As we continue into Part III and the final chapter in our website analysis for the new year, we ask you to look at the following questions:

Can visitors easily navigate their way through your site?
Is your call to action clear and are you getting visitors to act?
Are you clearly communicating to your target audience?
Are you doing everything you can to market your website?

Can visitors easily navigate their way through your site?
You’ve been to your site over and over and you know it better than you know what’s currently in your refrigerator.  You’ve created your navigation just the way you wanted, and it might suit your purposes just fine.  But for someone who has rarely or never been to your site, are you able to communicate what you are saying and funneling them where they need to go in order to maximize your conversions?

You want to be sure that if you have different segments of customers you funnel them through from the beginning or help them define which segment they are first.  For instance, if you sell vacations along the Grand Strand, then you may want to first segment your beaches – North Myrtle Beach, Myrtle Beach, and Surfside Garden City vacations.  Have information about each segment available, as well, incase your buyer doesn’t know yet.  Always have it easy to learn about the other beaches or view the properties available in each section. 

Have information like great family beach to target families, or best beach for couples, so that each need that the customer has is easily identified and ready to book.  For instance, if you are segmenting down to couples, you don’t want to suggest massive 8 bedroom oceanfront houses, but maybe a small romantic suite with options to upgrade to Jacuzzi or add on additions like champagne and strawberries.

Always have it be easy to go back to the start and let the visitor choose other options.   With better website programming available everyday, website owners are customizing their websites more and more.  This is important as the consumer wants to know their options, see the benefits and values, and choose which suits them best.  Help them find what their looking for and what will satisfy their needs without getting frustrated and leaving.

To check to see how your website is doing, go back to your analytics and look at bounce rates, time on site and exit pages.  Also, make sure you are tracking conversions and always strive to improve on them.   If there’s something that doesn’t add up, evaluate that page, funnel, or call the experts at ICND to help you identify these trends.

Is your call to action clear and are you getting visitors to act?
Do you feel like your calling but nobody’s home?  Make sure that each page has a clear call to action and it’s easy for your visitors to get started browsing your inventory or filling out contact information.  If you have a phone number, make sure it’s in a clear spot on every page.  Yes, the whole point of a website is usually to buy online, but sometimes it’s just not that easy. 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to a site, saw what I liked, but couldn’t figure how to get it!  But if you go to big brand e-commerce or vacation sites, you’ll almost always see a clear call to action and point of sale.

Are you clearly communicating offers to your target audience?
So many times I run into conflicting communication with marketing to an audience.  There has to be consistency in your messages.  If you are targeting your audience through any sort of marketing, whether it be direct mail, email, pay per click, make sure your offer is clear, concise, and consistent across each medium.

If you send out an expensive direct mail piece with an “Exclusive Summer Savings” offer and you call it “Super Summer Savings” on your site, you are going to confuse the heck out of your visitor.  Even if it’s the same percentage off and the details read about the same, it’s going to be confusing.  Buyers need to feel confident in your offer, not confused or hesitant.  This may lead them to check else where and leave your site.

Are you doing everything you can to market your website?
Of course this may be limited by budget, but are you doing the most for your money?  There are simple things you can to look at your website and make sure it’s in good working order.  In fact, an expert at ICND can take  a quick 20 minute look at your site and see if you have basic things correct for SEO, where you rank, where your competitors rank and a plethora of more information to let you know how you are doing amongst your competition.   We’ll put together suggestions and integrate these into your current marketing goals and objectives.  Let us work with you and make the most out of your website and market
 

The Palace Theatre of Myrtle Beach has selected ICND to complete the redesign of their website.

Myrtle Beach, SC December 30, 2009- InterCoastal Net Designs (ICND) is proud to announce the signing of its newest client, The Palace Theatre.  ICND has been selected by The Palace Theatre of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina to redesign their website. 

“We’re excited for the opportunity to redesign The Palace Theatre’s website.  It gives us a chance to show how ICND can compete as much creatively with design as we can with programming and marketing”, Vanessa Humes-ICND Account Executive.

