The Green Apple Blog

More and more businesses are continuing to improve their digital footprint by expanding their online marketing and development solutions. For many companies, the focus on widespread marketing can often overshadow the importance of local marketing. Depending on the type of business, localized marketing is becoming more important than ever for independent retailers, restaurants and others. Luckily, there are some great alterations a marketing and business team can make to improve localized marketing strategies.

In the last few years, the takeoff of check in services has been crucial to many companies. These check-in services such as Foursquare have been more crucial to those businesses looking to promote on a local level than anyone else. With these services, businesses are able to offer up benefits and discounts for checking in at their location. When customers check in, it has a twofold effect. First, it keeps customers coming back to receive discounts and second, it allows people throughout social media rings to see their friends checking in at your establishment, working in a sort of viral marketing type way.

In social media, it’s important to gear your profile towards your customers. With a company looking to build local marketing, remember to use platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to spread a localized campaign first, and then go wide if necessary.

Along with check in services, it is important to stay on top of the overall digital marketing landscape. Just like national companies, small businesses and restaurants often struggle building their names because of a lack of web features and information. No matter the size of the company, it’s more important than ever to maintain a solid online profile.

Extending from just an online profile, building a mobile platform has become crucial as well. Most websites that have mobile versions climb the search rankings easier. It also helps get correct information and directions out to people on the go.

So now you’ve focused on building a localized social media and web campaign. When building a website and looking to improve local based marketing, it’s important to gear your website to your customer base. This means that the information and content should be targeted towards the area where your businesses is located or attempting to break into. Another great tip for improving a localized profile is to keep your companies address within view throughout online profiles. With this technique, visitors will be aware where your company is located and ease of access to your services.

Many businesses that are looking to improve localized marketing are often in a tough position when it comes to improving their advertising and reach. Small restaurants and stores are sometimes lacking in a professional who can properly improve marketing efforts. Luckily, there are some outbound options that can be taken to help improve a company’s local marketing profile. For example, an independent store in the state of Florida could look at Jacksonville, Tampa and Orlando SEO or development platform to improve their footprint. This can be a big help for marketing, as well taking some of the stress and load off of the everyday employees of the business who could be ill prepared.

With smaller companies and regional businesses, having a local marketing plan can often be essential to success over time. With the ease of access on the internet today, an improved digital footprint can help improve localized marketing, with the possibility of both quality and convenience.

Data analysis and performance in 2011: Trending in analytics

In the growing world of web analytics tools, it’s hard to track an always changing slate of leading trends. Still, there are always a few new systems and tools that are taken on by numerous clients, while building a positive reputation online. Right now a quick look at the industry and you will see somewhat of monopolization on the category of web analytics.

The increase of marketing optimization and customer experience are veering away from traditional web analytics in an effort to look elsewhere. Some companies are looking for new innovations to look elsewhere for revenue. Some attention has seemed to turn away from traditional analytics towards a more optimization and user experience focus.

Right now, the internet is growing as a key aspect for more and more businesses. In many cases, it’s the main avenue of implementation, exploration and overall revenue. With the importance of social media only continuing to grow, it’s allowed for closer connection from the provider to the user. This has continued to shape where analytics is going because of the focus on the customer and their own behavior. ‘

Along with an increased focus on the behavior of the customer, optimization and testing has become more important than ever. Many companies are using testing in coordination with their other online efforts with plans to have everything working together. When testing and optimization are linked with the other platforms of the business, companies have been able to get a full view of the results and success of their optimization efforts.

Along with the trends in what companies are doing, there have been some exciting new platforms in which organizations are expanding their efforts. Companies have been taking on too much data in previous years and in recent times organizations have aimed to use new tools in an effort to manage easier. Things such as user analysis, intrusion and anomaly detection, as well as tag management have all been taken on to help companies manage their growing heap of data.

Certainly there are a growing number of tools in analytics as businesses continue to push the boundaries of digital marketing and web analytics. As the analytics universe seems to be heading towards more user oriented tools, look for optimization and customer experience to continue to influence the emerging software and tools that shape the industry.