Creating Your Marketing Kit

Thursday, February 4, 2010

A great website is an important tool in your marketing arsenal, but you'll probably want to have print pieces to support your online marketing. But we all know by now -- or should know -- that print is not the same as the web when it comes to effective content. People read print media differently, interact with it differently, and respond to it differently. Therefore, it has to be different. You simply can't cut and paste your brochure copy into your website and succeed -- or vice versa.

On the other hand, you want to maintain a consistent brand identity and a consistent message. So how do you harmonize print and online media?

Shopmobbing.com has a grand total of 158 words on their homepage -- one of the smallest word counts I've ever done. For their press kit (shown above), they need much more than that. So I started from scratch and wrote them a package of press releases that told their whole story. It has the same young, fresh, energetic tone as their website, the same fun, urban feel, but it shows the strength of their company, too. They used the same images as their homepage to tie the whole thing together, and they can send it as a print document or as a pdf file. The focus is on their new website -- the web address is the first and largest thing on the page -- but they've got scope in their print media to tell the whole story for investors and the press.

Landscape architect Chris Olsen started with a fresh press kit. He wanted a physical item to mail out and to hand out to people he meets at his presentations. His website is not a strong introductory marketing piece for him, but once people are interested, they can go there to learn more about him. Since Chris is a TV personality and a popular speaker with lots of opportunities for physical world networking, a physical object was the highest priority and a logical starting point for him.

I wrote this for LeeAnn Larkan at Vivid Marketing, and she used Chris's great garden shots and enthusiastic testimonials to put together an appealing brochure (shown above). We did a strong sales letter to go along with it for direct mail and following up on personal contacts.

Since this is intended to be read on paper, not on the screen, we can take advantage of the opportunity to have two pages visible at once, and we can use a lot more text and tell a story. Now, we're working with Chris to make his website as fine as his press kit. Vivid will use the same look, and I'll change the text for usability and search -- but keep the same message and feeling.

Sani-Service took a different approach. For this company, I wrote a complete marketing kit, with a number of seperate elements:

case studies
testimonials
unique selling point briefs
company story
product and service descriptions
educational materials
homepage text

Sani-Service has been picking and choosing from this menu of elements for their website (shown above), their press releases, their training materials, their brochures, direct mail letters, and more. Whatever they want to say, they have the right phrases on hand to speed up the process.

Whether you start with your website, your print media, or a complete marketing kit, you can end up with successful marketing pieces for both online and print media. The key is to take the differing needs of the media into account.

Labels: online marketing

Your Website's Traffic

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

I've been doing annual reports. Traffic is the starting point for all of them, and of course everyone is happy to hear about their increases in traffic. Me, too. My traffic is up 198.92% over the same time last year. But don't stop there. Ask yourself a few more questions:

Is it business, or is it just traffic?

I have one client who had an increase of 370.95% in 2009, compared with 2008. But he only serves local clients, and his local traffic increased by a mere 44%. That extra traffic is fine -- there can even be side benefits, such as a general increase in web visibility and prestige that could increase conversions -- but his basic traffic info suggests a higher level of success than we're really seeing.

Are you seeing the trends?

The client below had a nice percentage of increase between 2008 and 2009, but really it's better than that. 2008 was essentially flat, while 2009 shows an upward trend (ever since they hired me) that is likely to continue if we continue making good decisions. The reality here is better than the percentage of increase would suggest.

The client below has a fairly new site, and the percentage of increase isn't that impressive yet. But the line on the graph is heading upwards. We might want to speed the process up, but the general trend suggests that we're on the right path, and shouldn't make a complete change in strategy.

Have you broken it down?

Here's my chart for traffic from search engines.

If I look at my traffic over the whole year, I have a fairly smooth and steady increase, like the ones earlier in the post. But breaking it down by source shows a different story. My direct traffic is relatively flat. Search traffic shows a temporary peak in May when I was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, and then a nice increase between July and August that stayed high till the typical holiday drop --and even then was considerably higher than it was to begin with.

Here's a site, launched this summer, that shows completely different profiles for its three sources of traffic:

I haven't been working on this site since its launch, but if I were, I'd need to be aware of the different paths visitors were following.

When you look at your site's traffic for 2009 and make your online marketing plans for 2010, be sure to look closely enough at your traffic data to get the information you need for strategic decisionmaking.

Need more basic info about website traffic? Here are some posts you might find helpful:

Website Traffic
Learn from Your Traffic Sources
Detective Work at Analytics

Labels: Google Analytics, online marketing, traffic

Seasonal Online Marketing

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Yesterday, in the context of creating a marketing calendar, I talked about seasonal businesses. Many businesses show a seasonal pattern, and whether to try to get as much mileage as possible during the busy season or to try to even out the oscillations in your system by marketing heavily in the off season is a strategic decision that has to be informed by the unique realities of your business.

But what about the truly seasonal business or product?

Right now I'm working with a couple of websites which are so spring-specific that there is really no way to market them for the current season.

First, here's Sweetique.com, a company distributing chocolate-filled eggshells (real eggshells, that is, filled with chocolate)

While Sweetique does make some other products that appeal to consumers year-round, this page is so completely for Easter that visitors who aren't looking for Easter items won't stay. The call to action is clearly "Order Easter eggs," so we can't expect sales till March.

The second site is Grand Getaways Passover 2010, a Passover destination site. While taking a Passover vacation (possibly with friends and family) is an undertaking that people are likely to prepare for earlier than ordering Easter basket items, we're still talking about an event that won't take place till the end of March.

Both sites offer the option of booking or ordering early, but neither will probably see much conversion for the next month or two. One of the benefits of the internet is immediacy -- but that also means that many of the things we'd usually do in the way of online marketing won't be valuable for these sites.

What's our best strategy?

Work on rankings. We want to see Grand Getaways at the top of the page for "Passover vacations," "Passover travel," "Pesach program," and similar terms. Sweetique wants high ranks for "Easter baskets," "Easter chocolates," "Easter gifts," and other terms of that kind. Starting now gives us a good chance of being on top when consumers begin to search for those phrases, even with such highly competitive terms.
Use articles. Well-written articles on these subjects can bring links and traffic. With this kind of lead time, we can pitch to online magazines and top bloggers in these areas as well.
Get busy with linkbuilding. Intensive linkbuilding will help us reach the rankings we want, and can also get us at the places where consumers are likely to look for information once they start looking. Passover travel directories are an example of strong niche directories that are worth courting. Easter sites may not be updating soon, but their webmasters also aren't being inundated with link requests right now. This is a good time to start identifying and reaching out to sites that will want to share our sites with their visitors.

"Strike while the iron is hot" is good advice, but having plenty of time to heat the fire before you need to put your irons into it has its advantages as well.

Labels: online marketing

Your Online Marketing Plan for 2010: Top 3 Moves

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

This may be the wildly busy time of year for you. If not, it's time to start thinking about your online marketing plan for 2010. How does your website fit into your company's overall marketing plan?

