The best part about it? It’s accessible to anyone. Brett Bajcsi an IT Operations Manager is quoted in an InformationWeek article saying, “Start Small”. He says, “Keep your scope small to begin with, understand how it’s implemented and how it’s going to work, and then expand from there”. Charted below are reviews taken from pcmag.com. For a more in depth analysis of these, click here.

Get creative! This is a fun way to market and connect with your customers and it doesn’t have to be complicated. There are a variety of ways to disseminate your information; think Facebook, email, Twitter, website, blog, Youtube, radio, newspaper, podcasts, or letters. Then think about what you’d like to offer up –this of course should relate back to your business. Could you share articles or books, DIY project ideas, money saver ideas, tip and tricks, offer guidance to others in your industry, share interesting facts, or the latest trends? The truth is, whether your business is just starting out or you’re an old pro, if you can offer people relevant information; increased trust and sales will be close behind!

Need more ideas or help executing your own ideas? See what Twelve Oaks Group can offer your small business!

Fact: Today’s consumer turns to the internet before the phone book. We go there for reviews, pricing, hours of operation, contact info, latest happenings, buying, comparison, location, videos and pictures –to name a few. If a small business is able to address even some of these key issues with their website, they will inevitably reach new customers, save time spent on the phone, and have a leg up over competitors.

Fiction: Websites need to be updated all the time. Yeah, it’s great to keep potential customers in the loop about what’s happening with your business, but this info doesn’t have to be posted to your website. If site maintenance is of concern to you, you’re better off omitting time sensitive information to avoid outdated pages.

Fact: Sometimes less is more. If you don’t have the budget or skills to create a site with all the bells and whistles, that’s not a deal breaker. Websites should be clean, informative, and functional. Simplicity in many cases will provide the user with the information they need, and will allow them to take the next step by visiting your business in person.

For more information about how a website might benefit your small biz or to get pricing info, please contact Twelve Oaks Group. It maybe more affordable than you think!

3D design can dramatize boring info and data

~ Chris Blaylock

 Chris Blaylock of Chris Blaylock 3D Designs sheds a little insight on how all this technology can positively impact your business. Let us start with the basics…first up, “3D design can dramatize boring info and data”, says Blaylock.

He explains, and it kind of goes without saying, that 3D animation can make anything look cutting edge and state of the art, which in turn will effectively capture the attention of viewers and introduce a novelty that is almost impossible to duplicate with live-shot video. Blaylock’s portfolio displays video intros, company logos, and products –all of which offer his clients an opportunity to convey their message with increased professionalism. 3D animation doesn’t just add to a company’s image, in some cases it offers businesses practical alternatives to explaining product. It can give the viewer a better understanding of how something works without the setup or take down, and can sometimes offer clearer images than live-shot video.

Investing in quality 3D animation does not come cheap, but the payoff can be BIG. Blaylock says “an animator will charge around $50-$75 per second of animation. One second equals roughly one hour of work”. Though, in some cases, the designer will quote a flat price after evaluating the overall scale of the project.

Chris Blaylock is a 3D Designer and Animator in Nashville, Tennessee.

Do the math and you’re looking at a $2,000 investment for 30 seconds of animation. More often than not the investment is well worth it; especially if your business depends on a clear and concise way of explaining product. In addition, the animation may be something you can use in a variety of settings, like your website’s homepage, Youtube, Facebook, tradeshows, meetings, etc.

While the connections between 3D animation and marketing may seem pretty straight forward, they can easily be overlooked. It wasn’t until I starting thinking about 3D design that I noticed exactly how much of it exists in the business world. So let this be a reminder that 3D animation is accessible to all of us, and making it work for your business could be well worth the investment.

When we talk about internet marketing, it might surprise you to know that there are many types from which you can choose. Many of you may already be familiar with article marketing from a previous blog post that we did. But there’s a whole big sea of methods you can use for successful web marketing. You can use one method or several to take full advantage of the various promotion options for your services or products.

