Reflecting in the Waves of Integrative Waves

The ocean that is social media has been all very interesting but Integrative Waves is now dragging our tail. The year is almost at an end and we need some well-deserved vacation. Heading off to relax and consider all that we have learned.

Going to the southern hemisphere to get some sun and to think on the right side of the earth. The 'wa' of Integrative Waves needs a reboot!

Last bit of work before we leave. To review and reflect on what we have learned - to look back so that we can go forward with knowledge and insight.

We started using social media only recently. Now we understand a lot more. We have dipped and dabbled in quite a few coves. Now it is time for a swim!

Integrative Waves began a Facebook Page and found we have been getting increased interaction. We have not posted any real business promotion on it yet. We wanted to get accustomed to using it and posting regularly before the real work began. Now we definitely have a better working knowledge and so can proceed with a more certain step. But a business does have to be creative and interesting to get and hold attention.

Twitter has been extremely interesting and rather fun, LinkedIn and Google+ need more of our attention. Newsletters are being planned and organised, blog topics scheduled.

Will social media and the like be the main way we interact with our clients? No. Integrative Waves is a very much hands-on business and face-to-face works best for us. But the combination will be powerful, the blend potent.

What is the nice thing is that now we have a solid foundation upon which to build and grow. The waves can depend on the sand for support.....


Blogs commented on:
Nate Scharff
Mella Webster

Scheduling Integrative Waves

Now that Integrative Waves has dabbled our feet in the wide blue ocean that is social media and decided on some waves to catch, it is now time to design a schedule that will allow surfing those waves successfully!

What will we become all aTwitter about and tweet, focus on for Facebook, and become goggle-eyed on Google+? Chit-chatting and blabbing in our blog, note-worthily newsy in our newsletter ....The list goes on.

How much time to do all this? Again reality is a very important factor. What is feasible and sustainable on an on-going weekly schedule? What will be enough to keep the work enjoyable, to obtain results without it becoming drudgery and building feelings of resentment?

Will an hour a day be enough? Or is it better to spend a larger chunk of time twice a week writing and scheduling posts and blogs for the future?

Too many questions without answers at this time! Integrative Waves will just have to go for it, try a schedule out and then modify if it is not manageable or working. We will spend an hour or so a day attending to our online presence.

OK, enough said about the time commitment! Why choose these particular tools? The interaction that is possible and the unlimited potential reach is quite mind-boggling!

Our business lends itself well to Facebook and Google+ - small bits of information combined with photos about health and beauty. Questions are a fun way to involve the viewer. It can also be a way to find out more about what people want to know in this area. There are many ways to be creative and not always have to be the author of the post such as sharing interesting articles regarding skin care or health. Facebook Insights will help us fine-tune our posts as we monitor who likes what.

A weekly blog - some short articles, some longer - will help demonstrate our expertise. This will be a useful reference for clients and potential clients and will keep Integrative Waves more as a presence for them.

A monthly email newsletter, as mentioned in a previous blog, helps reach those people who do not use social media. If someone does not use a computer very much at all or maybe never, this is something that can be printed out and mailed to them. A business must meet clients at the client's comfort level - do not expect the client to adapt. The blog posts can also be printed if needed.  The newsletter can also be handed around at events.

Goals for online marketing strategy for the next six months -
1) Increase online audience to social media sites.
2) Increase traffic to website from these sites.
3) Increased online interest translated into potential clientele becoming actual clientele.

After much consideration, the schedule for the first month, January 2014, is:

Twitter - daily tweets.
The topics will be varied - inspirational, health related.  There will be a mixture of original tweets, interesting quotes retweeted, and articles shared. Facebook and blog posts are linked to Twitter, reducing the daily workload.

Facebook - twice weekly posts.
 - Essential Oil highlight each week with photo of the plant:

• Lavender
• Rose Geranium
• Lemon
• Eucalyptus Radiata

- Skin care product highlight and photo of product - Cleanser. Ask a question - What do you clean  your skin with?
- Share a health related article such as "Sitting may be shortening your life". Ask what people are doing to help their health.
- Nutrition spotlight on different seasonal fruits and vegetables. Orange - photo of it and its' nutritional information,

Google + will be gradually introduced with similar scheduling style and similar but not the same posts as Facebook.

Blog scheduled weekly - articles of varying length - midweek day such as Wednesday.

• Week 1 - Battling the Post-Holiday and Winter Blues.
• Week 2 - Lavender Essential Oil.
• Week 3 - Battling Winter Colds and Flu.
• Week 4 - Water and Lymphatic Drainage

Email Newsletter - monthly.
January's newsletter topics:

• Essential Oil of the Month - Lavender
• Monthly Skin Care Product - Regenerating Cream 
• Skin Care Tip - Winter skin issues
• Why use? section - Why use sunscreen during winter? 
• Seasonal Recipe - Winter Essential Oil Blend
• Special of the Month - Facial Extraordinaire

LinkedIn will be a work in progress. Small steps forward.....