Tim Ash's Landing Page Optimization has an interesting chart showing the people who visit your website. He has them laid out like this:

NO
maybe no
maybe maybe
maybe yes
YES

The no and yes groups, he says, have already made up their minds, so it's the maybe group that you're really talking to.

People who know for sure that they don't want what you offer have come to your page for some other reason than to shop. People who know for sure that they want what you offer have come there to shop.

The rest of the people have wandered by or come over because they heard of you, or they're checking you out as a possible solution to their needs.

Here are the top three things to consider:

Is your website doing its job? You can make all kinds of efforts to get traffic to your site, but if your website isn't doing what it needs to do, then bringing more people isn't necessarily a good thing.
Do you have a way of keeping in touch? The people who come to your site thinking "maybe" might need a bit more contact. Do you have a way of collecting contact information, and a plan for contacting them?
Are you visible? Whether you choose advertising, social media, or a combination of online and physical world strategies, you need to do something to make sure that people who need you can find you.

Labels: online marketing

Word of Mouth Marketing Online

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

"Word of mouth marketing doesn't work," the woman I was talking with said scornfully. And then thought a moment. "Except for you."

It's true that I had a marketing plan back when I first started my business, and haven't been able to implement it yet because I have too much work to do. I keep thinking that I need to do some email marketing or something, but I don't have time -- we're turning away work as it is.

This is a nice problem to have.

Here's the thing: I don't drive people to my website by shooing them over there with the broom of high-pressure sales and I don't then browbeat them (I guess I could use the same broom for that) into calling me by covering my home page with special offers. That's doing it the hard way.

Instead, I have a high level of online visibility, and I do my best to offer useful stuff here at my website, and to do a good job for my clients. The typical person contacting me with a job offer or a request for a proposal (and I get about three a week) has read something I've written or heard about me from someone, and was already interested in working with me before arriving at my website. My website offers enough evidence of what I do that prospective clients can feel pretty confident about me before they ever call or email with that offer.

That's enough about me. I'm only talking about myself like this because I know that some people feel as though word of mouth, online networking, inbound marketing -- whatever you want to call it -- doesn't work, and I know from my own experience that it does. I also know that seeing the statistics proving it works is sometimes less convincing than hearing about it from someone who has direct experience. Word of mouth, in fact.

Are you good at what you do? Then strut your stuff online. Have pictures of the things you make at your website, or case studies of the work you do if it doesn't lend itself to pictures, so your visitors can see for themselves that you're good at it. You don't have to announce that you're good -- let them notice it on their own. Let other people say it for you.

See the penguins up there? One is sharing the amazing experience he just had with his friends. One of those friends, excited about this great news, is sliding over to another group of penguins to spread the word. I just made that up, actually. I don't know how well word of mouth works among penguins. But I know that it works among humans, who are probably the majority of your target market.

Labels: online marketing

The Myth of Black Friday

Monday, November 23, 2009

Some say that the Friday after Thanksgiving is called "Black Friday" because that's the typical day on which retail operations get into the black, or begin earning a profit for the year. Others say (with better historical data) that the term "Black Friday" actually refers to the experience of retail workers and police officers coping with the beginning of the holiday season.

Neither of those is the myth. The myth is that the Friday after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day of the year. It hardly ever is. December 23rd is more likely to be, followed by the Saturday before Christmas.

Retailers like the idea of making Black Friday into a sort of holiday, though, a special shopping day that you shouldn't miss. And a few years ago, online retailers managed to concoct a whole mythical shopping day of their own: CyberMonday.

On the Monday after Thanksgiving, the story went, people would get back to work and spend their coffee breaks shopping online. Internet news sources reported the phenomenon, which didn't exist, and actually managed to get a nice little spike in online shopping for that day.

E-commerce sites have, ever since, offered special deals on this day and otherwise tried to get people to see it as a special shopping opportunity. Why not? Marketing stunts can entertain and amuse people, and can also increase sales. So if you're in the mood, run a CyberMonday promotion. Don't forget to do press releases. Interview local major business owners about whether they plan to be strict about CyberMonday shopping among their employees, and describe the extra efforts you'll be making to cope with the rush. If you have a brick and mortar store, tell your Black Friday shoppers to be sure to check out the CyberMonday specials. Make it a worthwhile stunt.

Labels: online marketing

What Do Your Want Your Visitors to Do?

Friday, October 9, 2009

We've talked before about the importance of the call to action. You need to let your visitor know -- as instantly as possible -- what you offer and how they can get it.

Sometimes it's not that simple.

This is a work-in-progress page for the hot iPhone app Kosher Cookbook. Let's acknowledge right away that this version of the page doesn't really have that clear call to action. It will. The primary action the visitor is invited to take at this page is simple: buy a $4.99 iPhone app.

This is the only kosher cookbook available for the iPhone, and I think we all know that iPhones are the place where our recipes belong nowadays. If you're a kosher cook, then as soon as you see the tasty pictures, you're going to push the button and download the app.

There's more to it than that.

Appsolute Media, developers of this particular electronic cookbook, plan to make more cookbooks in future. Their Cookshelf app is an elegant platform for the purpose, and they have big plans. So they want people not only to download this cookbook, but to come back in the future and see the new ones.

This website must therefore not just allow people to buy the item, but must also foster a sense of community and bring people back.

Sometimes, you need to look behind the immediate sale, toward your company's future plans. How does your website reflect your company's long-term strategy?

Labels: online marketing, web content

Is SEO Easy or Hard?

Monday, September 21, 2009

Sometimes people talk about SEO (search engine optimization) as if it were a mystical art of some kind. It isn't. It's good business, good communication, ordinary stuff like that. If you wanted to find a metaphor for SEO, though, I think video games would be a better choice than magic. Like video games, SEO requires speed, strategy, and focus. There's a thrill in vanquishing -- excuse me, I meant in moving ahead of a competitor in the search results. and of course an equal sense of loss when they smite -- or rather, when a canny competitor moves ahead of your company.

So is it a hard game or an easy one?

I can give you a solid "It depends" on that. Optimizing a page for search requires skills which are fairly rare, but those of us who have them don't find it a particularly hard task. When you come to the fight for top ranks on the search pages, it can be quite easy or very difficult, depending on the company and the website.

If you want to predict the level of ease for your own company, ask yourself these questions:

Do you deserve a top spot? Is your website the most useful and authoritative resource for the keyword in question? Are you a recognized leader in your field? If so, then SEO will be a matter of pointing this out to the search engines. If you don't really deserve the spot, it's going to be hard. Changing keywords or improving your website can both help with this issue.
Are there a lot of orcs out to get you? It is easier to get a top spot for custom musical arrangements for brass quintets than for SEO services. The number of players, their skill levels, and the amount of time they spend on the effort makes an enormous difference. This varies from one keyword to another.
Do you have any special challenges? A very common company name, especially if there are competitors for the name who have a very strong presence online (I'm still working on that one that's up against a couple of government programs, Microsoft, and an Amazon offshoot), can make your task harder. Not having access to your site or having other limitations that prevent the best on-site optimization can also make things tough.

