We are looking forward to Mike’s upcoming presentation: “Building Traffic with Social Media” at UNCW on March 1st!  This informative seminar will help business owners take their existing social media campaigns to the next level with helpful tips and strategies on building quality traffic.  Many thanks to our friends at the SBTDC (Small Business & Technology Development Center) for hosting this event. We hope you’ll join us!

Register for Sage Island’s Social Media Strategy Seminar by Feb. 23rd!

Today is the last day you can register to attend the 2nd annual Biz Tech Expo! As the area’s largest Business to Business conference, this year’s event will include a variety of educational topics and seminars, a presentation luncheon with two impressive keynote speakers, and the ability to network with tons of successful local businesses. The conference will be held at the Wilmington Convention Center this Thursday, January 26th from 12-7 pm.

Sage Island has been given a special discount code just for our Facebook fans and customers, so if you are in the area and want to attend,  register with the code: sagebiztech. This waives the $5 entry fee to attend both the Expo and the after hours event. We hope to see you there!

We hope everyone is settling back in from a busy holiday season and tackling January 2012 with all you got!

The first few weeks of the new year have been busy ones for us. We’ve already hit up Surf Expo, an action sports tradeshow in Orlando that is near in dear to our heart–  they are both a client of ours and the hub of all things action sports for a lot of our customers! We have kicked off many new projects on a local level that we are can’t wait to share with you. A few ecommerce projects are underway, a favorite local hangout is getting a website facelift, and we have been fortunate enough to receive several real estate and developer clients this month- an excellent indicator for our local economy. Stay tuned for more details!

We feel so fortunate to be starting off the year with such a bang, and are anxious to see what the year will bring. Our resolution is to continue to stay ahead of the trend in terms of cutting edge marketing and design technologies, and bring you the best products and service possible. Here’s to a great 2012!

We are having so much fun playing with these Mungi Bands – we can only imagine how much kids are going to love them! This summer a client came to us with a simple, but brilliant idea- he wanted to create a toy/bracelet, similar to the popular synthetic bands, but with a big defining factor- a magnet.  The idea is for kids to collect and trade the different styles and colored bands to make their own design. Our client tested this new product concept first with his own children, and after getting rave reviews, he knew he was on to something! A few weeks later, he contacted Sage Island to help get this product off the ground, in which we took him through a series of phases to further develop branding, identity, design and packaging.

First our graphic artists were tasked with the logo creation. Our design team had a blast creating the Mungi Bands brand. The goal was to create a simple, fun logo that appealed to the children’s toy market and incorporated the magnetic theme. We explored multiple styles, shapes, and colors before we all decided on the chosen logo: A unique style of lettering that plays up the “U” in Mungi, and includes the magnets as eyes to create a smiley, kid friendly mark.

After working out the logo and the “Collect and Connect” trademarked tagline, we then moved into package design and development. Our team skillfully plotted the best way to package these fun bands. From deciding on quantity per package, shape, store placement angles, and finally the package design-we are thrilled with the end result.

We had a great time working on this project. It’s fun to take someone’s bright eyed idea and turn it into a reality. Now, Mungi Bands have over 22 unique designs and colors encouraging kids to collect, trade, share and play with the different styles! They are debuting their product this Saturday at both Wilmington Learning Express locations (10am-12 at the Hanover Center Location and 1-3pm at the Military Cutoff Location).  We encourage you to stop by to pick up these perfect Christmas stocking stuffers, and get in early on this trend!

With one of the largest online fan communities, One Tree Hill has grown immensely in popularity over the years and it’s all filmed right outside our office doors! As Wilmingtonians, we have been lucky to see the actors and scenes being filmed around our town for years. Over the past nine seasons they have accumulated thousands of pieces for their sets and wardrobes, which is all being made available to purchase at their much anticipated Wrap Sale.

Sage Island was lucky enough to work  with the great people over at Auction Co. of Wilmington and the team at One Tree Hill for this job. Tasked with designing and building a website that mirrors the One Tree Hill brand and showcases the vast amount of items for sale, we were excited to get to work. The new website is built in WordPress, which integrates perfectly with their Flickr photo albums containing THOUSANDS of photos of the items being auctioned off on December 9-11. With over 5 million fans on Facebook, One Tree Hill supporters are anxiously awaiting the Wrap Sale and we know will be visiting the website for a sneak peak. That being said,the website needed to be able to handle the large amount of traffic, which our hosting department gladly took care of!

We have so enjoyed working with this One Tree Hill project, the perfect send off to the production that has been in our backyard for so many years. We are looking forward to attending the Wardrobe Sale and Auction ourselves!

With 1 in 5 search queries now being related to local terms, it is more important than ever to focus on optimizing your business for local search. At Sage Island we have been working with many of our SEO and PPC clients on boosting their local search presence. In researching tactics and best practices we came across a very informative article explaining how users search for local businesses. Here are a few interesting highlights to keep in mind when optimizing for local search.

Study Findings and Suggested Tips to Optimizing Your Local Listings:

Finding: 71% of searchers value the information contained in local search results. 60% of these searchers said that local listings with an image get their attention more than standard listings.

Tip: Make your local listing stand out from the crowd. After claiming your listings within Google Places, Yahoo and Bing local listings, you wil want to enhance it with a great looking photo.

Finding: 17% of searchers do not use local geo-modifiers when searching, with this percentage on the rise amoung younger searchers. While on the other hand, older searchers are more inclined to search using local modifiers – roughly 63%.

Tip: When targeting a younger audience, businesses should focus more on generic terms. When targeting older consumers, businesses should focus more on local modifiers within their search related terms.

Finding: 60% of local searchers add a city name to their search query. 42% of searchers choose to add a zip code.

Tip: Optimizing for town name and city name should deliver more traffic than ZIP code, but a well-rounded local SEO campaign should utilize both.

Optimizing your local listings ensures that potential customers find you using search and map functions within search engines. Doing this correctly will support your SEO marketing efforts, as well as increase your visibility and online reputation. For more information, check out Google, Yahoo and Bing Local Listings. If you have questions, or would like to discuss claiming and optimizing your local listings, we would be happy to help. Contact Sage Island today!