It’s pretty tough to physically call each one of your clients on a regular basis. An email blast provides a convenient and effective method for frequent communication that keeps you in the forefront of your client’s attention.

Email blasting is a powerful marketing tool that allows businesses to reach customers and prospects directly with meaningful news and product updates. Companies can utilize this to highlight specific products or share new and exciting events with all their customers in one easy step.

Email blasts give you a higher ROI by allowing you to spend less money and resources than with traditional marketing tools like print and direct mail advertising.

Netwave Interactive Marketing can design custom templates that make it easier for clients to send out informative blasts on a regular basis. These templates help to promote your company’s brand by giving all your blasts the same look and feel that your company is known for. This helps your customers immediately identify you.

Once set up, you can prepare and sent out ongoing blasts in a matter of minutes. Schedule blasts in advance to maximize their impact by sending them at the most effective times.

Key Benefits of Email Blasts:

• Keep your company fresh in audience’s mind
• Highly cost effective
• Builds your brand
• High ROI
• Easy method to promote products, sales, and news
• Constant reminder to previous clients

Email blasting can give your overall marketing program the boost it’s been looking for, without breaking the bank. Contact Netwave Interactive Marketing to learn more about how to use email blasts to stay connected with your current customers and generate new business leads. Give us a call today at 732.701.9797.

For Social Media to be truly effective, a company should give its designated social media employees the space to interact with their community, yet maintain some control over what’s said. We had a restaurant client who had a real cheerleader of a waitress. She was a great Facebook and Twitter ambassador—until a customer took umbrage with her service—then the goodwill ambassador became a character assassin. Because we were monitoring all SM messages, NetWave was able to step in and diffuse the situation.

It’s a fine line companies walk to maintain a successful social media campaign. But the payback can be significant. Most clients don’t have the time to keep up with their social media accounts. They find it worthwhile to assign the task of “tweeting” and “posting” to one of their more web savvy (and usually young) employees. Therein lies the dilemma. The employee may know the ins and outs of Facebook, but they have little if any brand and marketing experience.

What’s needed is a silent mentor that quietly oversees all posts, makes sure they adhere to company standards and diffuses any potential issues before they become social media nightmares and examples of what not to do. We call the program our Manage, Monitor and Maintain Program. It’s designed to give your accounts the attention they need, all while growing your fan base and strengthening the connection with your customers.

Manage

Train you and your staff on Social Media outlets. Managing the scheduling of posts is an essential task. Your customers represent many different backgrounds and access social media at many different times throughout the day and week. We will make sure you are scheduling posts at the appropriate times to maximize reach, making adjustments when necessary.

Monitor

On a day-to-day basis your accounts will be monitored for any new interaction that requires action, such as a comment or inquiry from a customer. We will also monitor brand mentions on Twitter and checkins on Foursquare.

Maintain

Maintaining your accounts is a very important step in growing your fan base. Through the use of Foursquare and Twitter, we will be able to grow your “follows” and “likes.” Also, with the constant update and invention of new apps and social networks we will keep your accounts up to date and make suggestions of new ideas when appropriate.

To schedule a consultation or for more information about our services, contact NetWave Interactive Marketing, your Central New Jersey, full-service marketing firm.

For years, Andantex has depended upon us for website maintenance, search engine optimization and marketing to promote their extensive line of gear and gear reduction products. When it came time to update a large catalog, they turned to us for our creative design services. Instead of printing the large catalog, we recommended that they solely offer it online as a flip book and for PDF download. This cost savings to the client enabled them to put more marketing dollars towards industry related advertising and trade shows.

More likely than not, your consumers are talking about your brand through new media, even if they aren’t talking directly to you. A recent study shows that “60% of Millennials spend time rating products and services and uploading videos, images and blog entries online.” With that said, it’s time you find out what they are saying.

Using social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare will allow you to connect with your consumers on a more personal and interactive level. The very same study, mentioned before, found that more than half of the Millennials surveyed (53%) reported using social networks to explore brands.

If your brand is not already on or ready for such social networks you may want to consider setting up your account for monitoring purposes. Many brands do not use their Twitter account to send tweets but rather to respond, if necessary, to mentions of their brand.

Social media can also serve as a great public relations tool. By monitoring your Facebook account daily you prevent a possible issue from spiraling out of control. Here at NetWave one of our clients had an issue posted on their Facebook wall. Thanks to our monitoring and our New Media Manager working with their Marketing Coordinator, we were able to address the situation before it had a chance to spread through the social networks.

Learn more about how to handle bad publicity in social media. Contact NetWave Interactive Marketing to learn more about our new media and brand monitoring services.

Sources: Mashable & BCG Perspectives

There are companies who dedicate themselves full time to doing SEO at a pretty penny. Hiring an SEO agency comes at a high price and a lot of companies can’t always afford.  Here is a list of 10 “Do it yourself” SEO techniques that assist in gaining organic ranks.

