweet they send on your Twitter home page or your mobile phone. Follow the Wall Street Journal, your home town Chamber of Commerce, competitors, partners, your vendors, manufacturers and other business professionals.. almost anything you can imagine. Conversely, people interested in you and your business will click to follow you and your regular posts. Twitter quickly creates a community related to your business. Here are our four reasons we believe you should consider adding Twitter to your array of small business communication tools.

1. Push your message — Companies can use Twitter to publish timely company news and important announcements. You are limited in your posts, called “tweets”, to only 140 characters, so these are short, simple, brief messages or you can post links to longer articles or news items from your company blog, Facebook business account or any other website. Linking to a longer article on another site is called a “retweet”. Cute but easy to figure out in short order. This is a great way to expand your brand presence online as other people follow you. Use Twitter to manage your company brand and reputation online. Think of it as PR on a small business budget. If using Twitter for business, be careful to avoid letting your personal life get in the way. Business associates might not care that you shot a 76 on the golf course Saturday or that your four-year-old lost a tooth. There is place for personal info among family and friends, but your Twitter business account is not it.

2. Information collection — as I said above, Twitter can serve as a one-stop clearing house for all of your incoming business information. You do not have to write articles and participate in tweets. Some companies are active “listeners”. They keep track of trends in their industry and among other industry organizations, or companies.You can use your Twitter business account to receive updates from the various websites and news sources you follow regularly. You can even receive tweets on your mobile phone. With less than 10% of us using RSS aggregators, Twitter has become a faster, easier alternative for small business types short on time and patience.

3. Customer support — in August our web hosting server was hacked and it took my support team 30 hours to reload software and reinstall customer accounts from backups. During this harrowing experience, we had 100+ customers without their business email. What was wrong? When will it be fixed, damnit?! Patience was short for some and communication on the latest developments were extremely difficult.

That’s when I realized that if more clients were using Twitter and following  www.MH1webdesign.com, they could have been updated on the latest progress. No email necessary. Now the task of informing our small business clients about Twitter begins. If they see value in it, they will come along for the ride.

Futher Reading

Twitter’s take on business use

16 examples of huge brands using Twitter

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business

There are many ways to enter your website… whether through search engines, typing in the URL, or links from other sites. No matter the size of the business, management often does not have a clue how many people visit their website. Far too frequently, web design customers are very involved during development, but turn into no-shows after launch. Shopping sites that sell online can gauge effectiveness loosely based on sales. Other B2B and B2C firms that depend on their websites to generate qualified prospects might receive leads through web forms. But in either case, these businesses are missing out on the big picture if they neglect to analyze rich traffic data.

Start with your web host

Most commercial hosting providers include some web traffic application that uses web logs to measure monthly, weekly, daily and even hourly visits to your website. These metrics include hits, page views or impressions, unique visitors, and other vital information. MH1 Hosting  includes this service on all of our Linux with cPanel host packages. Even when customers know where to locate their traffic reports, they find the terms and metrics confusing. It’s important to your Internet marketing effort to understand your traffic statistics. It lets you measure who is visiting your web site, where they came from, and what they do when they get there. To make better use of this data, we refer some clients to Google Analytics.

What is Google Analytics (GA)

In short, GA is a traffic measurement application that emails results to you every Monday. It is free, convenient, and easy to manage through Google’s web interface. GA requires registration for a free Google account and some copying and pasting of html code on the pages of your website that you wish to track. The simple presentation of key information is a pleasure to use compared to most hosting web traffic applications. The layout is easier to follow and links to help, definitions and related Google content makes GA superior to many competitors. As an alternative, also consider some of the leading paid, commercial metric services, such as Haveamint.com that offer still more advanced features and customization.

Advantages of Google Analytics:

• View visitors by month, day or hour
• View where visitors are coming from geographically
• See if they found you using a search engine and which keywords were used
• See which other websites they were referred from (used a link)
• Analyze which pages receive the most visits, how long they stay, other pages of entry and exit
• Analyze your bounce rate, the % of visitors who click away from your site without visiting any other pages

How can you use this information?

GA emails you a detailed report in PDF form every Monday or you can login anytime to your account to study your website metrics. Use this newly generated information to:

• Determine which search engines and allied websites with reciprocal links send you traffic and which ones fail
• Discover how effective an advertising campaign is in sending you new traffic
• Save marketing dollars by stopping non-performing advertising efforts
• Rethink the effectiveness of your website pages and features-which pages are most popular and which are ignored
• Modify your page content and offer to increase site stickiness and reduce bounce rate
• Fine tune your overall site to convert initial visits into sales or qualified sales leads

Whether a small one-person venture or a large business enterprise, you must know how your company website performs as part of your overall marketing strategy. Accurate, informative web traffic statistics give you the hard evidence you need to be successful. Google Analytics offers one budget-friendly solution that can help many marketers reach their goals. Let us know if MH1 Web Design can help you implement Google Analytics today.

When the housing market tanked late last year with the contraction of US credit markets, custom home builder Philip Ware (www.philiplanehomes.com) quickly found himself in a quandry. Still involved in day-to-day operations of his highend custom home building business just north of Houston, the slow market pushed him into another, unexpected direction.

