We need to look beyond just features and align our mobile strategy to the entire customer experience. Here are six steps that you can use that will help you develop your mobile strategy with the customer in mind:

1. Define Target Audience

Identify and define your target audience and break them down into personas. Personas will help you to become more personable with your target audience and assist you in mapping out specific needs with each persona you define.

2. Carry Out Research

You need to conduct the proper research to learn more about your audience and their needs. Find out from your customers what devices and platforms they are using etc. You can do this by polling them, communicating with them on the social web, or by doing market research. Ensure you conduct this research for each persona as the needs and goals might vary.

3. Develop Your Mobile Solution

With the research you have carried out, you now have the basis to decide how you are going to meet your customers’ needs. As you develop this solution, stay focused by continuing to ask yourself how this tool will help meet the needs of each persona.

Remember that mobile is about delivering valuable services and solutions that are optimised for mobile devices and it is a different experience to using a PC to access the Internet. Show only what is needed as customers interact with your solution.

4. Design Your Pricing Model

As you are building your solution, consider how you can reduce the friction and allow purchasing to happen in very few clicks. Determine how you can enable customers to pre-pay for your product or service. The goal here is to allow the purchasing to happen in very few clicks, making it as easy as possible for the customer to make the payment.

5. Develop Your Support Model

Remember that it is not over after the purchase has been made. You need to carry on looking after the customer’s needs by providing the proper support and help them when they need it. You can also create ways for them to get help from their peers through social media tools or forums etc. Ensure you have ways for them to contact you directly if they need to.

Your support model is a great device you can use to listen and get feedback for suggestions and possible improvements. Many good ideas for future product features can come straight from your customers.

6. Develop Retention Or Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are based on gaining a long-term commitment from your customers. By having a great customer support model and loyalty program in place, you are on your way to creating advocates for your brand. If your customers are treated well and consistently nurtured, they will share with their friends and become a new source of leads for you.

If you remember to keep your customer and their needs in focus, then you will be on your way to developing compelling solutions that will help you prosper in the mobile space.

If you would like any assistance with developing a successful mobile strategy, please feel free to contact us ay Network Intellect.

There is a lot of good and bad advice floating around about how to get good SEO into your Facebook fan pages and how to optimise them correctly. Alot of people have mentioned getting keywords into your profile picture file name, however as Facebook renames it 34234234_14348434324.jpg or something equally obscure this currently really is of no importance whatsoever.

Linking to your website from your page is important for visitors coming to your fan page and wanting to take the next step but doesn’t serve to improve on the actual SEO of your  page.

First, it is useful to picture your Fan Page as your actual website. Treat it as you would your main site and try to optimise accordingly. You may never get to the top rank for your keyword(s) but you do want it to be optimised to try to do this. We will go through the areas you need to optimise step by step now.

Facebook Fan Page SEO

SEO Title:
Meta Description:
H1 Tag:

If you haven’t already got 100 fans you’ll be happy to know that you can still alter your page name. If you didn’t have keyword optimisation in mind when you created your page. The title is the name of your page with | Facebook tagged on to the end. The meta description is the name of your page and the About description with | Facebook tagged on the end again and finally the h1 tag is the name of your page again.

In additions to these simple search optimisation techniques it is important to keep your brand recognisable across your website and Facebook fan pages.

Page Updates

The first 18 characters of your update title will be used for SEO purposes, although sometimes this can be a little less. If you are going to share a link it asks you to ‘Say something about this link…’. Remember to always include something here because otherwise your SEO title will just be Facebook, which is definitely not what we want.

Notes

Although people don’t really use Facebook notes anymore, they are useful for adding longer updates to your fan page without having to take your fans to other web locations to get more content. They are also easier for controlling SEO as you’re note title will be used for the title of the page and in the meta description for that page.

Discussion Topics

Using the Topic Discussion board on your website can be very useful as you will have people adding different comments hopefully including useful content and SEO titles. Not only this, but it gives you an opportunity to have some sort of discussion with your fans about things they may not particularly want to post on your main wall.

If you would like help optimising your Facebook fan pages or SEO for your main website in general then why not contact us here at Network Intellect.

1. Two Homepages

When it comes to search, duplicate content is a big no-no and results in a site being penalised in organic rankings. This happens frequently.