Google Analytics will be used to monitor our progress and help us adjust as needed.

Well, now that our January is decided, planned and scheduled, Integrative Waves is going surfing.....

Blogs Commented On

The blogs that I have commented on:

• Cameron Sufficool
• Mella Webster
• Manuel Acero
• Becky Beamer
• Jessica Ipina - commented on Sunday. 

Integrative Waves Makes Social Decisions

Over the past few months Integrative Waves has examined and sampled some of the social media platforms. Now it is a good time to reassess our goals for integrating social media into our business. Too many businesses start off over-enthusiastically with social media and then 'crash and burn'. Integrative Waves does not want to be one of those casualties! So how to avoid this...

We need to consider two very important issues. What do we enjoy using and what can be realistically maintained in the longer-term. What is a good schedule that will fit in with our everyday business life of hands-on care?

We have enjoyed using Facebook and Twitter, blogging, and trying out an email newsletter. We have only dipped our toes into the waters of Google+. LinkedIn is a work in progress.

The only media that will work on a daily basis for us is Twitter because it is very quick to do. We are still discovering the potential of Twitter but have discovered that it is a very useful tool to find out quickly what is happening in many different areas. It has been helpful for keeping up with new social media and other news.

Facebook (and Google+ once we use it more!) can work twice a week for us. Since we found, via Insights, that questions and content with photos capture the most attention for us, we are becoming more creative with our camera to make our posts on Facebook more visually eye-catching. Integrative Waves wanted to become accustomed to regularly posting before we completely focused on more business oriented posts.We have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Facebook since we really am  unsure how many people get exposed to our posts. The rules seem to change quite regularly. We also need to revisit scheduling posts which will make life easier.

Even though we are very new to Google+, I  believe that it will be very powerful and useful for us. There are things we have not done yet that will aid Integrative Waves such as joining some communities.

A weekly Blog is planned. I have enjoyed writing regularly and feel this suits our business goal of consumer/client education.

A monthly Email Newsletter is planned. This will help reach clients who do not use social media regularly or at all.

LinkedIn is another avenue that will be useful but needs to be expanded.

This is enough to begin with! Remember reality....

Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr have not been investigated except for a cursory perusal and they need to wait. Small steps to avoid the 'crash and burn'.

Now it is time for Integrative Waves to plan an online marketing strategy. Part of that will include designing a content schedule for the next month to become organized and also begin testing this strategy! It might also be time to investigate a social media management platform like Hootsuite.....

More Analytics For Integrative Waves - Insightful Facebook

The work of Integrative Waves is never done.... First it was Google. Now we are assessing Facebook analytics - looking at the Page Insights over the last week.

Integrative Waves has recently entered the hallowed ground of having over 30 Page Likes. (I feel like it is Starbucks and I have my 30 stars for the year (or the month???) Now we are deemed worthy by Facebook and 'allowed' to see our Page Insights.

Thank you, Facebook, for revamping Page Insights recently. It looks very nice - it is easy to read and understand. That is very handy for us Facebook neophytes, especially in the land of Insights. However, reading the comments of other more savvy Facebook users, there are those who are decidedly NOT pleased!

Well, enough small talk! Let's get down to analyzing. (It is actually quite amazing what you can find out, even down to the viewers' demographics such as age group, gender, and country of residence.)

Firstly, there was much more activity on Integrative Waves' page this week! A few things can explain this. One, it was Thanksgiving week - maybe people had more time to peruse Facebook. Secondly, Integrative Waves may be developing an interested audience. Thirdly, there was an assignment to visit each person's business page in our group. Seeing who was liking and commenting, our activity was a mixture of 'all the above'.

We now have 32 page likes from individuals - not many in some business's eyes - but when there is a very 'laid-back' (read 'hesitant') approach to asking for 'likes' from friends and clients, the growth has to happen fairly organically.

Regarding our posts, there are fairly equal amounts of 'likes' and 'comments' but no 'shares'. I guess that is one area that we definitely need to examine further to see what our audience considers 'share' worthy. There is decidedly more reach and engagement recently. We can see what kind of posts get the most likes and engagement. Asking questions and posts with photos appear to get the most involvement. There have been no posts that have really been promotional types such as advertising a skin care product sale, so the reaction to these types of posts is unknown.

Fortunately, there have been no 'unlikes', 'report as spam' or 'hide posts' so that is a good thing. Integrative Waves' posts may not be 'shared' yet but at least we are not annoying anyone too much!

All this is very interesting and useful information. However, Facebook is still holding out! It appears that engagement demographic information is not given until you have 30 people engage with your post.