1. Title Tags

Each page on your website has a title tag.  This tag serves as a heading to a chapter of a book.  Search engines use these title tags for indexing.  The title tag is viewed by search engines as the most important tag compared to the description tag and meta tags.  When creating a new page on your website, make sure you include specific keywords in your title.

A page title is the first line item a search engine will look at when determining just what the particular page is about. It is also the first thing potential visitors will see when looking at your search engine listing.  The more relevant your page title is to a search word or phrase, the higher your website will appear.

It’s important to include a keyword or two in the title tag of each page, but don’t overload with keywords.  If you do, you will be committing a cardinal sin in SEO world which is known as “keyword stuffing.” This act actually penalizes your site and reduces your changes of increasing organic rank.  Netwave Interactive recommends 20-30 characters in a title tag of each page. Most people will include either the company name, or title of the particular page here, as well.

2.WWW Canonicalization

Every website has a own domain name (example.com).  However that 1 domain name can be viewed as 2 different pages by Google, Yahoo, and Bing (www.example.com and example.com).  To help major search engines index your home page, Google and Microsoft allow users to determine their preferred listing.  Through the use of Google and Bing’s webmaster tools section, you as a website owner can inform major search engines which domain name you would like to use.  Once completing the preferred domain, all home page traffic will be directed to your choice.  This will keep search engines from seeing two different sites on the same domain.

3. Proper Use of Heading Tags

This is a very important element to consider when writing out your site copy. Use of heading tags helps users, web browsers and search engines alike know where the major key points of your copy are.

Your main page title should use the <h1> tag — this shows what your page is about. Use of additional tags, such as <h2> and <h3> are equally important by helping to break down your copy. For one, you’ll see a visual break in the text. But as far as the search engines are concerned, it will automatically know what your topics are on a page. The various heading tags give a priority to the content and help index your site properly.

4. Update robots.txt file with new pages added

By creating and adding this type of file to the root directory, you are guiding Search Engine robots as to what pages to read and index and what folders to bypass.  Some pages that are commonly blocked by site owners are CSS folders, https pages, sort pages, etc.  By creating a robots.txt file, you are directing search engine robots through your site to important information, while eliminating them from entering trap doors.  This in turn aids in your organic results because when SEO spiders enter into your website, they will not get “caught up” in any areas that they should not be in.  These SEO spiders will only index/review the pages that you want visitors to find.

5. Title Attributes on Links

Including title attributes on links is another important step that any good web site will have. That’s the little “tool tip” that pops up when you place your mouse over a link. These are especially important for image links, but equally useful for text links.

As a note, you should use descriptive text for your links. “Click here” doesn’t really tell a person – or more importantly, the search engines — what the link is. At the very least put a title tag that will explain that “Click Here” really means “Web Design Portfolio” for example. Better yet – make the main link text something like “View my web design portfolio” — this will give some value to the link showing that the resulting page is relevant to searches for portfolio’s.

6. XML Sitemap

Similar to the robots.txt file, XML sitemaps “guide” search engines to your published pages on your website.  XML sitemaps are strongly recommended for site owners who have more then 100 pages or are constantly producing new content.  Also located in Google and Microsoft’s webmaster tools, website owners can constantly update their sitemap when adding new pages or updating a websites navigation.  There is also a free tool to use which generates your XML sitemap for you.  Simply download your sitemap, and upload using a FTP program to your root directory.  Once completed, log into your webmaster tools section and notify Google and Microsoft that your sitemap has been completed.  your reward?  Faster indexing and higher organic ranks.

7. Relevant Content

So you have rewritten your complete website to have a large amount of keywords sprinkled through your text.  You have watched your organic rankings increase each week.  However, you are no longer receiving phone calls from new prospects.  Why?  Perhaps because your website copy makes your company sound unprofessional.  There is a fine line between over doing it and fully optimizing your website’s copy.  Make sure you err on caution.  Keep in mind your website is a sales tool that is supposed to spark interest.  Although traffic coming into your site is a plus, if you are not receiving any inquiries, you have a bigger problem.  When creating your site copy, just write as if your were having a conversation with a new prospect.  Keep your information relevant to the topic of the page.

8. Link Building

We’ve probably all heard of Google Page Rank — it seems to be every web site owner’s dream to have as high a page rank as possible. While the algorithm for determining page rank encompasses many elements, and is constantly changing, one item is the number of links pointing to your web site.

Now, you’ll want to steer clear of link farms and other spammy attempts at getting links to your site. However there are many reputable and niche directory sites that you can use to submit your web site, or specific blog articles to.

With genuine content — especially if you have a blog — you’ll be able to generate links with other web sites and blogs, as well. It’s somewhat of a give and take, in that if you link out to other sites, you’ll find sites linking back to you  — and hopefully see your page rank going up, as well!

9. Register website with multiple listing directories

As the internet has grown, there is a need for a directory.  There are free directories that allow web owners to create a website and company info listing.  These listings provide company location, link to their website, and sometimes a brief paragraph about services offered.  Some directories are strict as to what content you can add.  Others like Google Maps allow the website owner to register business location, website, hours of operation, services offered, company reviews, etc.  All of these directories send links back to the website owner’s website which helps with Search Engine ranks.

