Snag Your Favorite NBA Team's Schedule

The NBA season is here! With the MLB season just ending and the NFL season in full swing, it is now time for the NBA season to launch. It is a great time to utilize Squareberry's SNAG features and grab your favorite team's schedule to display on your calendars and widgets and share on social media.

SNAG an NBA Team Schedule

http://squareberry.com/nba

Click the "Snag" button in the top right corner of the NBA calendar at the URL above. You will then be asked to login (if you are not already). Then, select the team you want to Snag and continue.

Now, that team will show up as a Category in your account. You can display this category on calendars and widgets (just like your created categories) and even set social media publishing settings for your team schedule.

Marketing With Your NBA Team Schedule

The most immediate and basic advantage to having your NBA team's schedule Snagged, is that you see the schedule on your social planner. This makes scheduling messages, events and coupon promotions to coincide with your team's games easy.

For restaurants, publishing messages on the day of a big game can help draw attention and get more people in the door to watch the game at your place.

This strategy can be taken even further, by running coupon promotions to go along with the games. Simple promotions like "Buy 2 Drinks, Get One Free" or "15% Off Everything During The Game" can help bring in groups of people to watch the big game. Running these promotions heavily at the beginning of the season can help you establish your place as the location of choice for grabbing some food and drinks while watching the games.

Making Your Mobile Website a Place to Come Back To

The key word in the title of this article is "back". Like your website, Facebook page and your actual business location, you want people to come BACK. One visit is good, but repeat visits is what you are looking for. Your mobile website needs to be an ever-updating hub of happenings, news and fresh content. Tell people to use it and keep them coming back.

Events and Promotions

For many businesses, special events and coupon promotions are what draw people in. Your mobile website should serve as the ideal location for people to find this information. Create calendar pages on your mobile site to show off your upcoming events and promotions. People, who are out and about, will be drawn in by your happenings.

Mobile News Source

News pages are a great way to keep your mobile website fresh. With Squareberry, you can feed in RSS (such as a blog) or publish your Twitter feed. These options give your mobile website fresh news content without the need to login and update the news page. Your mobile website keeps updated via your existing main news publishing tools.

Keep It Updated

The most important thing to do is keep your mobile website updated with fresh content. Squareberry's calendars will automatically hide past events/promotions, but page content needs to be maintained (if applicable). Don't leave a message about New Year's on your home page until March. Out of date content can turn off potential customers who will think nothing has changed at your business.

If you are a restaurant, keep your current menu updated/available on your mobile website. Squareberry offers an intuitive Menu/Catalog page type which allows you to easily create and update a full menu of items.

Tell People It Is the Place to Come Back To

Signs on your door and/or tables can go a long way. You are probably already featuring Facebook on your collateral, do the same with your mobile website. Tell people they can easily see what's going on, gets news and find promotions on your mobile site. Spreading the word helps get them on your mobile site. Fresh content, news and events/promotions keep them coming back.

Two Daily Deals Strategies

Squareberry's Promotions feature allows you to plan, schedule and deliver coupon promotions on social media, web calendars and more. This feature can easily be used to implement your own "Daily Deals" strategies. "Daily Deals" websites have become very popular in the last year and the concept is appealing to consumers. Taking advantage of this appeal can help any business.

Publish Your Daily Deals Daily

Tongue twister? A little bit. But you get the idea. Publish your deals each day. This means people do not know what tomorrow's deal will be. You keep their focus on one deal at a time.

Here is how you can set this up in Squareberry:

• - Create a category called "Daily Deals" or something similar.
• - Set your publishing settings for this category to be "Day Of".
• - Make sure this category is not included on any of the Views you are using on your website or for your Facebook Calendar. You don't want your entire Daily Deals schedule on display.
• - Schedule Daily Deal Promotions and tag them with your Daily Deals Category

Now, all the Daily Deals promotions you schedule will publish to your social media accounts on the 'Day Of" the promotion. They will not publish before that and will not display on your calendars and widgets.

Daily Deals Calendar

Some organizations may want their deals on display ahead of time. To do this you will schedule your promotions normally in a category of your choosing. But, you may want to have a calendar or widget dedicated to your Daily Deals. This can easily be done:

• - Create a category called "Daily Deals" or something similar.
• - Create a custom Event View in the Calendars & Widgets Area and select only your Daily Deals category so that it is the only category in the View.
• Embed a widget or calendar from this new custom Event View on your website or anywhere you like.

This new calendar will display your Daily Deals category and nothing else. You could use one of the sliders on your website to grab attention or even add the List Widget to your home page to show off your upcoming "Daily Deals".

Mobile Website Page Type Alternative Uses

Mobile Website Management

For this week's tip, we will take a look at the various page types in the Mobile Management Area of the Squareberry platform. Many of these page types are straightforward, but have alternate uses you may not have thought of previously. Let's take a look.

Mobile Website CMS Page Types

Mobile Menu/Catalog Page

This page type allows you to create a catalog of items or a restaurant menu. But, it could also easily be used to create a staff page. Each staff member could be added as an item and even be organized using the spacers. This is the perfect example of using a page type for an alternative and useful function.

Mobile Website Contact Page

A contact page's function can change by simply changing the name of the page. If you are a restaurant and you make a Contact Page called "Order Now", it instantly becomes an order page. Simply have the contact info be sent to an email inbox that takes orders.

