Panoptic Online Marketing celebrates a very special anniversary this month: it’s been one year since we teamed up with Kathy Estadt of Fresh Focus Group, our sales and marketing partner agency based in Daphne, Alabama. With a background in strategic planning, new product development, brand management and advertising, Kathy rounded out Panoptic’s capabilities nicely, providing insights that give our technical SEO and PPC staff a richer, more informed foundation on which to build online marketing strategies and execute plans for Kathy’s local clients. [Read more…]
Website Redesign and SEO Starter Package for Shoreline Pixels
Panoptic Online Marketing has been working with business owners along the beautiful Connecticut coastal towns that make up the Shoreline area. It’s a joy for our client account managers to get away from the grit and hustle of NYC to spend a few days meeting with clients, prospects and colleagues in Westbrook, Old Saybrook, Madison, Clinton and Guilford. The scenery is gorgeous; farms and forests, the beaches of the Long Island Sound. And local business owners that actively help each other — and the larger community– grow and thrive through their local Chambers of Commerce.
We’ve joined two of these: the Old Saybrook Chamber of Commerce and the Shoreline Chamber of Commerce; it’s through the latter that I met Peter Sikes of Shoreline Pixels, a Google Street View Trusted Photographer. Peter has been providing 360-degree virtual tours for a variety of businesses from New Haven to New London, and we are now teaming up to round out each of our respective business’s capabilities, share leads and deliver great results for our clients!
In getting started, we decided to work with Shoreline on the redesign of its website and make sure the new site was properly optimized for both visitors (hopefully potential customers) and search engines.
The new site provides for better responsiveness to mobile devices and provides Peter with an easy way to add new Virtual Tours to his portfolio, new Testimonials from business clients who have taken advantage of his expert service, and blog/news items for stuff that doesn’t fall naturally into other categories, for example, beautiful shots of moonrise over the Madison Surf Club. We also provided him with an intake form to collect more information from potential customers who may be looking for specific types of digital imaging services.
If you run a business with a physical location — could be a shop, restaurant or bar, hotel or even your manufacturing plant — you should consider a Google Street View for your website. Let us know if you’d like us to introduce you to Peter at Shoreline Pixels.
PPC Case Study 1: The Do-it-Yourself AdWords Client
Our client, a manufacturer of industrial parts, had been running his own PPC campaign for years and was having a hard time managing the account. He had become somewhat obsessed with trying to outbid competitors and spent a lot of time adjusting his bids and guessing which keywords he should invest in more heavily.
He also worried about what he calls “Unwanted Clickers” — people he perceived as clicking on his ads randomly without really understanding what he was selling, then leaving the website (“bouncing”) without making a purchase, submitting an inquiry form or making a phone call to inquire about his products. To make things even more interesting, he didn’t have a good understanding of how to set up Conversion Tracking so in effect almost every move on his website was being reported as a Conversion.
As a result, things got a little out of hand and he found himself losing time (and possibly additional revenue) for his business as all his time was spent managing the paid search advertising campaigns. It came to a point where he felt as if nothing was happening and too much time was spent on just handling PPC that he finally sought the help of Panoptic through one of our partner agencies. [Read more…]
Case Study: Blogging & Social Media for Apparel Network
One thing we never fail to tell our prospective clients: online marketing isn’t for those seeking instant gratification. It takes a substantial investment of time and effort to identify and reach your target audience; it takes focus and persistence to reap real bottom-line benefits. So when we launched the Apparel Network website back in August 2014, the principals knew they had only taken the first step on their journey into the world of Internet marketing.
