Let's see what happens

Keeping your website fresh is a challenge. One of the things we do at Sunrise Marketing is try to establish a schedule (and then keep it) for changing out our home page. We normally try to coordinate the graphic with a promotion that we might be running in one of our e-mail promotions. We keep the promotions to one a month and run it for 8 days. We suggest that all promotions have a definite time span in order to create a sense of urgency.

From that point we put another 'call out' to the right of it on the home pages with some other quick links for our catalog, publications and links to facebook and twitter feeds. The point is that if you have a recipe for defining your home page it can make it easier to manage. This week I thought it might be fun to share a recipe for a home page graphic that would break up a series of sale, or promotional offers. In baking our cake I added some of the base ingredients you might use in your graphics.

First the color. We wanted something that would not clash too terribly with the established colors used in our header. We used red this time around because studies show that it creates urgency and excitement. OK, so red it is.

Next, and most important, the copy. Again to exaggerate the point I went back to an old article I had written back in 2007 (wow) about the ten most powerful words in advertising which led us to another website featuring their list. Well, everyone has their opinion (and research to back it up) so we sorted through them all and selected:

You (number one answer), Easy, and Results.

We came up with "We make it easy for you to get the results you need".

Next came the image. Since most of our customers are garden center owners we selected an image from Istock.com of a garden center type guy pushing a cart of plants in a greenhouse. The objective is to choose an image people could relate to. Hope you like it.

Finally, a call to action. What do you want the person to do? We decided on listing our toll free number - Call 1-888-393-4443, plus a click here button.

So, put all the ingredients together and you have a graphic (or ad) for the front of your website. Finally, I posted this blog to keep the blog posts fresh and provide specific information to help our clients create more compelling ads. I will probably then post to Facebook to lead to this blog, which of course will trigger an automated Tweet with a link. Of course our other type of e-newsletter will go out on Monday (as scheduled) and will refer to this post, plus Facebook, Twitter and Today's Garden Center magazine articles.

I think by now you get the point. If you have a plan, a strategy and a message you can organize your marketing to get your message out on schedule.

Since we have a Google account (for blogger, analytics, alerts) we use the calendar in order to organize the dates for each of the tasks. I hope there is some information here that might help you with your e-marketing efforts. Let me know what you think.