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The Battle between Facebook and Websites

Mar 28, 2024 | Content Marketing, Social media marketing, Web Design

Maybe you didn’t know there was a battle between two of the top methods of digital marketing. Let me share what I’ve observed in the last few years.

The Problem.

Many business owners have been shunning websites for a number of reasons and using Facebook for their primary marketing platform. Both are good for marketing. Together they are very good! However, depending on the type of business you have, one is better than the other. Here are a few things to consider when you are trying to decide on your main marketing channel.

The Investment.

A professionally designed website can be a bit pricey but when you consider all that it can do for you when set up correctly, it will serve you well. Your website is an investment into your business. It’s the difference between buying a building or renting one; buying a truck or leasing one. Yes, your Facebook page is free but remember, you get what you pay for.

The Image.

A professional website shows your visitors that you are a serious business owner and you are in it for the long term. It says you took the time to set up a virtual space share your knowledge, products, or services with those you want to do business with and it shows that you care about how you’re perceived.

A website says you took the time to create a space just for your visitors to learn about you; to vet you or to communicate with you. By the time your visitors call you, they will know exactly how you can help them and they will have a good idea of what they can expect from you.

Privacy breeches are more prevalent with Facebook and anyone can steal your identity and pretend to be you. That can be extremely detrimental to a business owner.

The content.

A well designed website contains your content and that content stays in place until you take it away. You own it and it can’t be taken off your website unless you take it off. A website give you a place to provide as much content as you want to share with visitors and to use for marketing. Content marketing is an excellent way to bring visitors to your website and to show them your expertise.

With Facebook, you are using their platform and they can remove your content whenever they want for what ever reason. You are at the mercy of those who run the platform. Your content is shared only if Facebook allows it to be shared. Just because you added content to Facebook, doesn’t mean your target market will see it…unless you pay for it.

The Sales Team.

Think of your website as your 24-hour “sales team” ready at a moment’s notice to provide prospects with the information, products, or services they are searching for. Your virtual “sales team” doesn’t need benefits, or time off. It doesn’t need a raise and it cooperates with and enhances your marketing and operations. It’s out promoting your business even while you’re sleeping. Once you supply it with what it needs to do the job, it’s always prepared and ready for action. Visitors can stop by your website at any time, day or night and your “sales team” is ready for action!

Your Facebook “sales team” must continually feed more and more content into your free space. If they miss a few days, that content doesn’t get shared or it becomes dated. Even if your “sales team” shares your content continually on your Facebook page, the only visitors that can stop by and receive full access to your free space are Facebook users. So sharing more and more content every day becomes almost like an endless cycle and there’s no guarantee that your free space owners will share it.

The Brand.

Your website brand is a reflection of you and can be designed with whatever colors, fonts, content you desire. The list of colors and fonts is nearly endless. Facebook’s brand is it’s brand and doesn’t give you much of an option to personalize your free space. For the most part, you’re stuck with the Facebook blue. That’s their brand, not yours!

The Distractions.

When visitors come to your website, all they see are the virtual rooms you created for them. There are no distractions. They are in your business space and competitors aren’t shouting for your attention while they’re in your virtual building. You have their complete attention and you are the boss!

With your free space, visitors may see your content but at the same time they can easily peruse through your competitors content as well. It’s kind like a farmer’s market where tables are side by side and they can easily move from one table to the other limiting the full attention you receive from your own website.

The Summary

Please hear that I am not saying you shouldn’t use Facebook. It’s an excellent companion to your business website along with all the other popular social media platforms. Each platform has it’s primary audience and each is very helpful to boost your reputation and your reach.

LinkedIn’s primary audience is professionals doing business with other professionals. It’s best used for B2B companies to provide a place to network with others in that segment while Facebook is best for businesses selling to consumers (B2C). But, you must consider your industry, your target market, your priorities, and your goals for the future of your business when choosing your main marketing platform.

ADA Compliance and Business Websites

Mar 25, 2024 | ADA compliance, Web Design

Monday morning marketing logo- circle with man and woman doing a high five

 

 

 

ADA Compliance for business websites needs to be considered by all business owners. It’s important to provide access for those who use screen readers or other assistive devices to make your goods or services available everyone just as if you owned a storefront or office building. We will be starting a series in August on how to make your websites ADA compliant and hope to make it an easier transition for you.

Government Guidelines for ADA Compliance

The following information on ADA compliance is useful and relevant information to understand guidelines, compliance and timelines for business websites.

1. Guidance on Web Accessibility and ADA describes how State and Local Governments and businesses can ensure their websites are accessible to people with disabilities.

2. Referencing Ogletree Deakins Law, on a recent post, they mentioned:

“In August 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that would make the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) the standard for compliance for state and local governments covered by Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)2. The DOJ is proposing to make the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines the ADA Title II compliance standard for local and state governments.

3. If finalized, the standard would apply to websites and mobile apps, and would give governments two to three years for compliance, based on population.

4. The DOJ explicitly recognized the impossibility of designing and maintaining a website that conforms in all respects and at all times to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, but what measure of conformance would be adopted is unclear.”

3. Preparing for the unavoidable requirements for compliance for business websites will give businesses advantages:

• Being pro-active and sensitive to the needs of people with disabilities
• Being ahead of the competition meeting compliance
• Being a leader in addressing the needs of its clients, prospects and visitors

— Charles H. Castano | Monday Morning Marketing

But What Does Being ADA Compliant Have to do with Marketing?

