Roughly around 45% of Zero To Sixty Marketing clients don’t have an actual brick and mortar store to sell their items. Many of our clients offer services from office buildings where they have no intention of actually entertaining clients. Still others depend on event marketing to sell their wares to industry retailers and discriminating customers.
If you operate a business like these, without a storefront where buyers to come to you, making sure your products can be fully appreciated is a challenge. Tangible items may need to be felt, services need to be shown relevant and necessary, and conveying luxury is often the missing element when it comes to being able to convince upscale buyers to purchase.
Knowing how to sell your luxury item face-to-face isn’t the problem for smaller brands. The problem is that type of salesmanship has an ineffective ratio. It’s far better to harness the online environment, where your efforts can be multiplied to reach an unlimited number of customers.
How do you replicate the luxury, class, and ease-of-use to an online market? Especially when so many shopping online are looking for a discount and low-ball pricing?
No matter what your technical ability is at the moment, this year you’re going to have to stretch. It’s seriously that important. Video, audio, imagery, and social media avenues couldn’t be more effective than right now.
Equation Research conducted a study in November of 2011 over the last quarter viability of tablet, smartphone, e-reader, and PC purchase habits. With a reliability of +/- 3% accuracy, the results should change how American business owners think about their company growth for the future.
Tablet shoppers said they feel more fulfilled, happy, and inspired when shopping on tablets. They liked to linger; they liked the entire experience. And, they said they’d do it again in 2012. Smartphone shoppers didn’t particularly enjoy using apps, surprisingly, but liked the ease of following brands and sharing that Facebook offered. It was obvious, according to ZMags, that mobile devices drove 20-30% of revenue. Their upscale online magazine measured 5x-6x growth during Q4 2011.
29% of tablet and mobile users cited convenience as the #1 reason they purchased, and 24% said they enjoyed the entire ‘browsing’ experience.
Knowing these precursors to purchase, we should be getting real excited about how to convey our luxury and convenience items and services. It’s not going to be acceptable to offer these items in a poor light. Polish on marketing copy and design, while maintaining a conversational and approachable manner, are the new goals of the year.
My advice to you? Learn how to develop videos, audios, and images the right file size for the online environment, and use a service with a reputation for making the process easy. For audio and video, I use AudioAcrobat. I can count on easy streaming and mp3 download for my clients and subscribers, and my information can be shared easily. I like that. It’s really easy to learn, too.
If you use a WordPress website, start uploading product images to your media library. This will be a necessary step when we go forward learning how to use those images. They need to have an ‘online home,’ and your WordPress.org (not .com) is a great place to keep them to be used easily in the future.
Are you planning on being available to a mobile crowd? Leave me your comments below!

External Links
If you’re not regularly archiving and maintaining your CMS website, you might be getting yourself into trouble. Whether you work with a web developer or ARE the web developer, know that monthly tasks need attention if you want to avoid a headache.
What is all the buzz about content, anyway? Content is that necessary component of your online marketing that has a very soft voice, but carries a pretty big stick. While copywriting is specifically related to marketing, content has more to do with reputation building and link strategies.
Content is so important to your online efforts. It’s a mountain to tackle, though. There are so many places to continually update, it can seem like a daunting task. Even when you love to write, it’s not always easy to conjure up the passion necessary to crank out quality work.

Your business should be active on Twitter, but how often does the day get away from us and we just can’t seem to make time?
Your SEO Company Can Actually Hurt Your Business
We offer many SEO services for our clients, and take time each day to learn and better understand the particular SEO strategies that help your business succeed online.
Optimizing for search isn’t just a once-and-done thing. It’s a long-term effort, employing some basics that tend to stay true, like quality keyword research and use and building sound back-links.
It’s also staying abreast of current online trends within different industries. Not every company will benefit from the same strategies, and NONE will benefit from anything less than a ‘white hat’ approach. If you think you’re getting into the gray zone, back away my friend. Reputations are hard to build.
Recently, comment spamming has become more of an issue for our clients.
When we manage a company’s entire marketing wardrobe, we include internal website management. We actually moderate comments for clients, and teach them how to determine quality comments from those that merely gum up or potentially invade the system. That gives us a pretty good insight into the dark world of black hat SEO. We’ve seen just about everything.
Yeah, I don’t think some of these businesses that comment on our client sites have any idea they look so slimy. It’s obvious they’ve hired someone claiming to understand SEO to build a back link structure based on comments. If you’re anything like me, you see those stupid comments and wonder if they understand what they’re saying and why they felt the urge to leave that comment on your blog post.
Let me show you how it works:
SEO claims aren’t all black and white, some of it dabbles in gray areas like this. What’s the problem with that, you ask?
Well, to say the least, wouldn’t you call that fraudulent?
Here’s how they look on a WordPress comment dashboard when they come in for moderation. I don’t believe So-and-So’s Service Company has any idea their SEO is leaving links like this on other websites.
Notice the poor use of language. Notice the meanness. Now, notice the website link! If I were the plumber who received the comment, I’d develop a relationship with this company and link to it if the comment wasn’t so stupid.
Now look at another one on the same blog, different post:
So we’ve got great location-based keywords, two different email addresses, one nasty comment, and one nice one with poor grammar. This person was paid by the amount of links he provided the SEO company, but did it hurt So-and-So’s Service Company to get spammed in the comment dashboard? Yeah, it did.
When your company gets marked ‘spam’, it’s an identifier to search engines. It’s a red flag, a blown whistle. Someone working at So-and-So’s Service Company would never have left such ridiculous comments, they would have had some relevant input to add to the post. They would have tried to reach out for dialog, not one-way useless jibberish.
Think about that when you leave comments or approve them in your dashboard. There exists online a monster with a black hat, and it wants to throw your business in the air like a baby in a pool, but won’t be there to catch you when you fall. Quick procedures with little forethought inevitably hurt, so avoid them at all costs.
If you’d like to learn more about our white hat SEO services, please call us today. Your business success is important to us, and we won’t compromise that with poor strategies. Learn how your company can benefit from a better incorporation of SEO services that will help new customers find you easily online and through mobile devices. And … by the way … we don’t comment spam.
For more information, go to Tweak Your SEO Regularly.