Geo-Location Social Media

One of the most trending aspects of social media today is the feature
of geo-location.  From the popular idea of picture sharing and
connecting with local friends or strangers from around the world in
Facebook, the world of social media has advanced drastically.  People
need more than just pictures, ideas, and events.  They want to know
“where”!  What good is a beautiful picture if no body knows where it
is? Or, how are we going to know if you’re on vacation in a picture
with your loved ones if you don’t tell us exactly where you are?
Geo-location has made all of that possible.  People of facebook are
able to show where their pictures, posts, and statuses are coming
from, and users are able to find out where their “friends” are as
well.  Since Facebook has now been around for such a long time and we
all seem to be used to this feature, where is Geo-location Social
Media going now?

When Foursquare was launched in 2009, the idea was not only for the
social network to be able to allow a user to “check-in” or show people
where they were, but also to help businesses to better market
themselves.  This became a virtual way for companies to create brand
awareness without having to spend tremendous marketing dollars.  If
people are able to see that their friends that they have very much in
common with are at some type of event, bar, or other place with means
of attraction, the likelihood that those people join their friends is
highly likely.  This definitely seems to help create more business!
Now in 2012, Foursquare has connected over 10,000,000 world wide
users!  Think about the potential exposure for all types of entities
that can come from a number so large!

While Foursquare has obviously seen major success in their geolocation
app, people are always looking for more as previously mentioned with
Facebook.  Today, geo-location app makers are focusing heavily on
connecting people through games and other means of entertainment to
keep the application’s success moving exponentially.  Some other
geo-location app’s that are trying to breakthrough the market to
compete with Foursquare are Scoville, Bizzy, Lowffer & Yobongo.

Scoville integrates with your Foursquare account check-ins and picks
up your favorite places on a weekly basis.  As more users sign up for
Scoville, these favorite place recommendations will create a ranking
of places in each city, which allows Scoville to recommend check-ins
based on the popularity each place receives.

Bizzy took the geolocation idea and went with a different angle.
Bizzy collects place ratings and reviews each time users leave a venue
through a check-out feature.  This adds value and experience to Bizzy
and helps those who are looking to go or stay somewhere to choose
wisely.

Lowffer uses geolocation to find nearby deals and special offers based
off of Lowffer user recommendations and your location.  It does act
somewhat like a mobile groupon app, but it also contains a game-like
leader board that is emphasized to motivate user participation, like
Foursquare.

Finally, Yobongo was made to create connects with strangers nearby
using your location to show other users that are around you.  You have
the capability to set up “rooms” of that usually has between 10 to 15
users in the chat room.  It is an “ice breaker” app that helps you to
come out of your shell and make new friendships!

What most of these new apps and what all geolocation apps are trying
to do in the upcoming future is create value to the user.  If users
are able to receive a great amount of value out of their social media
application while having the application easy to use and understand,
it certainly has the ability to survive in this competitive social
media world we live in today!

At Digital Motion, we can help you to stay connected and grow your
business through using geo-location based applications amongst all
types of social networks.  Find out what our Social Media Optimization
skills can do for your business today!

What do you know about Google Advisor?

Google Advisor is a feature that presents you with a way to quickly find relevant financial products for your specific needs from many providers and compare them. Google Advisor is currently only available in the U.S and can help you make difficult financial decisions with ease.

The Advisor feature has helped Google enter the Automotive lead generation business.

“Google will establish a Web page for vehicle shoppers. Dealers will bid, through a Google auction, to be one of about three dealers listed on the page when shoppers fill out a discounted price request for, say, a 2012 Toyota Camry with some specifications. The shoppers choose which of the listed dealers will receive the lead and provide the price…”

The webpage for vehicle shoppers has been launched. With this Google application, competition for new car leads can get very interesting. Buying cars on the internet (especially Google) will catch quickly, just like eBay and craigs list. Google provides the Internets lead search engine optimization so this feature will explode. Do you think it will be effective? 

Toyota prices are now available on Google. Google has the ability to advertise this feature at the top of every Toyota search and allows you to research dealers in your area and present you with the options of different models available. Anything sold on the Internet seems to be a hit because of its convenience but how will people react to changing the way cars are bought, sold and advertised for years to come?

