The Gulf Shores Plantation Project
As Gulf Shores Plantation celebrates its 25th year, we're excited to announce that we've recently launched a new online marketing strategy including a brand-new website for one of the most well-known leaders in the world of travel and tourism; Gulf Shores Plantation & Pedro Mandoki.
The Goal: Redesign existing website, restructure navigation functionality for better usability, and integrate property management system (Instant Software) for a seamless online booking experience.
The Result: An attractive, redesigned site that is fully integrated with the company's property management software. This means that property and reservations data must only be maintained in one place, and it offers real-time availability.
From the user perspective, the booking process is extremely smooth and intuitive. The custom site design allows users to easily search properties, view photo galleries and virtual tours, and check availability and book online.
SEO & PPC: Better Together
For maximum exposure and effectiveness, it's best to tailor your SEO and PPC strategies to complement each other. The wily search marketer knows how to leverage each approach to attain the best results.
As you probably already know, there are two common methods to market your business on the search engines. The first method is SEO, or search engine optimization. Two important aspects of an effective SEO strategy are generating consistent quality content and the second is increasing your link popularity by gaining inbound links to your website.
A consistent SEO campaign will provide the longevity and exposure for your primary and secondary or "long tail" keywords. A solid SEO campaign can bare higher R.O.I. than paid search campaigns due to the longevity of favorable rankings - especially once you land in the Top 10. Generally an SEO campaign is a long-term strategy, and that is why complementing SEO with a highly-targeted PPC campaign is key ...
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Email Marketing: Metrics That Matter
If you're main focus in analyzing your email reports is still stuck on the "unique open" and "unique click" rates, then you're getting an out-dated and partial picture of your program's effectiveness at best. With image blocking so prevalent in so many email clients these days, and with so many at-work email subscribers either reading messages in their preview pane or skimming messages without loading images, it's become necessary to evolve the way we guage an email campaign's effectiveness.
Here are a few important steps you can take to get a clear picture of how well your email marketing program works:
- Implement action tracking
- Integrate Google Analytics into your campaigns
- Calculate the Click-To-Open-Rate metric
- Use a unique phone number on your campaigns
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Organize Your Internet Marketing Plan
Are you having trouble keeping track of your online marketing plan? Short-term, long-term, pay-per-click, eNewsletters, site updates — with all those balls in the air, it can be difficult to make sure none of them hit the ground.
One great organizational tool is the mind map, and a great mind map product to check out is Mindomo. You can organize your marketing strategy — or anything else for that matter — in a way that makes the most sense to you. And, like the world of the Web, it's a living, breathing, document that can grow with your marketing plan and change as your needs change. Additionally, you or anyone who is granted access can access the map anywhere there is an Internet connection.
Many of you may already be familiar with the Mindomo product as we use it regularly to map out plans for our clients, but if you haven't seen it, give it a look at mindomo.com. If it looks like something that could help your organization, contact your account manager or sign up for the free account on the site and build your own (it's great for organizing the family chores as well).
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us to organize your internet marketing strategy today
SMC 3.21 Update
The latest and greatest Site Management Console (SMC 3.21) updates for all SMC sites that are currently using the standard SMC forms(s) now have the ability to enable a CAPTCHA system. The CAPTCHA system requires Image Verification before the form can be submitted. This keeps spammers away form using your form to send spam.
To enable this new feature simply login in to the SMC and open your form page click on form and and you will see "Enable Image Verification" check the box and test your new form with a new Image Verification.
If you need help enabling this feature please give your Account Manager a call or send them an email. They will be happy to help.
