It isn’t just shopping mall retailers who love the holidays; there are thousands of online stores selling everything from toys to fishing equipment that see a huge spike in new orders when December comes around.

Not everything is red ribbons and overstuffed stockings when sales drop off, however. It can be tough when you’re counting on an end of the year sales blizzard, and all you see at the end of the year is a light dusting of new orders. And with more competition than ever in nearly every online retail category, there are more grinches than ever waiting to steal your holiday cheer.

With that in mind, here are three things you can do to gear up your online store for strong holiday sales:

Include wrapping. Doing your holiday shopping online is all about convenience. By offering free gift wrapping with every purchase after Thanksgiving and before the end of the year, for example, you give customers one more reason to buy from you… without having to run up large costs for your business.

Offer gift cards. It isn’t just the big box retailers who can benefit from offering gift cards. If you think someone might like to give credit from your store, give them the opportunity.

Get to know your local shipping center. It isn’t a matter of whether your customers will leave their shopping to the last minute – they will – but whether you’re going to be able to guarantee them that their purchases will arrive on time. Figure out beforehand what kinds of shipping options you’ll have available, what the costs will be, and how late you can send to different parts of the country and still have packages arrive on time.

Is your business ready for the holiday rush? Don’t wait until the last minute – find out how Marcy Design can give your pages the upgrades they need in time for the busy retail season.

Call Marcy Design, a Columbus Ohio website design company to help with your web, marketing and advertising campaigns.

This is a question that comes up surprisingly often. I suspect it’s because so many small and medium-sized business owners and marketing managers see celebrities and huge corporations leveraging social media heavily and feel like they might not be able to get in on the act.

The truth, however, is that it doesn’t take a bottomless pit of money to succeed with social media marketing.

In fact, while a small budget can definitely help you get the right tools, the most important parts of your plan don’t have to cost a lot. Like any marketing operation, having a sense of focus and direction, the willingness to keep at it, and a strong value proposition for your ideal customer will nearly always win out over a big budget.

Don’t let anyone convince you that it takes a huge pile of cash to find customers on Facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn – it doesn’t. Instead, work on finding a partner who can help you streamline the process and make things as efficient as they are affordable. Money doesn’t hurt in any area of business, but it’s not the first requirement, either.

Call Marcy Design, a Columbus Ohio website design company to help with your web, marketing and advertising campaigns.

Here are the links from this week’s posts on Marcy Design

Are You Making a Classic Online Marketing Mistake?

Can You Really Gain New Customers Over Facebook?

The Easiest Way to Improve Your Website

A Good Rule of Thumb for Facebook Marketing

Are You Promoting Your Small Business Events as Effectively as You Could Be?

Call Marcy Design, a Columbus Ohio website design company to help with your web, marketing andadvertising campaigns.

A lot of us can still remember how strange it was to receive those first electronic or e-mail invitations to a party or event. The whole thing seemed pretty novel, but even if you confirmed the appointment right there on your screen, you often had to turn around and scribble the date by hand into a calendar on your desk if you weren’t going to forget.

These days, of course, the exact opposite is true: appointments that are made off-line typically have to be entered into an iPhone or contact manager if they are going to be kept. Most of the world has simply realized that keeping our calendars in computerized form makes them quicker and more convenient.

So what does any of this have to do with your small business? More than you might think. Despite the fact that a lot of us keep our calendars online, we have a tendency to promote our own events with flyers, newspaper advertisements, and other traditional print venues. It’s understandable: why not stick with what has worked in the past?

The reason has to do with the way we are actually keeping those appointments. Savvy marketers can no longer promote their events in print – or at least not only in print. By inviting attendees through e-mail, Outlook confirmation links, Facebook fan pages, and other social media paths, we make it easy for them to see the event coming up and actually make an appearance.

To get the most out of your small business events, leverage the connections and tools you have in social media. It’s a lot less work than posting flyers, and you’ll probably get a much bigger response.

Call Marcy Design, a Columbus Ohio website design company to help with your web, marketing andadvertising campaigns.

We are sometimes asked what the easiest, simplest, and fastest ways to improve your business website’s profitability are. There are a lot of answers we can give, ranging from better search engine optimization to adding e-commerce features. The reality is that the right answer depends on the website and business in question.

In most cases, however, there is one fast way to find something that could make a big difference: look at what you aren’t doing or trying right now.

People are creatures of habit. When we find something we like, or that works, we tend to keep repeating it over time. That can be a good thing, since it magnifies our successes, but it can also hold us back by preventing us from testing out new ideas. And so, sometimes the very best thing you can do – especially when it comes to uncovering new customers and opportunities – is to break out of your existing habits and give something different a shot.