In order to grow and sustain a robust and engaging online presence, B2B businesses must offer more than basic brochure-type content on their website — and Apparel Network is no exception. They signed Panoptic to build and manage their business blog and get them started with social media marketing. [Read more…]
Case Study: SEO for Ecommerce Website
Late last summer, a manufacturing client came to us for help with their e-commerce website, which they believed to be underperforming. With over 20 years in the hair care products business, our client was generating over a million dollars in revenue annually and was hoping to expand into online sales — a natural next step for any manufacturer. After all, selling products via the website is almost a no-brainer – it requires no additional sale force and has the potential to bring in as much, if not more, income than offline sales. [Read more…]
Case Study: Rivertown Acupuncture Goes Mobile
Our friend and client, Randi Hoffmann, came to us seeking suggestions for how to grow her solo-practice acupuncture business. Randi has extensive training and expertise and exudes a warm personal style that wasn’t coming across on her website. Worse yet: her three year-old, custom WordPress theme was not mobile-responsive and as a result Rivertown Acupuncture was not ranking well in Google search results. [Read more…]
Online Marketing Case Study: Paddle Diva (Part 2)
Part 2: Winter 2011/2012
Developing a Long Term Strategy
Seeing the power of SEO to drive traffic and sales, Bradley continued working with Panoptic to develop an integrated marketing plan for Paddle Diva. We helped her understand that building a robust and sustainable online presence means delivering something of value to your audience —and speaking from the heart, with an authentic voice. The website had some basic, built-in blogging functionality (which was eventually moved to a separate WordPress platform), and Bradley herself had already established profiles for her business on the major social networks. But she wasn’t sure how to grow her following, especially during the off-season when no one in the Northeast would be paddling or interested in reading about water sports. [Read more…]
Online Marketing Case Study: Paddle Diva
Part 1: Spring/Summer 2011
Background
In Summer 2009, Gina Bradley launched her Stand Up Paddleboard business, Paddle Diva. Her timing was perfect — the sport was just starting to take off in a big way. Based in East Hampton, New York, Paddle Diva was among a handful of local businesses offering SUP lessons throughout the beach resort towns of Eastern Long Island. Bradley saw a niche amidst the competition: she would target women, marketing the health and wellness benefits of the sport as well as its recreational appeal.
Bradley’s first two years in business were successful enough for her to invest in a professionally designed website. Her website launched just as peak paddling season got underway in May 2011. The website was Paddle Diva’s primary marketing piece — a beautifully branded and visually compelling website with an easy-to-use content management system that allowed Bradley to manage and update site content herself.
But by early July, even with this beautiful new website, Bradley sensed her customers were not finding her online. She was Googling “stand up paddleboard Hamptons” and “SUP Long Island” and seeing her local competitors’ websites listed on the search result pages (SERPs) — but not Paddle Diva. [Read more…]
Case Study: Small Law Firms and Solo Law Practices
Client: Andrew Abramowitz, PLLC
The Challenge:
Our client, Andrew Abramowitz, is the founder of a small law practice in New York City. Needless to say, he’s got a lot of competition! New York is jam packed with lawyers — how do you distinguish yourself among so many other small business attorneys?
Solo law practitioners and small law firms rarely have the internal resources to devote to marketing activities. For the most part, these attorneys have a standard brochure website comprised of attorney bios, practice area descriptions, and perhaps a list of books or articles published by the partners; static, uninteresting content that doesn’t give the reader much insight into an attorney’s personality and style, or demonstrate what he or she actually does for their clients.
Andrew is a corporate and securities transactional lawyer who had such a website: a simple four-page site with his basic bio, practice description and contact information. We met with him, talked about his experience and goals for his business, and we discovered two things: (1) Andrew has special expertise in working with private placement investors (on both the buying and selling side), and (2) Andrew has been carefully following the legal and regulatory developments surrounding the American JOBS Act and how it is giving rise to a new model of business financing known as “crowdfunding.” [Read more…]
Case Study: Apparel Network
The Challenge:
Based in Rome, Italy, Apparel Network, S.r.l. provides end-to-end services to companies seeking to off-shore their manufacturing operations, particularly to China. Within the country they’ve had considerable success working with some big name fashion brands, especially in the “street wear” sector. Due to an increasingly difficult Italian market brought on by years of economic crisis, the company was seeking to expand their operations to the United States.