Oh well, I guess it is 'onward and upward'......

Analyzing Analytics for Integrative Waves

Integrative Waves has finally established a web presence. Great, terrific, hallelujah, congratulations.....we did it! Being Thanksgiving day and all, we are very thankful for that! But is being thankful enough???

Well, appreciate the gratitude because it is good for our health. But we cannot rest on our laurels because now comes the REAL work to see if that web presence is worth anything to this business. Is it effective in any way to entice customers to learn more about Integrative Waves? Or are we just talking to ourselves?

How to do this? Well, along comes Google Analytics to help make it easier to assess this...

However, first we must determine what the goals are for our online presence. At present it is to build our audience and gain interest for our physical business.

This is a small business with a new web presence. Analytics, like anything else, can get overwhelming if everything is considered all at once. Google Analytics contains a lot of very useful tools but there is a learning curve that needs to be considered.

So Integrative Waves is curbing the enthusiasm and looking at only a few at first.

Which analytics would be the most useful properties to monitor?
We decided on:

• Audience Data and Reporting - this will allow us to discover our audience - from who they are to where they are coming from, whether and how they like the content, and how engaged they are. We need to know whether we are pleasing anyone and what is pleasing them? How did they discover us and do they want to return?
• Flow Visualization - to monitor how visitors moved through the website - which pages did they visit before they left. This will help us refine the pages that are of low interest and improve the content.
• Social Media Reports - Integrative Waves needs to know how social media is affecting our business - do we need to modify some of our goals? We have a social media presence. This data that integrates web and social media will give us a full picture of our content and community
• Traffic Sources - we need to know how are people finding our site. Are they coming through direct referral, organic keyword search or some other way?

The web presence of Integrative Waves is small right now. If we are smart, we will learn to use the many useful tools that Google Analytics offers. This will allow us to grow in the direction that will provide the best service and fulfill the needs and wants of our audience.

One step and one analytical tool at a time.....

The ABCs of Coupons - Attracting Business Coupons

Coupons are an interesting phenomenon for businesses and consumers. How can there be a win-win situation so that both parties are happy at the outcome? There has to be enough perceived value provided for the consumer to want to spend their hard-earned money and support the business. For the business, there must be enough business to be potentially attracted to make the coupon financially feasible.

So does Integrative Waves jump into the world of coupons? The decision was already made not to use a third party coupon service at this time.  However, does this mean no coupons at all? Is a bit of 'couponing' (I think I just created a word!) beneficial to Integrative Waves?

Hmmm.... Well ok, coupons have been decided to be of benefit to Integrative Waves. The next big question is what to offer and why? Who are we targeting and for what goal?

Integrative Waves is a wellness practice - our goal is to help people achieve their full health potential. We utilize the modalities of Vodder lymphatic drainage massage, clinical aromatherapy, and professional skincare therapy to achieve this. So what kind of coupon deal would attract our potential target clientele? Our target clientele are 35-70, interested in integrative therapies, are wine drinkers, gardeners, love to care for their skin and like to cook and eat tasty food. They like to enjoy all aspects of life - they like to have fun.

 What would appeal to these people? What kind of coupons would make them want to come to Integrative Waves? Are they coupon people? Remember, there are some people who would rather 'die' than use a coupon! These people are often not the richest people but they do not believe in discounting their health! Interesting, huh???

Well, to the potential clientele that do believe in saving a bit of money - here is some (hopefully) enticing specials in the form of coupons -

'Buy a series of 5 facials, get the 6th one free! Get 6 months of skin care for 5 months cost - a savings of $110. A half a year's worth of in-clinic skin care therapy for only $550!'

Why would this entice? - You are saving $110 just by prepaying $550 (almost a 17% savings), your skin care for 6 months is already paid for, and you have made an important investment in skin care and overall health. The facials of Integrative Waves are extremely relaxing, skin-rejuvenating, and brain stimulating through education. The facials are extremely 'hands-on'. The powerful effect of touch stimulates endorphin release thus reducing stress. Reducing stress helps reduce inflammation. Inflammation now is being found as being the root cause of many diseases.....and part of the cause of aging. Ahhh, the power of facials......anti-aging and health-inducing :) It definitely makes one want to smile....

'Buy 5 facials, get $100 worth of free products!'

Again, there is a cost benefit of saving $100 (over a 15% savings). The products usually last for at least 6 months so there is also a savings in time. There is also a health benefit - people feel better when their skin is looking healthy - good for mental, physical, and emotional health.

So one gets the drift of 'couponing'. Integrative Waves wants people to have fun and enjoy their skin and health. If coupons will help people to enjoy life a bit more and attain better skin, health, and morale then so be it.....

Will YOU coupon with Integrative Waves??