Construction Marketing

At Digital Motion, we often work with clients in the construction and
contracting business. There are a few specifics in construction
marketing that are key to a successful advertising and marketing plan.

Construction marketing is based on many factors that serve to help
your construction company bring in more customers and higher revenue.
Those factors are location, brand awareness, the relationship with
your customers and employee happiness.

Choosing your location as a construction and contracting company is
very dependent on your expectations for your business.  If you know of
areas that are being developed very frequently and areas that are
looking to be developed, it would certainly be a good idea to get your
construction company’s name into the conversation of the consumers
that sound a little bit like, “Who are we going to choose for this
project?”  As well as being considered in that conversation, you want
to find ways in your early stage to get your construction company’s
name involved in all types of construction conversations, not limit
yourself to only high volume locations.  The way you do this is with
brand awareness.

Brand awareness is developed early in a construction company’s career.
 Obtaining a lot of “little clients” and jobs is a great way to start
your construction company and an even better way to do a very good job
on your projects.  This is a classic method of setting up your company
for referrals.  Referrals are extremely important to a construction
company’s life span and in many ways, referrals help a construction
company to maintain good business throughout the duration of its life.
 But where does the solid relationship between your company and the
consumer start?  It starts with your employees.

If you are an attractive company to construction men or women that are
looking to do a great job for you and even more so for the customer,
your business is much better off.  The quality of your jobs come
directly from the happiness of your employees.  If you are paying your
employees well you might be thinking, “I’m not too sure I have the
revenues coming in to afford these employees”, however, if your
employees are taken care of, then your work is done well, your
referrals are way up, and your work has increased substantially.

High “percentage of revenue” marketing budgets coupled with high
revenue per employee is a sign of incredible profitability.

Here at Digital Motion, we can help you to begin or improve your
marketing strategies to get those calls and referrals that you are
looking for to stay competitive and increase your profitability today!

Catering Marketing

Although Catering Marketing may seem the same as Restaurant Marketing from both being a part of the food service industry, it is important to pay attention to a few extra details that will benefit your catering business because ultimately the restaurant business and catering business are different.

1) Market locally - If you’re a local caterer, you must reach the minds of the people in your area so that when they have a wedding, birthday, holiday party or any type of celebration, they remember that they already know someone. You need to make sure they know and want you to cater their upcoming event. Twitter is a great way to build these personal, local connections with potential customers. Try it out, everybody has one.

2) Network with related Bloggers - Bloggers are important people to know in this situation because they very often have readers. Readers will stumble upon a feed or a bookmark because they are interested in what that blogger has to say. You want to get their readers interested in you. If you’re working on catering marketing, there are a couple ways you can benefit from blogger outreach. In the catering business two accepted blog groups to target would be popular recipe blogs and wedding blogs, both in which have great relevance to your business.

3) Create Video Content- Today, who doesn’t go on YouTube? Create a video about what you cater, where you cater or to whom you cater and upload it on YouTube to separate your catering marketing from the rest. Post the video on your website as well. Grab the attention of your viewers and make them potential clients.

4) Optimize- Use Google search engine optimization (SEO) to rank your website on the internet. Make your local listings and search terms more visible to the public. The easy it is for viewers to find your website, the more likely they will click and explore more.

5) Drive traffic with Flickr or Pinterest-

Flickr is another great site that small businesses can use to drive traffic, while creating new linking opportunities simultaneously. It also gives you something to do with those 200 photos of your dishes you have lying around.

Pinterest is the perfect application for your catering business. It is the most thriving social network at the moment that is based on photography, beauty, décor and food. Throw pictures of your recipes out there and see how popular they become.

Restaurant Marketing

At Digital Motion, we often work with clients in the food business such as restaurants, bakeries, food production and more. There are a few specifics in restaurant marketing that are key for a successful advertising and marketing plan.

Restaurant marketing is based on what your restaurant, cafe, bakery, pizzeria, etc has to offer to potential guests. It is a way of inciting interest and describing the unique features of your menu, of your service, and of your location.

