It’s happened to most of us by now. We’ve been on Facebook posting something on a friend’s wall about a specific interest, like design, next thing you know Facebook is showing you an ad about design agencies. That’s the power of Facebook ads, using what Facebook knows a user is interested in and allowing us to specifically target certain users.

Facebook ads can be powerful tools that help generate traffic to your website or Facebook page and increase brand awareness. Facebook ads can be an advertiser’s dream, allowing them to target a specific market simply by using the information they have so willingly shared. But it is important to know the strategy of advertising on Facebook before you start.

1.  Identify your goals
What do you want to achieve? Do you want more likes on your business page, increase traffic to your website, or elevated brand recognition? Do you want to get people to enter a contest or just offer them a promotion? Do you want to obtain new sales leads? Your objective will always define your marketing strategy, so make sure you know what your goals are before launching any campaign.

2. Know your audience
Who do you want to reach? Don’t define your audience solely by demographics, for example.  Go further than that. What would attract your customer’s attention most? Knowing your market will allow you to target the ads more effectively by creating imagery and copy that will get their attention.

3. Set your budget
Set a clear budget as you would with any marketing initiative. Determine how much you want to spend either daily or during the length of time you will be running the ad. Identify your cost per click or cost per thousand impressions bid. How much of a budget are you able to put towards Facebook ads? What’s your strategy? Should you start a cost per thousand (CPM) or a click through (CTR) campaign?

4. Know the rules
Become familiar with Facebook’s policies and approval process. You’ll find information on what you can and cannot include in your ads. Knowing the guidelines ahead of time will not only save time, but lower the chance of your ad getting shut down.

5. Copy is key
Write enticing copy that grabs your viewers’ attention. Include a call to action like “Click here!” to help get your audience to act.

6. Draw the eye
Facebook ads that have simple images generally receive a better response. If possible, include a person’s face to help create a personal connection with your audience. Avoid using images with hard to read text.

7. Prepare for landing
When creating the ad, make sure to consider where you are sending your audience. Your landing page should reflect the content and tone of the ad. If a user clicks the ad to get to your landing page and there is too much of a disconnect, they might distrust the service or product you are offering.

8. Analyze the performance
One benefit of Facebook advertising is that you can stop ads and launch new ones at any time. You need to create many alternative ads in order to test which ones are most effective. Most importantly you will need to analyze the ads that are not producing results so you can see where to improve.

Facebook ads are great for customer engagement, brand loyalty, and increased traffic. They can better integrate your brand into your customers’ daily life.  Keep them aware of your brand and talking about you by asking questions and through constant engagement. Recently, Facebook announced that it might include ads in their users’ news feed which would make ads possibly even more effective by integrating them into customers’ every day Facebook activities.

The subject line of an email can make the difference between a reader opening your email or deleting it. Good subject lines include details about what’s inside and emphasizes the benefit of the recipient opening your email.

It is important to have a subject line that is not only effective so readers open your email, but also one that does run the risk of getting filtered into a spam folder. Surprisingly a lot of terms that you might expect to find in a subject line can get your email filtered to a spam folder or negatively affect your open rates due to the impression the reader received. Words like free, Help, Percent off, and Reminder have been known cause spam filter problems and can cause users to delete the email because spammers tend to use these words.

Below is a list of tips for a successful subject line for your email marketing campaign:

• - Keep your subject lines under 35 characters. Open rates tend to drop from 24% - 17% on average when the subject line goes over 35 characters.
• - If your email is a periodical for example a newsletter include the name of the newsletter and date/issue number in the subject line.
• - Give the reader an idea of what to expect inside the email. Keep it straightforward, don’t try to be overly creative!
• - For most emails avoid telling people what to do. Telling your reader what to do can hurt your open rates, because the reader decides before reading your message and seeing the imagery, “No, I don’t want to do that right now. Delete.” Keep in mind, however, although it can hurt open rates,  “telling people what to do” has been shown in research to improve the actual response from your email. So, using direct words can be beneficial in certain circumstances.
• - Pose your subject line as a question.  These subject lines tend to perform better because they will entice the reader to open the email to view the message.
• - Avoid promotional or sales oriented phrases. Your subject line should not be written like an advertisement.
• - Avoid words like “free,”” help,” and “reminder,” as they tend to trigger spam filters and can cause a negative open rate.

These are just some of the things to consider when evaluating your brand. helium provides all of these services plus more under one roof. This allows us to create a consistent, quality branding campaign. Consistency and quality is what ensures a memorable brand that drives your product.

