We’ve all been there before — driving in the car, feeling anxious and desperate as the street names and surrounding houses begin to blur into one. Constantly rereading the gibberish scribbled on the piece of paper resting on the console. The frustration mounts as a new, unheard of neighborhood approaches. Pulling over to ask a gas station attendant is the last resort. And then the reality hits: your friend’s house is on the other side of the highway, nothing more than a distant image in your rearview mirror.

If you’re over 25 years old, the above scenario may sound all too familiar. Nowadays, with the advent of cellular phone and global positioning system (GPS) technology, being lost is a nightmare of the past. It wasn’t long ago (essentially half a decade) that finding your way from one place to another required several missed turns, a bevy of phone calls to the awaiting location and many stressful car rides. With the onset of smartphones and mobile devices, getting directions from Google Maps is at your fingertips, saving this unneeded anxiety for other life experiences.

To give you some background, Google Maps is a free web-mapping service application and technology provided by Google. This convenient advancement offers street maps, a route planner if traveling by foot, car or public transportation and an urban business locator for many countries around the globe. Moreover, map control options are present to give you control over map navigation and the display of street and imagery data. The details shown when using this service allow you to see exact locations of your favorite shoe stores, sporting venues or even hiking trails, and give you the opportunity to avoid the headaches of blindly finding each destination.

Using Google Maps in correlation with your smartphone has never been easier. In 2006, Google introduced Google Maps for Mobile, a Java application designed to run on any Java-based phone or mobile device. Since then, the revolutionary minds at Google have upgraded this option to provide you with the most useable and precise global mapping system imaginable.

Because there are currently several versions of smartphones to choose from, Google Maps has become a highly durable application and is available on most platforms, including Android, iPhone OS (iPhone/iPod and Touch/iPad), Palm OS and Blackberry. There are also various features offered that will help in the navigation process: search by voice and in plain English for quicker feedback; street, satellite and traffic views to better convey your location and best route; and a car dock mode, which keeps your hands free for safe driving.

The days of paper maps and directions jumbled on a napkin are definitely a thing of the past. Technological advances have opened avenues (figuratively and literally) that will help you route and follow easy paths to your destination. Google Maps is the leading mapping services provider, and the inclusion of this handy application on your cell phone should ease any lingering travel fears. Your freedom is in the palm of your hand. Let Google Maps show you the way.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 21st, 2010 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Online Marketing . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Believe it or not, social networking is becoming an extremely effective and profitable vehicle for potential customers to discover your business. Whether you, yourself has one or not, a Facebook® page for your business can yield a tremendous amount of brand recognition, referrals and customer retention. When a customer becomes a “fan” of your business, they are inviting you to keep in touch with them, providing them with special offers, discounts and promotions which are invaluable ways of tracking where customers are finding you and what services they’re interested in.

Twitter can work in much the same way. When you invite your customers to “follow” you on Twitter, you are creating a level of constant communication to your client base that allows for much stronger customer retention and increased sales. If a customer only buys from you once a year, but sees that you’re having a special promotion on their favorite product or service, they may increase their frequency of purchase, thereby increasing your profits.

Now this all sounds great if you’re selling widgets or doo-dads, but what about periodontists, patent attorneys, term life insurance providers and air quality testers? These businesses often don’t have repeat customers or coupons to design and give away. Social networking must be a huge waste of time for that type of business… right?

If you’re goal is to make a ton of friends with your Facebook® page, you may find that difficult you’re your hobbies as “sulfite analysis” and “environmental water testing”. These very specialized businesses do, however, have a tremendous advantage over the more traditional, service-oriented businesses. A person may only need the service once, but that means that the majority of these potential customers are starting their search from scratch. They’ve probably never even heard of the service before they found out they needed it. That means they need a trusted source telling them who to buy from.

The potential customer may not personally be a fan of your patent attorney office, but they may ask the question on their profile, “Does anyone know how to get something patented?” If you have a fan who’s a “friend” of that potential customer, you’ve probably just got a new client. Also, businesses are now searchable through social networking sites. Setting up a profile page will increase your visibility on search results on Google and the other major search engines.

If you look around at the landscape of online marketing, new and interesting ways of promoting your business are popping up each day. Some are worth while, some aren’t, but staying abreast of the newest trends isn’t something you should have to worry about.

When you hire Fahrenheit Marketing to manage your brand, you can rest assured that the most viable and beneficial marketing strategies will be implemented immediately and without any frustrating time lags and delays. Your company’s best interest is what guides every decision concerning where to place your business information.

