When done correctly, using blog posts can really enhance your business’s online operations. They are a great way to reach out to your audience and connect with them in a more personal way than many other means of marketing.

Of course, like any form of marketing, it can take a little while to figure out how you can make your business’s blog a success. How often should you write? What should you write about? These questions and more are commonly asked by beginning bloggers.

The answers to these sorts of questions depend on your business and your company goals. When you start to build a blog for your company, keep some of these tips in mind in order to make your blogging system as successful as possible:

Figure out your goals. It’s hard to measure whether or not your blog is successful if you don’t have any standards that you’re looking to meet. You could be looking for a certain number of page views per month, or looking to create a certain number of sales conversions. It could also be used as a means to collect consumer feedback. Each individual post should also have a goal; ask yourself, “what do I want to get out of this post?” This will help your blog to stay targeted toward your overall goal.

Make it both reader- and search engine-friendly. Find out what your target audience wants to read about. You can do this through social media, or by looking at successful blogs of other companies in your field. Once you’re sure you’ve got topics that will engage your audience, be sure to target your posts with keywords that will help you to rank higher in search engines. Remember, though: the use of these keywords should never compromise the flow of your writing.

Promote your blog. Of course, “promote” doesn’t mean “spam”—share it through social media, include blog posts in your company newsletters, include a link to your blog in every company email, etc. However you choose to advertise your blog, do it in a way that will make potential readers want to click on it. If your promotion seems too “spammy,” it will instantly turn readers away.

Track your analytics. Figure out what keywords are working and how many users you’re getting per day/week/month on certain posts and your blog overall. From viewing this information, as well as plenty of other information that will be available to you, you’ll be able to more closely analyze what is and isn’t working in your system for blog writing.

Are you struggling with creating your business’s blog? InterKnecht has the tools to help you! Contact us today and learn how we can instantly and easily transform your business’s blog.

The importance of using social media to build your brand is well-documented. However, converting all of your seemingly random Twitter and Facebook followers and fans into actual paying customers can occasionally feel like a daunting task.

There are a number of ways you can go about creating customer conversions through your social networks, and for the most part the methods you use will depend on your brand. However, no matter what kind of company you run, there are some social media conversion methods that are the same across the board:

Search. Use the search features on your social networks to find people that are talking about your brand, or about ideas that are related to your brand. You can search using targeted keywords that should give you the kinds of targets you’re looking for. You can also search your competitors’ followers and fans and reach out to them.

Use pictures. These could be pictures of your product/service, pop culture images that draw people in to your brand, etc. Of course, any images you post should be consistent with your company’s brand image.

Be personal. If someone asks you a question on Facebook or Twitter, be sure to respond with a helpful and personal answer as quickly as possible. Your customers should always feel as though they’re talking to a person, not a robot. Don’t ignore negative feedback, either—one of the most important ways you can use social media is to address the concerns of unhappy customers and turn them back into happy ones!

Acknowledge your customers. Show off pictures of happy customers with your product. Create competitions through your social media pages and give plenty of recognition to the winners. People love to be recognized.

Don’t over-promote. People aren’t going to be as keen to follow you or become a customer if all your social media pages do is advertise your business. You need to give your customers a chance to get involved and encourage discussions on your pages.

At InterKnecht, one of our specialties is helping businesses to find success through social media interaction. Contact us today and find out how we can transform your company, and start turning your Facebook and Twitter leads into actual customers!

The importance of using social media to build your brand is well-documented. However, converting all of your seemingly random Twitter and Facebook followers and fans into actual paying customers can occasionally feel like a daunting task.

There are a number of ways you can go about creating customer conversions through your social networks, and for the most part the methods you use will depend on your brand. However, no matter what kind of company you run, there are some social media conversion methods that are the same across the board:

1. Search. Use the search features on your social networks to find people that are talking about your brand, or about ideas that are related to your brand. You can search using targeted keywords that should give you the kinds of targets you’re looking for. You can also search your competitors’ followers and fans and reach out to them.
2. Use pictures. These could be pictures of your product/service, pop culture images that draw people in to your brand, etc. Of course, any images you post should be consistent with your company’s brand image.
3. Be personal. If someone asks you a question on Facebook or Twitter, be sure to respond with a helpful and personal answer as quickly as possible. Your customers should always feel as though they’re talking to a person, not a robot. Don’t ignore negative feedback, either—one of the most important ways you can use social media is to address the concerns of unhappy customers and turn them back into happy ones!
4. Acknowledge your customers. Show off pictures of happy customers with your product. Create competitions through your social media pages and give plenty of recognition to the winners. People love to be recognized.
5. Don’t over-promote. People aren’t going to be as keen to follow you or become a customer if all your social media pages do is advertise your business. You need to give your customers a chance to get involved and encourage discussions on your pages.