The Palace Theatre has been a thriving attraction for Myrtle Beach visitors and locals alike.  They have been very successful at promoting their theatre and booking tickets via telephone and at their box office.  With the new site design and ticket booking engine, they hope to increase their online ticket bookings. 

Along with the website design, ICND will be helping the Palace Theatre with email marketing, search marketing and social media promotions.  The new site is set to go live mid-January.

For more information contact:

Vanessa Humes

InterCoastal Net Designs

VHumes@icoastalnet.com

6649 Beach Dr. SW

Ocean Isle Beach, NC 28469

Phone: 910-575-6095

Fax: 910-575-1095

www.icoastalnet.com

December 29th, 2009 | by Stan Schroeder4 Comments

When you look at a list of top 10 websites in the world, or the U.S., which site do you expect to see on top? Google. Although Google still dominates the list most of the time, with 6.7 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November 2009, on Christmas day another site was on top: Facebook.

According to Hitwise, this was the first time that Facebook was the most-visited U.S. site. It’s logical: On Christmas day, everyone wanted to connect with their friends and family, which pushed the largest social networking site to the top.

But it’s still a testament to how huge Facebook really is; and it’s still growing. Add to that the fact that “Facebook” was the top search term in 2009, and its 350 million users, and it’s clear that Facebook is dominating the web in a way very few web services have done before.

Millward Brown Breaks Down Location, Mobile, Display and Viral Video

Posted by Ken Mallon and Duncan Southgate on 12.29.09 @ 06:00 AM on Ad Age Digital

In our discussions about what will happen in the digital marketing industry during the next 12 months, one overarching trend emerged: The basic rules of brand building are just as important for innovations in the digital space as they are for traditional forms of communication.

Using new technology won't in itself bring success; your digital communications still need to be creative, engaging and relevant if they are to cut it during the second decade of this century. Here are the first five of our top 10 trends for 2010. (We'll post the next five here tomorrow.)

Online display: Don't be blinded by the shiny and new.
In 2010, advertisers will experiment with new, larger ad formats. These formats may be initially attractive because they are different, but the basics of brand building beyond awareness shouldn't be ignored. Most of the new formats perform very well in the short term. Dynamic Logic has previously reported the high performance (brand impact) of video ads when they were first introduced. They found that video ad performance, relative to average ad performance, declined over a two year period following introduction as the novelty wore off. We'd expect this to be true for most of the new, larger ad formats and their progeny.

Ultimately, over the next several years only the fittest for these larger formats will survive. If they prove too intrusive, they may make people less favorable toward the advertised brand or the website on which they are served. Other advertisers and agencies will use these formats more cautiously, taking note of creative best practices gleaned from prior work.

Viral video will move from art to science.
As online video consumption continues to rise, advertisers increasingly value viral viewings as a clear and visible sign that their campaigns are engaging audiences. In response, viral video analytics are becoming sophisticated. YouTube has enhanced its video analytics offer, and companies such as Visible Measures and Unruly Media are providing comprehensive viral monitoring services across multiple online video platforms.

This information will fuel a more scientific approach to viral campaign planning. Rather than just place videos online and hope an audience will come, advertisers will invest in viral seeding strategies. They'll promote their videos via online influencers, Facebook video-sharing applications and targeted, paid placements. Advertisers will also become smarter about developing and selecting ads with the most viral video potential before they employ the seeding. A recent calibration exercise for Millward Brown's Link pre-test, for example, identified the creative factors which explain most of the variation seen in levels of viral viewing.

While there are likely to still be more misses than hits in the viral space, the opportunity of being next year's T-Mobile "Dance" or Evian's roller babies is something many marketers will plan for.