Mobile Calendar Page

This page type shows upcoming events and promotions from the categories you select. But, try making it more specific. You could make a calendar page called "Daily Deals" and have one category called "Daily Promotions". Then you can schedule a single promotion for each day.

Mobile Info Page

The Info page type can also be used as an interesting "Contact" page. While it does not have a contact form, it offers a phone call button, links to social media sites, location features and a content area for adding any text and media you want. This page type can easily be used as your page for providing contact info to mobile site viewers.

Think Outside the Box

Management systems always have specific functions and features. Thinking outside the "standard" use case is a great way to make interesting and effective content. The above examples are just a few ways you can use a mobile website page type for an alternative function.

Mobile Website Sub Menus

Sub-Menus are pretty much what they sound like. Instead of having all your pages on one large menu, you can have lower levels of navigation that allow users to move through your site in organized areas. Sub-Menus on a mobile website can be equated to a drop down on the main menu of a standard website.

Utilizing sub-menus on your mobile site can improve navigation and increase the time people spend on your site. Sub-Menus can be used strategically in a few specific areas. Here are some tips for utilizing sub-menus on your mobile website.

Restaurant Menus and Product Catalogs

This is a great place to use sub-menus. Instead of plopping your entire catalog of items or your entire restaurant menu on one large page, you can use sub-menus to break it up and organize. For instance, a restaurant could make a sub menu with 3 pages: "Breakfast", "Lunch", and "Dinner" - each of which are their own distinct page outlining the food items for that meal. The sub-menu in this situation divides the content in an organized way, so you do not have too much on one page.

A retail store with a plethora of items could implement this same strategy to break up their catalog into departments or types of products. The degree of specificity you take it to is up to you. You could have 4 levels deep of sub-menus to clearly organize everything, or keep it simple with a 2 level structure.

Photo Galleries and Media

You can also organize media on your mobile website with sub-menus. The simplest way to break this up is by media type. For instance on your main menu you have "Media" which opens a sub-menu. This sub-menu then has "Videos", "Photos" and 'Audio Clips". Each of these pages feature media of that certain type.

You can also break your media up more categorically. Let's say you are a non-profit organization who does a variety of activities. You could have a sub-menu called "Media" and a photo gallery on that sub-menu called "Building Projects". In this gallery you feature images of various building projects. You could have more galleries, all featuring images of their own distinct activity type.

Mobile Website Sub-Menus

No two organizations are the same. No two mobile websites are exactly the same. It is important to figure out what works best for your mobile site. Sub-Menus can be very useful, but be sure to not overcomplicate your mobile website or make your navigation so complicated that users get lost.

Catalogs and Restaurant Menus

Yes, Even on Mobile

Don't be fooled. The Mobile Web can be just as feature rich and informative as desktop websites. More and more people are browsing on mobile devices and using their phone as a primary resource for information and search.

Catalogs

Some people may never see your full website. If they find you on their mobile device - that may be it. That could be your only chance to catch their attention or sell to them. Why not have your catalog or featured catalog items right on your mobile site?

For example, if you own a stationary store, you will want to show off the products you offer. Including a catalog of your products on your mobile site is the best way to show off what you have and why someone should visit your location to make a purchase.

Restaurant Menus

Most people searching for a restaurant website online are concerned with a few factors: hours, location, prices and food. (What else do you need to know?) Your mobile site needs to offer all of this information and in a sleek, easy-to-use fashion. You may not need to include every single menu item (though there is nothing stopping you). But, people want to know how much things generally cost and what you offer. Be sure to show the range of your offerings to get interest from as many people as possible.

Also, do not forget about the Phone call buttons. Most mobile users are on phones and including buttons such as "Order Now" or "Call Us" can help encourage people to call your restaurant right then and there. Of course, be sure that someone is there to answer the phone and take the order.

Rich Media on Your Mobile Site

Small Screen? Nobody Cares

It's true. A few years back people could not get enough of bigger and bigger screens (TVs, Computer Monitors, etc.). But, now a mobile crazy culture has turned the tide a bit. People want devices to be quick and portable. Even with this desire for compactness, rich media is still very popular.

People love viewing photos and watching videos on phones and other mobile devices. The lack of screen space or high quality audio has not limited the desire for on-demand streaming content. So, when working on your mobile site consider this. Yes, text loads faster and people are often hunting down specific info on the mobile web. But, do not be afraid to jazz things up a bit.

Adding Rich Media to Your Mobile Site

YouTube Videos

YouTube is very mobile friendly, working across almost all platforms (thanks Google). Squareberry's mobile management area offers a few ways to include YouTube videos. First, there is the YouTube video page type, which allows you to provide a URL to a YouTube video and it will be formatted and fit right onto your mobile site. Additionally, you can embed a YouTube video anywhere you are adding custom content (Home Page, Info Pages, or a Custom Content Page).

Photo Galleries

The Photo Gallery page type is a great way to provide visual content for your site viewers. You can upload and arrange any number of photos. You can add multiple galleries and optimize to your liking. Your galleries are optimized for mobile devices and offer thumbnail views as well as full screen versions of your images.

Graphics, Banners, Icons and More

Your menu can be customized with icons for each page to give your site even more pizzazz. You can also add a banner image to your header and customize your background. All of this enhances your mobile site visually to make is more appealing and striking. It is important to feed the visual appetite of mobile device users to get them engaged as soon as they reach your mobile website.