According to Wikipedia, “Internet marketing ties together the creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including design, development, advertising and sales.” Also known as web marketing, online marketing, webvertising or e-marketing, the broadness of types is extensive:

• Display advertising
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Referral marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• Inbound marketing
• Video marketing
• Mobile marketing

That means there are many ways you can enhance visibility for your services and products. Twelve Oaks Group has already touched on some of these, so we’ll be careful to not tread where we have been before. We’re only going to touch on those that we feel a small business or local government agency might want to tackle first.

“By 2016, advertisers will spend $77 billion on interactive marketing — as much as they do on television today. Search marketing, display advertising, mobile marketing, email marketing, and social media will grow to 26% of all advertising spend as they are embedded in the marketing mix.” (Forrester, August 24, 2011)

Display Advertising

You might have heard the term banners mentioned before and the importance of displaying banners next to your written content on your web pages, in your emails or even internet messaging (IM) applications. These banners come in all sorts of sizes and shapes and can utilize text, logos, images and, quickly becoming more popular, rich media that can have audio, video and more. Display advertising is just like your newspaper and magazine ads and your TV commercials — only in an online environment.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is what you do in the way of marketing that places your website higher in ranking on the major search engines like Google, Bing, Ask, Yahoo! and any other search engine that is out there on the Web. By getting higher placement in these engines, the likelihood of visitors coming to your site increases tenfold.

One of the most popular types of search engine marketing is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Simply, SEO is trying to “figure out” how search engines work. What search terms or keywords do individuals type into the search bar? What are they looking for?

The major applications where you want to consider utilizing SEM are social media marketing, email marketing, referral marketing and content marketing.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a very low cost way to promote your business. Not only does it allow you to target the group you want to focus on, but it can be used very effectively with other types of internet marketing to drive direct sales and build relationships, loyalty and trust. Email marketing allows you to either use cold lists (ones that you have not had any interaction with previously) or your own customers — previous, potential or current.

Okay, so are you still with me? I’m going to quickly mention 2 more types of marketing that a small business can focus on. Both of these are catching on like wildfire.

Video Marketing

You’ve heard of YouTube, haven’t you? Making and using videos is not as expensive as one might think. Videos can be used both as a training tool to teach someone how to do something, as well as a tool to advertise. You can then upload your videos to YouTube where you have a prime opportunity to cash in on a brand new avenue of internet marketing. Why is video marketing useful? It’s been shown time and again that people don’t remember text content as well as seeing a visual.

Small businesses are just now beginning to realize the open field of opportunity in tying video marketing in with our last type of internet marketing — mobile marketing.

Mobile Marketing

That cell phone you have can be a powerful tool to use for advertising. Just think – it’s been said that there are at least 5 out of every 6 homes that probably have a cell phone. Now think about this — it’s also been said that mobile marketing can be 3-5 times more effective than online marketing. Those are mighty telling statistics, wouldn’t you think?

There’s no doubt about it. internet marketing can pave the way to success for small business. You can choose one type or combine multiple types, and Twelve Oaks Group has the web design and consulting services that can help you succeed. Why not contact us so we can sit down together and develop a customized internet marketing strategy for your business today!

Copyright (c) 123RF Stock Photos

Link to Full Comparison

For those of you that manage teams with an overabundance of spreadsheets to keep everyone organized and on track, I’m sure you have found that that method can become very cumbersome to manage, as well as possibly being the cause of projects not being completed at all. I’ve only see this method used successfully once. That took a lot of work and time — time you could be spent doing something much more critical to your operations.

I’ve tried multiple solutions in an effort to become more streamlined with keeping my web design and development teams on track, and here are 3 project management solutions that I have found to be helpful:  Basecamp, Trello and Asana.

Basecamp

I’ve used Basecamp for many years and have even gone through several design updates with them. Just when I think that they can’t get any better, they come up with even a more useful update than they had previously.

