twelveoaksgroup.net » Twitter

You Are the Expert

Elizabeth — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 20:05:28 +0000

Give away your knowledge and market yourself as the expert! Your knowledge and experience within your industry is invaluable and by offering it to others you will increase your credibility in the eye of the consumer and your peers which in turn yields sales. There’s no doubt this will require some invested time and thoughtfulness, and you may even give away secrets to your competition, but if you’re offering valuable information and it has your name attached to it, people will know where to go when they’re ready to spend their money.

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!

Elizabeth

Elizabeth McPhail grew up learning about the trials, tribulations, and perks of small family-owned business. She creates and maintains websites and blogs, and in her spare time can be found on the water boating!

Branding Your Small Biz

Elizabeth — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:51:27 +0000

Big-businesses can offer product or service with a “take it or leave it” attitude –small businesses however, are not afforded this luxury. The little guys –in an effort to stay in the game or grow—are often left to tweak the image of their product or service in different situations so that meaningful messages are conveyed to potential customers at all times. This creates a tricky situation for branding consistency. Below are a few things to keep in mind as you strive to brand and grow your business.

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.

Elizabeth

Social Media Education: 21st century perks and 21st century risks

Elizabeth — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 12:50:58 +0000

It’s true that more and more private information is being used and shared via the internet, and small businesses are no exception to the trend. Marshable Business offers up four tips to protect your small biz against cyber attacks: smart passwords, mobile devise education, risk management and perhaps the trickiest of them all, social media education

Cyber security expert Rick Doten tells Marshable,

“…companies should allow employees to post online about the company in a positive light, but cautions that employees who use social media too carelessly can give away sensitive details about a firm’s internal business.”

“If I see someone tweeting about a conference in Omaha, I can guess what’s happening there. Social media’s great from a competitive counter-intelligence point of view. I can learn a lot [by] following tweets.”

- 4 Tips to Protect Your Small Business Against Cyberattacks

Twelve Oaks Group realizes that not every company is at extreme risk of sharing counter-intel information via Facebook or Twitter, but it is important to think about what kind of company information is being represented on the internet. Companies that don’t have a Facebook and Twitter account still need to take into consideration how an employee might be representing their business online. In some cases, business that do not have a social media account will find that their business is listed on Facebook and may even have a few “likes”, but the rest of the pages are completely empty. While this does not necessarily pose as a counter-intel threat, it doesn’t help your business put its best foot forward either. Or perhaps you’ve got a product or service on the market that’s loved by customers –loved so much that one of those customers created an unofficial business page for you. Again, not necessarily a counter-intel threat, but it does pose a risk.

If used correctly, Facebook is a very effective tool in helping you connect with current and potential customers. Interested in getting your business on Facebook? Contact Twelve Oaks Group! We can help your business master the perks of Facebook –one of the best values in online advertising anywhere.

Elizabeth

Successful Ways to Track Topics on the Web

Twelve Oaks Group — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 13:00:21 +0000

How often have you been curious as to how a particular topic is doing on the Web, you know, is it being talked about a lot or hardly at all? There are ways to track topics, did you know that? Read on as Twelve Oaks Group shares successful ways to track topics on the Web.

Google Alerts

A popular method, and a very successful way I might add, is through the use of setting up Google Alerts. It’s very easy to set up. Start with going to Google News and put in your topic that you want to search for (like Twelve Oaks Group, for example). Now scroll all the way to the bottom and click on the link that says “Create an email alert for Twelve Oaks Group.” You can do this for any topic you want. The final steps would be to add your email address and make your selections for what’s showing. Voilà, click on Create Alert. Then depending on how often you have chosen to have the email alert delivered, you’ll get an email anytime anything new pops up in Google.

Social Media

If you would be more interested in taking the social approach, then two good options are Google+ and Twitter.

1. Google+

Google+ is Google’s version of a social network. When you signed up for your Google account, you were automatically set up with Google+. If you were to go there now, you would type in your search topic. If you look over on the top right, you see a red button that allows you to save your search. To check your topics you saved on a regular basis, just go to your Google+ homepage, select the More drop-down list in the sub-menu where you’ll be able to see your Google+ circles, as well as your saved searches.

2. Twitter

Did you know you can save your searches for topics in Twitter — whether or not you use the hashtag? Yes, that’s right; you can. Just log into your Twitter account, type in your search query in the search box on the top right and click the magnifier. Presto, all the tweets that relate to your search come into view like magic. To save it, click on the search icon at the top of the tweets and choose either Save Search or Advanced Search.

Now finding that topic that you just saved is not so intuitive to find. Remember where you typed in your initial search on the Twitter homepage? Click on that again, and you will see all your search topics that you have previously saved.

3. Facebook

Some of you may be wondering if you can conduct searches for topics on Facebook. You can by searching a topic but at this point, it’s pretty hit and miss.