Conventional marketing (for restaurant marketing) is all about broadcasting or printing the message where a lot of potential consumers will be able to see it, but only few will find it relevant. For greater efficiency, marketing slowly has become more centered on specific demographics, enabled largely by improvements in communication.

It is relatively easy to create restaurant marketing campaigns that focus on a particular geographic area, like advertising in a local paper. You can also target a particular “psychographic” group, such as advertising your healthy menu options on a healthy living website. However, it can still be very difficult to reach viable consumers, those that turn into guests and into food sales.

Location-based online marketing is the answer. If it’s not in place, over 90 percent of ad impressions are wasted on potential guests who are outside your geographic area. Technology has advanced to allow geo-location marketing. For instance, smartphones allow marketers to obtain device-location data and modern search engines, such as Google, enable consumers to find what they need based entirely on the geographic location they are in and what’s near it. Better targeting means better conversions and more food sales.


To make sure your restaurant marketing strategy is effective or if your on a do it your self plan, follow a few simple guidelines provided by Restaurant Commando:

PICK A SPECIFIC TARGET FOR YOUR RESTAURANT MARKETING CAMPAIGN

Make sure that your campaign is targeted well to the area you operate in. Major search engines like Google, allow you to target your restaurant marketing campaigns based on City, ZIP codes, neighborhoods, or even a specific street intersection.

This way, when you advertise your coffee shop, you can be sure that most of the consumers exposed to your message are within a range that would make sense for them pay you a visit.

BE A GOOD NEIGHBOR

You can use your restaurant’s geographic location to your marketing advantage in promotions by focusing on providing consumer incentives at a hyper-local level. For instance, you could create a time-sensitive coupon to those who live within a few mile radius of your foodservice establishment.

EXPLAIN HOW TO GET TO WHERE YOU ARE

With geo-location, you can also explain your location, to make it easy for your first-time guests to find you. (People are lazy and most would rather go to your competitor than spend time looking you up in the directory.) It’s very important that you provide a map. Even better is offer directions from the person’s location (walking, by car, or by public transportation).

CAPITALIZE ON THE NEW AND COOL

There some very interesting “new and cool” tools available to you as local marketer. Many coffee shops (and we can’t not mention Starbucks here), are using programs such as Foursquare and Facebook Locations to turn location into a game. Consumers can “check in” at your location, allowing you to provide incentives for consumers to visit a specific location more frequently by offering status (e.g. mayor status, badges), points, or incentives based on the number of visits (e.g. free appetizer on your fifth visit).

Geo-targeted online marketing is a key part of growing your restaurant business and brand, to attract local customers.

Local Internet Marketing is much more than just slamming together a website. The real restaurant marketing work is about becoming “findable” in multiple places when a local consumer is searching for your type of product.

We at Digital Motion Advertising & Marketing can assist you with your restaurant marketing plan.
Check out Restaurant Commando for more info

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the method of analyzing and
constructing individual web pages and/or entire websites, so that they
can be discovered, analyzed, and then indexed by various search
engines.

SEO makes the content of your web pages more relevant, more
attractive, and more easily read by search engines and their crawling
and indexing software.

With SEO, marketers receive the power to create strong brand messages
for certain industries and search keywords to better market
themselves.  This is done by creating relevant and attractive websites
and web pages which results in having their pages show up on
first-page results when a user is doing a search that is closely
related or the same to what the business has to offer.

As well as users locating your websites through search, SEO allows
you, the marketer, to find target markets where you want your
advertisements and products to be shown and to whom you want it to be
shown with the option of choosing certain demographics.

SEO makes it possible for potential customers to locate your web site
easily, brings more traffic to and through your website and builds
brand awareness to your product and to your company.

This is why Digital Motion Marketing & Advertising is here.  Find out
what Digital Motion can do for your Search Engine Optimization needs
today.  Help us help you define your business in the digital
advertising world.

Digital Motion Held Open House

Digital Motion held an open house this past Friday, June 15^th and it was a great success! The open house lasted from 12-4pm. Business marketing representatives attended from all over the country along with many local clients. Tours of the Digital Motion office facility were given, the team was introduced, food and beverages were served, marketing presentations were given, and promotional products were showcased. Everyone who attended had a fun time while learning about what they could do to help market their business.

