One of the main goals of having your Las Vegas website out on the internet is to provide helpful and interesting information to your website visitor. This key face with help drive satisfaction for your customers and potential customers and if you have satisfied website visitors and customers, they will quickly become return customers who will stay loyal! They will even recommend your Las Vegas website to others.

Of course, the more traffic you have to your website from your satisfied customers, you can begin to collect their email address for email marketing purposes. An email newsletter is an excellent way to capitalize on your email list and communicate with your clients. With an email newsletter, you can send out relevant articles, tips, tricks and special offers that will help drive business.

Email newsletter marketing is a very inexpensive and effective way to help market your website, your company and its products and services. You can sign up with an email marketing company like constantcontact.com at a very reasonable cost. In your account you can choose from a wide variety of templates, upload an excel spreadsheet of your contacts, compose your newsletter, and click send. Make sure to include links back to your website! 

You want to make sure that all of the contacts you are adding to your email contact database are opt-in, which means they give their consent to receive email from you. If you collect email addresses with a consent check box, you are most likely covered. With an opt-in subscriber list, you are can be fairly sure that the email newsletters you’re send out are received, viewed and read your subscribers and not simply being deleted. 

The other side of the coin is that if you are sending out email newsletters to help promote your Las Vegas website and business and if you aren’t delivering relevant information or the information that your customers are expecting, you run the risk of having subcribers unsubscribe. 

Here are some tips for relevant and engaging email newsletter content:

• Make your newsletters fun and creative while still maintaining professionalism
• Add photos and links to your website
• Research what information your customers are most interested in and information that will help them solve business problems
• Write articles that are informational and engaging, but keep them short and sweet
• Keep the content varied and diverse, don’t over write about one topic or subject
• Put coupons and special offers in your newsletters

If your email newsletters subscribers can benefits from your well written newsletters, they will actually look forward to receiving them! Just don’t email them too often, you don’t want to annoy them!

Happy New Year to all Las Vegas businesses and here’s to your continued success in 2010!

A new year is also a great time to step back from your Las Vegas business and assess all of your current online and offline marketing materials. Have you added products and services? Is it time to refresh your brochure, business cards or logos? Is your website up to date?

This is a great time to readjust things that might not have worked for your business in 2009. Consider polishing your corporate identity and developing new marketing materials. Consider advertising online to promote your website. Consider building partnerships with companies that offer complimentary products and services.

This is a good time to commit yourself to getting out into the Las Vegas community and meeting other business professionals in Las Vegas. You’ll have the time to hear about other companies and businesses and perhaps learn from what they are doing and what has worked for them. It’s also an opportunity to promote your own businesses products and services.

Any way you look at it, you should take the time this week to write down 10 new marketing and business goals and execute one each month of the new year! 2010 should become your year to grow!

With the widespread rise of social media websites like Facebook and Twitter, rating websites for every business sector out there, and popular blogs which show up on search engines, it can be difficult to manage your brand’s online footprint. If one popular voice says something negative about your business or product, or even you yourself, it can easily snowball into a public relations catastrophe of epic proportions. The good news about the Internet is that folks are easily distracted - the next big thing will likely take their minds off whatever bothered them. However, all that bad press sticks in Google’s memory like a terrible song, and if anyone searches for your name or your business, guess which sites will be at the top of the list?

There are a number of steps you can take to combat negative press, otherwise known as Online Reputation Management. Depending on the severity of the situation and how popular the negative press is, these can require some public displays of humility, professional assistance, or a full-blown social media campaign.

First off, it’s important to keep tabs on your name’s and business’s presence online. Remember in this digital age, anyone can say anything about your brand and be heard. You have to hear it all. Type your brand into Google every few days or so to stay abreast of any developments.

If you catch a blog post that could potentially be damaging, the best bet is to email the rating service, blogger, or social media user directly. Most people don’t expect to get a message from the person they’re maligning, and many times some frank discussion or incentives will be enough to get them to remove the post. If they don’t, make sure to respond to the complaint in the comments below, and make it appear that the blogger’s dissatisfaction is a freak occurence. Honesty, sincerity, positivity and humanity are the most important tones to take in responding.

If someone is actively trying to discredit your name on search engines, you can fight back by launching a SEO campaign stronger than the one they’re using to put out positive reviews. Every company should do this anyway, in order to build a strong reputaton online that’s less assailable by disgruntled reviewers.

Finally, if government, top-tier news, or wikipedia sites say bad things about your company, you won’t be able to push their negative content top rungs of the search ladder. The best way to combat them is to write a sincere apology and launch a SEO campaign to put it all over the net. Searchers may act like numbers, but they are still people, and will still be swayed by your humanity. Despite it being the 21st century, reputation management is as much about being a sincere human being as it is about SEO.