Gaming gets more social and mobile.
The ability to access Twitter and Facebook from the Xbox game system is one sign console gaming is becoming a lot more social. Games such as "Uncharted 2" already allow you to tweet your progress from within the game and we anticipate seeing these features implemented in more games. Microsoft's Project Natal promises to bring even more interactivity to gaming by supplanting controllers with your actual body movements, improving immensely on a model created by Nintendo. Perhaps the most promising and category-busting idea appears to be OnLive, a games-on-demand service that allows you to play any console or PC game on your TV or computer, without the need for a console at all.

Gaming's reach is already significant -- "Modern Warfare 2" is the biggest entertainment launch ever -- but the social elements are going to make the growth exponential. The proliferation of mobile games such as Doodle Jump for the iPhone, which allows the user to interact with other players, brings gaming to the masses.

Dynamic Logic's research has already shown that gaming can be very effective in increasing brand metrics. As interactivity increases and gaming becomes ubiquitous, we expect more advertisers to enter this space. For example, in the fall of 2010, Disney will launch "Epic Mickey" for the Nintendo Wii, the first major communication vehicle for a significant repositioning of this much-loved global brand.

Mobile takes a bite out of online.
According to the Mobile Marketing Association, total U.S. spend on mobile marketing will grow from $1.7 billion this year to $2.16 billion in 2010. Google's $750 million purchase of mobile ad network Admob reinforces that 2010 will be a significant year for mobile. We expect to see more consolidation in the mobile space.

With Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and RIM's BlackBerry platforms making the smartphone choices more attractive to consumers and cost of access slowly coming down, mobile web usage numbers will increase. The iPhone alone has now reached 57 million units worldwide, the fastest uptake in the history of technology. The real innovation will be increased adoption of the next-generation mobile browsers that will make the mobile web look and feel more like the applications we know today.

While web-based mobile, despite its growth, still only reaches a relatively small number of people, this niche audience can be particularly attractive to some brands and we've seen many targeting successes. Mobile provides the ability to target by site, phone model, demographics and location, all of which can be useful to advertisers. In addition, Dynamic Logic's normative advertising effectiveness data already suggests that mobile is two to five times better at driving brand metrics than online, and we expect this differential to remain consistent in 2010.

All of this means that mobile may well start to take ad dollars which would previously have been spent online. Since it's a new medium, there remains some consumer resistance to mobile advertising, so we advertisers will initially favor the soft-sell approach of providing useful content in this space, rather than pushing hard-sell messaging.

Here I am. Over here!
The promise that technology would enable automated direct-marketing messages to be pushed to consumers with GPS-enabled mobile devices has yet to come to fruition. Consumers are understandably reluctant to broadcast their location randomly or to be interrupted by unexpected messages without their consent. Instead we're seeing a variety of innovative solutions created to facilitate geo-targeting of marketing messages (when in-aisle, in-store or in-proximity) as the number of GPS-enabled devices continues to rise.

Services such as the mobile game FourSquare contain a social-media element that allows users to broadcast their location to a network of friends and other users in their respective cities. The social element of this voluntary disclosure has allowed marketers to tap into an engaged network of users and offer special promotions based on reported location. We expect FourSquare and other apps with a hybrid location/social-networking component to grow significantly in 2010.

We also expect to see utility-focused location applications gain popularity on GPS-enabled mobile devices during 2010. ComScore has reported that 11% of their mobile panel is currently using map or direction-based applications on their devices, representing 41% year-on-year growth and potentially stealing market share from standalone GPS devices. How these applications are eventually monetized remains to be seen, but the "Minority Report" scenario of "push" location-based advertising is starting to become a reality through voluntary user disclosure of location.

Even if consumers won't share their location with brands, brands can share their locations with consumers. In this vein, marketers will increasingly make location a feature of their campaigns, as the recent Levi's Twitter promotion in Australia demonstrates.

ICND was a proud attendee of this years VRMA (Vacation Rental Management Association) conference held in Washington DC. The conference lasted 4 days, through which we sat alongside industry leaders from across the nation and learned a wealth of information concerning the vacation rental and travel industries.

ICND is committed to staying on top of the issues that matter most to your clients and our market. Here's a snap shot of this year's VRMA 25th Conference.