Over 75 million iPhones have been sold worldwide and the term iPad is being used synonymously to describe all tablet devices. What do these statements mean for your brand exactly? Chances are, existing and potential customers are using iPhones and iPads. helium provides the service of developing apps for iPhones and iPads. The number of ideas and functions used for apps are practically limitless. The benefits of mobile device apps are unique to each brand. They provide a seamless, instant way of reaching out to your audience by literally putting your brand at their finger-tips.

For Levinson Jewelers, we are developing an app that allows users worldwide to now shop at the luxury jewelry store from their mobile device, ultimately propelling Levinson into becoming a global brand. The e-commerce tools helium created for their website will now be exponentially more effective and intuitive for the millions of mobile device users. The app poses to make Levinson’s products more accessible, resulting in increased sales and brand recognition.

Most recently the architecture firm PowersSchram proposed the challenge of creating a customized file sharing application for the iPad that would allow them to connect directly with their client base in order to upload renderings, plans, documents, relevant movies and images in order to stay up to date with the development of a project. helium designed and programmed this user friendly app with the intention to not only offer an organized and efficient backend system for PowersSchram to upload and manage content, but also create a front end interface that will keep clients well informed and current with the progression of projects as well as offer the ability to directly share content on social media platforms.  With the ability to easily share data and store client information, the PowersSchram app acts as an essential tool for the firm to offer leading service, innovation and convenience to their customer, ultimately furthering the value of their brand.

We created a truly unique app for the world-renowned pop-up book author Chuck Fischer. His books, titled “A Christmas Carol” and “Twas the Night Before Christmas”, were brought to life on the iPad. All of the colorful illustrations animate and move organically; something simply not possible in print form. The reader is truly immersed in these classic stories as they directly interact with the illustrations, tilting, touching and tapping characters and objects and seeing how they respond. For Chuck, mobile devices and Apps created a completely new way for people to experience his products.

Mobile device and App development are quickly becoming the standard for brand communication. As technology advances, mobile devices are taking the place of home computers. The ability to access information 24/7 from on the go creates an ideal scenario for marketing. For the first time, you can be in constant contact with your audience. Give us a call and we’ll discuss the many ways these services can be utilized to further your brand.

]]> http://www.heliumcreative.com/blog/reach-higher-hows-apps-will-help-you-reah-new-heights/feed/ 0 http://www.heliumcreative.com/blog/links-matter/ http://www.heliumcreative.com/blog/links-matter/#comments Wed, 11 Apr 2012 22:24:31 +0000 helium creative http://www.heliumcreative.com/blog/?p=452

Whenever I’m asked about what I do for a living, I say something like this: “you know those pieces of text that you can click on inside of a webpage, the ones that take you somewhere else? I place those.”

Blank stare. Sometimes they respond with, “OK, but why?” That’s a damn good question. The “why” behind the existence of links has been a bit more absent than it should be, especially for people who are new to the field.

Why Do Links Matter?

Hyperlinks were the main method of building the Internet and connecting sites through HTML, allowing people and bots to move around and find what they needed. They were like any other citations, methods of getting additional information by going somewhere else.

Contrary to popular belief, Al Gore didn’t invent the hyperlink. The term itself was first used in the 1960s, before most of you were born.

In 1998 there was the first on-paper mention of PageRank, just before Larry Page and Sergei Brin actually founded Google. The theory behind PageRank became part of the basis of the Google algorithm, and continues to be so today.

To greatly simplify the concept, PageRank is a popularity contest wherein the pages with the most support (via inbound links) behind them should be viewed as the most important ones. You could increase a page’s importance simply by building as many links as possible to it.

As anyone who deals with SEO knows though, it’s a lot trickier than that.

Not All Links Are of Equal Importance

A link from the homepage of a powerful site like the BBC will be of a higher quality than a link from the links page of your high school’s blog.

If a competitor that ranked above you in the SERPs had 100 more links than you, you couldn’t just go grab 101 links and rank above him. Some links are simply more valuable than others, particularly links from authoritative sites (like respected news sites) and links from .edu and .gov domains.

Like every other SEO tactic, this was abused, differing opinions abounded, and everyone tried to nail down the exact science of it.

In 2005, the nofollow link attribute came along and ruined all our fun. No longer could we throw tons of links at sites in order to make them rank. That can still work as you’ll see at times, but quick wins with links aren’t as plentiful as they were pre-nofollow.