It is often necessary for sites to have homepages residing at two different URLs for the sake of the hierarchical index files. However, broadcasting the fact that you have both of them is a big mistake.

2. Non-optimised Images

Search engines understand text. They do not appreciate pictures, and as far as they’re concerned, a logo is just an image file. A logo should be named after the company. Meta-data and keywords will further help makes sense of these and other types of media files. There is no good reason not to assign words to images on websites.

3. No Keyword Research
It is a big mistake to build a site before keyword research has been conducted around the offering and core mission. Unless you are eager to re-write, ensure you conduct at least initial keyword research before the site build.

4. Company Name

As is often the case, companies have a two-word name. For example, say a company in the URL and most of its site elements, is rendered as “NewCo.” This means it is not findable for “New Co,” which searchers are likely to look for. Render the company name, and other key terms, the way searchers are going to search for them.

If you require some help with maximising your SEO strategy, contact us at Network Intellect and speak to one of our digital strategists.

Depending on objectives, there are a number of ways to measure social media success and it is important for companies to take a practical and business goals approach to marketing on the social web.

A big step toward a practical approach to social media marketing involves an understanding of customer social preferences and needs along with how the business will meet those needs through social media engagement.

In order to better connect with customers and attract new business through corporate social media participation, working through various questions can be very useful for effective planning. Here are six key measurement and organisational questions worth considering:

1. What are your customers’ preferences for social content discovery and sharing?
2. What differences exist between your customer segments in terms of social media participation? Which customers create, share, collect etc?
3. What goals do are you hoping to achieve? Have you defined goals for different audiences such as customers, employees, prospects, partners, and the media?
4. How will your social media marketing efforts coordinate with other SEO, content marketing, and external communications?
5. What is the social media policy for internal and external communications?
6. What departments, business units, cost centers, and approval entities need to be involved?

Questions such as those above can provide valuable insight into a company’s state of social media marketing readiness. In addition it can provoke new thoughts and direction. The more informed companies are about planning for the social web, the more successful they will be.

If you require any help with maximising the effectiveness of your social media marketing strategy, contact us at Network Intellect for more information.

1. Do Not Hound Customers With Unwanted Information

No matter how targeted the advertiser thinks the message is, it is still not targeted, relevant, or timely enough. Modern consumers are so overwhelmed with information that they frequently ignore ads and tune everything out. There are too many variables that affect purchases by any given individual. There are far more effective and measurable alternatives to broadcasting general messages out to large audiences using one-way media like TV, print, and radio, so the sun is setting on the era of big “push” advertising.

2. Be Honest

Advertisers can no longer lie or exaggerate about their product or service. If they do, they will be found out and called out. Any claim has to be backed up by an awesome product or service.

3. Respect Your Customer

Consumers are empowered with information and with connected peers who help them decide what is important and useful to them. They will quickly find out when reviews, blog posts, or tweets are paid for or planted. Advertisers also need to respect consumers’ privacy or suffer the consequences.

4. Make Information Easy For People To Share

Word of mouth is one of the most powerful influences on customers’ purchases because it doesn’t come from the marketer and it isn’t marketing. Recommendations can come from friends, whom the customer trusts to have a good amount of knowledge about specific things to recommend. Word of mouth is not something that can or should be done by advertisers, but they can make it easier for consumers to pass-along information or make recommendations by doing simple things such as adding “share this” links on everything, everywhere.

5. Listen To Customers

People talk when they hate something or when they love it. More and more people are ranting or raving about stuff online, and these are the absolute best customers to be listening to. The ones who love your product will tell you what you are doing right. The ones who hate your product will recommend ways you can improve your product or even make derivative products to fit their expectations and needs.

If you would like any help with any aspect of digital marketing, whether it be social media optimisation or search engine optimisation etc, please contact us at Network Intellect.

A further study carried out by a marketing company found that LinkedIn is 277% more effective at generating leads than Facebook and Twitter. These findings demonstrate how integrating LinkedIn on your website can help improve the success of your business.

With this in mind, here are five important plugins to integrate:

1. Share Button

The Share button should be placed on your site next to technical product guides, articles, throughout your blog, and on any other page that features any professional or business content. This allows visitors to your site to click the button and share the related content via LinkedIn.

