Our Blog Posts

It’s Time to Take Your Brick & Mortar Store Online

marciacatlin · April 1, 2020 ·

Maybe your business is impacted by a sadly now familiar emergency or disaster.

Maybe all of your competitors are moving online. Or maybe your customers have a newfound preference for online shopping.

Pairing your brick and mortar with an online store is key.

For online retail, sales are expected to reach nearly $600 billion by 2024.

Combining online and offline retail efforts in your 2020 business plan have the power to amplify reach and sales. It is another stream of revenue for your existing stores or a back-up plan if your customers are unable to purchase on a specific channel.

eCommerce + Brick-and-Mortar Advantages

Depending on your business needs, there may be many different reasons to add an eCommerce channel to your business. Here are 5 reasons why you should consider adding eCommerce.

Track customers to know what they really want.
Have direct access to your customers’ purchasing behaviors.
You can learn from these insights and make real-time changes to your store.
Improve customer loyalty and experience.
The online experience adds convenience to your customers’ daily lives. They can engage with your business anytime, any place. This creates more opportunities for you to serve your customers with relevant, personalized content.

Selling online gives you an entirely new landscape to entertain and connect with your customers. Get creative when thinking about how you can merge your online and offline.
Competition is moving online. Creating an online presence will give you a fair shot at challenging your competitors.
Speeds up the buying process.
Customers can now engage with you at any time in any place when many of them can’t shop offline for various reasons.
Engage customers of all generations.
While your business may thrive in a particular age demographic, selling online expands your reach which means you may discover customers from all generations.

The beauty of eCommerce is that you can create personalized experiences for every customer.

eCommerce Complements Brick-and-Mortar

Drive customers to your brick-and-mortar with in-store events or exclusive promotions (and vice versa).

Offer a wider product selection online. You may not be able to provide your entire inventory in-store. But, an online store makes it easy to display your entire offering — perhaps even products that haven’t been released yet.

Leverage your online store to showcase all your business has to offer and your brick-and-mortar to give customers a chance to interact with your products in person.

How To Select An eCommerce Platform

BigCommerce for Small Business

Not all eCommerce platforms are created equal. Every business has its individual needs, so you’ll need to review each platform with your own considerations in mind.

Depending on your industry and company, you may require specific features, such as:

Responsive eCommerce.
Product page functionality (e.g. cross-sell and upsell capabilities).
Auto-updated shopping cart.
A beautiful, modern, and clean design.
Mobile optimization.

J&M Group Tip

If you’re thinking about modernizing your eCommerce business, or are ready to begin selling online, we want to help. You can get three free months of BigCommerce to build your new online store. If you’re new to eCommerce, not to worry — J&M Group and BigCommerce can help you get set up. Click below to get started!

Create Your Store

Here’s Your Free Landing Page Guide

marciacatlin · March 23, 2020 ·

Landing pages are the superstar salespeople in your online business. Download your free landing page guide here.

No matter what stage of business you’re in, landing pages come in handy for a wide range of different marketing purposes.

Each landing page is designed with a single purpose: to convince visitors to convert. This means eliminating anything that is distracting like navigation menus and other unrelated content.

Successful landing pages share a few common elements. You can read more about how to design winning landing pages in our guide to landing page best practices. Here’s a quick overview:

• Create a new landing page for each offer. Landing pages with more than one CTA see dramatically lower conversions, so keep each landing page focused on a single offer.
• Keep your design clean and simple. The best landing pages are aesthetically pleasing, easy to read, and have clear messaging.
• Attract visitors with pictures and video. Great imagery evokes emotion, and emotion helps drive landing page conversions.
• Write persuasive copy. Focus on the pain your audience is experiencing and how your offer will help solve that pain.
• Add social proof and testimonials. The power of storytelling is mighty. Testimonials and case studies from existing customers build credibility and boost customer loyalty.
• Answer your visitors’ burning questions. Your copy should leave no stone unturned, answering the most common questions and concerns your audience might have.
• Include a strong call-to-action. Your CTA is crucial to your conversion rate, so it needs to be crystal clear.
• Track and optimize for conversions. Understand what success looks like, measure your results, and work on improving your landing pages over time.

