This TV buy will help provide synergy between the North American Spine’s current online and offline media efforts planned and purchased by Envision Interactive.

The following is a simple set of guidelines that will help you maintain a healthy website; one that draws in potential customers and gives them reasons to interact with your brand.

The obvious goal of any website is to attract visitors. In order for that to happen, users need to have a reason to visit. And that reason is quality, relevant content! Naturally, upon the launch of the website, you will already have some basic content on your site, usually in the form of text on multiple web pages, a blog, a sign-up form, etc. But is that sufficient?

Offer Solutions

The best type of content to add to your site are helpful tips, how-to’s, or discounts as part of a customer loyalty program. Any effort at providing helpful advice to your existing or potential customers is often seen as a gesture of goodwill, and helps portray your company in a favorable light. Plus, you’ll often be rewarded by an increase in average pageviews and time spent on the site – both of which are indicator metrics of website success.

More Is More

The more relevant, quality content on your website, the more you will be rewarded. Organizing and structuring the content into individual pages according to specific themes will work wonders for the website’s organic search engine rankings, boosting your links higher up in the results pages on sites like Google and Yahoo!

There are a number of ways to find new content to regularly add to your site. Do you have a new product offering you’re proud of? Create a blog post about it. Do you find that many of your new customers often have very similar follow-up questions? Add a page of content that thoroughly, and proactively, answers questions you can anticipate from soon-to-be customers. Have video footage that is entertaining or informative? Stream it on your site and provide readable text-based summaries. Make sure that your content is easy to read, easy to understand, rich in information and targeted for your audience. And remember to update often!

How Will People Find My Website?

There are a number of different advertising programs to use to help promote your website. If your new website project was part of a broader marketing effort to attract new customers and build market share, Envision Interactive offers media planning and buying services that help our clients achieve such goals.

Who’s Searching?

Undoubtedly, your prospects are out there on the Internet actively looking for information, products, or services you offer. They are using search engines to tell them which websites contain the most relevant information on what they are looking for. The sites these users are navigating to are the result of either strategic SEO or SEM efforts by your competitors.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a term that refers to the modification of specific elements of a website in order to improve the site’s organic (i.e., free listing) rankings on the search engines. High natural rankings can contribute to a significant volume of site visits – by very qualified prospective customers! There are many different approaches that SEO firms take when trying to achieve a level of effective results. But Envision Interactive’s SEO services have proven successful time and time again. We employ a rigorous optimization methodology, whereby we focus on the core fundamentals of proper HTML structure, perform intensive data analysis to gain insights into successes as well as shortcomings, and then put in place any learnings gained.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM, “paid search”) is another means of driving qualified visitors to your site. Unlike it’s free counterpart (outlined above), SEM is a pay-for-performance advertising model; an advertiser only pays when a user clicks on a text ad that directs the user to their site. This is an attractive, low-risk marketing platform that often yields very profitable returns for advertisers. SEM provides a great deal of flexibility, allowing advertisers the ability to maintain control of budget level, keywords, geo-targeted areas, and maximum keyword bids. Again, Envision Interactive’s SEM team has extensive background experience proving the value of this advertising platform for numerous clients across dozens of industries.

Social Media went mainstream in 2009, and marketers across the globe are realizing that consumers are using Social Media to exert more influence over marketing and business decisions. A recent study by Unisfair found that 75% surveyed plan to spend more money on social media in 2010. Our own research with marketers in the Dallas area tells us that companies are facing two issues when it comes to social media: knowledge to create a strategic plan and manpower to put the plan into place.

If you are wondering how to organize a social media campaign, how social media should integrate with the rest of your marketing efforts, or where to find the time to manage the process…think about contacting us for a discussion. If Envision can help you devise or manage a social media campaign for your business, feel free to contact us.

Enter Pay-Per-Click advertising. Also known as PPC. If you are new to this term, don’t worry. You probably know more about it than you think. PPC ads are the text-based ads that appear on the results page of any search you perform. You’ve probably seen them a million times on Google or Yahoo! or Bing. They usually take up the far right column, and sometimes can be seen at the top of the page too.

First let me say that PPC isn’t good for every company, nor is it always the right tool to use to market a new product or service. For instance, if you run a software company that makes a never-seen-before business-to-business application for education institutions, you would probably find that PPC doesn’t work as well as direct sales. If your product is highly technical, or if it requires a shift in thinking for your customer to “get it”, a small text-based ad probably won’t make the sale for you.

But for many companies (dare I say most companies?) running a PPC campaign through major search engines can provide incredibly accurate ROI in a time when spending is critical. During a recession, advertising dollars rightfully are directed toward performance-based marketing, such as paid internet advertising. Why? Because when cuts are needed, it’s easier to stick with results-driven channels that have a measurable ROI.

If Envision can help you understand the benefits of PPC, contact us.

North American Spine, our client, is a leading provider of a laser spine surgery procedure called The Revolutionary Accurascope™ Procedure. Envision created this 3 dimensional animated video which they use to explain this minimally invasive spine procedure which can prevent traditional open spine surgery and is superior to other so-called Minimally Invasive techniques. We completed extensive research, digital storyboarding, modeling, texturing, lighting and compositing phases to achieve a photo-realistic style.

After examining some 300,000 Twitter accounts, a Harvard Business School professor reported last week that 10 percent of the service’s users account for more than 90 percent of tweets. The study dovetails with recent analysis by the media research firm Nielsen asserting that 60 percent of Twitter users do not return from one month to the next. Both findings suggest that, thus far, Twitter has been considerably better at signing up users than keeping them.

We’re thinking the explanation is pretty simple: Twitter is just like any other networking channel – some people just don’t get it. Read the entire Slate article.