Bringing Brands to Market

Ecommerce

If you sell products or services that are either shippable or transferrable online you probably want to be competitive, right? You’ll want to give your customers the option of using your website to purchase directly. Our shopping cart systems include an inventory management system that allows you to add unlimited products, create custom categories and manage your inventory quickly and easily, with many timesaving features. We know how to make online shopping easy for customers, and easy to manage for business owners.

Perhaps you have promo codes that you want customers to use, or maybe you have a points system for repeat customers, we can program any and all custom features you need. In addition, our managed services will help you with the bigger picture. If you build it they won’t necessarily come. Our marketing and SEO team knows how to get your product in front of your target market quickly so that you can be successful online. Contact us today to get started.

Data Feeds

What do we mean by data feeds and why would you need one? If you’ve heard the term RSS Feed and understand the concept, a data feed is essentially the same thing. It’s a one-time or regular service, that we manage on your behalf. In short, it is a transfer of data from one database to another, either through a network or over the internet.

Data feeds are very popular in industries that advertise products on multiple websites, like the Automotive or RV industries. Our inventory management system allows dealers to manage and upload their inventory to their own websites, while our data feeds then send their data, in the right format, to as many other sites as they require. Classified sites like RVHotline.com, Kijiji, AutoTrader and RVT.com are just a few of the sites we’ve built feeds to.

Another reason to use a data feed would be the transfer of large amounts of data from one website database to another, in the case of a website redesign or upgrade. Blogs or ecommerce sites can contain a great deal of content, making manual transfers impractical. We can develop data feeds that transfer all the data from one database to another, from one provider to another, or from one website to another.

Content Management Systems

A content management system, or CMS, sounds technical but is really just software for uploading and managing the content on a website. We have been designing and developing these systems for over a decade now and have recently released our latest CMS which we call “focus”. We have taken a modular approach to focus, allowing our clients to pick and choose from a growing number of database-driven modules for uploading, organizing and editing content. Slider managers, inventory managers, page builders and many more.

We have also built in a number of marketing support modules as well, like an email marketing module, a CRM for managing leads, a telephone voice recording system, an online chat module, and we are building new modules regularly.

Other types of content management systems we’ve developed include variations on CRM, or customer relationship management. Companies use these tools to manage client interactions by optimizing and systematizing relationships, or to manage their sales teams by organizing calls and followups to optimize impact on large sales territories.

Call us for an online demo of focus, or to discuss a custom solution for your company.

Wordpress

Although we develop our own content management systems here at Synergy, we often get requests to design sites in Wordpress. The client may already be comfortable using Wordpress or their current site may be built on Wordpress, making the transition to a new Wordpress site somewhat easier. We can help you choose one of thousands of pre-designed themes from the Wordpress community, or we can build you a custom theme depending on your budget, timeline and technical requirements.

Our Wordpress themes are responsive, which means they automatically adapt to any screen resolution or device, we pay close attention to performance issues as Wordpress tends to be somewhat bulky, and we optimize projects for search engines based on the package you choose. Widgets and third party add-ons are also available to our Wordpress clients, allowing our team to build your company very robust and feature-heavy sites quickly.

SEO/SEM

Search engine optimization has been a growing concern for companies for years now. Most know what it is, but haven’t had much success. Google and the other major search engines are getting very good at determining what your website is all about, so much so that those traditional techniques for keyterm ranking are no longer critical. No longer is keyterm density or placement important, there is no longer a formula for combining meta tags, titles and headings that will get you to number one. It’s now far more important to publish useful information, original photos and video, become the authority on your product or service. And then build relationships with other websites in your space because if popular websites are linking to your content you will be recognized as an authority - and that is now what search engines are looking for.

SEM, or search engine marketing, is also gaining popularity. Not only a game for larger brands, more and more smaller companies are now taking advantage of paid advertising - PPC campaigning, retargeting and social media advertising. Reasons for the popularity are: 1) smaller businesses are finding it increasingly hard to rank organically for many keyterms, so paid ads allow them to be at the top of the listings. 2) with the pay-per-click model that most advertising providers are using, budgeting and paying only for actual visits makes PPC both cost-effective and highly measurable.

Of all the services we provide, SEO/SEM is the one that companies always struggle with. Let our SEO and marketing experts take all the ‘struggle’ out of it. We can cut through the nonsense and explain the essence of online marketing to you, and together we’ll devise a plan that not only makes financial sense to you, but we can assist in tracking your customers from one end of the equation to the other, from finding your website on the internet to buying your product or service.

Social Media

Many clients ask us about social media, and the number one question is "Do we need to participate to be successful online?" To properly manage content and launch effectual campaigns on Facebook, Twitter or any of the thousands of other social networking websites you need two ingredients: knowledge and resources.

If you understand how social websites work or have used one in your personal life, we can help train you to use it to your business advantage. Likewise, if you are willing to devote company resources to using social networks, our team will help set your business up on the network(s) best suited to your goals, and then train and support your staff in the fundamentals of social media.

Social media is here to stay, and companies are quickly figuring out how to use these social sites to advance their online goals. The older generations are not as quick to adopt this technology but we always remind them that social networks are just another advertising vehicle. They are the evolution of two-way advertising, and allow businesses to interact with their customers in a way that wasn’t possible 5 years ago.