In 2009, PageRank was removed from Google’s Webmaster Tools, mainly due to the fact that people didn’t really understand that the number they saw wasn’t a true representation of their sites’s importance (and was updated about as frequently as your grandma’s hairstyle.)

Note: there have been some updates to the original PageRank patent, which Bill Slawski covers in detail here.

The PrePageRank World

What did we do before we had that pesky little toolbar indicator? Without that one commonly misunderstood metric to constantly monitor and agonize about, we used rankings and traffic as an indicator of our performance.

We could also rank a site without links, just by keyword stuffing (cramming keywords into my tags and content to the extent that 50 percent of my words were that exact keyword, for example) and cloaking (figuring out how to send search engine spiders to one place where I keyword-stuffed while showing users a nice, pretty page). Those were the good old days when you could get a link on a site and not get cussed out by your client because they wanted all PR 4s and up and you, stupidly, got a link on a new but very relevant and well-trafficked PR 0 site.

We still knew that links were important. They just didn’t make us crazy.

Link exchanges were very big. Having a page just devoted to outgoing links was huge. It was a softer, gentler time when link building as we know it today was innocent. The only people that I knew who built links were generalist SEOs, and looking back now, it’s easy to see that we did it badly by today’s standards.

Actual PageRank

There’s a point that gets lost a lot, one that makes it obvious that actual PageRank and visible PageRank are two very different things.

The PageRank that we can see represented in the bar, a number, from a PageRank checker, etc., is updated infrequently and isn’t the actual PageRank that Google assigns to your site. The actual PageRank calculation, if shown here, would make all of our heads spin. Let’s just say that it’s a lot more complicated than a number from 0 to 10.

Toolbar PageRank

This is what you do see (and sometimes confuse with actual PageRank.) Toolbar PageRank is one of many factors in how your site will rank but its importance is way overblown and oversimplified. You will see sites with a Toolbar PageRank of 1 outranking sites with a Toolbar PageRank of 5, due to various other considerations (like social signals, for example.)

PageRank Sculpting and Link Juice

Now here is where things get particularly interesting to me. Pages have their own specific PageRank (both actual and toolbar) and through linking elsewhere, they can send link juice in the same way that they receive it.

If a page has 10 outgoing links on it and none are nofollowed, each page linked to should receive one-tenth of that page’s link juice. If five links are nofollowed and five are not, each of those five followed links should receive 20 percent of that page’s link juice and the five nofollowed links should receive none of it.

Due to this idea, people began to experiment with manipulation. (Can you imagine SEOs manipulating anything?) We nofollowed certain links that went to other site pages, ones that weren’t quite as important as the others but ones that we did link to in the navigation. That seemed OK.

Later, like with almost everything else, it got complicated. I won’t bore you with the details here. Suffice it to say it’s not a widely recommended practice anymore. Some still do it, some don’t, but controlling link juice didn’t work as we hoped it would. You’d think we would all learn our lessons but no, no we never do.

So Why Do Links Matter Today?

Oddly enough, they matter for the same reasons that they have always mattered: they send traffic by making connections and yes, they are still a large part of ranking. I don’t see that changing any time soon, even though many people (and myself) think that certain other factors like social signals are becoming important.

A good link will send you nice link juice and help to boost your rankings so that you’ll get more traffic and hopefully more conversions. A great link will do the same thing but it will send you traffic on its own.

Some links probably do absolutely nothing positive. You can get a link on a high-profile site and no one will ever click on it. You can receive referring traffic from a footer link on the crappiest site you’ve ever seen. You can get a rankings boost from both of those links. It’s like magic.

Then there’s the concept of authority. Links from other sites will lend credibility and authority to your site, ideally, through using you as an example. When a site links to you, the anchor text is viewed as an indicator of what your site is about.

Like the rest of this, that is no longer a perfect system. Theoretically, the keywords that a site links to you with should boost your authority for that topic.

If CNN linked to your site with an anchor of “great place to buy a computer” then your site would probably be viewed as an actual great place to buy a computer, and you’d probably rank higher for that phrase than if you’d gotten that link from your mom’s local birdwatching site. However, the birdwatching site would still help you rank for a great place to buy a computer, but since it’s most likely not as authoritative as CNN, to actually get a noticeable rankings boost, you’d need to get that link and more of the same for it to make a difference.

CNN has authority signals, which engines can take into account: people link to it, they reference it on Twitter and Facebook, they comment on stories, they comment on videos, the traffic is probably truly amazing, and the brand itself is one that most people recognize. One link from a site like that is much, much more powerful than more links from sites that have no social traction or online footprint.

