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.

Facebook launched their Deals site earlier today to a small group of cities including San Francisco, Dallas, Austin, Atlanta and San Diego. The new Groupon competitor site fully utilizes all of the social features of Facebook, such as Notifications, Sponsored Stories, Likes and Shares amongst friends, email blasts and more.  Within the Facebook Deals Guide for Business they describe the Deals feature as a way to create unique social experiences for friends to enjoy together. Deals encourage people to share their excitement about your business, creating word-of-mouth for your business and can help you build long lasting relationships with your customers.

We believe this new Facebook feature is a great way to increase new customer reach, as well as increase your brand and customer loyalty. Facebook seems to be making it increasingly easier for people to recommend your business through several different sharing options within their platform. These days it is crucial to utilize the marketing features of Facebook and other social media channels because of their endless opportunities and simpler marketing tactics.

If you have any questions about Facebook Marketing, please feel free to contact us here at Sage Island.

I am happy to announce that the new Vacation Home Services website launched yesterday!  They are a new vacation property management company that came to Sage Island for a new logo and new website for their business.  Their site is built in DNN for easy updates and will feature an integrated online reservation system in the near future.

Since Google has introduced Realtime Search, it has become ever-so-important to understand social media feeds and the value behind posting on Twitter. Below are a few best practices that our team at Sage Island follows, that may be beneficial to your business as well.

1) Establish trust:

To be successful on Twitter, you have to build a reputation for being a trusted source. You must become your industries leading source for up-to-date and timely information. This will help you build a strong following on Twitter. You can establish this trust by referencing articles and links about the bigger picture as it relates to your business.

2) Link to your website:

Integrate your current Twitter URL into your website by placing a button or call to action on all pages within your website. When tweeting, provide back links that redirect to your site to help gain traffic to your site. Make sure that when promoting your company’s URL, that you have provided added value once they arrive. Both integrating your Twitter URL and linking to your site – will help drive your Twitter URL up in the search engines.

3) Be responsive and reward followers:

You won’t win over the twitter population if you only use twitter as a self-promoting platform. While providing one way marketing messages about your product is okay, it is preferred if you instead ask questions and engage followers in a more casual, conversational approach. Share other peoples content in order to let the “Twitter-sphere” know that you are participating in the conversation. Engaging followers, thanking followers for following and responding in real time will help you build your customer engagement.

4) Don’t forget about your keywords and character limit:

When possible, write keyword rich tweets. Beginning your tweets with a primary keyword will allow you to leverage the realtime and long-term index relevance across search engines. Also, make sure your tweet’s character limits allow for “retweetability.” It is best to keep your tweet under 120 characters in order for your followers to easily add your RT@name in front of their tweet.

5) Measure and monitor what people are saying:

Utilizing tools such as HootSuite and Radian6 will allow you to monitor, track and gain insights regarding your Twitter traffic. Similar to Google Analytics for your website, these sites provide data regarding your Twitter visits, demographics, referring site visits and specifics on individual tweets that you have sent.

Understanding these 5 Twitter tips is only the beginning. Knowing who to follow and the important hashtags for your industry are important as well. Keep your eyes out for more insightful Twitter and social media tips to come in the next week. If you have any questions, or want information regarding other social media opportunities, please contact Sage Island today.

These days there are several different PPC options available that reach out to millions of people around the world.  Thankfully one of the largest networks in the world allows you to display your image ads on their site to all 400 million of their active users. Below are the top 5 reasons why Facebook Ads could benefit you:

1) Ad Destinations
Facebook Ads allow you to drive traffic to any destination on your fan page for an increased amount of “likes” and Facebook interaction.  You can also choose to send your traffic directly to any page on your website.  No matter what your marketing strategy is, Facebook ads are easily customizable for increased opportunity and advertising control.

2) Targeting Your Customers
Facebook allows you to target your ads to users based on their gender, age, location, birthday, relationship status, education, workplace, language, interests and more.  The more targeted your ads are, the higher your CTR will be.  You will also see a large decrease in the unprofitable clicks that you may receive in less targeted PPC campaigns.

3) Character & Image Flexibility
Facebook ads allow almost double the character limit of Google AdWords for greater ad descriptions.  They also give you the option to choose whichever thumbnail picture you would like to display above your ad copy.  These customizable options give your ads increased visual value to the consumer and allow you to say what you want to say.