These factors affect the speed with which you can expect results, and they affect the best strategy for your online marketing. They don't make the process any less fun, though. just examine them with a realistic eye, and then go ahead.

Labels: online marketing, SEO

Your Website vs. Web 2.0?

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Social media supports your website and extends the value of your investment in that website. Crowdsourced and user-generated content are great opportunities for linkbuilding, wonderful places to meet your customers and show them what great goods and services you offer, and the ultimate in professional networking.

So where's the vs. in "Your Website vs. Web 2.0"?

It came from a question a client asked me yesterday. "If you're good enough at social media," she wanted to know, "could you do without a website?"

It's an interesting question. If your business is adept enough with Twitter, Whrrl, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Squidoo, Digg... and so forth ... then that could be your entire online presence. People searching for you could type in your name and see your Amazon lists, your Flickr and YouTube contributions, and your deviantART portfolio, and learn all about you.

There could be advantages to this:

In general, those sites are free. You save the cost of building a website.
You can present different sides of your business to different markets.
You can change and update your information continually even if you have very limited technical skill.

There are also disadvantages.

Those sites are only free if your time is free. Putting time in at a few sites is great support for your website, great for networking, and good business practice. Managing your business via forum and aggregate site is extremely time-consuming. I know people who spend most of each day maintaining their presence at multiple free sites. They aren't running profitable businesses. These two facts are connected.
All your different sides will be visible to potential customers at all times. So will all your changes and reinventions. I'm extremely visible on the web, myself, and you could see different sides of my life if you made the effort to do so -- but my website is primary. That means that the professional face I choose to present is the main one. People who search for my business aren't going to happen upon pictures of my family unless they make an effort to find them. If you conduct your life all over the web, you have little or no control over what tops the list when people search for you, and it will change from day to day.
Even if you maintain a consistent presence across all Web 2.0 spaces you inhabit, you still have very limited control. Some sites will allow you to show products and some won't. Some will give you the option of showing certain information and some will insist that you do. None will let you present a consistent visual effect -- especially if you have limited technical skill. Forget branding your business.
Your customers will hate you. Seriously. Let's say that I discover your products on Flickr and contact you via Twitter to buy something. A couple of months later, I think what a great gift that item would make for a friend -- but I can't remember your Twitter name. I Google you and find your Ning page -- but with no website, I can't track down your products easily, and I've already spent fifteen minutes getting cross about not being able to find your website. I'm not going to make the extra effort involved in finding you.
It shows a lack of seriousness. All businesses need websites. If you don't have a website, it's going to be hard for people to take you seriously enough to send you money.

Your business website is the foundation of your online presence. Your participation elsewhere on the web supports it. But you can't do without it. (Want some figures? Check out "Can You Do Without a Website?")

Labels: online marketing, social media, usability

Results of Regular Site Upkeep

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

While I work for private clients, I also work for a couple of agencies, helping to build and optimise websites and looking after some of their clients as I look after my own. At one of those agencies, I have a colleague named Tami. She minds the PPC results and I mind the organic SEO results, and we meet virtually sometimes on Monday mornings in our ritual mining of analytics data.

Tami calls this, "Making sure nothing awful has happened."

I like to think of it as seeking opportunities to maximize results, but it's one of those half full vs. half empty things, right?

In any case, I was there poking around among web sites that I take care of and websites that I ignore. Some people are happy with their initial results and don't care to be more aggressive about their online marketing, so there are sites in my data that get regular care and sites that just trundle along on their own momentum.

Not long ago I wrote about a single SEO case study: a company I'd had on my regular clients list for a year, with excellent results.

That's just one company, though. There are so many factors for each company, ranging from the state of the economy to seasonal changes to level of compliance, that one company can only be an indication of what can happen, not what does happen.

So I ran some anonymous numbers comparing well-built, optimized websites that were being taken care of with equally well-built optimized websites that were being left to their own devices.

I compared only one thing: traffic increase over the past month. Website traffic is not always the most interesting or important metric, but it's easily understood and easily compared. It's a neutral choice. Comparing July and August will certainly give you different results for a lawn care company than for a school supply store, but over a large number of sites, seasonal variations even out. So I simply gathered up all the numbers and took the mean increase (or decrease) in traffic for the entire population.

The good news is that the average good website increased in traffic, whether cared for or not. Some of the untended websites went up in traffic and some went down, but the average result was a 6.49% increase in traffic.

In general, healthy websites do show a gradual and steady increase in traffic, interrupted sometimes by seasonal dips. So it's good to know that a good website can survive a bit of neglect.

The other good news is that sites that were being looked after showed an average increase in traffic of 38.23%.

"Looked after" can include social media, blogging, routine linkbuilding, and keeping an eye on analytics and Google alerts. The sites generally have one to three hours spent on them each week, though some have less and some have more -- sort of like having the cleaners in.

What's the moral of the story? Simply this: spending a little time looking after your website is worth doing. If you have someone with the skills on your staff, give them an hour, or perhaps a morning, a week to do minimum maintenance. If you don't have someone with the skills, consider hiring someone.

The other take-away is that getting your on-site optimization done so you have a healthy website can be enough, even if you do nothing else, to keep you on a path of steady improvement. That's got to make you feel optimistic.

Labels: online marketing, SEO

Does Your Website Work Weekends?

Monday, August 31, 2009

One of the great things about your website is that it will go ahead and work for you while you're out doing other things. It will, assuming you've done a good job with it, show the best side of your business to visitors 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

That is, if you have visitors 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

You can tell by looking at your analytics. Here's your dashboard. You can see the traffic to your site in the blue line.

If you put the cursor over the little blue dots, you can see exactly which day, and day of the week each is.

Look at a couple of examples and see the difference:

This site has minor peaks and valleys. Some of the peaks are on Thursdays, some on Tuesdays or Fridays. The traffic never goes way down. This site has traffic all week.

This site has valleys on the weekends. There is an enormous difference between weekday and weekend traffic every single week. Essentially, this site doesn't work on weekends.

What difference does it make? In general, if your site doesn't work on weekends, your customers probably don't either, and they're only visiting when they work.

In that case, your website can be an all-business kind of place. You can use the jargon of your industry. You should be serious enough that your customers' bosses can walk by and see they're working.

You might also be able to increase your traffic, and perhaps your sales, by posting something interesting on weekends, or even offering special offers only on the weekend.

If you have traffic all week, then people come to you whether they're working or not -- or they work weekends, too. You may want more of a Web2.0 feeling, a community aspect, a fun area. You should make sure that your site accommodates amateurs as well as pros at whatever you do. Or, if you're in an industry where people work on the weekends, you might want to take advantage of it by offering those weekend specials if your competitors don't.

It's just another useful piece of information about your clients.

Labels: Google Analytics, online marketing

Is an Old-Fashioned Website Harming Your Business?

