Social media and its many platforms have been a game-changer when it comes to marketing. With the ability to target certain audiences and at low price-point, being on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter is as important as ever for promoting brand awareness. However, more important than social media is a company’s website, said Patrick Fransko, president of Eye Magnet Management in Newport Beach, Calif., in his opening seminar on the final day at the International Window Film Conference and Tint-Off™ (WFCT).
“Our philosophy is that a website is the hub of a wheel,” said Fransko. “Everything you’re doing online and on social media connects to that hub.” The main purpose of social media marketing, he explained, is to drive consumers to your website.
“It doesn’t have to be a very expensive website,” he iterated, “but you need to have a really solid one that presents your company well.” Ultimately, you have to think of your website as a showroom, he explained, and you should be able to get a quality website for $2,500 to $5,000 USD, if you’re not selling products online.
“You need to have something that is updated frequently and presents well, looks current, looks modern and is mobile friendly in order to get organic traffic on search engines,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to implement all of these social media strategies to drive traffic back to your website if it’s not maintained and current.”
Fransko’s advice? Update your website regularly via a “latest news” section, or a portfolio of completed projects with multiple images and captions. “Google bumps websites that are getting updated regularly,” he said.
Fransko also addressed search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, pointing out that dealers should be more concerned with long tail SEO. This type of strategy utilizes longer and more specific search phrases, as opposed to general key terms.
“Think of how you search on Bing or Google,” Fransko said. “A lot of times, people will just begin typing a sentence as opposed to keywords; that’s called a long tail search.”
To make long tail SEO work for your company, Fransko says to cater your website content to best match what your target consumers may be searching for. “You need to get in their mind and think, ‘How do they actually search?’ and create your SEO around that,” he explained. “We talk about industry so much differently than the way our customers talk about our industry.”