At InterKnecht, one of our specialties is helping businesses to find success through social media interaction. Contact us today and find out how we can transform your company, and start turning your Facebook and Twitter leads into actual customers!

Many major companies are having quite a bit of success by creating YouTube advertising campaigns. When done in a creative way, these videos can draw quite a bit of attention to your brand and encourage people to share them with their friends.

Of course, it’s not easy to make an immediate impact. There are over three billion videos viewed every day on YouTube, so you have to know how to make your videos stand out so that they don’t get lost among all the other messages.

With that in mind, here are some of the best tips for creating a solid YouTube presence for your brand:

Keep it brief – You probably don’t want to go too much longer than a normal television advertisement. If you keep your videos to two minutes or less, chances are that more people will watch them all the way through. Some companies even choose to upload their television commercials to their YouTube pages.

Promote your videos – Post your videos to your website, social networks, and blogs. Encourage followers through these channels to subscribe to you on YouTube so that they’ll be updated whenever you post a new video. Be sure to optimize your videos by including keywords in your title, description, and video tags!

Monitor your comments – Comments give you a great idea of what people are saying about your brand. You can directly respond to users that have questions or concerns, or moderate any inappropriate posts. However, this doesn’t mean you should delete negative comments—just ones that are abusive. If you encourage chatter, more people will want to view your videos!

Personalize your channel page – Create personalized skins and layouts for your channel page that help to build your brand image. You could include your logo, relevant images, or anything else that is consistent with the message that you’re trying to get across!

Use the playlist function – Once you’ve got a lot of videos uploaded to your channel, you can organize them better by making playlists of related content. That way, if viewers find themselves interested in a particular video, they’ll instantly be able to watch other videos on your page that are similar!

Watch your analytics – Through YouTube’s free analytics you can track demographic data of your viewers, performance data like subscribers and views, likes, comments, shares, and much more. Reviewing this information can give you a good idea of what is and isn’t working in your YouTube marketing scheme.

YouTube can do a lot to improve your brand awareness so long as you follow these guidelines. For more information on how to create an effective YouTube campaign, feel free to contact one of our experts at InterKnecht!

By now you probably know all about the benefits of social media marketing for your business, and you probably even have several social media pages set up for your company. However, simply getting these pages set up and attracting followers are the easy parts. The real challenge is determining how you can use the information you gain through social media to improve your business operations.

Sometimes it can be difficult to determine what messages on your social media pages are relevant to improving your business and what messages are simply fluff. Here are some ways that you can differentiate between these two, and then use that knowledge to make the necessary changes in your business:

Find comments that directly discuss your brand. Whether your fans or followers are prompted to give their opinions or not, anything they say about your product or service will give you an idea of how people perceive your brand. If customers have a different perception than what you’re trying to exude, you can analyze these comments to figure out how to make a change.

Know what gets people talking. You might have noticed that certain kinds of announcements or posts or certain products get more attention on your social media pages. This attention could be positive or negative, but in either case this provides your business with some extremely valuable feedback. When you find something that gets people talking in a positive way, work off of that to give your customers more. When something gets a negative or underwhelming response, figure out what the problem is and make any changes that are necessary.

Search for issues your customers are having. Be sure to deal with any complaints or issues that come up on your business’s page immediately in order to ensure your customers’ satisfaction. Also, many times your customers will talk about issues they’re having with your product, but not bring these issues directly to you. If you see one issue that continues to pop up (it could get a lot of retweets or shares), try to get it solved before it’s even officially brought to your attention.

Categorize social media conversations and analyze them accordingly. Figure out what messages are complaints, feedback, related to specific products, etc. You’ll be able to see how many messages of each category you’re getting while tracking exactly what they’re saying. Keep up with all of this information and make it a weekly focus in your business.

Sometimes it can be difficult to separate useful information from “white noise” on social media, but when you are able to extract useful data it can make a big difference in your business. InterKnecht can help you do this. Contact us today to see how we can revolutionize your business through social media marketing!

Most small business owners agree that a blog can be extremely helpful for creating extra business opportunities and marketing your brand. However, it can sometimes be a struggle to keep your blog relevant and interesting, especially once you’ve had it up and running for quite a while.

Letting your blog go static can create some problems. Search engines provide users with the most relevant, helpful, and up to date results that they can find for a given search, and the best blogs provide this. If your blog doesn’t fit any of those three adjectives, search engines and readers will quickly fade away, and you’ll be left with an ineffective blog.

So, how do you keep your blog both relevant and compelling? Here are a few tips that you should keep in mind:

Don’t force it! You don’t need to have a long, in-depth blog post every day. Your posts can be brief as long as your readers still find them interesting. Feel free to embed relevant YouTube videos, links to articles or other blogs that you find interesting or more. Of course, this shouldn’t be your blog’s main strategy, but it’s fine to do this every once in a while.

