We were excited when long-time customer The North Face Breckenridge (Breck Gear) came to us for guidance in social media marketing! As you know, there are a number of Social Marketing tools one can use to reach out to potential product buyers around the United States. Our end goal for Breck Gear was to help increase qualified traffic to the company website through social media tools. By exploring this new marketing opportunity for them, we ultimately helped them reach a broader audience through the use of two simple, yet powerful social tools: WordPress Blog and Facebook.

WordPress Blog:
Breck Gear already had a blog through Blogger in which they frequently updated content, which was awesome, but it was completely hidden and not accessible from the website; it was also at a third party domain rather than the site domain. By being so hidden, this already established blog wasn’t giving Breck Gear a chance to showcase their posts. Our suggestion here was to build a link between the blog and website (as shown in the navigation on the site), reskin the blog in WordPress (to have the blog match the look and feel of the site) and build the blog under a directory in the domain (to ultimately give the site’s domain ‘credit’ for all that blog content).

Facebook:
Here, again, Breck Gear was a step ahead and already had a Facebook page, but we had a few suggestions for improvement. First and foremost, we suggested adjusting the account name from ‘Breck Gear’, to ‘The North Face Breckenridge’ to allow us to capitalize on the North Face association. We then suggested a creative landing page and efforts to get at least 25 ‘likes’ in order to create a vanity URL for the page.

Since our suggestions on the blog and Facebook page, Breck Gear has really taken off and are currently working on building out the photo gallery, adding videos and linking posts from the blog to the Facebook page. In the future, once they have a solid following/community, they can have fun creating a Facebook campaign or contest. I encourage everyone to check out their new blog and Facebook page and leave a comment!

The big, awaited event is finally here! Cucalorus 17 (as in 17 years in the making!) begins tomorrow and runs until Sunday! If you haven’t noticed a surplus of people swarming our small town, you just may! Filmmakers and fans from all over have already started rolling into Wilmington, NC where the festival takes place! Films will be screening in venues including Thalian Hall Center, City Stage Theature, Jengo’s Playhouse and the Soapbox. It has truly been an honor, joy and pleasure working with the Cucalorus team and helping contribute such an important part to the event: the website and print materials. I know the Sage Island team is excited to attend the event and are counting down the hours until tomorrow’s start date! Make sure you all get your tickets today and go out and support such a great community event. See you there!

It’s always tough when the manufacturer sells direct to consumers, and often times you may feel as a retailer you are ‘competing’ against the manufacturer, but this can also be a moment to sit back, take a look at your site and current marketing strategies and view this as a window of opportunity. This is the time for you to make your site, services and products stand out from the manufacturer, but in a clean, professional way.

To help jog some ideas on what you can do for your company, below are just a few things to help you stay ahead of the curve in selling:

1.    Loyalty Plan/Incentives:
Although you may not be able to control the price of a product, here you can control incentives—such as free shipping, promotional deals, discounts…etc.

2.    Build Local Loyalty:
If you have the advantage of having a brick and mortar store in addition to an online shop—take advantage of this and help build the loyalty among the locals. You can seek out local resorts, tour companies, hard goods stores…etc. and have them help promote both your physical store and online store.

3.    Exclusive Products/Cobranded products:
Depending on the agreement with your manufacturer, you may carry exclusive products not available on their store, or you may be able to cobrand the products for your location—play up on this if you are able to benefit from exclusivity. Promote this on your website, blog, Facebook page…etc.

4.    Website Enhancement:
Now is the time you can beef up your website and make it have that ‘cool’ factor that the manufacturer’s site may not. You can add comparison tools, rating feature, testimonials on people who purchased a product from your site and how they rave about your customer service…etc.

5.    Ramp up Social Media:
There is so much you can do here! First thing’s first, if you have a Facebook page, make sure it is promoted on your site. Add  ‘addthis.com’ and additionally add the Facebook ‘likes’ to each product page to help boast and promote your site through social media. You can make your Facebook and site more interactive—offering a purchase discount when ‘liking’ or a Facebook contest to help boost your likes. Once you get a ton of likes established, you can consider selling your products on Facebook. You may even consider Facebook Ads to help generate likes or conversions/transactions.