As LinkedIn’s audience is based round business, the LinkedIn Share button should be used much more sparingly than for example the Facebook Like button. An ideal place to install a Share button is a company’s blog.

2. Recommend Button

Using the Recommend button on your website allows visitors to recommend your company’s products or services on LinkedIn. The Recommend button can also be used in the product and services sections of your LinkedIn company page. Remember however, that this plugin is not right for every type of product or service page. Decide if what you plan to add the Recommend button to is something that is relevant to the LinkedIn audience.

3. Follow Company Button

The Follow Company button allows companies to grow their LinkedIn company page directly from their website. Once a user is following your company on LinkedIn, they can see your status updates in their LinkedIn news feed. This can help you regularly engage them and develop leads for your business.

The Follow Company button comes in two different types and is most effective when used on the homepage, blog, and contact page of your website. Some companies also use the button in the header and footer of their site as a constant reminder to visitors to join them on LinkedIn.

4. Member Profile

The Member Profile plugin operates as your business card on LinkedIn. There is also a Full Member Profile plugin, which allows for a much more widespread view of your profile. This plugin is most frequently found on personal blogs and on the websites of smaller companies. This is due to the fact that most companies choose to add LinkedIn plugins that highlight the organisation as a whole, as opposed to one individual.

5. Sign In With LinkedIn

The Sign In with LinkedIn function allows people to sign in or register with your site using their LinkedIn log-in details. This is particularly beneficial for your customers because it allows them to quickly identify themselves when they try to leave a comment on your blog or forum. Your company also benefits because it gains useful information from the people who register. This knowledge can be used to make more informed decisions concerning the flow of web traffic etc.

Any website that requires visitors to register or sign in can benefit from Sign In with LinkedIn. Career-oriented websites can gain the most from this tool.

Having a strong social media strategy can help make a big difference to the success of your campaigns. If you would like some information on how to maximise the effectiveness of your social presence, then why not give us a call at Network Intellect.

Adobe informed brands that they were not spending enough on mobile and tablet search advertising, and that marketers only have a six month period before prices considerably rise from their comparatively cheap CPC to desktop ads.

Tablet CPC was 20% less in the first quarter of this year, and mobile was about half as much as traditional desktop search. While tablet and mobile ads’ conversion rates were about a quarter less than desktop in the period, if you factor in tablets’ average order values and costs, investment in search on these devices is likely to offer a better return to desktop. This all comes at a time when Google revealed that its CPC is presently at a bargain cost. The company’s CPC fell by 6% compared to the previous quarter, in the three months to the end of March.

Analysts queried the decrease in its CPC value, wondering whether this could have an impact on future revenues. However, considering Google reported a revenue increase of 24%, up to $10.65 billion year on year, and a profit increase of 60% in the period, it is apparent that advertiser demand is still very high. The CEO of Google, Larry Page, told analysts that lower CPCs provide better return on advertising spend. It is a lower cost so an improved return on investment for advertisers.

A survey found that around 50% of internet users have researched and compared products online, while 40% of offline buyers have carried out online research prior to purchase. It is obvious that search is one of the simplest ways for marketing to act as a service.

It is the ideal medium to speak to people that are actively seeking further information, frequently ahead of a purchase. Search is currently very hot, so ensure you grab it while it is hot and relatively cheap.

For more information on search marketing opportunities please visit our website or contact us at Network Intellect.

Google has made a lot of changes to its search algorithms during the past few months and a lot of businesses have been hit hard by the latest update, Google Penguin. Lately, there has been a new ‘page layout algorithm’ update along with Google Panda and Google even released errors that caused sites to be delisted.

In addition to all these updates and errors, there was the announcement about penalties given to sites for being ‘Overly-Optimised’. Again, in the last few weeks we have started to hear about something called ‘Negative SEO’ which is basically the process of building hundreds or thousands of ‘bad’ links to your website in an attempt to boost search rankings.

Google has been rampant in changing its algorithms lately and it seems gone are the days of one major update during a year. The latest Penguin update has wreaked havoc among many sites across the web in the past month and now SEO experts are scratching their heads as to why. Under Google’s previous way of updating from time to time it was much easier for SEO experts to track what factors changed Google rankings and what held more weight within Google’s algorithms.