10. Create Flat Websites

The Creation of flat sites has proven to be very effective.  The key is to purchase a keyword specific domain.  On this domain, develop a 4 – 5 content heavy website that then points to your main website.  Make sure your website is keyword specific.  Therefore when developing your flat site, you want to make sure your domain name, title tags, meta tags, meta description, and website content all focus on one keyword string.  Once this new flat site starts to appear higher in search engines, visitors will be clicking in to find our more information.  Offer enough information to make the visitor interested to find out more.  Have the Contact Us and About us links on the flat site link directly into your parent website.

The purpose of the designation, according to Constant Contact is to “highlight customers who are great relationship marketers, and produce consistently high results.” Some of the criteria include:

• Consistently high open rates (greater than 25%), click through rates, and low bounce rates
• Regular contact with audiences
• Using social tools to share and promote content or events
• Utilizing reports to monitor progress

As a solutions provider for our clients, we manage their program for them, write content, design eye-catching templates, manage mailing lists and analyze results.

When handled properly, email campaigns can be one of the most cost effective marketing tools available. Contact us today for campaign examples and suggestions on how we can help you become a future Constant Contact All Star.

Varying sources say website visitors stay between 5 and 8 seconds before leaving a website and moving on to the next search result if they are not “interested.” In 2012, people want answers. I need x, can you help? Why not build a website that says “We have x, contact us to find out more.” Generally speaking, new clients, prospects, or customers will contact you if they find what they are looking for and need clarification. Do not make your website visitors dig for the answers. List your products or services right up front. Your websites navigation needs to be clean, specific, with an easy to use flow. Your services or products must be listed clearly. Don’t overwhelm your visitor with an over abundant amount of text that answers every question possible. Even if they read that you offer exactly what they are looking for, they are still going to contact you.

Netwave Interactive Marketing has developed over 500 websites with answers in mind since 1998. Our design and development team are masters in playing the devil’s advocate to ensure you, as a business owner, are utilizing your website as a sales tool. Take a look at our portfolio to see examples of sites we have built.

First thing’s first.

• Facebook Timeline will be in full effect as of March 30th, 2012.
• The new layout is intended to be much easier to read and more informative (see the attached reworked NetWave brand page as an example).
• Admins may choose to preview their page in timeline before the full rollout.
• You have the option of publishing the Timeline now, before March 30th.

What’s changing?

Cover photo

• The biggest change, besides the way posts are displayed on the page is the Cover photo.
• This is a larger image where you can be as simple or as creative as you want, but should ultimately reflect your business.
• There are several restrictions for the cover. (No direct promoting or advertising)
• NetWave can design and optimize this image for you (more on this later).

Tabs

• No longer will all the tabs (currently on the left) be showcased.
• Tabs now have larger logos.
• The ‘Photos’ tab cannot be moved.
• You may swap out the other 3 tabs, as much as you want, with your other tabs you want to feature. (Perfect for current promotions, menus, contests, etc.)
• Custom apps/ tabs can now be wider.
• NO more landing tabs, which means ‘Welcome’ tabs are irrelevant.

Great Improvements for Brand Pages:

Featured content

• Pinning
• You may “pin” a post, which will make it “stick” at the top for up to 7 days. You can change which post is pinned as much as you want.
• Highlighting
• Makes the post wide across the screen.
• Milestone
• Milestones are just that, any milestones for your business may be added separately to make them stand out on your timeline and provide a history of your business.
• Messaging
• Users can send private messages to brand pages.
• Brand pages can respond to these messages.
• Users must initiate the message first.
• You no longer have to ask a customer to send you an email (listing the email address for all to see). Simply ask them to message you.

See our example here.

In an effort to make the switch easier for you, NetWave Interactive will offer two services:

• Basic Update: Includes a simple cover photo, provided by you, and editing which tabs are displayed.
• Custom Update: Includes a custom designed cover photo and edits to the tabs. Option for new tabs to be generated.

Our professional services rate is $125 per hour.

• A basic update for our current clients will take approximately ½ an hour because we know your layout. For new clients the change may take about an hour.
• A custom update for existing clients will take approximately 1-1 ½ hours. Additional custom work will be quoted upon request.

If you would like to move forward with one of the above services please contact us at 732.701.9797 or email our New Media Manager.

NetWave Interactive Marketing would like to remind you of our full Social Media services, which includes management and monitoring. Thank you and have a great day!

Saying “thank you” can go a long way. In a follow up mailer, Spencer Savings decided to add a personal touch by including the person’s name, branch location and branch manager contact information. This mailer is also consistent with the look and feel of all Spencer Savings marketing.

Go Grailey came to NetWave Interactive in dire need of a brochure for the International Roofing Expo in Florida. This brochure provided all the neccessary information and was even customized to include specifics to the trade show. With a quick turnaround Go Grailey was able to divert a potential disaster of not having any marketing materials to hand out.