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

When people ask for an analysis of their websites (I do that for free, by the way -- don't hesitate to ask me), one of the most common things I see is an old-fashioned website.

Here's one. This website is a good example of how websites used to look, long ago. Words and pictures and things were just stuck on the page one after another. Pictures were small. Nothing gave the visitor any indication about how to move through the site. People in those days expected to have to spend time figuring out what was going on with a website, and to have to read everything in order to find the information they sought.

In some ways, websites were like things on paper, in those days, but they wouldn't really have made nice brochures or anything. They were more like classroom handouts. It was kind of cool if there were pictures at all.

This site was also built in an old-fashioned way. Web designers in those days used the techniques developed for making tables of information, to sort of put things approximately where they wanted them to be, and it sort of works on some people's browsers.

Again, it was kind of cool, in those days, to be able to do anything besides just making a black and white page of text.

We are way beyond that now.

Here's the new website Shan Pesaru of Sharp Hue and I worked with owners Eric and Cindy Studer to build for The Retreat at Sky Ridge.

Obviously, the new site looks more attractive than the old one. But notice the ways in which it works better:

The name of the place is in the top left hand corner, where people who read English naturally look to begin getting information from a page, and it's large and different enough to work as a title. The old site had the name (the former name) in that place as well, but it wasn't visually distinct from the rest of the page.
The navigation is obvious. It's in the place where people expect to see it, it looks like navigation, and the colors change on mouseover (the mouse, in the screenshot, is over "Contact") to help visitors find their way.
There are clear calls to action. If the visitors are ready to book their stay at The Retreat, they can do that. If they want to get on the mailing list for special offers, they can do that too. Getting the contact info to make a call is easy.
The site is built to modern standards. You can't see this in a screen shot, but it makes a big difference. As time goes on, old-fashioned kinds of website construction work less and less well, and before long they simply won't work at all. Trying to maintain a web site built with outdated methods is sort of like clinging to cassette tapes. It's only a matter of time.

If your business has an old-fashioned website, that may mean that you've been online for a long time. Good for you. You have domain age and probably also faithful visitors on your side.

But you may not realize that you have an old-fashioned page. The first time I heard my son talk about what astronauts did "in the olden days," I experienced some cognitive dissonance. To me, the terms "olden days" and "astronauts" didn't go together. I'm old enough to think of astronauts as kind of new by definition, and "olden days" as something that goes with maybe cowboys or knights in armor.

If you have an old-fashioned web page, then you might be used to it. You might not realize that modern users of the internet are going to look at a page like the "before" picture here and feel confused. Is that the homepage? Where are they supposed to go? What company is this, and what do they offer?

Highly-motivated visitors may search around to find the information which is after all, there somewhere. Most visitors, though, will spend a few seconds at this page and then return to the search engine results page whence they came, and go somewhere easier to understand.

I should add that I sometimes see quite new websites which have been built in old-fashioned ways, with old-fashioned designs. This is really sad. If you have one of those, then you've got the negatives of an old website without any of the positives. It's a bit heartbreaking to say "I realize you just had this built a month ago, but you know all that money you think you saved by having your cousin do it for you? It's an illusion."

If your website looks like the "before" picture here, you really have to have a redesign.

Labels: budget, online marketing, web design

Finding Your Customers

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

In general, the object of a web site is to allow your customers to find you. You make your site eminently findable with good SEO and SEM, make sure it says what you need your customers to know about you, and get on with your work.

But it occasionally happens that your customers don't actually look online for what you offer.

One of my clients creates custom software for people in the financial sector in New York City. We were talking recently about how he has lots of traffic now, but still would like to see more conversions.

"We need," I said again, risking getting really boring, "to figure out where the people who need you are hanging out online. Then we have to make sure that you're visible from there."

This is another thing that's generally true about online marketing. It involves research. I track down the people who need my client's product. I say to them, "Now, supposing you needed some goat gamma globulin, what would you do?" or whatever the product in question might be.

Sometimes it takes further probing, but at some point you will find out what terms people are going to use and where they'd be likely to begin. You'll then have enough info to begin some in depth research. Or you'll confirm what you, as a business owner and expert in your field, already thought. Or you'll be amazed,and that can really turn around your business.

But in this particular case, we're talking about a small and specialized group. So it's different.

I understand this because I'm a musician. If you're not a musician, and you need one, you might go to your favorite search engine and type in "wedding singer" or "guitar teacher" or something.

If you are a musician, then you are never more than one contact away from the right person. You say to yourself, "I need a tenor -- who might be available?" If you can't come up with anyone yourself, you ask another musician. Conceivably, you tweet it: "Short on tenors for the Requiem. Who's available on the 19th?"

I've literally never Googled for a musician of any kind.

So what if your customers are like this -- such a specialized group that they practically all know one another? Does that mean that you really don't need a website, and can just rely on word of mouth?

Nope. Even in groups where "everyone" knows "everyone," it isn't literally everyone. There's a new person in town. There's a start-up company you haven't heard of yet, but with your help they'll be in the inner circle next year. There's someone in a slightly overlapping circle who could use your services, even though you didn't go to school together.

And there are also people you know -- even current clients -- who need something else from you, and they've been meaning to call you, but haven't yet. Or your competitors' current clients, who aren't completely happy right now and are considering a move.

So the fact that you may need to go out and find your clients doesn't mean that your website is irrelevant. Here's what it means:

Your website probably won't be the first place people encounter you. Don't assume that your visitors know all about you, but do assume that they'll be prepared to read more, and will want more information. They're deciding, after all, between you and some small number of specific other people. The idea that people will decide to stay or leave within a few seconds may be less true for your website than it is for most. You may need more content than another site
Your website needs to come up first on search for your name. When people hear about your business from someone else, they'll still look you up online before they call you. They're just very likely to look for your name rather than your business name. Having your business website at the top of search for your name allows you more control over how people see you. Sure, they can still check out your Facebook page or Amazon profile, but a good website can make them feel that they don't need to.
Don't neglect social media. It's the new word of mouth. An online follow-up after some face time at a conference, tweeting the link to an article you discussed, or adding someone to your network can remind them of you and help establish a mutually satisfying business relationship.

Even when you need to find your customers, your website still speaks for you.

Labels: online marketing, social media, web content

Your Website is Horrible

Monday, August 17, 2009

"This is the point," I told the client, "where I tell you that your website is horrible."

I was joking. of course, but only slightly. I have had to do this in person several times recently, because for some reason I have a bunch of local clients right now.

Usually I send these things off by email, couched diplomatically in words like, "Your website doesn't seem to do your wonderful gallery justice" or "You might not have realized that your meta description says, 'Add a description here.'" If people are shocked and horrified, I don't have to see it.

Often they email back after a bit saying, "We had noticed these things, too. What can we do about it?"

In person, it's different. I met with a nice realtor Shan and I are working with, and he kept calling out to people in nearby offices, "Our website is awful! I can't believe this!"

"That's okay," I say soothingly. "We're going to fix it."