Many Las Vegas companies may decide to follow a shortcut method of planning their marketing communications strategy. Whether you’re an individual business or a company, skipping this step of business development will hinder your sales growth long term. It is important to recognize the focus on advancement by those that take the time to develop an effective marketing communications strategy. You will definitely spend several hours putting this together, but you will know that it’s useful because a marketing strategy provides you with a plan of how to handle projected successes and when it’s completed, you will have gained valuable intelligence about your target customers, brand strengths and weaknesses, competitive landscape, and finally the marketing objectives that will lead you to the top.

Start with what you know.

Take a few moments and capture your thoughts on the ideal target customer for your business. Write it down. Your final notes will give you the detail you need to formalize your Marcom strategy. Consider who you are and what you represent. What image would you like to project in the marketplace? What’s most appealing to your customer? This should be your perspective when putting a marketing communications plan together. Question everything from the customer’s point of view. Note common themes that come to mind – industries, trade associations, demographics, or anything else you notice.

Next, decide where you want to go.

Brainstorm ideas of how you can promote yourself to gain awareness of your brand as you advance through this process. Evaluate your brand’s strengths and weaknesses. Follow the basic marketing S.W.O.T. (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) formula by developing several bullet-point statements to define each section of the analysis. Create a list of competitors in your industry, region, or specialty. You may even wish to complete S.W.O.T.s for your top, three competitors as well. It’s good practice to spend the time getting to know your competitors and this will make you much, much smarter in the end. Everything you do should be viewed through your customer’s eyes. If you have more than one, majority-type of customer, include each perspective throughout your strategy.

Now map it out.

Now that you’re fully armed with detailed knowledge of your customer base, company goals, and strengths you are in a perfect position to map out the marketing venues that will lead you to success. Begin this process with what I call a ‘zero budget.’ Author your dream list. There are no monetary blocks here and this encourages you to consider all possibilities. Explore advertising paths, customer events, trade shows, associations and chambers of commerce. Refine this list with a dose of reality then put it into action. Remember to design your ad promos from the customer’s perspective. 

Try to have fun with this process and take some time to review these web sites for great tips and tricks:

More on marketing intelligence and considerations:
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newSTR_94.htm

Great tips for individuals looking to market:
http://self-employed-marketing.suite101.com/article.cfm/create_a_marketing_strategy

Marketing strategy formats with templates:
http://www.businessballs.com/freebusinessplansandmarketingtemplates.htm

For professional Las Vegas Marketing Communications consulting, contact Perkolate at 702.341.0085 or visit our website at www.perkolate.com.

When looking into building a website in Las Vegas, or trying to further your website into something a bit more successful, finding ways to improve your search engine rankings is a very important concept. The first thing you should know to fully understand how to improve your search engine rankings is to know exactly what it is and how it is affected positively and negatively.

What are search engine rankings?

Search engine rankings are positive and negative marks given to your website by the search engine providers themselves, like google for example. A search engine ranking will either make your website higher or lower in search engine results pages - the difference from your website appearing on the first page or the hundreth.

What can I do to improve my search engine ranking?

Search engine rankings are influenced by many different concepts, strategies and tactics -  all built into how your website is structured, designed, and advertised, along with how all of the content is relevant into each other in the use of keywords and key phrases.

Some ways in which you can help improve your search engine ranking is to make sure your web address is simple, short, and supported by the most commonly used addresses such as dot com, which is the most popular on the internet today. If you are able to have relevant keywords as part of your title, that can help tremendously as well.

Another way to improve your ranking is to keep all content on your website relevant to either your website service, or the topics which your website focuses around, for example if your web name is dolphin, then dolphin should be a keyword which is used in all of your content to link relevancy of all web pages to your website. Even advertising pages which are not on your website should also still be relevant to the given topic.

When using keywords you need to watch your density of usage, you do not want to use too many or too few. Too many can get your website black listed as spam by a search engine, while too few will make your website hard to find on a search.

The best way to increase your search engine ranking in a short amount of time to gain maximum traffic, would be to invest some money into your website and hire a professional Las Vegas web design company. A professional web design company knows all the tricks to maximizing page ranking and getting your site to the top of the search engine using Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

When starting a new business in Las Vegas, after your business plan, the most important plan you should create is your company’s marketing plan. You can hire a company or marketing professional to help write your marketing plan, however, if budget is an issue for you, there are many free online resources to help assist you in writing a solid marketing plan for your new Las Vegas business.

Let’s start with an overview of why a marketing plan is important (some online resources for your review):

• Why you need a marketing plan to achieve ultimate success
• Yes, you REALLY need a marketing plan
• Do you really need a marketing plan?
• Why do we need a marketing plan anyways?