Category: Onsite Marketing

Google Apps for Business: Why It’s a Smart Choice, Especially If You’re a Small Business

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For many small businesses, Google Apps for Business is the perfect fit. One of the most obvious benefits is cost. At only $50/user/year, you can manage upfront costs by buying only what you need. Google Apps is ‘cloud computing,’ meaning everything is performed and accomplished online over an internet connection, you don’t need to spend money on:

  • Expensive computer hardware such as a server or powerful desktop machines
  • Additional energy costs associated with running powerful computers
  • Special HVAC to maintain equipment performance
  • Additional office space, racks and furniture to store equipment
  • Installation, set-up and maintenance costs associated with computer hardware and software
  • Software purchase and updates
  • Storage and Back-Up solutions
  • IT department and Tech Support

Instead, for a fixed cost you get a comprehensive suite of powerful communication and collaboration tools, including:

  • Google Docs (web-based documents (like Word), spreadsheets (like Excel), drawings and presentations (like Visio and PPT)
  • Gmail + Postini (archiving and e-discovery)
  • Google Calendar (share project calendars, integrate with Gmail and popular calendar programs, mobile access)
  • Google Groups (for internal or client projects: share docs, calendars, folders, videos)
  • Google Sites (build collaborative sites for project workspaces, team sites, intranets, more)
  • Google Video (video channel that hosts and streams your videos across any operating system means you don’t have to share via email or burden IT with a complex on-site video solution)
  • More Apps: Google Reader, Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, AdWords
  • Storage: 25 GB per user of email storage (Blackberry, iPhone and MS Outlook interoperable)
  • Business Security: SSO, forced SSL, custom password strength requirements
  • Business Support & Reliability: 99.9% uptime guarantee SLA, 24×7 support
  • Google Apps Marketplace: you get access to a large variety of additional enterprise applications, such as Intuit Quickbooks, Fedex, and so much more, that help you with your most common business functions like sales, marketing and finance. Many applications can directly interoperate with Gmail, Calendar, Docs and contacts, helping you to do your work faster and more efficiently.

For added functionality and flexibility, what we do for customers is integrate Google Apps for Business with custom development work we provide, such as a corporate branded website application, ecommerce solution, or extranet, making everything accessible online 24/7  from a secure, centralized custom Dashboard. This option provides you with the most control and options for managing a wide variety of business tasks online, particularly useful when you have satellite offices, an external sales force, or employees working from their home office.

Bottom line is you just can’t beat the cost. For roughly .14 cents/day/user Google Apps for Business provides you with most, if not all, of what you need, leaving you free to safely set aside funds for custom development work and other marketing and business development initiatives.

Want to hear what others say?  Click here to visit Google’s Business Apps Client Stories page.

Ever worry if someone else is accessing your Gmail account?

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Your email account contains a lot of personal information, from financial items to personal notes. To help you keep control of your data and its security, Gmail lets you track your recent sessions and sign out of your account remotely.
At the bottom of your inbox in Gmail, you can find information within “Last Account Activity” detailing the time and IP address of the last activity on your account and whether it’s still open in another location. Follow the details link to see more information and sign out of other sessions.

Quick Google Tip – Taking Gmail Offline

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Even though you can grab Internet access pretty much anywhere nowadays, sometimes you may find your connectivity unavailable but you need to get to your email. Gmail has a nice feature that allows it to go offline and be accessible to you as you need it. You can read email, flag them etc, and if you respond to emails they will simply remain in your Outbox until the system detects a connection when they will be sent automatically.

Try it; to enable this feature:

  • Click Settings and next to the Labs tab look for “Offline”
  • Select Enable next to Offline Gmail
  • Click Save Changes

note: Your OS needs to support Gears (the program that makes this all happen) and most do, except for safari 4 on Macs running Snow Leopard (yes, I am on a Mac using Safari running Snow Leopard :) ) but it will work in Firefox.


Learn more here

Why Audience Segmentation and Targeting is So Important

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I came across a great little B2B case study in a post by Michael Brenner that I recommend you all read. In a nutshell, by providing respondents with “directed paths and audience-specific messaging” the subject of the case study increased website conversion rates by 556%.

It is so often the case that companies offer a tremendous amount of valuable information on their websites but they just are not getting the kind of conversions they expect. Typically the problem is the way in which the information is presented and sometimes even the keywords used to attract audiences. The entire presentation is either too generalized or not targeting audiences accurately.

Not all information is relevant to all audiences. Additionally, even if the information is relevant to everyone, it is often not relevant for the same reasons. These distinctions are important to understand when you are creating and presenting web content, particularly landing page content designed to greet respondents from a search engine or email campaign.

The first order of business is to understand who you are talking to (segment and profile) and why they should be listening to you (value you offer them). There are many ways to segment your audiences and the criteria you select to do so should make sense for your business. An example would be to target differently those familiar with your type of service or products from those who are just now learning how what you offer could work for them. The core information may be the same, but how you present it will determine how successful you are at attracting and motivating each group.

Something else to consider when segmenting and profiling your target audience groups is what their role in the decision-making process will be. If you are marketing B2B, typically you want to get your message across to decision-makers but have to go through those who are conducting the research. In this case, your initial challenge is to speak to the interests of those conducting the research using the language they use.   If done well, later in the process you may begin to present information in a manner that will allow the researcher to be your representative to the decision-makers.

Bottom line, present web content in a way that allows each of your target audience groups to easily identify and interact with the content meant for them. From landing page through to conversion, keep the conversation focused on them, providing each group with interesting ways to interact with your information as it guides them seamlessly through each step to make contact with you.

Social Media Counts Towards SEO

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The rapid growth in popularity of social media has caught the attention of the major search engines like Google and Bing. In October 2009, Google Social Search was launched, which delivers results for the terms you searched from within your online social circle. By October, Bing implemented a new feature that delivers ‘Liked by Your Friends’ in Facebook information along with the search results. Many website owners interested in achieving page one rankings in the major search engines for the terms important to them wondered if their popularity on the social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others could or would influence their rankings.

Well as it turns out, it does to some degree. In a recent interview with search engine guru Danny Sullivan, quoted here at seomoz.org, a Bing representative stated the search engine does “look at the Social Authority of a user.

Tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.” Google uses what it terms ‘Author Authority’ for both organic and news rankings. Google also looks to see how many people share a news article, much the same way Twitter ranks the top re-tweeted Tweets and Tweet topics. Google’s Author Authority and Bing’s Social Authority rank content according to their proprietary ‘authority’ scores. Google points out, however, that Author Authority differs from and is separate from PageRank, which impacts where on the search results pages a web page may be listed.

I highly recommend you read the post at seomoz.org for the ideas the author presents. Concerning search engine optimizing the social media content you produce, as always you want to include the keywords around which you are building your authority. You’ll want to keep your titles brief, containing only one or two keywords, so that the search engines can easily find your content.

Build your Followers by providing important content that is interesting to them. Reach out to new Followers both online and offline. Build a community among other “authoritative authors” who also write about the same subjects as you. And by all means, keep your social media sites, as well as your website, updated regularly with fresh, relevant and interesting content that makes readers want to share it with others.