Sambuno Media

Why Your Business Needs to Incorporate Mobile Website Design

Sambuno — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:44:53 +0000

Did you know that over 90 million consumers in the United States utilize a smartphone? As more and more consumers are relying heavily on their mobile devices and apps, it is important for your business to incorporate a mobile portal for consumers to reach you and your products.

What is Mobile Website Design?

Mobile website design is simply a design for your mobile website. This needs to be simple and seamless experience for consumers. When a consumer uses their mobile device to obtain information from a website, they are looking to get to that website and grab that needed information quickly. It should be more than a smaller version of your current web browser website. Instead of thinking corporate, although you do need to ensure that you integrate your company look and feel, think simplicity, ease and speed.

Why You Need a Mobile Website Design

You can’t simply utilize the same website design for your mobile site as you would your regular site. If you were to look at your website on a mobile device, it probably isn’t very eye-catching. This is why you need to get a custom mobile website design so that when customers visit your site via their smartphone, they are able to access an easy to use, simple, intuitive and thumb-friendly website.

Mobile is everywhere, so it is crucial that you expand your horizons if you want to grow your business and that means going mobile in every way possible from mobile website design to mobile marketing strategies.

How Local Search Marketing Can Help Your Business Grow

Sambuno — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 02:56:41 +0000

The internet is a large realm full of millions and millions of business and website listings. If you want to use the internet to find success in your business, then you are going to have to figure out a way to stand out from the rest of the pack. While Google is great for business, it may not be your best option if you have a lot of competitors. Instead, you should also use local search marketing as part of your business strategy, which will still integrate Google and other popular search engines.

What is Local Search Marketing?

Basically, local search marketing is marketing your business to local searches. In other words, when an individual in your local area searches for “computer repair,” they are going to be provided with a list of local businesses. These listings will provide all necessary contact information for the business as well as their location on a map, if that service is available.

Using Local Search Marketing

You can use local search marketing on a variety of websites including popular search engines such as Google and Bing. Google’s place for business owners to list their company information is called Google Places, and on Bing, it is known as the Business Portal. Both of these areas are completely free to the business owner and are fantastic ways to get your business information displayed in local searches. Another popular local search marketing option is Yelp.

Taking advantage of local search marketing sooner rather than later simply means that you have the highest leverage of your local competitors especially those who have yet to find the ways of the internet and the tactics of local search marketing.

Print Advertising is Not Dead

Sambuno — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:33:05 +0000

While an online presence is something that is going to boost your sales significantly, it is important that you don’t let your real-life customers forget you. After all, not everyone uses the internet…shocking, I know, but true. In fact, did you know that there’s over 30% of individuals in America that do not utilize the World Wide Web? Therefore, it is important that you keep plenty of print advertising circulating while building your cyber business.

What is Print Advertising?

Print advertising is related to advertising and promotional material that is printed out from a printer and circulated to customers’ hands. Whether it is a direct-mail piece or an advertisement in the local newspaper or popular magazine, print advertising is vital to the success of any business.

A Little More About Print Advertising

Sometimes, when done accurately, print advertising can bring in a lot of business more than what the internet can bring. There has been research conducted that shows individuals are able to process print advertising more effectively, which means your ad will stick with them for a longer period of time and they will understand it better. This leads to an increase in sales.

Your print advertising material must be attractive, eye-catching and informative whether it is about a new product or service or an upcoming sale. Just know your target audience before you create any type of print advertising to ensure that your ad is being seen by the most effective target market with the most potential of coming into your business.

The best music service is Spotify.

Sambuno — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 14:36:16 +0000

Spotify is the best music service in existence. For me as a user it has saved me between $30 and sometimes $100 a month simply because I’m not buying music. There is so much that spottily offers, but for me most of all has been the cost in comparison to buying music from iTunes or Amazon.
From time to time, even though having an 8000+ music playlist, I still buy music because sometimes you just want to hear new music, and my collection has been listened to plenty of times, and new music is coming out everyday.

The reflex to buy music is still there. In fact when ever I ear music I like, I catch myself going for iTunes or Amazon music and then it hits me, -wait a minute, I have Spotify” I don’t have to pay for it. A sense of relief comes over me, cause I just saved $10 or $15 dollar that I probably shouldn’t spend. Impulse buy, averted.
From my general experience, usage, and interest in music. Spotify is a must have service. By paying what’s roughly $10/month, you have access to the largest selection of music ever. Listen to new releases on a whim, or browse and discover new music of interest.