Ware started another company based on one of his passions, devoting time, sweat and some personal savings. Texas Trikes (www.texastrikes.net) is a niche motorcyle company that converts Harley-Davidsons, Hondas, and other big bikes into shiny, powerful three-wheelers called “Trikes” in the motocycling community. From experience, Ware knew an effective business website that could be found in Google and other search engines would be an integral part of his marketing effort.

“Good business websites have helped us build clientele and attract new customers in the past and the relative cost to print advertising and other media makes it a no-brainer,” explained Ware. “People expect you to have a website today. It’s a fact of doing business. Customers are looking for my trike conversion kits and services online and I need a nice, well-thought out, informative website to bring in these prospects.”

Ware had worked with MH1 Web Design of The Woodlands, Texas on previous home building websites and marketing over the years. So, with a relatively small budget and simple plan in mind, Ware contacted MH1 owner Mike Hallaron to develop a simple, clean brochure-style website. Advanced features were not necessary and could be added down the road.

“Working with MH1 is easy because we work one-on-one and the customer service is very personal and responsive. They quickly took my concept and some initial graphics and developed a simple brochure-style website.” MH1 owner Mike Hallaron helped Ware refine keywords and create effective meta tags and text that would serve the balance between human visitors reading the site and search engine crawlers scouring the Texas Trikes content for ranking purposes. It took some hard work and late hours but the resulting site is simple to navigate, easy to read, and filled with photos of real trike samples.

“Our goal was to produce a website that ranks highly in the search engines under our desired keywords and urged visitors to call or email to learn more. If we can help generate interested leads for our web design customers than we have done our job,” said Hallaron.

The outlook for Texas Trikes is already very bright even though Ware’s hobby-turned business is only a few months old. As far as his new website goes, the proof is in the pudding.

Ware claims, “If you search for “trike conversion dealer” on Google, Yahoo, Ask, or Bing, we are the first listing to come up!  I am getting sales leads from Minnesota, Massachusetts, California, Canada, Ireland, and beyond.  Now I have to turn these pricing requests into sales!”

 That’s what he calls results.

by Mary Tuma, Houston Chronicle
www.chron.com

When IKEA decided to switch its logo font last month from Futura to the ubiquitous Verdana, it took some customers by surprise. Many are wondering why a seemingly insignificant change erupted into controversy. A Rice University marketing professor, Vikas Mittal, may have the answer.

Co-author of “Do Logo Redesigns Help or Hurt Your Brand?” ­— ­­a new study exploring how customers react when a company changes its logo— Mittal sheds light on the relationships we form with brands. The professor recently spoke to the Chronicle about ways companies can prevent brand blunders and why it’s important to consult with the customer base first. What follows are excerpts of that conversation.:

Q: What is your area of research interest?

A: I look specifically at what actions companies take to improve customer satisfaction and how these changes impact their employee retention and long-term financial performance.

We noticed that companies spend a lot of effort redesigning their logo. A typical redesign can take up to two years and cost $15 million to $20 million for a large company. Yet, there isn’t too much research done on how it affects their customers. Anything from size, typeface to color can trigger different associations.

Q: Your most recent study takes a look at logo redesign and in particular, font change. What did you discover?

A: One of the things we did is change logos of different recognized brands, like Adidas and New Balance, to make them either more round or more angular, and examined how customers responded to the difference. We found customers with a high level of commitment to the brand became unhappy with the change and the customers with a low level of commitment were more happy.

The very interesting thing here is that a lot of managers think loyal customers will always buy their products and that changing the logo a little won’t matter because it’s just an aesthetic issue. But we find these customers see themselves as so connected to the brand that they feel threatened. This basically goes back to the idea a picture is worth a thousand words.

Q: How do these redesigns affect consumers’ brand attitudes and buying power?

A: What you find is that companies who have strong brands typically encounter financial benefits, lower cash flow risk and are able to finance their debt at a lower cost. You don’t want to imperil that by trying to change the brand without doing full research.

We usually see an initial dip in sales when companies redesign logos, and then things go back to normal as people get slowly acclimated. Some customers who felt really negatively won’t go back to the store, but many are able to forgive their brands.

Q: What are three tips companies should remember when designing, or redesigning a logo?

A: 1. Do enough marketing research — like focus groups combined with surveys — to quantify the impact and get a sense of how customers will react.

2. Never do it unilaterally, make it a participative effort. Key constituents companies ignore are their employees.

3. Instead of having one big splash, make it a soft launch. Bring it out gradually— if there are any pitfalls you will know how to deal with them early on.

Q: What is your take on the IKEA font change uproar and why did it illicit such a response?

A: One thing the company has to understand is that the four letters in IKEA are the brand. A lot of customers against this change see themselves connected to what IKEA represents — progressive, modern style. Changing the font jeopardizes all of those associations.

Q: What lessons can companies learn from the backlash IKEA and others faced from loyal customers?

A: Companies shouldn’t rebrand and wait to see what the impact is. No matter how slight the change is, consult with committed customers so they feel like partners in the transition.

mary.tuma@chron.com

by Mike McDonald, WebProNews.com

Brett Tabke was among the speakers on the ‘Mega Panel’ at SMX Advanced this year. This session essentially consists of a panel of established industry experts fielding questions from the crowd of conference attendees. It never takes long in these type of sessions to get a feel for what’s on everybody’s mind. This year, to the surprise of exactly no one, it was all things social media and Twitter that dominating the Q & A.