To get the most from these promotions here are a few simple pointers to get you started:

Start planning now: Plan your promotions in advance, build up suspense with your customer base and let them know of any upcoming offers and savings in advance whether its in-store, on Social Media or via an Email Campaign.

Create specific page copy: Plan the products or services you are going to offer savings on. Ensure your website is optimised with product pages for these specific items. Point customers in the right direction and ensure your user experience is customer focused, they are not afraid to shop around when it comes to huge savings!

Create eye catching content: Whether it is for your businesses website, Social Media or to be distributed to your list of customer contacts creating eye catching content significantly increases click through rates.

Plan for an upsurge: Ensure your website can deal with increased volumes of traffic, too many page requests can slow the site down or crash the site itself. Test your website using tools like Loadimpact.com to ensure the server that your hosts your businesses website can take the strain.

Test, test, test: Before any of your promotions, artwork and copy goes live test your processes and ensure your site is fully prepared, functioning and operating as you would expect with the new pages, copy etc. Get another set of eyes from a team member and gain feedback.

Some businesses go as far as offering loyal customers a first glance ‘Exclusive’ access to a flash sale. This is used to gain customer feedback, fine tune and tweak their offering to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible in time for the main event.

Whether you love it or hate it, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are here to stay for the foreseeable future. The chances are if you are not taking part, your competitors are. If you think it would be something that would add value to your business dip your toes in, start planning and prepare a campaign using these few simple pointers.

Test your equipment: Prior to going live, before any trial run ensure that all your equipment is in full working order. Ensure your laptop/desktop/smart device is running at full capacity. Having a slow device or a device with a chance of break may affect how well your video is produced. You want to produce a quality professional video not one that may end at any given moment.

Have a trial run: Before going live have a run-through, it should be both scripted and un-scripted. You want to know what you are going to talk about, but you also want to mix this with more personable chat with viewers, this leads to higher levels of engagement. Test the equipment, have a few run throughs and once you are 100% confident flick the switch and go live.

Engage with customers: Quite a simple but important one, engage with people live. Use their names, interact, ask questions, thoughts and try get their feedback. A Facebook Live video and any webinar should be a two-way experience.

Invest in a microphone: Invest in a good-quality microphone to deliver your customers a crystal-clear message, you don’t want your video to be muffled, voice distorted or break up. Investing in decent quality recording equipment will improve your recording experience, the streams quality for both you and your viewers.

Schedule your broadcast: People working won’t have time for webinars. Ensure that your broadcast takes place outside of working hours, viewing figures are likelier to be higher outside of the hours of 9-5, an early evening slot gives you the chance to expand your audience and its potential reach compared to doing it during the day.

Don't forget to promote: Running a successful webinar is one thing but don’t forget to promote it for a few weeks, build up hype through Social Media, Email Campaigns, Blogging or whatever other advertising medium you use.

One last thing to consider, something very-obvious but after watching numerous webinars test out your internet connection. Test that the signal strength is all okay and ensure that there are no disruptions to your live video. 

We have put together some tips and pointers to get you on your way to Youtube success:

• Invest in equipment & software: A simple one to consider before you get started creating video content – equipment. You want your video and sound to be audible with professional quality. Invest in editing software and quality equipment, this does not have to be costly with sites selling pre-owned goods. Just do your research!

• Create consistent content: Viewers like familiarity and routine. Create a format which works best for both you and your customers. Keep the branding and format of the video consistent, along with the duration, when it is posted and how often. This will help your viewers get to know you better, your offerings and your brand. Keep it simple, map out a plan and strategy in blocks.

• Encourage action: Get your viewers to engage with your video, not just in terms of interacting and starting a conversation. Pre-programmed notifications can be created to drive your viewers to certain products, pages online. Tie these in relevantly with any video you create.

• Build a following: Enhance your video and channel with your very own ‘community’. Grow a following, engage with them and encourage debate. Reach out to potential influencers, suppliers, offer product reviews and maximise your visibility and audience.

• Optimise for search engines: Search engines will naturally pick up Youtube videos associated with your business as its quality, consistent content. To get it ranking highly each video needs optimising – include keywords in the title, create tags using your businesses keywords and provide a detailed description of your video and what it is offering.

• Think mobile friendly: According to Google, 75% of adults watch Youtube at home on a mobile device. The number of users watching content on smart devices is growing year on year. With mobile users more likely to be watching content concentrating compared to watching on a Smart TV/PC adopt a mobile first strategy to deliver quality content to your viewers. 

Site Architecture & Crawling

As your business’s website develops over time, the site’s architecture needs to be considered to ensure that Google can regularly crawl, cache and index your pages. Google has little bots and ‘spiders’ which are used to crawl websites, the main one being the ‘Googlebot’ which scans the links from one page to another.

Indexing is how search engines categorise your webpage based on content, links, meta descriptions etcetera. Using an algorithm, they categorise each page in relation to a search term and give it a ranking based on this. Page caching is another method that can help you to improve the load time of your web pages and thus optimise your site for the search engines. Cached pages are served up as static HTML versions of a page to avoid potentially time-consuming queries to your database.

Categorisation

For e-commerce websites, categorisation plays a significant part in the site architecture (and makes user experience much simpler). Careful keyword research and planning should be carried out when planning your site categories – attention should be paid when assigning a URL with crucial keywords as this can play a role in ensuring that specific pages get ranked for your preferred terms.

Site Speed

Site speed is also pivotal for an e-commerce website to perform well in the eyes of a search engine. Customers want a website to be slick, quick and allow them the capability of checking out in a few moments. This can be quite a challenge for the garment decoration industry, where there are thousands of products available.

Costs

The costs associated with managing thousands of products on an e-commerce website on a managed server is high and something that needs to be planned for as part of your ongoing online budget – the common consensus here is less is more.

Show your customer a select group of garments rather than offering hundreds of similar ones will not only ensure that the load time isn’t compromised but will also make for a much simpler user experience.

One Last Thought

The best time to take care of the technical aspects of SEO is during the construction phase of the website. Do your research, ask developers the right questions and make sure that the technical bases are covered. Fixing these areas after your site has gone live can be costly and time-consuming.

We have put together our top five tips to get your business started on Instagram:

• Upload visually engaging content: For the garment decoration industry, Social Media is all about showing off your latest work and products. Curate posts showcasing your latest work, what is going on where you are and any office antics. Instagram stories can display a series of images or videos over a 24-hour period and appear at the top of the feed, a great way to grab potential customers attention. To increase a posts potential reach do not forget to include the relevant customers ‘handle’ in the post.

• Optimise your profile and call to actions: A basic tip but an important one, ensure your profile is optimised, a nice crisp clear hi resolution brand logo as your profile picture, a brief description of who you are and what you do and importantly add contact information. Similar with your posts don’t forget to add calls to actions, ways to get in touch and convert the lead.

• Embrace the #hashtag: A major bone of contention with many users, the use of the hashtag. Some love it, some loathe it, but Instagram is all about the hashtag - so embrace it. Users use hashtags to search for posts, it is almost a way of indexing your post in the plethora of posts online so ensure your post has all the hashtags it can to get found online by users and expand a posts reach.

• It’s not just a Marketing tool: A hidden gem within Instagram is the Notifications feature, perfect for research and keeping an eye on competitors and influencers, you receive a notification every time they post a new piece of content. Simple click (…) and click ‘Turn on post notifications’.

• Grow your local reach: Increase your local coverage with the locations feature.Instagram allows you to find local users, search for local businesses, people, influencers etc. Increased engagement with these can only enhance your businesses Instagram feed and increase potential business.