Basecamp is the brain child of 37 Signals. The parent company has one of the greatest philosophies I’ve ever seen — “The basics are beautiful. We’ll never overlook what really matters: The basics. Great service, ease of use, honest pricing, and respect for our customer’s time, money, and trust.”

It’s so easy to set up your projects, assign To Dos, assign people, update files, move things around — and I could go on. Basecamp has a very attractive format that allows small businesses to know exactly where they are in any given project. Are there upcoming milestones that need to be met? How do I know if someone is late on a task?  Hey, we forgot to put Joe Blow on the project; we need to add him.

Basecamp makes it easy to answer those questions — all at an affordable rate! They’ll even give you a 45-day trial period to check it out for free. This puts Basecamp at the top of our list for project management tools for small businesses.

Trello

While Basecamp may have come in at the top, it was a hard decision to make as to whether to stay with Trello or not. Trello makes collaboration with teams a breeze with their boards and cards to help a small business manage their projects — and it’s **free**. Grab a card and move it to a different list. Add labels in a second. Insert checklists, and much more.

Do you have a hot topic that you want read right now? Assign it its own color and label — you know, like Priority or Completed. And with options like sharing, printing and exporting, small businesses starting out have all they need to make project management a breeze.

So why the switch to Basecamp? For the web services teams at Twelve Oaks Group, the switch over was due to Basecamp having more options that would fit our needs. One big decider for us is that Basecamp is more customized to meet the needs for team communication where Trello is pretty much strictly a task management tool. Basecamp also allow you to receive a daily update as to updates that have taken place the previous day which allows us to just be much more effective for our clients.

Asana

Asana’s development team built Asana to be fast and versatile and to easily cover the simplest of small business projects to the extreme of very complex projects. Asana is composed of three window panes within one. The first pane shows your workspaces, as well as the projects within the current workspace.

The middle pane contains the name of the selected project and the list of tasks associated with that project. You can then expand that pane into a third pane that described the details of the particular task like who’s assigned to it, due date and comments.

Adding tasks is a piece of cake. You just start typing the name of the task in the appropriate row and there it is.

I used Asana some time back when they were newer and didn’t have as many options. They just didn’t seem to be as intuitive as I would have liked. It appears as though things have changed for the better. Still all in all, Asana does have the features to be great at what it does — and that is to serve you quickly and efficiently.

It doesn’t matter what Twelve Oaks uses. What matters is what is going to help you when it comes to managing your projects. The question we started out with was, “Is there project management tools for small business?” The question is yes. We have listed just three that happen to be those that Twelve Oaks  has direct experience with, but there are others that may be more useful to you. The final choice is what are you going to use?

Still can’t decide which is best? Get additional information from our consulting team at (731) 337-4330. We’ll be glad to help you sort it all out.

1) Potential customers need to have a clear understanding of what and who your business is before they will buy anything.

If your business is not self-explanatory, it’s important that you convey clear and concise messages about what you have to offer and the application of it –think elevator speech, and then where you’re going to publicize that info. If your business is self-explanatory, think about the image you’d like to convey to people and how you might set yourself apart from other businesses like yours.

2) Keep everyone on the same page.

It’s Important that businesses strive for consistency and cohesion with all publicized info. The way information is presented on Twitter, Facebook, and websites varies greatly, but because each of these platforms is so effective at relating to the customer on different levels, there is immense opportunity to enhance the image of your business. That being said, it’s important the customer doesn’t receive conflicting ideas. Social media admin need to have a clear understanding of what the short-term and long-term marketing objectives are and an overall understanding of how to put forth info and respond to comments in a way that aligns with the priorities and values of the business.

3) Maintain consistent logos, colors, and fonts.

While you may be a long way from the widely-recognized Swoosh, it’s important to remain consistent with these nuances. Some brand recognition is better than none. Brochures, business cards, website headers, etc. should all maintain the same look and color scheme.

Small-business is full of compromise. Next time you find yourself at a crossroads, weigh your options and stay mindful of your business branding. Would you like some hands-on assistance? See what Twelve Oaks Group has to offer.