At another client's home office, we were gathered around the screen looking at the problems. "See," I pointed out, "the search engines can only see what's on this screen. They can't see your pictures, or hear your audio clips, or read the words in your Flash introduction. This is all they're seeing. They have no idea what you do."

These clients were silent, their brows furrowed in distress.

So when I brought out my printout (really, it's worse when we do it on the screen) and pointed out all the problems to the third client in a row, I felt a bit apologetic.

On the other hand, I also got to visit a client whose beautiful new website just went live. She's going to be taking care of her own blog, so she needed a little bit of training. She was very excited. She gave me a hug.

It's a before and after experience.

If you suspect that maybe your website is horrible, you can email me and I'll tell you the truth.

Labels: online marketing, web content

Cleaning Up Your Internet Presence

Friday, August 14, 2009

I've had several clients recently who want to get rid of something online. There are plenty of reasons for respectable companies to find themselves wanting to to clean up their online presence.

One of my clients has a listing of his company as an LLC, when it's not. Another had a disgruntled employee who took his side of the story to Rip Off Report. Another has moved several times and hates to have customers coming into the brick and mortar shop saying, "I'm so glad I found you! I looked you up online and went to the address and you were gone!" It reminds her of all the people who go to that old address and then don't find her again.

In the past, I've had clients troubled by online blogs kept by people who used to work for the company, old public online arguments, and people with very similar names.

My name is Rebecca Haden, and when I first got my website online I was sharing the front page of Google with an actress also named Rebecca Haden. Now, I don't mind sharing, but it looked odd to have "Join the Rebecca Haden Fan Club!" there on the SERP with me, so I wanted to get rid of that.

How can you get rid of these things?

Remove it. Surprisingly, companies often have outdated information online at sites which they control. Your Google and Yahoo local business listings, Merchant Circle page, etc. are things you can fix. Often, they've been set up back in the mists of time by someone who no longer works for you, so there's some detective work involved in getting into the interface to update the information, but you will be able to correct or remove these references, with persistence.
Correct it. Sites like Manta or Rip Off Report aren't under your control just because they have content about you, but they do have places where you can submit corrections or additions to the information they list. Do so. Your calm and well-reasoned response to a negative review or just plain inaccurate information can help to undo any damage.
Bury it. Often, the item you want to get rid of is outdated, or simply not the best source of information about your company. You can use honest SEO and SEM to move that item off the front page, and people simply won't see it any more. That actress still has a fan club, and I wish her well, but she doesn't need her fan club on page 1.

Sometimes, clients are unaware of the need for a cleanup until I tell them about it. You can use Google Alerts to keep track of your online reputation, or just search for your company occasionally to see what your customers are seeing. Then respond to any problems swiftly.

And, of course, if you don't have the time or the skills to keep track of or correct these things yourself, you can hire someone like me to do it for you.

Labels: online marketing, web content

Website Traffic

Friday, July 17, 2009

Josepha's been doing basic foundational linkbuilding and social media for a nonprofit, and they've seen a 922% increase in traffic. Another client we're working with has a 215% increase in traffic. Another is up 28% after implementing only a few of my recommendations. We're happy to see these numbers; an increase in traffic is always good.

Yet last week I wrote about a client who has had a 600% increase in online sales in the past year, with only a slight increase in traffic. And I currently have a client whose traffic is down slightly, even though they've moved to the front page of Google for their top keywords.

Increased traffic is good, but it's not the only thing to look at. Here are some questions to ask when you think about your traffic:

Are your visitors actually your customers? People visiting my website after typing in "internet service provider" probably aren't looking for the kind of internet services I provide -- they're probably looking for an internet hosting company. Increasing their numbers isn't going to do me much good. If your well-targeted traffic increases and your random traffic decreases, you can see improved results without much increased traffic.
Are your visitors in your service area? International traffic is cool, but your lawn care service won't benefit from it. If you only work with local customers, then you should ignore traffic from elsewhere and look for increases in your local area only.
Are your visitors taking action? It can take some time for people to move from visiting to taking action, but if you see increasing traffic with no conversion over a long period, then you're not getting the return on your investment that you need. This particular question can be hard to answer if you're not an e-commerce site, but you'll want to notice whether visitors move through your website the way you planned. Make sure that you're taking into account those who visit online and then walk into your shop. And of course with Pay Per Click it's all about conversions -- if you're paying for traffic and they're not paying you, then increased traffic isn't good.
Are your visitors showing seasonal change? It's essential to compare apples to apples, not to oranges. The client I mentioned earlier who has had a dip in traffic is seeing a normal seasonal downturn. The one who has had a huge increase in sales but slight increase in traffic is up 49% over last month -- for Back to School -- but only 12% over last year at the same time.

Increased organic traffic is never a bad thing online. You don't pay for extra staff or higher electric bills from having visitors, even if they're not from your service area or not taking action. Larger numbers of visitors can increase your chances of gaining organic links or of drawing the attention of people who will become your customers. And sometimes there's a gap between when visitors find you and when they begin shopping with you or calling you.

But it's important not to focus on that single metric without looking at the others.

Labels: ecommerce, Google Analytics, online marketing

Planning Web Forms, part II

In the first post on planning web forms, we thought about your visitors' initial response to your web form, and your initial goal: information seeking.

Let's take it a bit beyond that. The way you set up your contact form can influence the choices your visitors make.

I want to emphasize that we're not talking here about manipulation. We're talking about creating harmony between your company and your visitors.

I'm thinking right now about a web form for a new website I'm building with Shan Pesaru for an upscale chocolatier who does custom, private label chocolates for nonprofits and corporate promotion.

When we think about the user journey for this company's customers, we know that their search for information is likely to begin far in advance of their need to order. The retail consumer of fine chocolates is likely to pick up a jar of the company's chocolate seashells spontaneously for a gift, a souvenir, or even a bit of self indulgence. The symphony orchestra currently considering using their private label chocolates as fundraising items at their concerts isn't likely to make that decision so lightly.

They need figures to take before the board, they'll be holding committee meetings and discussing it with their community partners, they'll be looking at competitors, and they'll be using their annual planning calendar to choose the best launch date for the private label chocolates.

A corporation intending to choose private label chocolates for tradeshow giveaways or corporate holiday gifts will have an equally lengthy procedure.

At what point in this journey does the company want to engage the organization?

The decision isn't like the conductor's decisions for a symphony. It's like the decisions of the players in a bluegrass band. When to move to the second part of the tune, when a player will take a solo interlude, when to make a key change or a shift in tempo -- each of these decisions will influence the next move of other band members and change the direction of the music as a whole.

Just so, your web form can influence your relationship with your customer. If we limit the number of information fields to the essentials, as we did with the software company, then we encourage the greatest posssible response and increase the number of leads.

However, if we ask for more information and offer more interaction, we limit the number of leads but ensure that those leads are hotter.