These days it’s becoming harder and harder to judge what makes and breaks good SEO. One days fluctuation in traffic and you feel the chills of the Google Penguin beast coming to hunt you down. However, it doesn’t all have to be doom and gloom, and here at Network Intellect the SEO team have come up with a few helpful tips to keeping afloat during these turbulent times.

1.Build ‘Proper’ Links

It may sound a bit drastic, but it may be time to reduce all paid link building campaigns. It may come as a suprise to hear such a statement but it seems the Penguin is coming to stamp out these practises. If you haven’t been hit already, you may be OK, however it could come back to hit you when you least expect it. If you do link building practises then here are a few pieces of advice to follow:

Don’t build exact match anchor links

This has come to the attention of most SEO experts as the biggest issue. If you have every anchor link on every page saying ‘Green Monster’ because you want to be ranked high for ‘Green Monster’ then in time, the Penguin will come and punish you. Try to keep your anchor text varied, focusing more on brand name than random keywords. Remember it’s all about being natural and not trying to force your SEO.

Become Random

Try to make your link builds more random. Instead of building your usual set amount of links each week or month, try to vary this. Google can see how your link count grows each month and if this increases the same amount week on week then the Penguin will cotton on pretty quick to what you’re doing. Remember, the Penguin is a different beast, a very clever beast. In addition to this, try to make sure that you buy varied quality leads.

Kill Dead Links

Although you can’t technically kill something that is already dead, in this instance you have to do just this! Find all your dead links, links that go through multiple or 302 redirects and kill them instantly. Fix your dead links and make all links 301 rather than 302 re-directs to actual working active URLs.

2. Content

Instead of spending the majority of your budget on paid links, a better place to spend your money is on your content. Try to get as much fresh and innovative, relevant and interesting content as you can on your site or blog. For example try to write how-to guides, update your blog daily, build landing pages, write reviews of your products or services, create videos, infographics, images related to your site and keep it constantly evolving and fresh.

In addition to making your site feel more active and alive this will actually generate you the links you were looking for anyway, through people sharing your content on their website or social media platforms.

In addition, content helps you be able to get more involved in your business and market by constantly searching out new content and researching what it is your users are looking for, and this is priceless.

3. Social Media

In addition to the above, make sure that you have an active presence on as many Social Media sites as you can, especially Facebook, Twitter and Google+ constantly releasing new information and updates and informing users on what you are doing. Also keep the branding as similar as you can across all the platforms.

If you have been hit by the recent Google Penguin or other updates then speak to us here at Network Intellect and we would be more than happy to help.

At the end of this month the pending cookie law comes in to affect. So what does this mean for online business, for me and for you?

First of all, what is a cookie?

A cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is a piece of data stored by a website within a browser, and then subsequently sent back to the same website by the browser. It is usually used by websites to store little bits of information about the user, such as usernames, userids, searching preferences etc. They cannot carry viruses or install applications and are mainly used for the tracking of users.

So, what is the cookie law?

The cookie law means that websites will have to ask permission from a web user before they are allowed to store cookies on a users computer, something up until now has never been required. It has caused quite a stir among businesses as it can have major impacts on the way websites and web programs run. There has also been complaints that companies have not been given enough warning despite the 12 month window.

In addition to this, there hasn’t really been much information in regards to how to comply with the regulations and who is likely to be caught.

The ambiguity comes in the fact that the law states that cookies that are ‘strictly necessary for the delivery of a service requested by the user’ are exempt from the cookie law. This has been the stand point of many companies, that believe that all the cookies they use are in fact strictly necessary for their site.

The other problem lies in the fact that many retailers intend to take ‘implicit consent’ when a user uses their service, however the ICO says that users must be told what and when cookies are being put on to their computers before they are put there rather than after.

Alot of retailers have said that they have complied with the ePrivacy Directive by auditing all the cookies that their site uses and referencing these in their privacy policies however the thouroughness of these audits could be unknown as some retailers believe that third-party cookies are nothing to do with them, however the contrary is very explicitly true.

If you would like a thorough audit of the cookies used on your site as well as a full solution to the cookie law, please contact us here at Network Intellect.