4) Pricing Options
Once you’ve created your Facebook Ads you can choose to pay for impressions (CPM) or clicks (CPC).  You have total control of your daily budget and bids.  Your ads will discontinue once your budget has been met for the day. Historical data has shown that the average CPC for Facebook is dramatically lower than that of Google AdWords.

5) Reporting
Facebook has much different reporting tools than any other PPC interface we have ever seen.  They have multiple dynamic statistics that allow you to see standard PPC metrics alongside Facebook statistics such as amount of “likes”, social impressions, social CTR and more.  Another report that Facebook can generate is an Ad Demographic report that allows you to see the age, gender and location of the users that are clicking on your ads.  Lastly you can choose a Profile report that shows certain profile metrics of your clicks such as interests, favorite movies and books etc.

Here at Sage Island we have used Facebook Ads for our clients such as Warehouse Skateboards and have seen an increase of over 21,000 “likes” in 2 months.  If you have any questions about Facebook Advertising or you would like to increase your brand exposure on Facebook, please contact Sage Island to begin your social media marketing success.

Summary
Are you a hardcore Front End Programmer or UI Developer?
Do you live, breathe and eat HTML/CSS/JavaScript?
Are you looking for an opportunity in the Wrightsville Beach, NC area?

If so, please read ahead..

.
This is a great opportunity to be a part of a high-quality team that is responsible for the development of large-scale, customer-facing websites. This person will have the opportunity to work with cutting edge web technologies, including HTML5 / CSS3 and JQuery!

What you’ll be doing

• Develop high quality, great looking, cross-browser web applications
• Work closely with visual and interaction designers, product managers and back-end engineers
• Translate UI requirements and art direction into clean and stable code
• Working closely with developers and programmers to develop the company’s front end design

What’s in it for you

• Excellent compensation package commensurate with experience
• Company paid medical, health, and dental insurance
• Casual work environment
• Paid vacation and holidays

What you need

• Experience building / developing XHTML based web pages for high traffic websites
• Expert-level hand-coded, standard compliant, cross-browser supported JavaScript and CSS 2/ 3
• Experience performing cross-browser compatibility testing & adhering to 508 Compliance / W3C Standards
• Ability to provide significant input to user interface and look and feel functionality requirements
• Excellent proficiency with Adobe Creative Suite 5 (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.)
• Ability to quickly learn and understand internal systems and methodologies
• Dot Net Nuke / WordPress development experience
• Nice to have .NET architecture (ASP.NET, Silverlight, C#, SQLServer)
• Minimum of 3 years experience in web development
• Recent Portfolio/work examples showcasing web/interface design examples

Send cover letter, resume, and salary requirements to jobs@sageisland.com.
Specify Front End Web Developer on cover letter.

Summary

Sage Island is seeking an Account Executive to serve as the liaison between clients and the agency. The Account Executive partners with the client to understand their overall business objectives in the sales and development stages of a project and leads in the development of marketing strategies to meet the client’s objectives.

• Build business relationship with potential customers to assess their needs and propose appropriate marketing services
• Able to lead and develop sound, results-oriented, strategic recommendations based on clear understanding of each client’s customers, competition, industry and business
• Fully understands and recommend agency services
• Manage all aspects of the project from start to finish
• Develop, administer, and communicate project details and schedules to manage both agency and client expectations and ensure jobs deliver on time to the highest level of excellence
• Demonstrates “can do” attitude and does whatever it takes to get the job done

Skills/Abilities & Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree
• 3 years digital marketing experience; agency experience preferred
• Strong project management skills
• Exceptional communication skills, written and verbal
• Proven track record in planning and managing website development & marketing campaigns
• Experience scoping, planning and managing technical projects a plus
• Proven ability to build and maintain strong client relationships
• Strong decision-making, organizational, planning and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to multi-task in a fast paced work environment.
• Ability to create and manage budgets and manage internal teams to get the job done
• Self starter with a positive attitude, can work independently yet be a pivotal team player

Full-time with benefits package. Send cover letter, resume, and salary requirements to jobs@sageisland.com. Specify Account Executive on cover letter.