Here are some examples of web form elements that limit responses:

additional information about the visitor's company or organization, especially questions designed to elecit the size of the organization, such as "How many employees in your company?" or "How many locations?"
additional information about the visitor's plans, such as "How soon do you expect to make this decision?" or "What is your anticipated budget for this project?"
expressed contact intentions, such as "Submit this form and a sales representative will call you."

These items in a web form will discourage those who are merely toying with the idea, and tend to solidify the resolve of those who are serious in their interest. Answering these questions requires more thought and more certainty about the resources involved, and will cause the visitor to envision using your goods or services in a clearer and more concrete way.

You'll have fewer responses, but those you receive will be nearer a decision.

How can you decide which way you ought to go in your contact form? Here are some questions to consider:

How much staff time is involved in responses? The software company offers an automatic free download with no human effort on their part and no real cost to the company. They want high volume. A company that needs to craft an individual proposal or quote for each prospect may want to pre-qualify those leads as much as possible.
Can you provide samples? The software company's download is a sample. Someone who is thinking only casually about their product is likely to be swayed by trying it. This is true for the chocolatiers as well, but the cost and logistics of providing samples is completely different.
How important is it to build relationships? Some products and services are likely to be one-time purchases with quick decision-making. Others require nurturing of relationships that last over a period of years and may lead to many future business relationships with others. Where your company's offerings fall along that continuum affects how important it is to you to build your house contact list for the future.

For the chocolatier, the best decision may be to create two web forms: one on the Contact form which encourages a high volume of additions to the email list, and one on the Private Label form which narrows the field to people who are ready to talk with a sales rep.

Good planning will let you use your web form to make beautiful music with your visitors.

Labels: call to action, online marketing, web content, web design

Your Website as Salesperson

Thursday, July 16, 2009

I was talking with a local businesswoman yesterday, a woman whose business caters to brides. It's hard to get help, she said.

We hear a lot about how hard it is to find jobs nowadays, so I was a little surprised.

"It's hard to find someone you can really rely on," she amplified. And, as we talked more, it turned out that she meant it was hard to find a good salesperson. She had good reasons for thinking so. But you know, this woman is a friend of mine. Finally, I just had to mention the one salesperson in her business that I knew about.

Her website.

I was hesitant, because of course I'm biased. I write websites. It's easy to get an exaggerated idea of the importance of your own field, since you're in it all the time. There was that minute during which I thought, well, maybe people planning their weddings don't go online.

Sure.

The internet is now the main source of information for Americans, I had to point out to my friend, especially people as young as the average bride. Not to mention the fact that the modern working woman planning her wedding does at least some of that planning in the evenings, when human salespeople aren't working and that online presence is all that's available.

"I have a website," she objected.

"True," I agreed,"but people looking at your website can't tell how wonderful you are."

We both thought about her website: the tiny, muddy pictures, the old-fashioned design, the poorly-crafted text, the "Map" page with no map...

Having this website as the major source of information about her business is like having a dim, disheveled, inarticulate salesperson going out to represent her.

It may be hard to get good help, but it's certainly not hard to get a good website.

She looked uncertain. The cost was on her mind.

A new website costs less than the income she can expect from one bride. The significant number here is not the cost of a new website. It's the cost of all the brides who pass her up for someone who looks better online. A good website is the cheapest good salesperson she'll ever have.

Labels: online marketing

Planning Your Web Forms, part I

Monday, July 13, 2009

Web forms have been on my mind lately. For one thing, I've been helping Fargo web design firm Onsharp get the word out about their opening for a Web Project Manager (click on that link and apply if you're qualified and live near Fargo -- they're a great team), and this is a task that involves filling out lots of web forms.

For another, I've been assisting backup software makers FileReplicationPro to plan a new web form, and that discussion included many more viewpoints than such discussions generally do. This is because we were hanging out at Basecamp talking about it, an approach which tends to get more input than the usual IM exchange.

There are two big questions when you plan your web form. The first is what information to include or request.

As a general rule, people get antsy if you ask too many questions on your web form. They get tired of typing and give up, or they begin to wonder why you want to know all these things and decide not to tell you.

So your first goal should be not to ask for any more than you have to. And that means that you need to ask for the things you really want to know.

For FileReplicationPro, it seemed to me that we didn't need people's physical locations, but we did need to know their position in the company.

"They're CTOs," FileReplicationPro assured me, "or IT team leaders."

But what if they're not? What if they're office workers whom someone has instructed to find some data security software? Or small business owners with limited technical knowledge but an awareness that they need to back up their data? In that case, we need to be using completely different language when we write to them.

We never really need to know where in physical space they are. So, while there may be a natural inclination to start a form with name, address, and phone number, by giving up some of that we get to ask the visitors' position in the decision-making process. This information will let us target our content instead of just guessing.

When it comes to the questions you ask, your web from should be, as Einstein said of something else entirely, as simple as possible, but no simpler.

The next issue is how the form looks. Look at these two different approaches to the same hypothetical form from Angela Peace's web design class:

The first design, by Brandi Samuels, lays out the options very clearly, while the second relies on drop-down menus and bunches the choices together in a less readable way. The second approach creates a smaller form, but it may still be daunting to the visitor.

Your designer will have quite a few options for getting the information you want, once you decide what that is. You can make your visitors use a drop-down menu to choose their state, for example, or you can let them type in their two-letter abbreviation. I live in Arkansas, so I don't mind the drop-downs much usually -- but having to scroll down to North Dakota for Onsharp over and over was something else. People visiting your site during a coffee break may resent those extra seconds. Do you have the kind of volume that makes it worth inconveniencing your visitors in order to have some automatic sorting of the response data?

You can give them, as in the examples above, default options -- which of those designs do you think will lead more customers to choose a service plan, the one that starts with three years or the one that starts with "none"?

Consider testing a couple of different approaches to see how visitors respond.

Does your web site have no response form at all? The preschool website Jeff Wain and I are building currently doesn't have a form. The preschool owner hasn't had a website before, and she's used to getting contacts entirely by phone.

But a web form, however simple, will allow her to track conversions a bit better, build up her email list, and perhaps reach the busy working parents who search for a preschool in the wee hours of the morning and don't remember to call her later.

So I'm thinking that we need to add a contact form. Name, phone number, and email address should be plenty, and I can rely on Jeff to make it look great.

Labels: call to action, online marketing, web content, web design

When your new site launches...

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Shan Pesaru and I just finished making a new website for a local church.

They had the common problem you find in churches and other non-commercial organizations -- a website built by a member who volunteered, and then didn't keep up with it, and lots of people getting access and making changes and no one remembering how to get back in and fix the resulting mess...

They really needed a new website.

However, since their previous website had been unusable for some years, their members aren't in the habit of using it. They want to get the membership, which naturally includes people of many different ages and levels of technical comfort, to use the new website as a primary source of information.

Succeeding at this will allow them to reduce the amount of time the church secretary spends answering the same questions, the number of group emails they send out, and the money and other resources they spend on mailings.

