» Savannah Marketing

E2 Marketing proud to redesign Savannah’s Historic River Street’s Website.

admin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:37:31 +0000

E2 Marketing had the pleasure of working with Kenny Hill of the Savannah Waterfront Association in completely revamping the riverstreetsavannah.com website. In the development stages of the site we established that we needed to create a website that would be a great asset to all that work, live and enjoy visiting historic river street. To do this we needed to make it a website that would not only be a pleasure to view but would also become a financial asset to the waterfront association. We achieved this goal by setting up a site that is easy to maintain so that there will always be fresh content including weekly blog postings letting viewers know what are the next events to look forward to on river street and any specials that river street businesses may be offering. We also established an advertising structure on the website as a way to generate revenue for the non for profit company which website generates a very large amount of daily and returning viewers. We hope that we have created a website that is engaging, informative and everyone can share their experiences and love for historic river street.

Link: www.Riverstreetsavannah.com

Project: Website
Software: Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver

Wards Auto Painting & Bodyworks Website

admin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:05:54 +0000

Wards Auto came to us with the need to effectively and efficiently advertise their many services and locations to the general public through a website that people could easily navigate through, receive important information and keep up to date with what Wards is offering and also make it a site that is easy for their staff to manage. We have developed this site with a custom “CMS” content management system that enables users of any skill level to easily and quickly update and manage the site.

Link: http://wardsautopainting.net/

Project: Website
Software: Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver

E2-Marketing, was honored for its website design and online advertising approaches at the Savannah Advertising Federation’s ADDY awards. E2-Marketing took home six ADDYs at this year’s competition.

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:53:56 +0000

E2-Marketing, was honored for its website design and online advertising approaches at the Savannah Advertising Federation’s ADDY awards. E2-Marketing took home six ADDYs at this year’s competition. The Addy Awards are the advertising industry’s annual creative competition. Categories can include such media as television, radio, magazines, newspapers, brochures, collateral and interactive work, such as Web sites.Each year, agencies vie for the awards, with the top winners getting a chance to compete on district and, hopefully, national levels. E2-Marketing recieved Bronze ADDYs for Collateral Meterial for Business Cards for Tiffani Taylor, Ony Salon, and Redefining Moments. One Silver for Website for ShopScad.com. One Gold for Website for TiffaniTaylor.com. E2-Marketing also won a Gold ADDY for Advertising campaign for Blue Door Photography. We thank all of our clients for letting us help them build their businesses.

Ok, so you’ve got someone to visit your website once. What if you wanted them to visit again, and again, and again? Ooh, that’s hard, isn’t it?

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:54:52 +0000

Ok, so you’ve got someone to visit your website once. What if you wanted them to visit again, and again, and again? Ooh, that’s hard, isn’t it? Not really. Find out how to attract them back without begging with this simple internet marketing tool. First, The Myth. Ask most web designers what is more important: a unique visitor or a repeat visitor? Most will choose, the former. I tend to disagree.

Let’s analyse a unique visitor. They could just be browsing, like shoppers in a mall, or they could be a potential customer. Now, don’t get me wrong. Unique visitors might be important, because they are like new customers. However, with new customers,it is on you to prove your credibility.Existing customers already know what you do and how you do it.

You do not have to prove yourself over and over again.

Why Is It So Important To Retain Existing Customers? Because, it costs eight times as much to get a new customer than it does to retain one. That alone should make you want to keep them. Also, since you’ve developed a relationship with them, it’s now easier for you to do business, to re-sell, up-sell and get referrals (really, really important). If you play it right you can use your website (amongst other communication material) to stay top of mind with them.

My Customers Have Already Seen My Website: Why Should They Go Back? Precisely!

Do something constructive. Put your ego in cold storage and start re-engineering your website and your internet marketing to give information to your customer. How Do I Go About Giving Them Information? The system is amazingly simple. You know everything (or rather a lot) about your business. Your customers will never know quite enough. If, you provide them with a steady stream of information, you are already two steps ahead of the competition. You are taking the time to educate your customers and you are keeping in touch with them.

Take a look at this website for instance. It’s essentially a power marketing vehicle. With minimal effort it gets existing customers to have a look at it repeatedly, simply by giving them information that would help them in their business or their jobs. If you are a casual browser, your curiosity will be aroused, and you will find yourself wanting to read more.

Once you’re through with the How To section, it’s almost natural to move on to the Client Results section. At this point in time, I am no longer selling. You have begun to sell the concept to yourself.

