John's CSIT155 Degree Completion Blog

  Business Specific Online Tools   Websites and social media accounts like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are great ways to start building your online presence. Businesses need to consider economy of time when considering social media presence and marketing strategies. Aim for the biggest first, then move where you need to.   Smaller sites can make a big difference depending on your business. Yelp can break a business. Customers that post on Yelp tend to be passionate, both good and bad. Leaving the conversation to everyone else can sink a customer centered business. Sites like it include the BBB, TripAdvisor, HomeAdvisor, and Angie's List. Each one has different demographics and different strengths. Companies that rely more on B2B might find a better ROI on BBB.    One thing often left out until it is too late are employer rating sites. LinkedIn is a great place for professional networking, but there are many conversations between prospective employees and pe...

  Marketing with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Social Influencers Twitter... is hard. Twitter is public, active, time-consuming, and very difficult to do well. Twitter is also very active. The life of a tweet is 15-25 minutes, so Twitter engagement means at least 5-7 tweets per day, not including responses. Twitter is public. Every tweet is seen by everybody, so every comment has to be addressed. For all of that Twitter only ranks 16th in total active users per month.   Twitter does have some advantages though. 80% of Twitter users are between 18 and 50. Over 50% are in the premium 25-50 age group that has the most available money to spend. Twitter is the 4th most popular social media site in the United States. Twitter users are also some of the most active per day. Marketing is all about reaching the right market. If your target market is 25-50 years old, active on social media daily, and lives in the United States, Twitter may be perfect.   https://www.statista.com/statistics/...

 Email Marketing - Newsletters In general, conventions require a great deal of planning. Consequently, convention trends tend to evolve slowly. I feel like AES newsletters should be sent out quarterly.  Most conventions take 6-12 months for planning. Most event planners only handle 1-2 large events per year. Quarterly newsletters would have the best chance of reaching the appropriate audience with timely information; without being overwhelming. New technology features, rollouts, and updates of our service would be the most important things to highlight each quarter. Most technology releases and updates happen on about that timeline, so that would work very well. Even though that information would be the most important, it wouldn't necessarily be the most highlighted information. New and updated trends within the industry would be the most highlighted features. New technology is great, but showing how that new technology supports what the event planners are already working on w...

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 Categories Breaking blogs and posts into categories is just as important as creating multiple pages on a website. Visitors should not have to read through everything that you post just to get to what they are interested in. Site navigation should be easy. Blog categories help make searching through your content easy. AES would have at least 3 categories of blog/vlog posts. The first would be testimonials. Personal reviews are incredibly important to customers. Commercials, ads, and influencers will get customers to your site, but personal stories make the sale. Customers love to read and see stories about other people like them using products. Individual users' stories make the process personal. The second would be instructional. Customers don't like being confused. Having easy to find instructional blog or vlog posts is essential to any tech business. Within this category would be subcategories for text / video / and audio instructions. Creating duplicate content in multiple ...

 Adding a Personal Touch   People are scared of new things. People don’t like using products they don’t know or understand. Personal stories can be a great way to introduce people to new products by appealing to their emptions.   A “how-to” blog or vlog can introduce people to a new product. A “how-to” post can be even more effective by showcasing individuals that are also new to the product. Think of old infomercials. They would almost always have a host that was “inexperienced” with the product and a host that was the expert. The expert would show the “novice” how to use the product and it would appeal to the average person. Your blog can do the same.   Case studies can appeal directly to people, the more genuine the better. People like to read about real product experiences. People read reviews on Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and RateMyProfessors. Blogging can be an easy and curated way to provide your own reviews. Real customer reviews provided as blogs or vl...