TemplateZone Blog

Our Director of Marketing, Justin Rondeau, spoke at the Conversion Conference West in San Francisco, CA on March 15th 2011.  Justin has made it his mission to teach people about the benefits of generating quality content and publishing it properly over social media.  TemplateZone is a big supporter of the content marketing revolution that has been spearheaded by people like Byron White from ideaslaunch.com and Ann Handley & Becki Dilworth who are currently on the ‘Content Revolution Tour’ sponsored by BridgeLine Digital (see if they are coming to your city). 

Justin wanted to supply you with the slides from his presentation as well as some tips/tricks for anyone who wants to create a successful Facebook page or wants to have a presence on social media altogether. 

 If you are reading this then you are interested in using social media for your company.  My fascination with social media marketing began when I was asked to write a whitepaper for my company, TemplateZone.  My mission was to find the best examples of a Facebook business page, a mission I thought was going to be relatively easy.  To my surprise this mission was VERY difficult.  Examples of great Facebook pages were few and far between, and the only stellar pages were pages by large companies like Coca-Cola or Redbull who have a massive marketing budget. 

When I decided to look for a great example of a Facebook page for small businesses, it was no surprise that I didn’t find anything.  Most people are simply creating a profile picture and trying to sell their product on Facebook.

Before I go any further I think it is important for you to see how important it is for your business to not only have a Facebook page, but to have a QUALITY Facebook page.   

Facebook has seen rapid growth in the last few years, and is truly a marketers dream.  However, traditional marketers are approaching Facebook all wrong, and if they want Facebook to bring them any sort of return, they must approach it differently.

Facebook has seen rapid growth in the last few years, and is truly a marketers dream. Just look at the numbers, it is irresponsible to not create a Facebook page! However there is a disclaimer for those who are planning to create a barebones page: a bad page can be worse than having no page at all, REMEMBER THIS, if you are going to do social media you CANNOT do it halfway.

During my research for the white paper I found some really great pages, Redbull really has the right idea. There is a clear call to action, visuals and an incentive for liking the page. In contrast there is Bose’s page what has two major issues.  The first being when you land on Bose’s page you are immediately brought to the wall; there is nothing aesthetically pleasing about the wall, and any unique visitor that lands on the wall will likely bounce. The second major issue is with their tabs, one tab is just plain text, and does not stand out from other pages competing for ‘Likes’

So when you are creating a Facebook page don’t pull a Bose, pay attention to where your unique visitors land and give them ‘something to talk about’.

My next post will give you tips and tricks for your Facebook business page so stay tuned!

We have just released our BETA to a small group of user to let them see how easy it can be to create a polished and professional Facebook page.  I came across one of our BETA testers page and was delighted to see that they had successfully created a Facebook Tab with High Impact Designer!  Below you will see the page she created and her comments on the process of creating the tab:

“I’m new to using products from your company but honestly don’t know how I’ve been without them for so long!”

If you want a chance to create Facebook tabs that are both stylish and completely editable contact justin@templatezone.com for your chance to try out our Facebook BETA solution.  If you want to see this page with your own eyes go to www.facebook.com/AllDogBoots.

Lately I have been seeing more and more blog posts talking about the benefits of creating a Facebook Business Page, and showing some of the best pages in the industry.  These are very well written and insightful blog posts, but they miss one very important caveat, how to create a good looking page!  Sure, large businesses have the luxury of having a huge marketing budget and can afford designers and coders, but how are small businesses supposed to have an impact on Facebook?  Small businesses can’t have a designer on staff all the time so they are forced to hire free lance workers, which makes me think of the old proverb:

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

When implementing a new marketing campaign, small businesses may become too dependent on free lance graphic designers and coders. Obviously small businesses want great content to compliment their well thought out email, print and social media campaigns, yet they do not have the means to do this on their own. Small businesses don’t have the money to keep a designer on staff, which is why they would hire a free lance designer to create the images for their campaign, and a coder to create the email, Facebook page, or print template. This is all fine and well, but what happens when the small business owner wants to change the content even a little?

I’ll tell you what happens:

A whole lot of nothing!

There are really two choices for a small business owner:

1) Hire a freelance designer and coder to create NEW images and NEW emails, print documents, or Facebook pages.

2) Leave everything as it is and become BORING

Obviously ‘option 2′ isn’t an option for a business owner who wants to be successful. So the small business owner becomes dependant on the free lance work and will continually spend more and more money even for the most modest of changes. Small businesses are always looking for a better way to spend their time and money, and according to the proverb above hiring free lancers ‘to fish for you’ is only a quick fix and should be avoided.

If it is better to avoid quick fixes, then how are small businesses expected to get the tools to ‘learn to fish’? We can’t expect small business to lose time in classes or in a futile attempt to learn all the nuances of programs like Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe Illustrator, or intimidating HTML coding. The above proverb leaves small businesses in quite the predicament; it would have a business owner avoid the quick fix with free lancers, but leaves no room for the owner to get the tools necessary to be successful.

To any small business owners, how do you cut costs and manage time for your email, print, or social media marketing campaigns?

It seems as though with all of these other New Year’s Resolutions we have severely neglected the TemplateZone blog! There has been a whirl-wind of activity here at TempateZone as of late, and the following is a quick guide to the goings-ons at TemplateZone!

Affiliate Summit

The Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas was the first step in revitalizing TemplateZone’s current affiliate program. We learned more than we ever could about the differences between OPMs, Networks, Merchants, and affiliates. There were many networks represented down at the Affiliate Summit such as Shareasale, RevenueWire, and Commission Junction. It was great speaking with these networks and all of the other attendees at ASW 11.

If you are interested in becoming an affiliate contact Justin Rondeau (justin@templatezone.com)

Email Evolution Conference (EEC)

TemplateZone also attended the Email Evolution Conference in Miami earlier this month. This was an amazing chance for us to learn the best practices for email marketing. The EEC also connected us with many ESPs out there who likely see our templates sent by their users! If you met with us down at the EEC and want to get in touch please do, we would love to hear from you!

Conversion Conference

TemplateZone’s very own Justin Rondeau will be speaking at Conversion Conference West out in San Francisco. The Conversion Conference is one of the top conferences for discussing landing page tactics and new approaches to PPC ads. Justin will specifically be speaking on ‘Social Media Conversions’ and why it is necessary for marketers to abandon how they traditionally define conversions when dealing with social media

We’re Hiring!

We are in the process of hiring a talented and motivated Marketing Evangelist. Check out our Craig’s list advertisement here. If you are interested in the position or know anyone who would be a good fit, send your/their resume to jobs@templatezone.com.

New Product

We have been in the process of developing a new product, and we are VERY excited for its release.  We will provide you with more information in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for it!

Throughout the next couple weeks we will discuss each of these topics in much more depth, we just wanted to remind our readers that we didn’t forget about you!