6.    Online Outlets:
Perhaps in addition to selling on your website, you can look into selling utilizing different outlets, such as Amazon that already reaches a huge amount of interested buyers.

7.    Email Marketing:
Reach out to those that have previously purchased from you—collect email addresses via online store opt-in/purchases, physical store and Facebook and use these emails to send new product updates, discounts and specials.

The above just barely scrapes the service on things you can do as a company, especially with the upcoming holiday season. If you are interested, contact us and we are happy to take a look at your company, consult further and help with implementing any of the above ideas.

We just love working with the local organizations and lending a helping hand! This year we were fortunate enough to again work with our close friends from both Lighthouse Beer & Wine and Cucalorus!  With October quickly coming to an end and November rapidly approaching we were privileged to help prepare for 2 large annual events.

The first event took place last weekend, and it was the renown Lighthouse Beer & Wine Beer Festival. This year marked the festival’s 10th year in the making and it went off without a hitch! To prepare for this event we provided our creative services to help brainstorm the theme and create the poster design. You can guarantee more than half the Sage Island staff attended the event and are probably in the festival’s photo gallery celebrating another successful Beer Festival!

Another event we are looking forward to is the upcoming annual film festival, hosted by Cucalorus, which takes place in our own town of Wilmington, NC from November 10-13, 2011. To gear up for this year’s big event we provided our services in the creation of the festival poster, festival post card and trifold, as well as reskinned the website to match this year’s theme. Be sure to take a look at the site’s new look and feel! Start checking out the films that will be featured and if you feel extra generous, give a donation here to help Cucalorus put on the event!

It is with great pleasure that I announce the recent launch of the new Wilmington Animal Healthcare website! Built in our usual content management system (DNN), this site features an editable rotating JavaScript header (featuring our very own Mazie dog and Puff cat), embedded Flickr Gallery, and multiple editable pages the client can manage to keep the site’s content updated and fresh. Overall, the client is pleased with the new look and feel that greatly compliments the vet facility and has already taken the liberty in managing the site and adding new text, pages and pictures.

After numerous client meetings, calls and planning, we have officially launched Schoolbags for Kids! This is a unique site whose purpose is just as beautiful as the look and feel—for every schoolbag sold, one bag filled with school supplies will be given to a child in need. Currently the site promotes one collection of Schoolbags, the ‘Signature Collection’, however, the store will soon expand promoting various collections and patterns. With a playful design and fun pop-ups, you can navigate through the site to learn more about the mission, history and adorable characters. One of my favorite features of this warm site is the ‘create your own badge’ feature that appears after purchasing a bag. Here you can upload a photo and input personal information to create a bag ID in color of your choice to be printed and placed in the Schoolbag’s ID pouch.

Many talented people came together to make this site possible and it was a great joy and privilege working with so many backgrounds. For starters we worked with their designer by taking their beautiful creations and adjusting them slightly to be built within the ecommerce system ASPDotNetStorefront. We also worked with their fulfillment company by integrating their system and the storefront for order processing. In addition to integrating with the fulfillment company, many other platforms and systems were integrated into this one site—such as Constant Contact (opt-in located in the footer of every page) and Facebook ‘like button’ allowing users to share content with friends on Facebook.

The client is very pleased with the results and happy to announce sales are already taking place and the ‘buzzz’ is already spreading! On July 26th they will be featured on Daily Candy and we will soon begin discussions of building Phase 2 (the beekeepers club).

We are excited to present the new and improved look and feel for the Wave Transit website. This website was rebuilt within a content management system (DNN) that provides the ability to add, edit and delete content, images and elements of the website. The new site includes a comprehensive website search tool that will search all text within the website. In addition, we were able to incorporate a translator module on all pages that allows for the easy translation of all website text, content and navigation. Finally, this site features an updated Real Time Bus Tracking tool which is more interactive and uses Google Maps instead of Yahoo. Be sure to check out the new site’s design and unique features!