Let Fahrenheit Marketing guide you through the murky waters of social networking. We will design and build a marketing strategy that will deliver leads to your business no matter where they’re searching. Call our Austin office today at 512-206-4220 to set up a consultation with one of our marketing representatives. After all is said and done, your success is our success.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 14th, 2010 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Online Marketing . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

It begins with a simple question from a woman in a coffee shop, “Does anybody know a good lawyer?” It seems so innocuous, so innocent, so meaningless. Yet the mere utterance of this question in a room full of online marketers may lead to shear pandemonium the likes of which one only sees on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

It’s obvious to even the most casual of marketing people that the old traditional advertising media aren’t what they used to be. Newspapers, magazines and yellow pages better resemble the crumbling façades of ancient Greek temples than the glass and steel skyscrapers their advertising departments usually reside in. As for the electronic media of television and radio, there is more promise of a resurrection, but the prevalence of DVRs, podcasts and MP3 players has turned those giants into mere mortals.

The high-water mark for television advertising every year is the Super Bowl. Companies shell out nearly $140 million total for all 70 or so coveted 30-second spots that everyone will talk about for at least the next 12 hours. This is big for TV. This will comprise a massive chunk of the advertising revenue TV sees for the entire year. The week before the big game, tensions are high, as TV knows that one wardrobe malfunction could ruin an entire year’s worth of revenue. That same week, Google quietly generated $350 million in revenue. The week after the game, while everyone’s trying to figure out what was so funny about the Clydesdales playing football 10 years ago and why it should continue to be funny now, Google generated another $350 million, which they will do every week after that.

So let’s go back to the question at the beginning. Does anybody know a good lawyer? Well the answer is… yes! Facebook can point you in the direction of about 2,400 lawyers, yellowpages.com has a list of about 3,900 and Google can personally refer you to about 97.1 million of its closest friends who happen to be lawyers. It’s at this point that the woman in the coffee shop who asked for the lawyer gets frustrated and decides not to file her lawsuit against the coffee shop for forgetting to secure the top on her cappuccino, causing minor discomfort and serious discoloration of her shirt sleeve. Another potential lead lost to a lack of successful online marketing. What a shame.

So here’s the real question… Why should a business advertise online when there is a seemingly endless number of competitors and faux-competitors gumming up the works? The answer is simple. Your customers are trying to find you and you need to go where they’re looking.

It’s important to realize that even if you don’t currently have a website, that doesn’t mean you don’t have an online presence. Listing sites most likely have your business name, phone number and address splashed across their pages with untold numbers of errors and typos. Even if you have a website, that does not prevent inaccurate information about your business being distributed from site to site.

The first step is to clean up your image. Fahrenheit Marketing will produce a visually appealing website that incorporates the creativity and pride that led to the creation of your business in the first place. During the creation of the website, initial steps are taken to insure that the website is found early and often by someone looking for your service. If the coffee drinker really wants to sue the coffee shop, we don’t want our tax attorney’s website pull up. That wastes the user’s time, the tax attorney’s time and our time. The SEO process is crucial in insuring that the beautiful new website we created for you actually becomes a lead generator, not just something you refer your clients to for additional information.

So now you have a website. Fahrenheit has cleaned up all the mess created by the hundreds of bad links, phone numbers and address from all the listing sites. You’re optimized so that the people you want to find you can. The next step is making sure it works. This is what makes Fahrenheit so different.

There are a lot of companies that can provide you with website design, SEO, SEM, PPC, etc. Some are big corporations, some are just guys working out of their garage. There reason for such a variety of providers is that the way a online marketing company is judged is very simple and uniform. Cost divided by Results (return on investment). Fahrenheit can not only deliver phone calls, we can track them and record them for your review. Combine that feature with the fact that our advertisers are consistently at the top of their respective search results pages, and we have a product that not only works, but can prove to you the advertiser that it’s working day in and day out. At the end of the day, the proof of success is always more valuable than the promise of success.

Finally, you need to realize that the rules are always changing. What worked to make your site pull up at the top of Google yesterday, may very well be the reason you’re now in 6th position. Constant analysis and adjustment is the only way to ensure that you are getting what you paid for. That being a state of the art website design & SEO company with a proven track record and a genuine desire to make your business grow and mature to the business you dreamed about before your took the first and most important leap of starting your company. Your success is our success.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 11th, 2010 at 5:29 pm and is filed under Online Marketing . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.