Why The Website Is Such An Important Tool For Your Business. It’s dynamic, that’s why! Say, you printed your cards and brochures last month. You spent a small fortune on them. But now you discover you need to add something that will dramatically change what you’re communicating. You can’t throw out a thousand brochures or cards, but updating a website is easy-peasy! Simply tweak it, and you’re on your way.

Remember, customers aren’t always willing to buy when you’re willing to sell. By keeping them informed and in touch with your website, they can reach out to you whenever they are ready! How To Match Information And Credibility. Credibility is important. So you definitely need to have the About Us factor. What you need to do, however, is to tailor it in such a way that the customer understands what you’ve done, why you’ve done it and how you can help them. You can still strut your stuff, just make sure you’re doing it with your customer in mind.

That alone will change the way you write it and present it. It will make the difference between it being read or being ignored. If You Don’t Have Testimonials, You’re Missing Something. It’s brief, underestimated and really powerful. Remember, people are looking at your business from a monitor! They don’t know if you’re reliable, smart or just a dork. Obviously clues within the site will indicate these things, but why not go for the kill.

Why not get yourself a testimonial and completely rid them of that niggling doubt? It’s pretty nasty if you don’t have testimonials but totally unpardonable if you don’t go out and get them! When you do a great job and the customer says, ‘Great work!’, ask for a testimonial there and then. It’s the best time and customers tend to gush more than 6 months down the line, when they can’t even remember what you did!

A Word Called Discipline.No one said this was going to be easy. Having to update your website, sending out helpful e-mails, and keeping in touch is going to take time and effort. You will need to read more, so you learn more. Then you will have to write. And write reasonably well. You can do it yourself or get a freelancer to do it, but do it you must. Marketing your business must take precedence over everything else.

When times are good, we tend to slacken on the marketing. If you disclipine yourself to read one book on your subject and write at least one article a week, you are now starting to build up content. It can be done. And as Nike says, ‘Just Do It’. It’s the only way.

Johnnie Ganem Savannah Logo Modernization

admin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:36:31 +0000

We don’t take a logo re-design effort lightly. For starters, Johnnie Ganem has been doing business in Savannah GA area for decades. Being Georgia’s oldest liquor store and using the same logo since 1942. We wanted to modernize the logo without taking away the heritage. They had built a reputation around having the largest selection of wine and spirits as well as first class bar catering, and we wanted to make a world class logo to match the companies tradition of quality.

Project: Logo Design
Software: Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop

Old Savannah Business Myth: My Website Is Not Critical To My Business.

admin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:04:18 +0000

Many small business owners fall prey to this myth after having a website for several years without seeing any measurable results. Unfortunately, this conclusion grows out of a misunderstanding of how to use the website as part of the overall strategy to grow the business. As the small business owner fails to see results from their website they begin to allocate fewer dollars to improve and promote it. As time goes on, the website becomes completely out of date and no longer represents the company it was originally built to serve. The reality is that many companies, particularly small businesses are achieving great success on the web. The key is to define the purpose of the website and how this will fit into the overall sales strategy for your business.

Is the objective of your website to sell products online? Perhaps it is but, most likely for small businesses, this is not the case. Perhaps the best objective for your small business website is to answer the key questions and objections that are common among your prospective customers.

For example, if you are a small business that advertises in the community, prospective customers may want to visit your website before they call to invite you to quote their project. For many small businesses it may be appropriate to design the website solely for the purpose of providing validation of your company by answering the key questions that are common to your customers. Your website can help you establish credibility and trust with your customers and prepare them to take that final step to become a new customer.

So the first step is to consider how your website will fit into your overall business strategy. Look at your competitors, look at companies that follow a similar business model, talk to your customers about their experience with companies that are using the web effectively. Don’t give up on the idea that your website can be an effective element to help you achieve your overall business strategy until you have taken the time to research, consider and experiment with different techniques to use the web for maximum business growth.

It’s no secret that we live in rapidly changing times. The marketing industry and those serving it (ad agencies, market researchers, media outlets etc) are running just to keep still, constantly seeking guidance or reassurance about what’s looming and how to manage it.

admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:42:53 +0000

It’s no secret that we live in rapidly changing times. The marketing industry and those serving it (ad agencies, market researchers, media outlets etc) are running just to keep still, constantly seeking guidance or reassurance about what’s looming and how to manage it.