Now that you have a small business or home-based business, how are you going to achieve success. What can you do right now that will give your small business a competitive edge? Keep your eyes on these 6 guidelines!

1.      Website

You do not need an exorbitant amount of money to have a website. As a matter of fact, you are far better off (in my opinion) to not have a website that is too complicated-looking with a surplus of widgets plastered all over. No, having a website that is pleasing to the eye will go much further to bring in clients.

2.      Social Media

Social media has become a useful advertising, networking, and communications resource for small businesses. That includes such sites as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Pinterest is starting to catch on.

3.      Search Engine Presence

Small and home-based businesses can create a strong Google presence using the same search engine optimization (SEO) tactics that the big box stores use. There are a variety of methods you can use to do this. One of the best ways is through the use of keywords that relate to your website. Whenever you use article marketing, you want to use your keywords and have those keywords apply to how people will “search” for you in not only Google, but other search engines as well.

Another excellent way to become highly rated in Google specifically is through their Google Adwords Pay Per Click (PPC) internet advertising.  For small businesses that are on a limited budget, this is an ideal way to advertise within the confines of what you can spend. You basically just create your ads with the keywords and content that you want to use, your ads get displayed on Google, and your ad magnetizes customers to your site. Of course, it’s not quite that easy, but it really is an excellent program.

4.      Website Tracking

Knowing who is visiting your website and what they are looking for is all part of successful visitor tracking. Many businesses strictly rely on Google Analytics to gauge the overall success of the marketing campaigns. Twelve Oaks Group, however, prefers to take it two steps further by utilizing additional tracking sites to get a good temperature as to the well-being of our marketing techniques.

5.      Offering Discounts

Offering discounts can be a powerful lure to the customers out on the Internet. If they have clicked on one of your ads and actually ventured over to your site, why not reward them by offering them a discount or premium? For those of you that do eCommerce, offering them a

percentage off an item can encourage those would-be shoppers to actually shop around.

Offering discounts or coupons are gaining increasing popularity in the small business world. Many of those discounts often turn out to be just the enticement customers need to stay on your site awhile — and buy more!

6.      Local Search Marketing

If you are not being active on Yelp, it IS costing you money. It’s not just Yelp either. You should participate in local search marketing in order to increase visibility for your website and your brand. Recently, reports have been seen by the staff at Twelve Oaks Group that indicate that 73% of all internet searches are for local services or goods. To me, that spells out a strong reason for taking advantage of local search marketing while the iron is hot.

What I’ve offered above are just a few guidelines you can use to propel your small business on the road to success. Twelve Oaks Group has many more tips that we’ll be sharing with you in the near future. Are you ready?

Doodle helps you figure out the best time to schedule meetings and events by sending participants a number of dates that have been pre-selected by you the organizer. The participant then has an opportunity to approve each date and time. As responses trickle in, Doodle compiles an easy-to-read table showing everyone the logical date and time, which is later confirmed by the organizer. In addition, Doodle is mindful of the “wordier” participant and kindly offers space to write a note to the group.

Next time you’re ready to schedule your staff meeting or networking event, give Doodle a shot. The Twelve Oaks team members are avid supporters!

John Larkin of Supermedia.com sheds some light on the pros and cons of PPC ads through the lens of time, money, and goals. Larkin notes that effective PPC adds take a substantial amount of time –something most business owners are short on.

“…though…not having time doesn’t mean you can’t run PPC ads,” says Larkin.

With “…a reasonable budget, you can dedicate some of it to hiring an agency to handle your PPC ads. You’ll get support from people who know the ins and outs of online PPC marketing and your campaigns will be better for it.”

The truth is, PPC ads are not always a good fit for your particular goals. Larkin advises that Pay Per Click ads make the most sense for people selling product online. In short? “Don’t pay for each individual visitor if you don’t think there’s a potential to turn each one into a customer.”

-Should I Run Pay Per Click Ads?

For more info on the ins and outs of online marketing and what it can do for your business, contact Twelve Oakes Group –we’ve got your back.