Getting the best out of your Web Design Brief (Part 1)
During a web design project, our team will go out of its way to please our clients – be this through endless edits, additional features (perhaps not included in the brief), and a good deal of trial and error upon request. It’s no secret that some projects can tend to go more smoothly than others. While we can promise that we’ll do our best to inform and educate you about all things web design and project-related, there are a few tips we can offer our clients to ensure a seamless transaction is made between us.
Under the influence: using customers to collect customers
No matter how fantastic your product or service might be, getting the attention of your target audience can be a tremulous task – especially for small kiwi businesses. In a world where we tend to roll our eyes at obvious advertisements, it can be hard to target the trustworthy marketing zone wherein a potential customer can feel comfortable and eventually keen to try your product. Times are changing. Just as the internet morphed into the user-bolstered 2.0, companies are looking to the customers themselves for brand-boosting opportunities. With a little social media smarts… you might just see your customers magically […]
Three reasons why a rebrand is going to be the best bet for your business
Do I really need a new logo? Is it worth it? The old one has worked fine for us these past few decades…why should I bother rebranding? You wouldn’t show up to work in a garish pastel pantsuit, so why should your logo stay stuck in the 80’s-90’s? Even a few early 2000 logos are lacking that modern, timeless factor that many 2010-7 logos are strongly sporting these days. A relevant rebrand is every bit as important as updated technology for your business, so what’s stopping you from investing in that redesign? If it’s going to take a little persuasion […]
How to handle hate: keeping your profile professional
The ‘single star review’ is never a welcome notification for small businesses currently utilising social media for marketing. The lonely 1 star out of 5 will generally be followed by a client’s (often expletive-laced) narrative regarding an unsatisfactory experience they’ve had with your business. Sometimes the single star won’t be accompanied by any comments at all, and the ‘reviewer’ will just be seeking to bring down your overall rating – an issue we’ve faced ourselves at Tailgunner. Then there’s blatant negativity. A comment will come out of nowhere on one of your posts – cold and uncalled for. How are […]
Instagram is bettering itself for business: here’s how!
If you’ve been scrolling through Instagram lately then chances are you’ve probably noticed a line of little blue dots situated under folk’s photos and videos. Taking a moment to investigate this new feature, you’ll discover that a swipe will turn one post into a multi-pictured slideshow. Gimmick or golden marketing tool, today we do a brand-focused breakdown and see how your business might benefit from this new feature!
The benefits of video for business: websites
Soaring sales and increased conversions If you’ve got products to sell then video marketing is your new best friend. Studies show that by merely featuring a product video on your site’s landing page, you can increase conversions by more than 80%! Why? Well, sight is the most dominant of our senses so it therefore makes sense that videos would captivate and influence us more than a paragraph of text or a catchy theme song. If pictures tell a thousand words then continuous moving pictures will be able to simultaneously stimulate and inform your potential customers in a matter of […]
Continued: Choosing the right social network (Pinterest and Instagram)
Instagram This crisp, clean, visually-focussed social network is perfect for clients with eye-catching imagery to share. Instagram sells the concept of an experience, which is why brands often employ popular Instagrammers to share images of themselves using the product: faithful audience members – in an effort to mimic the Instagrammer’s lifestyle – will shop for the same products that they see featured in the photos. While Facebook draws attention to and offers information about your brand, Instagram aims to do this visually by instilling a desire within your audience to acquire the items or places promoted in your eye-catching […]
Choosing the right social network for your business
So you’ve decided it’s time to bring your brand to social media. Or, perhaps, you’ve already accumulated several accounts for your brand, and you’re finding it challenging to figure out which ones are successfully networking your business and which are wasting your time and energy. We know that you’ve got an audience of potential clients out there who are eager to learn about your product or service. The tricky part can be finding which social network this audience are currently active on, and that’s where we come in. Working with a myriad of clients ranging from tradesmen to pharmaceutical companies […]
5 reasons your website isn’t working
How is your website contributing to your business? It’s not often we start a new blog article by asking a question, but if you’re going to talk about website design for businesses, this is one of the most important questions you need to ask. Is your website improving your sales rate? Is it bringing in new leads and clients? Do people use it to achieve something they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to do? If you’ve answered “No” to all of these questions, there’s a chance your website isn’t working. Websites serve a whole lot of different purposes for businesses, […]
5 SEO myths debunked
We talk about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) a lot with our clients, and we’re often surprised by the outdated and incorrect views many have about SEO and how it works. To be fair, SEO has gone through a real shake-up over the last 5 or so years, and if you’re not actively keeping up to date with how it all works, it’s easy for your understanding to become outdated very quickly. We don’t expect our clients to have a thorough understanding of how it all works, otherwise we’d have nothing to do, and would probably go out of business. However, […]
Online marketing stats you need to know for 2016!
If you’re like most business owners out there, you probably spent a fair amount of time at the beginning of this year setting goals and targets, and creating a marketing strategy to help you get there. Maybe you wanted to invest more time interacting with your audience on LinkedIn. Or perhaps you wanted to start pushing your products more through Facebook. It could even have been as simple as writing a monthly blog post to share on your website. Well, we’re now nearly halfway through 2016 – so how’s the strategy looking now? Are you still writing those blogs and […]
5 Instagram Tips for Small Businesses
Instagram is a social media platform that allows you to visually promote your business to an incredibly wide and growing audience. It’s a community built on the power of visual storytelling, and if you’re not already on Instagram, you might want to reconsider your social media strategy. That said, launching your business onto a new platform can be a little daunting – it means more work and more activity to monitor, and you might be struggling to think what kind of content you can post that people might actually want to interact with. While these concerns are valid, you’ll soon […]
5 tips for boosting engagement on Facebook
One of the most common questions we’re asked is how can business owners increase engagement on Facebook. Here’s a common scenario: they’ve been running a Facebook page for 12 months., and in that time they’ve built a following of 2000 fans. But despite posting new content semi-regularly, they’re just not getting the interaction they’d like. Every post gets one or two likes, but nothing else. What can they do? Here are 5 tips we always end up sharing.