Download our free Landing Page Guide below. It includes the following chapters:

What is a Landing Page?
13 Landing Page Best Practices to Help You Make Your Mark
How to Write a Great Landing Page
4 Essential Landing Page Elements
How to Use a Landing Page to Test a New Idea
What is a Good Landing Page Conversion Rate
8 Call-to-Action Examples for Your Next Landing Page
How to Create Lead Generation Landing Pages that Convert
How to Use Landing Pages with Email Marketing
How to Grow Your Email List with Free Landing Pages in 2020

Download FREE Landing Page Guide

No More Excuses Video Marketing

marciacatlin · February 27, 2020 ·

It’s expensive. It’s hard to do. It takes a lot of time. It has a questionable ROI.

Are these the reasons you’re not investing in video as a core part of your social marketing strategy?

Video Marketing. Did You Know?

Videos on landing pages increase conversions by a whopping 80%.
Video ads have a CTR (click-through-rate) of nearly 2%.
A branded social video leads 64% of consumers to a purchase decision.
Social videos generate 1200% more shares than other forms of content.
Companies that are going video-first are running far ahead of their competition.

So why are most companies still not taking video marketing seriously?

Because they’ve bought into these misconceptions:

Too Expensive

As with most new strategic endeavors, adding video to your marketing strategy requires some investment of money. AI or Artificial Intelligence software, however, changed all that!

Off-the-shelf video creation services have now made things 10x cheaper.

Too Difficult

Creating videos may seem difficult to some, but it’s really not. Look what I did here -> Content Marketing Lumen5 Videos

With some careful planning, a business can generate ideas that produce hours of video content. Creating these videos is a matter of prioritizing ideas, associating a strong CTA with each, and then finding the means to film. This may require investing in some new equipment, finding a freelancer to edit on a per-project basis, or calling in professionals to produce the video.

With Lumen5, I needed zero equipment. I created all of my videos on their platform with their images plus my own, their templates, my content, plus countless styling, animation, and other tricks.

Too Time-Consuming

For businesses that don’t have a lot of time to spare, they can hire a freelancer on a per-project/contractual basis to handle everything from idea generation to editing to the final publishing. Those businesses that are able to put in a little more time can save substantial amounts of money by keeping things in-house.

How can a business realistically begin creating videos?

The trickiest part of creating any video is figuring out the focus of the video.
That’s what creates the hang-up for many businesses. Since they struggle to even get past this first step, they assume the entire video creation process is going to be an uphill battle.

The key is…

Turn Pre-Existing Content Into Video

Lumen5 video creator uses a powerful approach because it takes the content ideas that your business has already put on your blog. It then generates a storyboard that automatically enables you to create appealing videos.

These are content ideas that you’ve repurposed into a video that’s guaranteed to boost engagement.

It’s as simple as pasting a link into
an A.I. powered tool!

GET More shares. By having a video to accompany your written content, you can share that video on social media rather than simply sharing a boring old link.

Since video is the most shareable form of content on the web, you’ll immediately triple your organic reach.

GET More engagement. If a person clicks through to an article because of an enticing title but is then met with a wall of text, they aren’t as likely to stick around as they would be if you featured a video on that page to accompany the text. Most people prefer video.

GET More conversions. Remember how we said that video increases landing page conversions by 80% and leads 64% of visitors to a purchase decision? Once you get that a-ha moment of just how ridiculously easy it is to start adding eye-catching, professional video content to your blog and social media pages, you’ll never turn back.

There are tangible, incredible, revenue-generating benefits that come along with having quality video content.

A tip. Post every day. Do it. Seriously.
Videos aren’t like a Facebook personal status update – your viewers aren’t going to develop content fatigue. Every video presents something new, and as long as you keep it short & actionable, the few seconds it takes to watch a video is nothing close to the mental energy used to read a long post.

The importance of video marketing is only set to increase with researchers estimating that 85 percent of all internet traffic within the United States will be video-based by 2020.

WordPress Freelance Web Designers.

mcoffey@jmgroup.net · February 7, 2020 ·

The Small Business Solution

It can be challenging to decide whether to hire a web design agency or a WordPress freelance web designer. For most small businesses, a website project is a large undertaking, requiring a significant investment of both money and time.

What is web development? It is a complicated process consisting of several stages. Each is important: web design, web development, content creation, search engine optimization, and digital marketing.

There are several advantages to hiring a freelancer to complete your project. Today is a good example of what I mean! “I’m not sure you will really want to talk to me,” said Karen, my newest client, apologetically … at 8:30 am.

“Now my second partner has quit on me, so we will have to start out once again with designing the website, plus get another new domain. I hope you can help me!”

This was now web design #3 in two weeks. But who’s counting?

Flexibility

Along with setting their own rates, freelancers can set their own schedules. This can positively impact the timeline of the project.