Whether it’s social media marketing, pay per click advertising, or something completely different, resolve to try something new in your online marketing plan in the coming weeks. At worst, you’ll learn how something different works; and best, you’ll find a whole new way to attract revenue online.

Call Marcy Design, a Columbus Ohio website design company to help with your web, marketing and advertising campaigns.

When it comes to Internet marketing, a lot of business owners and executives quickly find that they only really have two modes: putting things off, or working at them furiously. In other words, they wait too long to get started on things like search engine optimization, and when they do get moving, they want to start seeing action – and results – right away.

That’s understandable, but it’s also a classic online marketing mistake. Why? There are really two important reasons to consider:

First, quality matters when you are adding pieces to your business website or social profiles. You don’t want to get into the habit of putting just anything online to fill some space. Your messages should be creative, concise, and most importantly, impactful. That typically takes some time…

And secondly, gradual approach is more effective. Even if you could produce great content at the drop of a hat, search engines (not to mention customers) like to see a gradual, steady flow of new content and marketing messages. Producing too much, too quickly, is a good way to overwhelm them.

Procrastinating on your Internet marketing plan is a bad idea, as is trying to “force feed” too much to search engines and customers in a short period of time. Avoid making these classic mistakes, and work with an online marketing partner who can help you stay on a realistic and profitable schedule.

Call Marcy Design, a Columbus Ohio website design company to help with your web, marketing and advertising campaigns.

An empty Facebook fan page is a little bit like a restaurant with no diners — you can see it’s there, but the prospect of hanging out isn’t all that appealing. After all, if it was so great, why aren’t others interested?

For that reason, it’s important that your businesses fan page have many followers. Here are a few tips to get you started:

Sign up some existing customers first. If you’ve ever watched a coffee shop opening up in the morning, you’ll notice that some of the more savvy baristas do is put a dollar or two into the tip jar before the first customer has even come in, since that encourages others to do the same.

Your approach should be similar. Get your existing customers and friends to sign up first — you’ll have an easier time attracting others once you already have a few dozen.

Keep your updates and messages brief. Online or off-line, none of us have time for someone who talks too much. Make sure that what you add to your profile is crisp and to the point. It’s much easier to lose followers because you post too many messages than it is because you don’t post enough.

Make things interesting. Contests, jokes, and personal anecdotes are all a great way to keep followers interested. Being “all business all the time” isn’t exactly what Facebook is about, so make sure to mix it up and show off your lighter side once in a while.

And call Marcy Design at 614-224-6226 to improve your social media strategy!

“Reputation management” has become a buzzword on the Internet in recent years, and for good reason: people trust what others have to say about you, your company, and your new products whole lot more than they trust your marketing materials.

This has always been true, of course, but with the rise of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, it has taken on a whole new importance. That’s because it no longer takes a phone call or an in-person visit for a prospective buyer to get the scoop on your company. All they have to do is check out your fan page, look for tweets that mention you, or look for customer referrals on LinkedIn to get the same information. It’s instantaneous, and they can find out what they want to know before you even have a chance to make your case.

So what does this mean to you, as a business owner or marketing manager? It means that you should be proactive in looking for information – and especially customer impressions – on social media sites. Hopefully, you’ll be doing such a great job serving your customers that there won’t be anything negative to find. But if there is, however, it’s better to know at the time and try to resolve the situation than it is to start losing business without knowing why.

Social networking sites can be a big boost to your business, and your company’s reputation, but if you want any of that to happen, you need to keep close track of what buyers are telling others about you.

In web design and online marketing circles, we hear a lot about what social networking is, what it can be, and how it stacks up against other ways to reach customers like search engine optimization or online videos. When I hear these conversations, two things stand out: first, that none of these are truly even separate disciplines anymore – what you do on social media sites affects your search engine optimization, and vice versa, for example – and also that it misses the point a little bit.

It doesn’t matter what we, as marketers, think about social media. The fact is that customers everywhere love them, so they are going to be an increasingly-important part of our plans to reach them whether we want them to be or not.

At the time of this writing, Facebook alone boasts somewhere around 600 million members, and doesn’t show any signs of slowing up. Twitter is nearing 200 million, and LinkedIn is connecting more than 50 million professionals with one another. The more people continue to sign up and use social networking sites as a forum to meet one another and share ideas, the more we are going to have to use them as marketing mediums.

The bottom line with social media is that your customers and potential customers love it. That’s reason enough for all of us to keep paying attention to it.

Worldwide the smartphone market has grown 79.7% since 2010. And nearly 100 million phone have shipped in the first quarter of 2011 according to IDC Worldwide reports. The Apple iPhone growth is strong while the Android phones are gaining speed. Now is a good time to make sure that your business website is optimized for viewing on cell phones. The design of your website should look good on a customer’s computer and cell phone.