My only fear is that with a service this good, its competitors i.e: iTunes, Amazon working to shut this down. The loss of revenue must be noticeable

Using Facebook Marketing to grow business

Sambuno — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 08:58:14 +0000

Social media can be a fantastic marketing tool, but you need to know how to use it. If you aren’t following a few basic principles, you may find that your marketing campaign isn’t as great as you may have once thought.

What is Facebook Marketing?

Simply put, Facebook marketing is conveying your marketing messages to consumers through Facebook via status updates, pages, paid advertising, etc.

Friends or Likes = Traffic, Leads and Sales

By jumping on the Facebook bandwagon, you have to be ready to get out there to build some relationships. If you want success, you can’t sit back and wait for people to come to you. You need to get the ball rolling and do some hard work yourself. Do a Facebook search for a keyword related to your business with your city name.

For example, let’s say you own a bowling alley. You would type in “bowling Dallas,” and your results would be a list of individuals who have “bowling” and “Dallas” listed within their profile. This gets you a chance to befriend some individuals that like bowling in the Dallas area, which will result in them accepting your friend request and coming to your place of business.

The point is to reach out. When you get a decent amount of friends, and there are people collaborating with you, be sure to communicate back. This is the best way to sell yourself and your business.

Facebook Hates Spam

Keep in mind, though, that you don’t want to send an overly large amount of friend requests per day because Facebook does not tolerate spam. Try to send around 20 or so per day.

An observation of social media at work.

Sambuno — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 03:29:59 +0000

Do you hear it? Do you see it happening? Do you feel it? Well, it’s happening and here is a concrete example of social media at work. The picture below illustrates the social media paradigm; the buzz, the talk, the bee’s knees, what this whole social media thingamajig is about.We observe one person (Naomi), had an interaction with a particular insurance agent that results in significant savings for her, she then proceeds to tell her social circle of this and her social circle takes this nugget of information and runs with it. You can tell that this insurance agent is going to have a lot of coming business and consequently her company.

Not surprisingly, this observation is part of a social media strategy that can be induced and measured, though when it happens out of the sporadic dynamism as we’ve just observed, one can’t help but marvel at it. This observation is the inherent goal of social media as it pertains to what business can do with it; although as wide as the social media environment is, the venture into social media by business is virtually limitless.

People do business with People.

Sambuno — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:27:56 +0000

People don’t do business with companies, people do business with people and the companies that are winning are the ones doing so with their people.

It all boils down to the fundamentals. Do you have the fundamentals down? Are you working to make sure that whatever progress you make is being built upon the fundamentals? In this day and age you and I interface with a lot companies who handle our stuff, ie: cell phone, cable, mortgage, banks, etc and the customer service that each of these company has is largely what is responsible for our choosing to stay with them. The winning companies, and by that I mean the companies winning our business are the ones focusing on the customer.

Winning companies develop an ownership culture within their environment. Each employee is held accountable and their successes are measured. The wining companies manage the questions below well and that is why they are winning.

What is the ownership level that each employee has in managing a customer?
Are there incentives for employees delivering exceptional service?
Do employees understand their roles and responsibility?
Do employees participate in initiatives that provide that sense of ownership in the process?

The customer centric culture wins customers by developing successively with the customer in mind. The winning companies ask the question – how will this affect the customer and our service to the customer – in order to build a pyramid based on customer satisfaction.

When you view a company like Apple, Fidelity Investments, Google, each of these companies inhabits a different space and are all atop their respective industries in more that one measure. Why are they

winning? The answer is their customer centric approach.

It’s almost too simple, but as a company starts to experience growth customer service starts to falter as the focus starts to shift to the tactical functions; the companies above have identified a guiding compass, and a fixed point in the customer and that has made all the difference.

Social Media, building the brand and building the following.

Sambuno — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 03:31:31 +0000

Customer service has changed overtime and the way companies now interact with their customers’ highlights a difference between customer service today and customer service in the past. Customer service today has come to a point where the goal is to befriend the customer, this all boils down to a more tactile engagement with the customer. The advent of social media and internet marketing, came about to help advertisers build not just familiarity with their customers, but intimacy and this higher degree of intimacy now evident in business has significantly reduced the obstructive barriers between customer and company. Companies now want to ingratiate their way into our social circles, they want to be part of our lives and are succeeding very well at that. The engagement companies now have with their customers has become more informal than formal and has moved from that professional sphere to a that casual space where more casual dialogue and influences can take place.