Here is What I Truly Believe

The importance of links may lessen a bit, but it won’t go away completely. The web was built on links. You can rank well without them of course (think breaking news stories or blog posts that get loads of attention on the first few days), but depending upon what shows up in a search engine‘s results is just as bad an idea as depending upon any one route into your site.

© 2012 Search Engine Watch, by Julie Joyce

We appreciate any donations that are made to team helium!  Help us give back to those in need!

A recent trip to Jamaica, Haiti and Mexico inspired helium to look at our natural and culturally influenced environment to find inspiration for future projects and concepts. While exploring these three countries, we found inspiration in some of the most interesting places.  From caves in Mexico to the depths of the Caribbean sea and waterfalls in Jamaica.  As the creative bunch that we are, helium photographed many of these recent adventures to preserve the memory and transform it into inspiration for a later use.   Good ideas can come from a variety of places that range from the most common to the more often times overlooked.

It is our job as designers and creative people to bring you fresh ideas and solutions that offer a unique approach to the conventional design aesthetic.  What better place to look than the very world around us?  Entire color palettes, themes and concepts can be created, for example, simply by using a color story taken from the environment.  helium is always looking to find inspiration in even the most unlikely of places.  Nature has always been a primary source of our creative juices!  From the depths of the ocean to the leaves on trees, we always have our eyes peeled for new and interesting influences in our work.

]]> http://www.heliumcreative.com/blog/we-are-environmentally-inspired/feed/ 0 http://www.heliumcreative.com/blog/our-new-and-improved-website/ http://www.heliumcreative.com/blog/our-new-and-improved-website/#comments Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:12:12 +0000 helium creative http://www.heliumcreative.com/blog/?p=399

The helium website has undergone a mini face lift.   We have added new features and enhanced existing ones.  You will see a homepage animation that conceptually  illustrates the benefits of working with helium – the slew of services that we offer, from website design and advertising, to app development, internet marketing and search engine optimization.  We know that it all starts with a single idea and that the process can be overwhelming to a client – where to go with that idea, how to express it to a target market, what avenues will provide optimum results?  helium can offer a higher creative standard that will lift you out of the weeds and that much closer to success!  Our homepage animation exemplifies how helium can come to the rescue and provide solutions that work!

]]> http://www.heliumcreative.com/blog/our-new-and-improved-website/feed/ 0 http://www.heliumcreative.com/blog/project-fine-art-has-arrived/ http://www.heliumcreative.com/blog/project-fine-art-has-arrived/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:57:42 +0000 helium creative http://www.heliumcreative.com/blog/?p=392 Project Fine Art is the brainchild of Christopher Heller, president and creative director of helium creative. An artist himself he started his career in advertising design as a way of utilizing his own talents and building a career free of the artist struggle.

We have worked hard to bring you a new gallery space chalked full of local talented artists that we are proud to showcase!

With the space, resources and connections to get other artists works viewed Project Fine Art was born. A combination of physical gallery to showcase featured artists and online gallery where all of the artists are displayed. Each with their own bio and ability to purchase online.

In addition Project Fine Art has committed to paying it forward by donating a portion of all proceeds to local a childrens art foundations. The charities are promoting art in our youth and creating the future artists of tomorrow.

We welcome you to join us at an upcoming even or to browse our growing collection of artists at www.projectfineart.com.

Our most current campaign efforts have been for the landscape architecture, planning and urban design firm, EDSA.  They approached helium with the objective of creating a year-long direct mail and e-blast campaign that not only promoted the company, but increased brand awareness.  The initial requirements were to incorporate the 5 senses with original photographs taken by EDSA employees.

helium proposed the additional goal of enhancing the company’s social media presence by holding a photography contest that enticed the public to submit their own senses inspired photographs to the EDSA Facebook page.  Not only does this solution drive traffic to the page and increase their fan base, but also exceeds the goal of increasing brand awareness by widening their market to the online community.

helium went to bat, constructing an original design piece that utilized each of the 5 senses.  Abstracting images that best represented a corresponding sense, we juxtaposed each original EDSA photograph to further illustrate the message – paired with a verse that bridged the two images together.  The five direct mail pieces translated seamlessly into five additional interactive e-blasts, as well as an ad campaign for Urban Land magazine.

Through this campaign, helium and EDSA have formed a well established partnership for future endeavors.  The year-long marketing scheme will not only place EDSA at the top of their game, but also raise awareness of the brand and increase their online presence.