Since moving my family and business to Kingwood Texas earlier this year we’ve enjoyed a great sense of community and support from our fellow residents and businesses.
Kingwood is a 14,000 acre community located in northeast Houston, Texas. The majority of the community is located in Harris County with a small portion in Montgomery County. Known as the “Livable Forest,” it is the largest master-planned community in Harris County and second-largest within the 10-county Houston–Sugar Land–Baytown metropolitan area.
With it’s vibrant onlinecommunity and local businesses, we feel right at home. Although we continue to serve the web design and marketing communications needs of businesses nationwide, we have already made several great businesses relationships right here in our local community.
If you are a resident of the the Kingwood Texas area and are interested in working with a local business for your print and Internet design, email marketing, search engine optimization, copywriting, and other marketing communications, please give us a call.
Apache Advertising & Design supports the work of charitable equestrian organizations. The equestrian industry has always been our strongest client base and this giveaway is just our way of giving back to the community that has made us what we are today. For the past 15 years we have performed a variety of marketing and design services promoting equestrian products, stallions/breeding services, advertising ranches, and more. We recognize that many deserving non-profit equestrian groups do not have the budget to properly promote their organizations online and we aim to help.
The last decade showed a phenomenal increase in non-profit horse-related organizations such as horse rescue groups, adoption and boarding facilities, therapeutic riding schools and more. We invite you to help us recognize the stories of these deserving non-profit groups and we’ll assist the work of a deserving finalists by donating our website design services, valued at over $2,000, to a winner selected by a public vote on our blog.
Nominate a charitable organization
If you work for, or know of, a deserving equestrian non-profit, please nominate them in the comments section below. I’ll publish the stories of our top finalists in a future blog post and the winner will be decided by a pubic vote on November 15th 2009. Our readers will get to learn about each organization and help choose the group they feel is most deserving of a new web site that will put them on the fast track to future success by having a professional design that delivers their message clearly and collects donations online.
“I’ll publish the stories of our top finalists in a future blog post and the winner will be decided by a pubic vote on November 15th 2009.”
Help spread the word
Help us spread the word about the Website Giveaway so that as many non-profit groups as possible have the chance to win the donation. If you have a newsletter, blog, or social networking account, please consider writing about our giveaway and post a link to this page.
What will you win?
Just what will you get? A completely custom website with up to ten pages designed, coded and hosted for a period of 12 months. We’ll also provide a consultation session to help our winner properly promote their new website and maximize their online contributions. If the winner already has a website they are pleased with, we will discuss providing search engine optimization, email marketing or print design instead.
Picture this, you’ve optimised your website and now rank in the top ten for all your major keywords, and first for several. Organic search engine optimization (SEO) has really paid off.
So what now? Should you pack in the pay-per-click (PPC) adverts? After all, you probably only got them to increase visibility while you boosted the site’s natural optimization, didn’t you?
Gibbons elaborates on this topic and suggests that marketers continue to purchase pay-per-click advertising to prevent competitors from obtaining valuable ad space, to protect your name, and to appear that your business has more authority.
I too recommend adding pay-per-click advertising into the mix even when your site ranks well organically, but for slightly different reasons.
I advise my clients to run a PPC campaign to help balance out all of their targeted search phrases. If one targeted search phrase is performing well organically, throw a little more PPC money at a more competitive phrase that might be ranking slightly lower than the others. If that particular search phrase improves in the organic search, adjust your PPC to a different area, and so on. With regular attention paid to your PPC and organic SEO, you can make sure that your business is always found near the top.
Pay-per-click also gives marketers a great tool for testing a variety of headlines and unique-selling-points (USP) that could benefit your advertising in other media as well…but that’s a whole other article I’ll save for another day.
Though the money marketers spend on it is a pittance compared with other channels, e-mail delivers the highest return on investment by a wide margin, according to the Direct Marketing Association.
E-mail returned a whopping $57.25 for every dollar spent on it in 2005, the DMA reported in its Power of Direct economic impact study released last month. In contrast, print catalogs generated $7.09 and non-e-mail Internet marketing produced $22.52.
“What this says is that e-mail is a highly profitable means of communicating, much more so than a catalog or any other form of communicating with your customers,” said Jay Schwedelson, corporate vice president of list firm Worldata.
What’s more, marketers are expected to sink significantly more into e-mail next year. However, the channel’s share of the average CMO’s budget is still barely a rounding error.
Recessions may be bad for the media economy, but they appear to be improving the health of the media ecology. Faced with tough economic times, consumers are consuming more media, not less of it, especially electronic media like the Internet and TV. In fact, the recession is actually fueling Internet usage among people looking for advice and information to deal with troubling economic times, according to results of new research released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
The study finds that nearly a third (31%) of online users are utilizing the Internet more often to get information about the economy in the past year vs. only 10% who said they are going online less often….
Tarah Cranford, owner of Tarah Photography, was featured on Fox News recently to share her inspiring story. Cranford found herself out of work due to the tough economy and instead of continuing to look for a job in the same field, she took matters into her own hands and was able to turn her passion for photography into a successful new career.
When asked about the first steps that she took to market her new business, her answer was very interesting. Did she take out a yellow page ad? Did she purchase magazine ads, or perhaps a billboard? No. The very first step taken was to revise her web site and to invest in search engine optimization (SEO).
Her online marketing efforts show that the most cost effective and successful means of marketing a business is still online. Whether you are starting a new career like Tarah, or if you are looking to grow your existing business, investing in your online presence is vital to your success.
In this video, Senator John Cornyn shows the importance of new media and social networking in the political arena.
The same is certainly true for businesses in the private sector. Social networking sites allow you to open the lines of communication with you clients, spread company news and promotional information, provide better customer service, monitor and manage your online reputation, and more.
For more information on applying social networking to your marketing program, give us a call at 832.971.4905 to schedule a consultation.
Click The Number Tabs Above To See More Portfolio Examples
Burkhalter Trailers Sales, one of the oldest and largest horse trailer dealers in Texas. Since 1979 Burkhalter has been a dealer for high quality horse, livestock, utility and cargo trailers throughout the US.
Burkhalter’s website is an SEO success, boasting several “page one” Google rankings, and serving nearly 800,000 hits per month. Combining simple navigation and design with clear pricing transparency was the winning formula. The horse trailer industry was using very dated marketing tactics and were slow to adapt the Internet techniques that were sweeping the business world. While many horse trailer dealers were still trying to lure customers into their store before giving a price quote, we created one of the very first websites that allowed shoppers to view pricing online., giving customers all of the information that they would need to make a purchase decision. While this may seem like common sense now, in 2005 it was still a foreign concept in this industry, but after Burkhalter’s sales skyrocketed other companies followed their lead.
For several years Apache Advertising and Design produced print and Internet marketing materials, provided search engine optimization services, website analytics review, media buying, advertising tracking, e-mail marketing, photography, radio advertising and other marketing services as needed.
The Most Experienced Horse Trailer Marketing Service
We have over 15 years of horse trailer marketing experience. We’ve worked with many brands and dealers over the years and we’d love to work for you! If you are in this industry and would like to learn more about how we increase sales and brand image for our clients, please give us a call @ 832.510.9714 .
Email marketing continues to be a cost effective and easy way to get your message to your customers.
Notice that we did not fill this email with advertising verbage, but instead, we created quality, news worthy content that their readers would enjoy. If you strive to prived quality content, your marketing efforts will always be more successful.
