A collection of current and relevant tips and news that you should be over in your business.
00:15 – iPhone 5 release
01:00 – Is your business phone number easy to find on your homepage?
01:36 – Facebook usernames for shortening your Facebook Page URL
02:26 – Tracking telephone numbers to measure effectiveness of different newspapers, magazines etc (Great tip from Steve Cochrane on Facebook is to use a Skype number forwarded to your normal business number for this- thanks Steve)
03:00 – Google Drive and the mobile app that goes with it allows you to collaborate in real time on documents with others right from your phone.
03:53 – iPhone training workshops – if interested make contact with me
04:30 – LinkedIn Company Pages update
Transcript
G’day guys, it’s Mick from Redcliffe Marketing Labs with another online marketing update for you.
iPhone 5 release imminent
Very close to the time you watch this video, Apple is going to be announcing the new iPhone 5. Now you may not be particularly interested in getting an iPhone 5 yourself right now – whether that’s because you’re using a Google Android device or if you’ve just got a new phone. But the thing to keep an eye on is Apple is now such a huge company that the iPhone will be in so many different markets and will be in the hands of so many different people. The features they unveil in the next couple of days for the iPhone 5 are going to set the tone and the pace and provide the baseline of what people will be able to do on their phones for the next couple of months, and then into next year. So it’s going to be worth keeping an eye on that announcement and the press that comes out about what these phones can do and have an idea on how it is going to plug into your marketing plans for the next 12 months.
Make sure your phone number is easy to find on your website homepage
Probably time to do a quick check on your website, make sure that people can easily find your phone number. I was sitting down with someone this morning and between the two of us, we were going through her website home page. It took the two of us both looking pretty hard to find the business phone number. We eventually found it down towards the bottom of the page in the text. So what that business owner has to do is pull that phone number up and get it towards the top of the page or the right hand side – either include it in graphics or make it a larger font so it is easier to see as soon as someone lands on that website. They can then ring through and contact the business if that is what they want to do. So just check your website, make sure it’s really easy to find your phone number.
Facebook Usernames for shorter Page addresses
Today we’ve been out and one of the things we fixed up on someone else’s Facebook page is again the Facebook username. If you are on the Facebook Page for your business and you look up at the top at the browser address bar and its says facebook.com/pages/name_of_your_business/xxxxxxxxx (then a whole heap of numbers), it will be very hard for you to put that on a business card or to give out to someone over the phone to come and find you. What you want to do is to go to facebook.com/username, and apply for a short description for your Facebook page. That way you are going to be tell people to go to facebook.com/yourcompanyname. An example is for Redcliffe Marketing Labs you can visit facebook.com/redcliffemarketinglabs
Tracking Phone Numbers
Another thought, if you are thinking about spending a lot of money on different forms of advertising – in a newspaper, magazine or banners – is to consider using a tracking phone number. A dedicated 1300 phone number that only appears in that magazine or that newspaper. That way you can track the number of inbound calls from that media source and feed that back into your marketing plan to see if the money you are spending on that particular marketing channel is effective and how it is performing against other marketing channels. Purely based on the number of phone calls that are coming through that dedicated tracking phone number you can test different advertising options.
Google Drive product refresh
Google Drive is the update to Google Docs. It is going to operate in a very similar way to DropBox. You will be able to sync a folder on your computer with your Google Drive account online and have a shared storage there. It is also where you can go in and create pages, documents, and spreadsheets. They just released the update for iOS, the iPad, iPhone app for Google Drive and again it is great. You can jump in on your phone, create a document, do your word processing, and also collaborate in real time – you can have your document open on your phone and be typing and see exactly what someone else in the office is typing into the document. As they type it will update on your phone, and as you update the document on your phone it will update for them in the office as well. It is quite a cool feature.
Local business owner iPhone training
And talking about iPhones, I have a had a couple of requests for some iPhone training. I looking at two different versions of the training – just a basic how-to use an iPhone to get around, and then a more advanced course on how to use the iPhone for business. Topics to include – what are the best apps to use, what sort of work processes to use, and I guess behaviours or habits that you could put in place, so that you can be quickly updating your websites and social media while you are on the go, as well as taking credit card payments and sending invoices. If you are a tradesperson, being able to do all that business admin from your phone can save hours at the end of the day. So if iPhone training is something you are interested in please drop a note on the Facebook page or shoot me an email. I will get out more details about that for you soon.
LinkedIn Company Pages
The last one for you today is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is upgrading their company pages and to be more of a base online now for professional services. You will be able to bring up a page very similar to your Facebook page and be able to update people who are professionally interested in your company within the LinkedIn platform. So it is going to have a different audience and it will be a way again of promoting yourself as a company, your company updates and news, and your company products to a more professional audience that exists within the LinkedIn platform.
Thanks for watching guys, it has been another online marketing update and please jump on the Facebook page at facebook.com/redcliffemarketinglabs and let me know what you think. Cheers.