They also want to make sure that people looking for their church online, or for a Methodist church of any kind in their town, can find them. (Secretly, they want to be above the big Methodist church on Google, but they are pretending that's a joke when they say it. After all, they're a church.)

So they're essentially in the same place that a business would be, upon getting a new website. You want your current customers to visit your site regularly, and you want potential new customers to be able to find you.

The things they need to do are the same things you need to do when you get a new website:

Submit your website to the major search engines. Here they are:

Yahoo!
Google
Bing
DMOZ

Tell your current customers about your website, and give them a reason to check it out. A store might choose to have a drawing among all customers who go to their website and fill out the mailing list opt-in form, a coupon available at the website, or a sale on online purchases only. The church has a blog at their website, and is e-mailing members asking them to send in items for the blog. Chances are excellent that members will then tell one another to go look at their pictures on the blog, and once there, they'll be invited to explore and to bookmark the website.

Take the opportunity to announce your new website. Press releases, articles in your local or industry papers, mentions in your newsletter (and while you're at it, start transitioning to an electronic newsletter), and face-to-face invitations to visit your new website are all completely appropriate.
Twitter, add a link to Facebook, request links from your clients and vendors -- any place on the internet that you have access to is a good place to mention your new site. While "We have a website!" isn't news, "We have a new website!" is, so go ahead and share your exciting news with your online community as well as in the physical world.

Chances are, you feel a little bit like someone with a new puppy, anyway, especially if yours is as nice as this one is. Go ahead, while you feel like bragging, and brag a little bit. Check your rankings and analytics after a couple of weeks and see whether your site has naturally done what you want it to do, and at that point you can decide whether you need an online marketing plan.

Labels: online marketing, SEM

PPC vs. SEO

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

I'm not an expert at pay per click. While I had a chat once with a guy who actually is an expert at it, and he assured me that it's all about the landing pages, my experience of PPC is analyzing its effectiveness for my clients, and it never seems to be doing them much good.

The conversion rate is invariably far lower than that for organic search or referrals from high-quality links, the traffic is never stellar, and the time spent on the site tends to verge on the insulting.

So my position on PPC, when I'm asked, tends to be that it's outside my realm, but it never seems to do much for the people I work with. Oh, and I'm told it's all about the landing page. Good luck.

Here's some data from SEOmoz that suggests that it's not just me (I'm quoting here -- click on the link to read the whole article):

For every 1 click on a paid search result, the organic results generate 8.5 clicks (this is on a keyword parity basis, not counting those search results that have no paid ads)
Based on action/conversion tracking, paid search clicks convert, on average, at 1.5X the rate of organic clicks (no surprise, since that ad text and landing page is custom optimized by the advertiser)
From the numbers above, we can see that the opportunity from organic search is 5.66X that of paid search
Across the board ad spending (via SEMPO):
- 2004 was 85% PPC vs. 12% Organic
- 2005 was 87% PPC vs. 11% Organic
- 2006 was 87% PPC vs. 12% Organic
- 2007 was 88% PPC vs. 10% Organic
Spend on SEO is 1/8th of PPC
Paid Search Agencies earn, on average 10% of their clients' PPC spend (this number may actually be low)
By this logic, SEO Agencies earn 1/45th (1 / 5.66 x 8) as much as paid search agencies (from a direct keyword-to-conversion path perspective)

Now, SEOMoz is written for SEOs, and so the focus here is on the fact that we make less than we're worth, if you compare the value of organic improvements in search with the value of pay per click campaigns. But from the point of view of businesses, this can be good news -- SEO is cheaper and more cost-effective than PPC.

And these figures assume a higher conversion rate, too, which I have never yet seen. The actual figures for my clients would be more extreme than this.

I plan to refer people to this data when asked in future.

Labels: online marketing, PPC

Only Pay If You're On Page 1!

Monday, June 22, 2009

A client shared with me a high-pressure sales pitch he's been getting from an online promotion company.

The deal is pretty simple: you pay a monthly fee of $120 dollars to stay on page 1 of the search results for Google. That is, if you're on page 1 that month, you pay. If you're not, you don't. There's a fee for the first month, to get your rankings up. After that, you pay only for results.

Doesn't that sound great?

It might, unless you know how search engines work.

While this online promotion company assured my client that Google rotates your link off page 1, and thus a continual watchful eye and "quick optimization of your link" is a must, in fact the search engines search for the best pages to offer the searcher. That name, "search engine," is a bit of a clue. The search engines then offer the best, most appropriate, most trustworthy page -- as far as they can tell -- to the searcher. The bit about rotating people off the front page is, if I may be forgiven a technical term, a lie.

No reputable SEO guarantees any particular results, any more than a pediatrician is going to guarantee your kid a particular height. It depends. However, I get most sites to the first page within a month. Some may even go to that first page within the first month all by themselves.

I like to have five to ten clients at a time, so I can look after them well. When we've met their goals, they may be finished, or they may have new goals. They may want to rank for more keywords, or they may just want maintenance. Keeping their content fresh, keeping up with their analytics, helping out with blogs or social media -- I'm sort of like having a worker who spends a morning or two a week taking care of that stuff for you.

But if I were a confidence trickster, I could offer to keep hundreds of people on the front page for $120 a month, per keyword, each. Once they were on the front page, I could take their money and do absolutely nothing. Chances are, many of them would stay there on the front page for that particular keyword. They would happily send me money for nothing every month. Those whose rankings slipped -- perhaps because a competitor got busy and did something to push them off to page 2 -- wouldn't pay me.

I wouldn't care. There are plenty more suckers out there, right?

Mind you, I'm not saying that the company my client told me about is running a scam. Perhaps they don't know any better themselves. I'm just saying what I, if I were a confidence trickster, which I'm not, could do.

Labels: ethics, online marketing

Writing E-Newsletters

Monday, June 8, 2009

A new study out of the UK claims that e-mail marketing brings in a 45-fold return. I haven't seen the raw data, but I find it believable. An electronic newsletter is the least expensive means available for reaching lots of clients, customers, or potential clients and customers with a strongly targeted message.

Here are some suggestions for making the most of your email newsletter:

Make sure it looks good. The example below has been put together by a business owner using a free newsletter program. They've left in the stuff that was just there to guide them, and they've made simple grammar and punctuation errors. The information isn't organized in a useful way, and their headline isn't a good choice for the text below it. The overall effect is not professional, and with some consumers, they'll lose trust. Since this company has an ongoing service, one new customer can be worth thousands of dollars. They've saved a maximum of $100 with their DIY attempt, so this is clearly a bad business decision. Unless you actually have someone on your staff with the skills and tools to do it for you, hire a professional.

That doesn't mean it has to be fancy. The example below is directed toward an audience with a high tolerance for the do-it-yourself look, and this is just a plain text email. The content is good and desirable to the population, and what's being done here is all being done correctly. If you have limited technical skills to draw on (but good writing skills), then an approach like this may work better than the example above.