See what others are saying. What are the other people in your industry and your blogosphere writing about? People want to discuss hot topics, even if they’re all over other places of the web. Give them an outlet to do that.

Allow comments. Your blog is a great opportunity to create a discussion. People will keep coming back if they see that you have built up a community through your comment section.

Invite guest bloggers. This is a great tip for two reasons. First, it takes some of the pressure off of your shoulders for creating a post. Second, it gives you a chance to showcase a completely different and insightful perspective.

Plan, plan, plan. Develop an editorial calendar in order to keep yourself on track. If you plan your writing out in advance and have a spreadsheet that tells you when your blogs will be posted and what the topics will be, you’re much more likely to stick to them.

Stay focused! While it might be tempting to insert personal factoids into your blog, a business blog should stay strictly business. People don’t come to your business’s blog to hear stories about your personal life.

There are many more ways you can keep your blog relevant and interesting, and InterKnecht can help. Contact our marketing experts today and keep your blog compelling!

There are a wide variety of features to take into consideration when you’re designing your website. You’ll want to pay close attention to your layout, the different pages and features that you preset on your site, and its content. But, there’s something that might be more important when setting up a website: the color scheme.

The right colors are important, as they set the tone for your website, and different colors can present different emotions. In order to pick the correct color scheme, you need to know exactly what emotions you want your brand to evoke and how you want people to feel when they visit your site. The right colors can cause excitement and stimulation, or they can be calming and soothing.

One of the best ways to visualize your potential color scheme is to use the color wheel. Looking at this wheel gives you a good idea of what colors go together well. Finding colors that are harmonious together involves picking colors that are opposite from each other around the wheel.

Before you select your colors, though, remember to consider the emotions that these colors could evoke. Are you trying to spread excitement, or do you want to look calm and professional? Perhaps something in between?

Red designs are generally bold, exciting, and desirable. It can be used for love, passion, leadership, excitement, or power. Since it’s an extremely strong and overwhelming color, it should be used with caution.

A blue color scheme is quite a bit more peaceful and stable, and generally a safer choice than an overwhelming red. Blue schemes can come off as being much more professional and reliable.

A yellow scheme is lively, happy, and youthful. This is a great choice if your product or service is aimed at small children.

Orange designs generally exude creativity and cheer. This is another color that should be used sparingly, as it can convey a bold statement.

Grey designs are perhaps most associated with being professional, practical and intelligent, and give a mature feel for the viewer. If you want your business to come across as dignified, or if your target audience is slightly older, grey can be a good choice.

White designs are simple, clean and wholesome, and highlights other colors on your page. They give a very traditional vibe, and are favored by many companies that swear by the old saying, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

These are just a few examples of some of the color meanings for common background designs, but there are plenty more out there. Before you choose the design for your site think about the message that you’re trying to send with your business, and how the color scheme you select reinforces that message. For help with designing your website, contact InterKnecht today!

The latest changes in the Internet’s largest social network promise to mean big things for many businesses. Facebook’s Timeline for Pages offers a multitude of opportunities for creative customization and audience engagement that could revolutionize the way you conduct your social media marketing. The feature has been available for users’ personal pages for several months, but now businesses can jump aboard the Timeline bandwagon as well!

Here’s a brief rundown of some of the new features that Timeline for Pages offers and how you might take advantage of them:

Cover Photo. The new cover photo option is a unique opportunity for visual branding that really provides an outlet to show off your business’s creativity. The cover photo is located at the top of the timeline and stretches horizontally across nearly the entire Facebook interface. It’s now the first thing your eye jumps to when you click on a Facebook page, and as such, it’s a great way to make a solid first impression.

Navigation Bar. All of your information, photos, apps, and map are now located in one convenient navigation bar, which is located directly beneath your cover photo, profile picture, and name. People who view your page can easily access all of this information in greater detail by clicking on the portion that they desire to view.

The Timeline. The Timeline itself is a great innovation, and gives businesses a great opportunity to build their brand by showing off their history. You have the option to go back as far as 1880 to implement significant dates and milestones for your business, and these milestones will show up on the timeline as viewers scroll down. The timeline also features wall posts, photos added, and more. There are options that allow you to choose what does and does not show up on your timeline. Along the very right side of your timeline, you can click a year to quickly access all timeline entries for that year.

Highlights. Do you want to draw attention to a specific entry on your timeline? You can scroll over that entry and choose the option to “highlight” it, which will make it much larger than your other timeline entries! Use this for entries such as more important milestones, or any special announcements that you want to make to your followers.

Some critics of the new timeline feature believe that it will now be more difficult for businesses that aren’t as creative to keep up in social media marketing. However, with the help of InterKnecht, that isn’t an issue at all! Contact us today to learn how we can help you set up your new Timeline in a creative way that encourages engagement from your audience.