We were developing a marketing campaing for a bakery shop, a client that came to us not surprisingly from our social media efforts on twitter. The task was on getting customers to come back and try our bakery shop. Up untill then the company hadn’t considered social media and their marketing efforts and resources had been spent on the old fashion way of building a following. The following they built were garnered through expensive direct mailing blasts directed to John and Jane within a 15 mile radius of a zip code and local newspaper advertisements, while it garnered some number of repeat business, we found the that the cost was too much and the results could be a lot better. Our campaign strategy with this client was to focus on a social media strategy.
Here are the steps we took:

1. We communicated this social media drive to all employees and staff.

2. Created facebook fan pages where communication could occur back and forth.

3. Developed the twitter page.

4 .Communicated this social presense to the customer.

placed social media web address on busienss cards and print materials that touched the customer’s hands.
Informed staff to lets customers know that “we are on facebook and twitter”
placed “incentive motivators on reciepts and other materials that customers interacted that stated “Find us on twitter and facebook for specials and tasty treats”

Once we had put together the tactical aspect of this social media drive, we then started using our fan pages and twitters to communicated coupons, specials and offers. We held contests and challenges and very shortly we had a thriving community of followers whom the client could communicate to and vice-versa. Customer would communicate new flavors that they would like, customer service praises etc. The client love it. The result was an increase in the number of customers and repeat business that made their way back into the store.

In essence the meat of the challenge was to introduce a new and more effective marketing medium and secondly to harness it for what is inherently its purpose, communication. By offering the capacity for more effective communication channel via social media, our client was able to develop the brand and develop the business.

What is the purpose of a mobile site for your business?

Sambuno — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 00:31:19 +0000

The purpose of a mobile site is simply to display information from your website on a mobile device such as the iPhone so that it shows well. You want it to be lightweight so it loads fast because no one will wait for a webpage to load on their phone.
Your mobile site should be a bullet point of your main site that includes the most pertinent details such as:

Call Us feature – make it easy for your customer to call you from their phone without actually entering your phone number in their mobile device.
Find Us feature – since most mobile device feature a map application, you want you customers to be able to locate you easily.
Call me back – added as part for the site so that customer can click an icon on your mobile site, enter a phone number and have it automatically routed to an email for you to follow up on.
Information updates – A feature that customers can opt-in to so that they receive your messages, whether text or email.

Everyone who as a phone today, has a smart phone, and they are using it so you want your site to display well enough for them to use it.

Value Mechanics – Marketing and Communicating Value

Sambuno — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 03:33:11 +0000

The hardest part of communication is ascribing value and worth to a subject and the communication of it is perhaps the oldest, if not the oldest of all forms of dialogue. It is the versatile communication form that allows for things to happen, it moves people to act and to be happy with their actions. Sales people today use it, develop it, and practice it as a professional trait, thus another name to ascribe to this form of dialogue is sales communication.

Sales communication is an act of ascribing value such that the subject being ascribed is more desirable and attractive; the discipline of this art is marketing, the art of fostering value. Today, it is essential to learn and understand value and how to create it, the modern world thrives on it. As our economy has shifted from that labor and production centered society to a more service centered one communicating value is now more than ever, the difference between success and failure.

Today, it is essential to learn and understand value and how to create it
Von C.

If you lack the ability to convey the added value of your services, products, and or solution to your customers, then most likely your endeavor will fail.

Through advertisements, branding, and sophisticated communication strategies value is being created on a minute by minute basis, consider the stock market. Considering the brand of toothpaste, or model of car to drive is an act that engages our internal value mechanics; now get this, it’s been and is being manipulated with our consent all the time.

Value is arrived at by understanding the underlying motives of your customers. The questions are:

Why would my customers need this?
What would my customers need this for?
Where would my customers need this?
When would my customers need this?

Understanding your consumer’s motives is peered at two levels, the first being on the macro-level and the second being on the micro-level

The macro-level analysis is simply this “what segment of the people are my customers” and “what does this population concern it self with.” The micro-level asks “who is my customers, who is she, who is he” and “what is he or she concerned with”

Once these questions have been defined then you can start to ascribe value to the products and services being sold and when you start to communicate value to customers you start communicating relevance in their lives. This is no longer the selling of products, or the satisfaction of demand giving supply. Now we are fulfilling the customers needs.