, , , ,

5 Marketing Ideas for Valentine’s Day That Aren’t Cliché

Mother and daughter making valentines day crafts. Marketing ideas for Valentine's

Valentine’s Marketing

Valentine’s Day is a big day for romance and marketing. These are also the two arenas where clichés only lead to eye-rolls instead of undying affection. Romance and marketing need to be inventive and authentic to get attention. Valentine’s Day is one of the first holiday opportunities in the new year for business marketing, but it also means every business is advertising around it. When so many businesses are trying to woo customers, you need to stand out to really charm them. Here are five tips to break away from those eye-rolling Valentine’s clichés and start planning original ideas.

Be Original and Make Your Business Creatively Romantic

Often when people imagine Valentine’s Day, they think of restaurants, candle-lit dinners, and flowers, but romance takes countless forms. Originality is the essence of charm. Imagine how your business can fit into romantic plans or a date, and have your marketing inspire novel romantic actions or gifts. Maybe certain products or Valentine’s packages can make a heartfelt gift or be the basis for a cute date. Have fun with it: new pajamas for a night away, bikes for a couple’s ride on the trails, or a board game for an intimate night at home. Be creative and market to the experiences and emotions of moments your business’ products/services can create. Even a gift card can be made romantic for partners to share a shopping spree date.

Market to their Original Relationships: Friends

Valentine’s is typically for romantic partners, but not everyone will be spending the holiday with their sweetheart. Friends, however, are no less important loved ones in our lives. You can include marketing that inspires shows of affection between friends. Our friends provide valuable emotional support like our partners, and it’s also nice to show them care and appreciation. Galentine’s Day on February 13 has recently become a more notable day for women to shower each other with amicable affection. It’s perfect if your business primarily caters to a feminine demographic. If you are looking for a more gender-inclusive option, you could go for the similarly punny “Pal-entine’s Day”.

Embrace Their Own Valentine

Along with partners and friends, everyone should have and show love and care to themselves. You can market services and products for those who are looking to or should give themselves that much deserved affection this Valentine’s Day. Along with marketing for platonic relationships, this strategy lets you reach customers or clients who may otherwise feel rejected or dejected during the holiday of love. Marketing that emphasizes their individual value and sympathizes with their possible loneliness helps motivate them towards acting on that original self-affection.

Be Their Valentine

Your marketing doesn’t just have to focus on customers and clients showing love to those important in their lives. Your customers and audience are valuable to you and your business, so Valentine’s Day is a great opportunity to show them some of your own love. Be their Valentine with special promotions or discounts. Create social media posts that acknowledge and thank your community. Be sure that those displays of affection or gratitude are authentic and in line with your brand so they feel sincere. Front-facing the human element of your business in this marketing will further ensure those Valentine’s posts create a real connection.

Combining These Together for Something Truly Original

One of these strategies alone will help you create some original Valentine’s marketing for the well-trodden holiday of love. However, using a strategy that only targets romantic partners, friends, or singles will exclude the others. Combining multiple of these strategies will allow you to reach and acknowledge most if not all your community and potential customers. Use multiple strategies together to create a fully original affectionate marketing roster that can pull on everyone’s heartstrings.

Originality is the Essence of Marketing and Romance

With these strategies you can bring some spice to your marketing this Valentine’s Day. Demonstrate how your business can play a vital role in your customers and community showing each other affection along with showing your own. Want more original strategies and ideas? Contact Rosewood’s marketing team for help creating novel and effective marketing.

/0 Comments/by
, , , , , , , , , ,

Why Every Business Should Have a Blog (Following Best Practices!)

Man reading a blog about hiring a PPC Ads Manager in Newmarket

Last week we talked about content repurposing, and how you can turn one blog post into multiple pieces of content. This time, we wanted to talk about why your business should have a blog

There are two aspects to why you should be posting blogs: Technical and Business. 

Technical Reasons For Why You Should Have A Blog

There are two very important technical reasons why you should have a blog: Increase Your Organic SEO (i.e. Impress Google), and Backlinking.

  1. Increase Organic SEO, i.e. impress Google’s algorithms and backlinking. 
    Blogging is effectively the single best way to increase your website’s organic SEO. Your SEO, also known as “Search Engine Optimization”, determines your ranking in Search Engines for relevant search terms.

    When blogging, you can write in a way that boosts your SEO score, that allows both your blog and your website to appear closer, if not at the top of the results page while Googling. This is how you impress Google’s algorithms. Google wants to show the search results that are the most recent and most relevant to the search inquiry. Examples of ways to write to impress Google’s algorithms is to include focused key words. This blog is full of them! Can you guess what they are? 
  1. Backlinking
    Backlinking is essentially any time another reputable website publishes a link to your website. This could be as supplementary info to their blog (i.e. check out so-and-so’s blog for more information!).

    The more people that find your blogs useful and link it to their website, the better your website will perform overall. This is great motivation to not only write blogs that are good for your SEO, but also enjoyable and informational to the reader. 