In some ways, the very explosion in information and connectivity we are seeing is a help as much as a challenge – marketers tracking the rapid changes occurring within their industry have an unprecedented quantity of information and opinion to draw on. The advice and guidance that exists from industry commentators is phenomenal.

Unfortunately the very nature of most such commentators creates a serious problem in itself, in that most of them understandably comment on their own area of expertise such as social media, search marketing and direct marketing.

In a classic case of “not seeing the wood for the trees”, it’s easy enough for marketers to believe they are keeping abreast with matters while failing to note the monumental changes we are living within.

Those missing the bigger issues at stake are the commentators and practitioners using phrases such as “sell to”, “communicate to”, or “market to” – all terms that convey an “us and them” mentality of the traditional marketer, a salesperson who deals with a mass audience via one-way communications. Without an eye on the big picture, people like this will suffer.

For what we are witnessing is the biggest shift in culture since the Gutenberg press. This is not an overstatement of the importance of social media, for one must bear in mind the term “media” encompasses all communications between people, and as such, changes in media invoke changes in broader culture and society (not for good reason is media control often the first act of dictators).

Until the advent of social media, media developments have only differed by technology. From cave paintings to Web 1.0, all that truly changed was cost, scale, timeliness and cosmetic enhancements. Most media essentially involved the thoughts of a few being distributed to the many.

The internet may have opened up an unparalleled amount of information to the world, but until social media evolved, a web browser was simply a combination library, shop and entertainment zone. Most chat rooms were restricted to clunky linear conversation threads open to the public – like Speakers Corner in Hyde Park: social, yes; sociable, no.

In contrast to the media landscape of the past, and the (falling) barriers of cost and physical access aside, almost everything that makes us human is now free of the traditional restrictions of time, space, editorial and political control. Traditionally separate media formats such as radio, television and newspapers exist as they do only for historical and / or technical reasons, and these reasons are increasingly difficult to justify (content from the Herald itself can now be accessed in eight formats).

Convergence will continue until everything in our lives not conducted face-to-face will occur through a single two-way transmitting device with assorted plug-ins for the physical needs of the user (eg, large-screen TV viewing, bath-friendly digital books). Everyone and everything is well down the track of being accessible to everyone and everything else.

The traditional delineation between content providers, advertisers, researchers, sellers and buyers will blur into a flat hierarchy of equally accessible interactions. What we are now developing isn’t so much Web 2.0 but Society 2.0. We’ve seen how democracy and free information flows can undermine dictatorships; the same applies to the traditional top-down marketing pyramid.

What does this means for marketers? In some ways much will remain unchanged – many people will still opt for advertising-funded passive media like TV and live, localised radio, and it’s unlikely that we’ll see products such as cat litter being heavily discussed within social media (although even the cat litter manufacturers will have to supplement their 0800 customer lines with social media interfaces).

But the big mindset change required is for marketers to stop thinking like one-to-many salespeople, transforming their brand-customer interactions into quality one-to-one experiences.

Consider the best salespeople and what sets them apart – they listen closely to their customers, engaging them in active, two-way discussions. As a result of this truly interactive conversation they determine how to present their wares in such a way that not only will their customers buy, but they will enjoy the process and feel no regret about their purchase.

In contrast, marketers communicating to a mass audience using traditional mass-market media (the loudhailer approach) have been unable to conduct such high-quality two-way communications, hence the enormous investments made in advertising pre-testing.

Marketers now have to understand that not only are their brands, services and products no longer just part of a marketplace but that they are actually part of a society. Brand managers are used to personifying their brands and imbuing them with personality, so now’s the time those personalities have to come alive, communicating with people as equals, not walking, talking wallets. Marketers used to operating large call centres will be used to the management practices required – the same now needs to be applied to the digital space. Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate this is to imagine the old model as hundreds of marketers on a stage, all trying to out-perform each other in presenting their sales pitch to the millions of consumers in the audience.

Today, marketers have to picture themselves off the stage, in the audience, accessible to all via equal, two-way interactions. In contrast, “doing a Facebook campaign” merely means taking the mass-market loudhailer to the social media space rather than joining the community.

For marketers struggling to change the “us and them” mindsets that they, their colleagues or agencies may cling to, try this approach – think of (and talk to) your customers as the real people that they are, not anonymous groups of consumers.