1. A successful website involves designing your website for the enjoyment and use of everyone. Designing your website in an effort to meet the standards of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) ensures that goal.

2. A well designed website; one that contains useful content and is user friendly, is crucial for improving your rankings in the search results.

3. An improved ranking in the search results will give your business more visibility.

Our hope is that the research we are doing and reporting to you will be helpful to you as you consider the benefits of making your website ADA compliant.

— Jillian Stone | Monday Morning Marketing

 

 

Creating Good Content for Your Website and Why it’s Important

Mar 1, 2024 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Small Business Marketing Strategy, Social media marketing, Web Design

Creating Good Content for Your Website and Why it’s Important

Often, in conversation, it’s not what you say, but how you say it that can make all the difference in the world. The same principal can be said for your website content. There are many ways content can be presented, and how it’s presented might make the difference between increasing customer interaction and a customer closing down your website as soon as it’s opened.

Video

Videos provide an entertaining way of presenting content in a short period of time. Because it allows for movement, videos can invoke more impact through motion graphics, visual effects, and musical scoring. Videos can be used to communicate different types of information such as how-tos, demonstrations, testimonials, facts, and statistics.

Charts and Graphs

These have been used for years for visually presenting data. They have their place particularly when providing data in business meetings or research. Statistics add more credibility to your content, but reading them in textual form make them hard to grasp. Turing text into a visualization like a chart or graph makes it easier for people to see why those figures are important.

Infographic

Being a designer, this is my favorite. Infographics have been around alot longer than we think.

Infographics are a great way to present study findings, statistics, and complex information in a way that users can easily grasp and understand. So instead of going through long texts, infographics presents all that essential information at a glance.

You might ask, how are these forms of content used in your marketing. The great news is that once you have them, they can be repurposed in many ways. For example, this article started as an email. The email is created like an outline; snippets of information so as not to force the reader to read through paragraphs of text.

For this blog article, we added a bit more text to the email format. After publishing it here, we post it to various social media platforms. Finally, fleshing out the “outline” more, we use the same content for our newsletter. Developing this process even further, you can create a series of articles on one topic, turn it into an e-book and offer it on your website for people to purchase and download.

As an example of “it’s not what you say, but how you say it,” I created an infographic based on the three forms of content mentioned at the beginning of this article. Which is more interesting to view? Which helps you grasp the data easier? Which takes less time to read?

 

Marketing with Social Media versus your own Website

Feb 5, 2024 | Social media marketing, Web Design

3 Reasons a Small Business Should Have a Professional Website from a Design Perspective

— By Jillian Stone

Home Cooked Meal vs. Fast Food

The difference between using Facebook for marketing versus a professionally designed website is like eating fast food versus eating a 5 course, home cooked meal.

When you have your own website, you have no limitations on how colorful, how interesting, how festive, how spicy, how many courses (pages) you want to have, etc. Having your own website allows you to express who YOU are; with social media, there are restrictions. However, social media platforms are great as a website companion. The two work together wonderfully!

Taking Advantage of e-Commerce

According to Statista, “In 2021, retail e-commerce sales amounted to approximately 5.2 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide. This figure is forecast to grow by 56 percent over the next years, reaching about 8.1 trillion dollars by 2026.”

Taking advantage of e-commerce gives you the opportunity to continue bringing in revenue even when your physical store or business is closed. Even service businesses with no products can take advantage of e-commerce.

Taking Control!

Why let social media dictate the terms and conditions the control over when your content is seen and who sees it?

Your credibility is super important. Without control over your content, anybody can create a page on social media with fake data. This is a concern for any business whose only marketing asset is social media. As a companion, social media is great! But every business needs their own platform to present themselves as they want to be perceived and to be able to control the content that is shown.

3 Reasons a Small Business Should Have a  Professional Website from a Technical Perspective

— By Charles H. Castano, Web and Cloud Services

Website Layout

Your website gives you the opportunity to control every aspect of its layout, making it a reflection of who you are, and how you want to be perceived by your visitors. Making the website simple to navigate and having visitors find what they need quickly makes them stay longer and want to return.

  e-Commerce Benefits

  • Lower overhead costs than a brick and mortar option
  • Reach a much larger customer base than a store
  • Develop a client contact list to stay in touch
  • Easier to manage inventory

Managing Content

Visitors come to your site for answers and solutions. The content you provide will determine whether you convert the visitor to a customer or a client. Content does not mean selling a visitor what you want; it mean giving them what they are looking for. Search engines emphasize ranking on content that answers questions or addressed visitor’s needs, rather than information about what you want them to get from you.

3 Seconds or Less!

Jan 30, 2024 | Web Design

3 Seconds or Less! That’s How Long you have to get the Attention of your Website Visitor Before they go to Another Website

By Jillian Stone | Stone Mountain Solutions, LLC

3 Reasons Why Your Website is Slow from a Design Perspective

Unoptimized Images and video
Images and videos that are large files will cause your website to load slower. Reducing the size of the images or videos before uploading them into your site will speed up the load time.

Alt Tags
Alt tags are important for the robots to read your images. Each image should have an alt tag associated with it that describes the image.

Too many elements on a page
The trick is to keep your website relevant, simple, professional with only the number of elements you absolutely need to describe your page. Too many bells and whistles will slow down you website significantly.

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