The marketing presentations were a hit. The presentation was given every hour for about 20 minutes so all of our guests could have a chance to learn about the new and most important aspects of the marketing world. Our guests learned more about search engine optimization, the newest social media, and other simple yet necessary facts about marketing a successful business in this day and age.

Another successful part of the open house was the promotion aspect. Digital Motion is in cooperation with Pro-motion that develops promotional products for your business. The promotional production showcase was a great way to show our guests and clients that not only can we help keep you up to speed with digital marketing; we can also help promote and brand your business in a traditional fashion as well. Pro-motion showcased all of their past work with clients such as hats, shirts, golf tees, mugs, signs and business cards, you name it, they have made it. The guests seemed intrigued and left wanting more.

As an end result, everyone enjoyed themselves, got a chance to see how Digital Motion operates and learned valuable information that will help their business grow through advertising, marketing and promotion. 

Make Your Website Worth Their While

Creating a website and launching it live does not necessarily mean people are going to enjoy or even visit your site. It is essential to follow a few steps or guidelines to make your website known to the public and worth looking at. A good website can open up a whole world of opportunities for your business.

1) Don’t Make Users Think – Everything on your website should be clear, obvious and self- explanatory.
2) Don’t Squander The Users Patience – The less action is required from users to test a service, the more likely a random visitor is to actually try it out.
3) Manage to Focus Users’ Attention – Visuals are key. Images are more eye-catching than text, but text is used to provide content.
4) Strive For Feature Exposure – Letting the user clearly see what functions are available and can be completed in 1-2-3-done steps are the fundamental principles for successful user interface design.
5) Make Use of Effective Writing – It is necessary to adjust the writing styles to users’ preferences and browsing habits.
6) Strive For Simplicity – Users are rarely on a site to enjoy the design and are probably looking for information despite the design. Although visuals are important, “Keep it simple”.
7) Don’t Be Afraid of the White Space – White space reduces the cognitive load of visitors, but it makes it possible to take in more information presented on the screen.
8) Communicate Effectively With a “Visible Language” – Visible language is the content users see on the screen and it is important that they can organize, economize and further communicate the information given to them.
9) Conventions Are Our Friends – Conventional design can gain user’s confidence, trust, reliability, and prove your credibility.
10) Test Early, Test Often – Website design project usability tests often and provides crucial insights into problems and issues related to a given layout. Test not too late, not too little and not for the wrong reasons.

Digital Motion has the ability to help you with your website in building the most efficient design content and marketing tips to get your website out there. Our team of skilled designers and programmers will work with you, by evaluating your goals and needs in order to perfect your ideal website. We take your vision and make it happen.

As learned through the steps above, the best websites are easy to navigate, have eye popping visual display, easy tracking and displays your message clearly. Digital Motion will accomplish all these things, and give you what you want in a business building website.

Check our website for more info: http://www.digitalmotionweb.com/web_design_development.cfm
More research: http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/31/10-principles-of-effective-web-design/

How Businesses Find a Target Market

With today’s economy in the state that it is in, many businesses are worried about where their marketing dollars are going. Target marketing allows you to focus your marketing dollars and brand message on a specific market that is more likely to buy from you rather than from other markets.

When new companies start out and don’t plan to target a specific market, they get eager to jump all over any new opportunities that may arise. However, trying to be all things to all people is a sure way to find failure in the marketplace.

The importance of finding your niche and your target market is crucial to the success of your business. Businesses find a Target Market by becoming an expert in one area, doing the market research, and then tweaking your marketing to appeal only to that market. Becoming an expert in one area allows you to fully know your product’s capability in your specified market.  This includes focusing your time, energy, and marketing dollars towards your market, giving your product a better chance to succeed.

Doing your market research allows you to better understand who, what, where and when.  Who is buying your product? What is the product that this target market is buying?  Where exactly are they buying it? And when is the best time to sell your product?

Once you can answer these questions about your target market and your product, tweaking your marketing is the key to really grabbing your target market’s attention and letting that market know that both you and your product are ready to go. 

This is why Digital Motion Marketing & Advertising is here.  Find out what Digital Motion can do for you today.  Help us help you define your business in the digital advertising world.