Business Reasons For Why You Should Have A Blog

There are three business-related reasons why you should be blogging regularly: establish your business as the expert, resonate with readers via real-world applications/case studies and create content to be redistributed on other platforms.

  1. Establish Your Business as the Expert:
    Sharing your knowledge, industry news, tips and tricks, or even news about your business through effective blogging gives you the opportunity to have your clients, customers and industry peers recognize you as an expert in your industry. 
  1. Anecdotes, Case Studies and Projects
    By sharing anecdotes, case studies and projects, you’re allowing the reader an inside view into your operations. They may even touch on issues the reader is experiencing and outline a solution to their own problem. By blogging, you are resonating with your readers. 
  1. Repurpose Valuable Content Quickly & Efficiently
    Blogs allow for a wealth of content to be redistributed with a few extra clicks. You can quote your blog and turn snippets into Canva Graphics. Then post these on your Social Media and backlink to your blog (See what we did there?!) 

Overall, blogging is a great way to drive traffic to your website, which in return will help increase brand awareness and conversions (contact inquiries and/or e-commerce sales). We understand that blogging can be a daunting task, especially if you are learning on how to improve your SEO. Here at Rosewood, we offer blogging services for all business levels, whether it’s needing help improving your SEO or because you don’t have the time to blog, we have you covered. If you are interested in blogging, let’s get in touch!  

/0 Comments/by

Keep Your Website Healthy – The Most Common WordPress Maintenance Issues

The Most Common WordPress Maintenance Issues and how to update them resolve them by Rosewood Marketing in Newmarket and Toronto, Ontario for Small Business Marketing.

Like any piece of software (or hardware for that matter), a WordPress website relies on frequent software updates to continue functioning optimally. There are three main elements that updates apply to: the WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes and the WordPress Core itself. Today, we’re explaining the most common maintenance issues that can compromise the health of your WordPress website.

The Most Common WordPress Maintenance Issues

Security Vulnerabilities

The most common issue that we have encountered during our Maintenance onboarding process are security vulnerabilities; which can cause the biggest negative implications if not resolved.

No safe is uncrackable, the same is true with the software and programs running on your website. As WordPress and the many themes and plugins continue to improve security, efficiency and features offered for your use, it is important to stay current with updates to maintain an optimal and secure environment for the visitors to your website. 

Examples of Security Vulnerabilities: 

  1. Older versions of WooCommerce had a vulnerability which allowed guest users to create accounts during the checkout process even if the option ‘Allow customers to create an account during checkout’ was disabled. Meaning bots could create accounts, obtain system access, and place fake orders to look for vulnerabilities in other plugins on the site1.
  2. Older versions of Jetpack had a vulnerability in shortcode embeds, which would allow a remote attacker to embed and execute malicious code on your site.
  3. Older versions of the MemberMouse Platform plugin were susceptible to SQL injection.  A successful SQL injection could get access to sensitive user data, including usernames, passwords and other sensitive information. It could extract, insert, delete, or corrupt any type of information stored in a database on your website.

Why Enabling Auto-Update Is NOT the Answer

While you may think ‘Amazing, I’ll just set up auto-update on everything!” that is not a great solution and you run the risk of BREAKING your site. 

A Technical Balancing Act: Knowing When to Update vs. When to Wait

Security patches are not the only types of updates that your WordPress environment will experience. 

As new features get added, and the backend language on which the WordPress software was written gets on overhaul, some plugins take longer to keep up – while others stop trying altogether. This is when errors start to happen. 

Websites often require interconnected plugins to support a theme and/or add functionality to the website. When one of the elements falls behind it triggers a break in communication affecting the performance and behaviour of your site.

Maintaining a healthy website often becomes a balancing act of knowing when to press the “update button” and when to wait for all the plugins to catch up so that nothing breaks. 

Updating PHP Memory: “The White Screen of Death”

With all these updates, the plugins, page builders and themes that run your site require more resources to be processed. Your host will often put a script processing memory limit in order to prevent a single website from overloading the server. To fix this you would need to manually update your PHP memory limit in the backend of your website. 

Recommendations

Before you venture to do your own website updates, we recommend completing the following checklist:

  • Website Backup:
    • Make sure to get a full backup of your website before doing any updates – that includes all files and database entries
  • Check the Fine-Print:
    • Read the plugin update details often provided when a new version gets released to make sure that your website meets the minimal requirements – this often includes a PHP and WordPress version
  • Create a Staging Site:
    • If possible test your updates on a staging site to make sure that the styling and functionality of your website remains the same

Rosewood takes website security very seriously; not only does proper maintenance reduce potential downtime but it ensures that your website information and that of any clients remains safe and secure.

Rosewood offers WordPress Maintenance Packages to suit your website’s needs. Starting at just $87/month, we believe it’s worth the investment to be proactive and prevent a potential crash or hack event.

Questions? Contact us here or join us on Instagram and Facebook for more resources!

Dasha

Director of Web Development

/0 Comments/by