Wednesday 23, June 2010

J&H Homes Are Ready to Move, Are You?

This is a slightly edited version of a post that appeared on our blog:

March, April, and nearly June have flown by!  Chances are it’s because we’ve had our heads down working hard on client’s sites. One of the sites that we recently launched was a redesign of J&H Homes - the ready to move homes division of J&H Builders Warehouse.

Their previous site was working okay for them, but they had new brochures that they wanted their web site to match up with for a consistent look throughout their marketing materials.  As well, they wanted their website to convey the history and strong tradition of building great ready to move homes that J&H Homes has had for over 40 years.

The slogans J&H Homes wanted at the top of the website are not just marketing speak, they are phrases that honestly represent what J&H Homes stands for:

By featuring large, beautiful renderings of the ready to move homes instead of just their names customers are able to, at a glance, see which home they are interested in on the /our_homes page:

Be sure to contact us if you have any questions about how your website could be improved to help your customers find the information they are looking for AND the information you want them to find.

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Should I Twitter?

A common question we're getting from clients is whether they should be twittering, on the Twitter, or doing that twitters thing?

The Short Answer

Yes. There's tremendous value in being a part of the online conversation about your business.

The Slightly Longer Answer

It depends. For a lot of businesses, it could be very beneficial to be on Twitter - provided you invest the time to authentically be a part of the ongoing conversation.

The blessing and the curse of tools like Twitter is that it's a two way conversation. Gone are the days of sending out a bunch of flyers and hoping someone might respond. With Twitter you can send out details of a promotion and get a response back from someone within moments telling you that your promotion is a terrible idea. How you respond will determine how useful Twitter is.

You can:

•  Ignore it. The potential customer will likely think your Twitter account is just a corporate/business account and ignore/block/unfollow you.
   
• Respond with anger!. You could tweet back a reply with an insult and be hurt that someone doesn't like your promotion. Obviously the potential customer will leave with an even worse impression of your business.
   
• Follow up with a question. By asking the potential customer something like "What would make this promotion appealing to you?" you can do some cheap and easy marketing research. Maybe they think you're price is too high. Or maybe they had a bad experience at your store the last time they were in. Whatever the reason, you'll be able to adjust and adapt more quickly, provided you're ready.

Not to imply that all responses are negative. There's plenty of good responses that you'll hear. But it's important to recognize that once you open up a line of communication on Twitter, just like when you advertise a phone number, you need to make sure someone is responsible for answering. If you don't have the time or resources to do that, then you shouldn't be on Twitter.

For a good example of businesses using Twitter, check out @starbucks, @DellCares, and locally, @NormFisher. Be sure to contact us if you'd like help deciding whether you should be tweeting on Twitter or if your time would be better spent elsewhere.

And be sure to follow @YasTech on Twitter!

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