When working with individuals, they may be able to devote all their time to your project to get the work done faster, whereas an agency will be managing multiple projects with different timelines.

Depending on the agency or freelancer, you may experience a more hands-on approach with a freelancer. Since he or she is your sole contact on the project, there can be a more personal approach.

The Generalist

Freelancers speak your language. There are aspects of being a generalist that give us advantages over specialists. The Power Of A Generalist

Generalists are always learning new things. This means there’s a greater chance we have dabbled in your specialty and can understand what you do and what is required for your job. At the same time, we know we’re not the experts — you are.

The BIG Picture

We look at the big picture of how different people and pieces fit together and where we fit. This makes us great people to work with!

So think of it this way in the animal kingdom.

Each creature resides on a species scale of generalists to specialists. The koala bear, a specialist, can only survive on an extremely limited set of conditions: diet (eucalyptus), climate (warm), environment (trees).

Mice, the generalists, on the other hand, can survive just about anywhere. They can withstand heat and cold, eat your organic breakfast cereal or seeds and berries foraged in the wild.

We freelancers are mice and for the first time proud of it!

Contact Marcia Coffey at 561-906-3436 or fill out our Getting Started form.

DIY WordPress Maintenance

marciacatlin · January 21, 2020 ·

So you’re considering handling the upkeep of your website all by yourself? That’s wonderful, even brave. For DIY WordPress maintenance, you need to know those tasks that ensure your website investment provides a healthy ROI.

Start with regular backups! But you do need to know those things required to ensure your website investment continues to provide a return.

Here are the things that need to be monitored 24/7, daily, weekly and monthly.

24/7 Monitoring

Tasks in this category can be critical to your website’s health. Failure to fix these issues could lead to costly repairs or lost visitors and sales.

Choosing a good host is crucial. But no matter who you choose, your website could still go down from time to time.

You can use a service like Uptime Robot which will check your website (up to every 5 minutes on the free plan, or every minute on a paid plan) to make sure it is online.

Good SECURITY Saves Websites

You need to have suitable security protection on your WordPress website. To get started with a free installation, you can install a plugin such as
WordFence or iThemes Security. These both have quick start guides to help you get setup.

The most important effort you can make for the health of your website is to keep regular backups in place. You will want to have daily backups of your website.

If your website is hacked, gets a virus, or a software update causes an issue, you can restore a backup copy of your website and having things working again in no time.

Your host may provide daily backups for you, which is great but they aren’t always reliable. It is always smart to have two forms of backup.

Weekly Tasks

While it can be annoying to take these tasks on each week (as they are less automated), skipping them can lead to bigger headaches.

Plugin Updates

Just like any piece of software, third party plugins are regularly updated for both functionality and security purposes. It’s important (especially for security reasons) to keep your plugins updated.

Just like any piece of software, your website can be vulnerable to website hackers or viruses that seek to use your resources for their own benefit. This can often be things like redirecting your traffic to their site, placing ads on your site, or even infecting visitors with a virus if they visit your site.

Check For Plugin Redundancies

Another tip I have for you is less about protecting your site but more about making sure that everything is cleaned up and running smoothly. It’s so easy to jump into your site and add multiple plugins that do the same thing.

To avoid ending up with 30 plugins and half of them being duplicates, I recommend taking a look over what you have installed and what you’re actually using every couple of months.

SSL Certificate

An SSL Certificate is crucial for your website visitors security as well as your rankings. This means if your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate, Google will display a ‘Not Secure’ in the URL bar.

The SSL ensures that the information transmitted over your website (like customer details from a form, payment information, or login information) is encrypted.

While these certificates are free (from Let’s Encrypt or from your website host), they do have to be renewed often and updates to your website could affect their validity.

What Happens to A WordPress Site if You Don’t Maintain It?

Don’t Leave BACKUPS To Chance

These are mission critical! To ensure the health of your website you need to keep regular backups in place. You’ll want to have daily backups of your website (though some sites with lots of traffic, or eCommerce stores will want to do this more frequently).

If your website is hacked, gets a virus, or a software update causes an issue,
you can restore a backup copy of your website and having things working again in no time.

Your host may provide daily backups for you, which is great, but they aren’t always reliable. In fact, I don’t recommend having one form of backup no matter what it is.

Check out our WordPress Maintenance Service and comprehensive plans. Services include automated monthly security scans, daily security monitoring, plugin & theme updates, secure cloud backups, client reports, free SSL certificates, and SEO ranking.