Savannah Quarters Westbrook Lakes Logo Design

admin — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:31:09 +0000

Savannah Quarters Real Estate Division came to E2 Marketing with the need to help establish an identity for one of the subdivisions within Savannah Quarters, they asked for us to create a logo that accented the lifestyle in the specific area, which is surrounding a large lake. When developing the logo we kept in mind the need to keep within the same color scheme and marketing efforts that are already in place for Savannah Quarters but stand out enough to draw more interest to the individual subdivision. We also kept in mind the many mediums that the logo would be used in and developed it so that it would translate to every medium easily.

Project: Logo Design
Software: Adobe Illustrator

http://marketinge2.com/E2_website/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/westbrook-lakes-logo.jpg

Music Industry Marketing Lessons

admin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:10:59 +0000

As much as I love movies, when I am asked the question “if you were
stuck on a deserted island, what movies would you take?” I ask if I can
take music instead. The best relaxation I get is when I am listening to
great music on headphones. The funny thing is, I’ve been doing this for
as long as I can remember. My parents raised me with music. It was
always playing in our home. I got to know Bruce, Elton, a great band
from Boston named… well, Boston.
There is a great digital music timeline at

http://www.dilanchian.com.au/ip-tech-e-biz/digital-music-technology-and-…

which, as I read, brought back a lot of my own memories about how my
music has evolved right under my nose. My parents had vinyl, the old
standard, but I was a child of the Sony Walkman. I had the yellow
water-resistant, supposedly unbreakable (later found to be untrue)
version. The cassette was supposed to ruin music’s ability to make
money because you could copy it. Does this sound similar to the cries
that downloadable musics would kill the recording industry?
In 1986, I got my first cd player. I was told it was a miracle disk
that would never degrade and never skip. This was later proven to be
untrue. The disks skip and the lyrics are tiny. Records skipped too but
at least I could read the lyrics.
CDs stayed the standard in my life for about a decade until I got my
first computer. That’s when I discovered the Internet. The Internet
changed the way music was presented as well as distributed. Napster was
really the start of it and it is funny to think of how much bands like
Metallica and The Beatles fought the revolution of digital music
distribution. Ironically both of these bands have since embraced
internet marketing.

In 2001 the same year Napster’s website went black,
Apple introduced the Ipod and the I Tunes store and the response was
enough for Microsoft to follow suit two years later with the release of
the Zune. Apple not to be outdone followed the Ipod up with the I Phone
which does audio as well as video.
The lessons that groups in the music industry have learned (and are
still learning) are good examples for the rest of us. Every one of the
technological advances have benefited those who took advantage of them,
while the ones who were kicking and screaming got left behind. The same
is true for Online marketing for small businesses. The ones who embrace
the Internet will flourish, while the ones who discount it as “useless”
will get left in the dust. If you need help or don’t know where to
start, contact us today.

If your company strives for quality, this should be expressed as much by your website as it is with your company’s products and services.

admin — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 20:41:16 +0000

If your company strives for quality, this should be expressed as much by your website as it is with your company’s products and services. From now on, consider your website as an extension of those products and services; consider it as your company online presence. Ask yourself what is important to you and your customers when it comes to the services or products your company provides? Is it the advantages like quality, performance, presentation and reliability that are offered? Does your current web site reflect this? Revisit your company’s mission statement – is this also reflected in the website?

It’s amazing how many companies do not have a professional online presence for fear of expense (in which case, they often opt for a “do-it-yourself” product). A well-developed, well-designed website is not a cost; it’s an investment, and any related expenses will convert into new clients. At present, there are several reputable organizations that will help your company build an effective web site for a reasonable price.

It is proven that R.O.I is quickly met when the website properly addresses your requirements and /or target market. Keep in mind that your website is the least expensive 24/7 (worldwide) salesman that you will ever find.

It’s important to find a team of website design experts who will listen to you, understand your needs, and not only follow your guidelines, but also present you with new options and suggestions to increase your sales and customer acquisition. A good team will produce a professional online presence that is in tune with your company’s image, excels in usability and is search-engine friendly.

Online marketing for your website is also very important since your utmost goal is to attract users that search for the products or services you offer. A high-quality website that is lost among search engines is like placing an expensive ad in a magazine that nobody buys. If Web browsers cannot find your site, they are limited in how they can purchase your product or service. Treat your we site as a marketing tool, not only as a source for company information.

Summary: A professional online presence and a quality website are the most important investments you will make for your company; it will reflect your company’s image, and the products and services you offer. Seek a website design company that is willing to learn about your company, and its products and services. Get involved in the website development process and offer your opinion and suggestions – after all, you know your market and your company.