5 simple ways to revitalise your LinkedIn profile
LinkedIn is the social network for professionals. Business owners use it to network and connect, and potential employees use it to showcase their skills and experience. Because your LinkedIn profile is presented in a professional environment, it’s essential you’re putting your best foot forward. If it’s been a while since you’ve visited your profile, we recommend you take some time soon to log in and give your profile a refresh. Here are 5 simple ways you can get your profile humming again.
SEO mistakes – why people can’t find your website
We talk a lot about good SEO practice, and how to make your website as search engine friendly as possible. A good search engine ranking can be so important for your businesses, and it places your website directly in front of people who are searching for the services you offer. But for every business that’s made it to the first page of Google, there are hundreds of businesses that haven’t. These businesses have websites that are sitting anywhere from page 2 to page 102, so it’s unlikely they’ll ever get much business out of their website. While there are countless […]
SEO basics for small businesses
If you’re a small business owner, it’s very important that you have a basic understanding of SEO, or search engine optimisation. Chances are you’re very familiar with the term SEO already – as it’s likely your inbox and junk mail folders are full of emails from companies overseas offering you cheap SEO work for your website. But unless you’ve spent a little time doing some reading and research, it’s likely you’re not too familiar with what it is, what it means, and how important it can be for your business. SEO is unique in that its not a fad or […]
Top 10 Social Media Tips
There’s no denying that we’re now living in a digital society. The internet has become an important part of nearly everything we do. We use it for work, for entertainment, for leisure, for socialising, and even for comparing home loan rates and insurance premiums. If you manage a business or company and want to reach more clients and get in front of even more potential customers, it’s essential you’re digitally active too – and one of the most effective ways to make your presence known online is via social media. Here are just a few short pieces of advice if […]
Is your website responsive? It needs to be!
When it comes to determining the order that results appear in a Google search, there is a long list of factors that Google takes into account. Until recently the main factors have included the content of your website, the number of links to your website, and how active you are on social media. That was until recently, when Google announced that on 21 April 2015, it will be introducing a new factor: mobile friendly. Google knows if your website is mobile friendly, and has decided to include it as a ranking factor. Essentially, this means if your website is mobile […]
Search Engine Optimisation Case Study – Stem Creative
Stem Creative is a Wellington-based video production company that specialises in telling stories for businesses online. They have an impressive range of clients including Garage Project, the National Party, L’Oreal, Whittaker’s Chocolate and more. They approached us in 2014 to have a go at optimising their website. They’d built the website themselves, and wanted to competitively challenge for the first page on Google. They’d hired a couple of different companies to do the same work earlier, but were unhappy with the approach and limited range of ideas these companies came with. When it comes to determining your website’s rankings in […]
Social media stats for 2014
2014 was a big year for social media, and it looks like 2015 might be much of the same. So we thought we’d start 2015 with a brief reflection of 2014, and what it meant for social media. We’ve got analysis on the big 4 social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube), as well as a few others, including Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Snapchat. Facebook Facebook has 1.28 billion monthly active users, making it the most popular network out there. Also: It has 1.01 billion mobile monthly active users 72% of online adults visit Facebook at least once a month […]
Practical strategies to grow your business in 2015
There’s no other time like the start of a new year to take a good close look at your business, and identify a few ways to grow over the next 12 months. But before you get stuck in to your work for the New Year, one of the smartest things you can do is develop a strategy that will help you grow, and we’ve put together 4 key online areas that every business should be looking at as we begin 2015.
Lower your bounce rate and increase your conversions
Imagine this: you’re sitting at your desk one day and decide to have a look at some of your website’s latest statistics. You log in to Google Analytics and nearly fall off your chair when you see that in the last week your website has attracted more than 10,000 visitors. That’s great! It means people who are looking for the services and products you offer are able to find your website online. Not so fast… You then look down at your bounce rate, and see it’s sitting at 75 percent. The bounce rate refers to the proportion of people who […]
We’re a Google Partner – But what does that mean?
This month we received a notification that we’d met the criteria needed to be an official Google Partner. That got us quite excited because it means Google has officially recognised that we are good at what we do. It’s also exciting for you because it means that when you use Tailgunner, you know you’re in safe hands.
The 7 deadly sins of Social Media
So you’re in charge of managing the social media presence for a business or organisation? Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been managing the profiles for a while, there are a few fundamental rules and guidelines that dictate best practice when it comes to social media. These 7 deadly sins of Social Media will give you a glimpse of social media’s dark side, and will hopefully give you a few ideas of what not to do while managing your own accounts. Chances are you’re guilty of a few of these “sins”, which may be holding you back and preventing […]
More choice for .nz domain names
When choosing a domain for your company, you now have even more options thanks to changes that came into effect on 30 September 2014. Until now you could only register 3rd level domains ending in .nz, such as tailgunner.co.nz, or stuff.co.nz. Now it’s possible to register 2nd level domains, getting rid of the “.co”, to have domains such as tailgunner.nz and stuff.nz. The reason for the change is to bring it in line with international standards, as well as make it fairer for entities that don’t necessarily consider themselves commercial. However, you’ll always be able to make a choice – […]