The Official OpenRain Blog

Today’s “brick-and-mortar” businesses orient marketing dollars around local product/service locations to maximize returns on marketing dollars using direct mail, signage, bulletins, newspaper placement, newsletters and local radio. Unfortunately, some of these tactics require commitments of over several thousand dollars per campaign just to get started, and cannot easily be changed once begun. Brick-and-mortar businesses owners often incorrectly assume they should not venture into more effective online marketing campaigns, and thus fail to realize the cost savings and other benefits of using internet-based marketing communication channels.

Getting eager customers in the door is critical if your business requires in-store sales. In many markets, Internet marketing has proven to be easier to maintain, cheaper over the long run and more effective than the aforementioned traditional tactics. Even franchise/licensed business owners of already well-known household names–such as Subway and Little Caesars–are using localized electronic marketing to distribute coupons, sales promotions and other marketing messages.

The first step is to establish a website specifically designed for your business. For your first site, focus on these elements..

1. Providing a look and feel should consistent with your logo, color scheme, typography and other branding. The design should be professional and business oriented. (Avoid the temptation to include large amounts of personal content.)
2. A clear and obvious call to action for what you want visitors to do. Contact and newsletter signup forms, phone numbers and maps should all be clearly accessible–as appropriate for your company–to maximize the likelihood that the visitor will “convert” to a paying customer.
3. You should have the ability to update content without needing to go through the web designer/developer. Developers will sometimes refer to these functions as “Content Management System” (CMS) features.

This great new site will be the center of your businesses electronic marketing campaigns. Once running, submit your new website URL to Google, Yahoo!, and MSN search engines, at minimum. Also look for online business directories under which you may register and list business contact information such as Google Local Business Center and YellowPages.com. All of these registrations may be used and updated free up charge. Also make sure your web developer is including visitor tracking code in your website so you may access statistics on the people visiting your website. Trends statistics on referral sources, visitors per day and most popular pages are all critical metrics you’ll need to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing. With your new business website silently running 24/7, you should now focus your attention on marketing it.

Google AdWords is the most popular search engine-oriented advertising service for driving potential customers to the call to action on your website. You may also configure your ads to show up on sites showing advertising via Google’s complementary AdSense service. AdWords is a form of “pay-per-click” (PPC) marketing. You pay a small fee each time a web user clicks on your ad and is redirected to your website, as well as a (generally much smaller) fee for ad impressions made without a click-through. Impression fees are usually changed by the thousand since the value of an impression is marginal compared to a click-through to your website.

The budget for your online campaigns is up to you! You may set a fixed daily maximum budget for ads, and specify the maximum price you are willing to pay for a click via a bid. Free tools are available to help find the right combination of search keywords and big pricing. Specific ads can be tied to specific geographic regions similar in spirit to traditional marketing tactics, and your web developer can even set up tools to automatically email you reports on the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Paid advertisements are not the only way to get customers in the door. Online “blog” services are essentially web-based bulletin boards to post news. Newsletters can be distributed by email instead of direct mail. Discussion forums can be used for customer support and questions. All these things and more can also be integrated into your website with the ultimate intent of getting people in the door or on the phone where your existing salesmanship can take over. With time and attention, the effectiveness of your online presence may even overtake your traditional offline marketing tactics.

Solutions

OpenRain’s Online Business Platform is an all-in-one package integrating custom web design, self-updatable content management system, social media integration and much more in a 24/7-availability package for less than the cost of 3 months of direct mail campaigning. No contracts or complications: just pure, online business the way it was meant to be done.

Or if you’d like to supercharge your existing site for online marketing, monthly consultation services are available as well.

Call us now at 1 (623) 691-7869 or visit us at http://openrain.com for a free quote!

preston.lee Content, Social Media, Whitepapers business, marketing, online business platform, openrain, phone, roi

New phone number: 1.623.691.7869

Try to contain your excitement, but we just implemented a shiny new phone system. It’s not exactly something you’d ask Santa for, but a critical piece of business infrastructure nonetheless. Last year we decided to try a Skype-based strategy and, well… let’s just say we had smiles when we turned on the new system.

We chose Cisco/Linksys SPA942 IP phones (currently ~$115 from Newegg) using VoicePulse SIP services in California proxied by an Asterisk server on our internal network. The awesome part is that we’ve been using the new system for about a week, and have seen crazy better call quality at negligible additional usage cost. The SPA942 has an outstanding price/performance ratio, giving you four lines, built-in web server configuration, PoE, voicemail, headset, tons of OSD menu options and other schwag for a little over 100 bones per unit. For all practical purposes that’s more than enough juice for a developer who only makes a couple calls per day.   

The increased SIP quality is also showing about 4x the bandwidth usage of our previous Skype hardware. While we could have a crappy Skype-to-Non-Skype call at ~4K/s before, a better SIP call takes about ~10K/s/channel, as reported by our T1 gateway. Using QoS prioritization at the border we’ve managed to avoid quality issues so far, but time will tell.

So, if you regularly have conference calls with us, we’ll probably give you our brand new 1.623.691.7869 number and a nice extension to dial into!

preston.lee General Announcements announcement, bandwidth, infrastructure, number, office, phone, sip, skype, voicepulse, voip