The 2009 Vacation Rental Managers Association (VRMA) Annual Conference was held October 24-28 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington DC.

During this silver anniversary event, leaders of the vacation rental industry joined together to learn about the latest challenges and opportunities impacting the industry, including the largest Showcase of products and services available to vacation rental managers. While there, ICND held talks with online vacation rental systems companies like Escapia and LivRez to how all parties could work closer together, with ICND developing interfaces with their unique software.

What’s more, the VRMA unveiled the latest news for members, including new and updated initiatives that support the vacation rental industry, provide added benefits and membership values in 2010 and beyond.

Approximately 40 distinct educational seminars, Certificated Sessions and keynote presentations featuring a wide range of topics judged by vacation rental managers to be the most important issues impacting their operation and success, including marketing, accounting, housekeeping, industry trends, tourism trends, social media, sales, guest reviews, revenue management, corporate strategy, property listings, measuring success, going green and leadership.

If you are a vacation rental company and missed this year's VRMA conference, do not hesitate to contact us today for more information. We'd be happy to share with you and your business what we learned.

We are happy to announce the following:

We have completed the Entech Intergration for Seaside Vacations, a North Myrtle Beach vacation rental company. If you use Instant Software's Property Plus or Entech on your website, contact us today on how we can integrate those services into your website through a custom interface. This custom interface allows you to customize the design and page layout of your Entech or Property Plus pages, AND it also pulls in the content into your own website, giving you an added optimization boost for better search engine penetration.

We have completed and launched Carmichael's new e-commerce system. Have products to sale but still not selling online? Get ready for the holiday season, and request a quote on the ICND e-commerce solutions and shopping carts today.

Here at ICND, we measure success with the success of our clients. When our clients are happy, we're happy. So here are a few of this months testimonials from some of our satisfied customers. 

• "I feel so much better knowing I'm working with [InterCoastal Net Designs]."

  
  Sharon G. Abee - Litchfield Real Estate

   

• "We've received a lot of positive comments from other residents who use our website to keep tabs on property values. The BOD and the Communication Committee are very pleased with the application.

  
  Steve Siegel - Tidewater HOA regarding their new ICND mls system
  

  • "Thank you for the addition to our web page as we requested. The addition was timely, and the placement was excellent! Thanks for all your great and efficient service!

    Bill & Barb Fargo

    Become satisfied customer with InterCoastal Net Designs today. Contact us or call 1-866-249-6095 and get the web solution or design you need to make your business succeed in today's tough market.

If you scratch our backs, we’ll scratch yours.

Starting in June, any new client that refers us to another client that results in a sale, you’ll receive 15% off their previous invoice. So, if you bought $1000 worth of web design services, and you refer us a client that converts into a sale with in 90 days of your invoice, you would recieve a $150 credit (15% of $1000). 

Please contact us today for more details on our Referral Program.

Here's a small list of projects we've been working on in the month of May, 2009.

-    BeachFunRentals.com (integrated Rental Management moduel)
-    SloaneVacations.com (full website development, rental property booking engine)
-    Coastal Tee Times (in progress = web design, Social media)
-    WhitneyBlair.com (Complete web design and MLS integration)
-    BillTrue.com, HiltonHeadHomes.com, and RandysRealEstate.com (SEO, MLS integration)
-    Courtney Leasing (Custom car search interface with car detail page)
-    Integrifirst  (full website development)
-    Getmitche.com  (e-commerce interface)
-    Cross Fit OIB – (in progress = full website development)
-    AeroFlow Healthcare  (in progress=full website development)

What to get added to the InterCoastal Net Designs line up? See our complete list of web design services and contact us today about any and all of your Internet marketing needs.

Well with newly hiring Brandon Evans in May, it’s no small surprise that he insisted that we create him his very own Blog for Internet Marketing.

Check out the ICND Internet Marketing Blog for tips, cool apps and widgets, cool websites, cool services, and well, just cool Internet stuff that can help you take your business to the next level.