Niche Communities or Specialist Services

Depending on what you’re interested in, you may find niche communities or specialist services that you can get good information from. Reddit is a good site for a niche community.

Tracking topics and tracking visitors are just two ways that small businesses can get an edge on their competitors or become aware of emerging trends and technology in the business world. Twelve Oaks Group has many more useful topics planned that will help you become the leader in your industry.

Twelve Oaks Group

Tennessee-based Twelve Oak Group is unique in its approach to its customers. Each team member is committed to helping grow small business, making local government more accessible, and enhancing communities with their web design and consulting services expertise. We will not deviate from this approach!

Why Small Businesses Need to Set Up Visitor Tracking for Their Websites

Twelve Oaks Group — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 14:33:41 +0000

In order for small businesses to be competitive with the “big box” stores, it is wise for them to take advantage of different analytics tools and resources to know how their website is performing. Why do they need to set up visitor tracking? Let’s look.

According to Wikipedia, “Website visitor tracking (WVT) is the analysis of visitor behavior on a website.” In order to measure that, small businesses should look into which applications going to give you the best results.

What is website visitor tracking?

Visitor tracking (or management) refers to how many people come to your website, what pages they are looking at, what page do they come in on, as well as leave your site on, and much more.

Look at Twelve Oaks Group, for example. By looking at any one of the website tracking tools, we can determine how many visitors checked out our site on any given day, what country they were from and even what city they hail from, how many minutes they stayed on our site, did they access our site from a mobile device, and so much more. Just imagine checking out our content overview and discovering that 69.23% of visitors in the month of June so far entered our website through our Home page.

Why is visitor tracking useful to small businesses?

Visitor tracking is useful to you because the more information you can gain about your visitors, the closer you can get to satisfying their needs and requirements. What are they looking for? Website visitor management can give you a closer look at what their searching for, how many times they are searching for it and what you can do to tell them that you have the solution to what they want. This makes your content more compelling, your mailing list management for campaigns more effective, your products more visible and likely to be purchased, and your return on investment be higher. Wow! How great can that be?

In summary to this section, some questions you should want answers for regarding visitor tracking are:

Is your advertising and marketing working?
If you’re paying for ads on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter or Pinterest, you need to know if those dollars are well spent: do visitors from these sources stay on your site? Are they finding what they need?
Is your site communicating effectively?
By looking at the pages visitors check out, can you determine if they’re finding what they need? What do you need to tweak as far as your content? Do you need to explain further?
What is your bounce rate? – A high percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page needs to be addressed. You need to get those visitors to venture deeper into your site.
Is your home page (or your most popular entrance pages) capturing the attention of visitors?

What are some WVT tools that Twelve Oaks Group uses?

We’re only going to mention 3 website visitor tracking tools right now — and these are used by Twelve Oaks Group now — yes, it’s okay to have more than one tool to get the answers to what you need to know.

Google Analytics

Invariably, the most well-known and most widely-used of the website tracking applications is Google Analytics. Offered by Google as a free service, Google Analytics (GA) provides a wide assortment of statistics that will tell you all your need to know about your website traffic. You can also upgrade to a premium version for a fee.

Get Clicky

Clicky is a real time web analytics service. That means that once you login, you can see what’s happening on your site — right now. Google Analytics has Real-Time also with the number of visitors on the site currently, the number of pageviews during each of the most recent 30 minutes, and the number of pageviews during each of the most recent 60 seconds.

Twelve Oaks uses Clicky as well for several options that GA does not have. Since Get Clicky only focuses on real time data as a default. There is access to comprehensive history; you just need to dig a little deeper on their site in order to pull out that information.

Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange records your visitor’s every click, mouse movement, scroll, and keypress.

Lucky Orange is unique in that it provides you real time analytics like GA and Get Clicky. In addition, there are three more features that you may want to know about. I’m only going to give you 3 bullet points per feature, so for sure you’ll want to go check everything out.

Live Chat Software

Chat box stays on the page and follows visitor as they browse your site for a seamless experience.
Can watch visitors screen while chatting with them
Add Customized Pre Chat Questions

Visitor Recordings & Live Sessions

Watch in real time or automatically records visitor browsing sessions
Watch every mouse movement, keypress, scroll, screen resize
Ability to chat with visitor while you watch them browse.

Heat Maps

Aggregate lots of click data to form beautiful heatmaps
Click heat maps
Mouse movement heat maps

Live Visitor Map

Watch a real time visitor map of all your website visitors
Animated with custom effects
Plot line between points for neat effect

So as a refresher, why do small businesses need to set up visitor tracking for their websites? It’s all for the better to see your visitors, my friends. You need to get a good overview of what they need, get feedback on your site’s performance and services and be able to be flexible so you can adapt quickly.

Do you need help setting up one or more analytic sites? The Twelve Oaks Group web services and consulting team can help you. Why not give us a call at (731) 337-4330.