This week I have been working remotely from Vegas for the first time and find several things very interesting. Vegas is a very in-your-face type of town with marketing everywhere. You can’t walk down the street, look up or down on the strip without being exposed to someones message. Guerrilla marketers are all over snapping gentleman’s club cards in front of you while street performers dance, sing and hustle to make a buck.

What can we learn from all of this? Vegas is motivated to sell, reinvent, change with the times and continually put their products out there. Sometimes as marketers we can forget these things when times are good and competition is scarce. Competition in this town is never scarce and it shows in how aggressive everyone fights over a dollar. We should stay hungry and even if the competition isn’t breathing down our backs we should perform like they are.

I have also been exposed to several marketing messages on different channels. Billboard cars drive by, cards are handed out, banner ads show up on the web and word-of-mouth are just a few. Vegas is a perfect example of how to hit people at several touch point and hammer your message and brand into the minds of potential customers at a point where they are willing to listen. How can you do the same? Where are your customers when they need to hear your message? Is the message you are putting out there the right one for each channel? Ask yourself questions like these and stay ahead of your competition, never fall behind.

Do you struggle with what to include in your new website? What goes on the home page? how big will our site be? Who will update the site and how difficult is it? These are all valid questions that must be worked through by you and your web designer but there are other things just as important that you might miss.

Many business owners don’t consider how social media will integrate with their website or why they would even want it to. At Reversed Out we have a variety of clients representing a broad range of ages, experience, industries and feelings about social media. Talking to them we typically recommend some Facebook, Twitter, Youtube or even Flikr presence for several reasons. One is that all of these sites offer powerful back-links to your website from credible sources. Back-links are crucial to your search ranking and are a must have for any company that wants to be found through search engines.

Another reason why Facebook is a good idea is that it adds updated information dynamically to your website through widgets that Facebook has created and can be easily added to your site. This option is only valid if you have an active community on Facebook. In the words of Face book the platform enables you to make your website more social. You can use their Social Plugins, such as the Like Button to drive user engagement with a single line of HTML. You can use the Activity Feed Plugin to show users a stream of the recent likes and comments from their friends on your site. You can use the Recommendations Plugin to show personalized page recommendations to your users based on the likes and comments across your entire site.

Working with a web design firm that brings these things to your attention and build a scalable website that builds these options into your new site strategy is important. So many clients think of Facebook as something that doesn’t really apply to them but given the two reasons above and the fact that we live in an ever increasing social web everyone needs to get involved. It requires time, but done correctly on your website can be automated to work for you and your business.