Make sure it's valuable to your readers. As with most other online forms of marketing, it really can't be all about you. Your readers are thinking about themselves, not about you, so you have to be offering them some value or they won't bother to read your newsletter. The example below offers contests, projects, and information about an upcoming event, not just information on the company or blatant ads. That's true for all the examples here, and it's an absolute basic.

Make sure you have a call to action. If people just read your newsletter and can't do anything about it, you haven't made good use of your newsletter. The newsletters below have links back to the company's main websites, and opportunities to download items.

Ironically enough, both these examples are tech companies, and both had some little technical troubles with their buttons. The moral of this story is that you should always test your newsletter before you roll it out for real.

One final reminder: don't try to send your newsletter out from your normal email account. You're very likely to be identified as a spammer if you do that, however willing your readers are to receive your newsletter, and however good your newsletter may be. It's part of the spam filter process. So go ahead and use a service. Your webmaster may offer that service, or you can look into a company like Constant Contact or iContact.

Stumble It!

Labels: online marketing

Where Do Your Website's Visitors Come From?

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

One of the things you can learn by looking at your Google Analytics is where your visitors are when they come to your website. Just click on "Map Overlay" at your analytics dashboard, and you'll see a phrase like "3213 visitors came from 92 countries." You can then look closer and see the region, state, or city your visitors were in.

If it's a personal website you're looking at, you can respond to this with, "Wow, cool, people from Hungary come to see me!" If you've got a business website, this information can be more useful than that.

First, consider whether you can actually sell goods or services to people from 92 countries. If you have local business -- a brick and mortar store, a service that requires your physical presence, things like that -- then it may still be cool to have visitors from 92 countries, but you want the great majority of your visitors to be local. If they're not, then you need to do more linking with local sites, to encourage your actual customers to visit your website.

One company I'm working with right now sells chocolate. They're happy to ship, but not to tropical countries, and not to subtropical states like mine except in winter. So a preponderance of visitors from hot places would tell us that we're not focusing on the right geographical areas in our marketing.

If you have a national or a global reach, you can still benefit from the information. The school supply company I work with serves the entire country, but school calendars differ from one state to another. Seeing when New York's teachers start their Back to School browsing lets us target our marketing and plan for staffing and stocking needs -- if we relied only on the data from the local brick and mortar store, we'd miss those opportunities.

Watch for changes, too. A sudden spike in visitors from Milwaukee? Then you need to find out what happened there -- a radio show? a local mention of your name in the paper or of your product at a workshop? Find out so you can repeat the effect.

Finally, you can look more closely at a particular population's activity once they reach your website. Is the content your visitors from India choose to look at different from that most popular with your visitors from the UK? Do some countries have a higher conversion rate than others -- and if so, might you want to focus efforts on them rather than on the people who look but don't buy? Or do you just need to tweak your message to increase conversion from that other location?

The map overlay doesn't need to be a daily check, but it should be something you look at before your next marketing strategy meeting.

Stumble It!

Labels: Google Analytics, online marketing

Colors and Your Website

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Have I said yet this week that I'm not a designer? I like to get that in every now and then. The things I do in the area of web design -- and I do a lot of those things -- are about usability, navigation, where things should go... The things that have to do with meaning and communication. I leave the graphic art issues to other people.

And yet, I often work with people who have to deal with colors in their websites without the aid of a designer.

Sometimes they're DIY website owners, or working with a stock template. This is never going to be the most effective plan, but plenty of people start out that way. Sometimes they have their website built, but have other things -- like their Twitter account or their blog -- which they control themselves. Sometimes they simply prefer to make their own design decisions, even though they have someone doing the tech stuff for them.

This post will discuss some very basic considerations about color and your web presence, in response to the kinds of questions people ask me about color. Usually I say things like, "I'm not the one to ask about color." When they persist, I can tell that they really need some basic assistance. So here it is.

The first thing to consider is how the color you're think of using will affect your visitors. Here's the current site for a new client of mine. We're going to be working on a lot of things, but the first question for the designer was, "Do you want to keep the colors?" The red looks bold and vigorous, yet down to earth, and red is what this site design is all about.

The effect would be completely different with pink, or seafoam blue, or with poison green. The new design will be more modern and more in keeping with the importance of this company in the industry, but with the same basic color, it will still have the same basic feeling.

Think about the kinds of colors people associate with your industry or your business, and consider going with those associations -- or intentionally breaking away from them.

When I had my own website designed, the first thing I said was, "Not black." I'm a tech person, an information worker, and a black background can give a hi-tech look. But one of the differences about my business is that people who aren't that comfortable with technology can be comfortable with me. So I wanted reassuring colors that would let visitors know that.

As it happens, I work for lots of tech guys, so the lack of a black background hasn't made them uncomfortable either. If you're not sure how people respond to the color you have in mind, you can test your website design and find out.

The next thing to consider is reinforcing your brand.

We have a joke at my house: if I say I'm tempted to do something out of character, like smack somebody, my kids say, "You can't do that. It's not your brand." This may not be much of a joke, but the point is that you want your customers to recognize you, whether they're at your website or your blog or your MySpace page.

Using colors consistently is one of the easiest ways to maintain your brand wherever you go.

Check out Onsharp's new web design portfolio -- it's a video, so you can see a number of color changes at that one site. Even though they're showing several different featured clients, each of which has a different set of colors, they've kept their own colors as a frame, maintaining a consistent look and feel. They're designers, so they can do stuff like that.

You can, too. At FileReplicationPro's Twitter page, I've changed the page to use their colors. This is extremely easy to do. You click on "settings" at your account, then "design," then "change colors."

I mentioned this yesterday, and someone emailed me to say that it wasn't that easy. How do you find the colors that match your website or logo? Sometimes you can just ask your designer, but not always, and sometimes you can look in your source code, but not always. You could just guess, but that isn't the best plan. Both the pages I'm showing you today use red, but they aren't the same red. How can you find the precise color match, out of all the possible colors?

I have a trick for this which I'll be happy to share. First, you need to know that online colors all have six digit numbers, called hex codes, which look like this: #f8d160. You can see examples at the Twitter "change colors" page. When you know the codes of the colors you want, you can match those colors easily. Here's an easy way to find them:

Go to Big Huge Labs Color Palette Generator.
Upload your logo, or a screen shot of your web page.
Push the "create" button.
You will see the numbers of the colors in your logo or website. If you only have a few, the creator will suggest more that would look good with what you already have.
Now you have the numbers. Write them down someplace.

You can now put those numbers into the appropriate spots at Twitter and have your own somewhat branded background. You can download swatches for Photoshop, too, or copy the sample CSS, but if you know what to do with that, you probably don't need this post.

The third thing to think about is that colors on a website aren't always just for decoration. Often the color of text says, "This is a link" or "This is a link you've already visited" or "This is a new section, and we think it's important."

The essential thing to remember here is that, if you use colored text just because you can, you should quit it immediately. Your visitors are trying to click on things that ought to be links but aren't, and they will come to hate you.

The final point I'd like to make is that all this has nothing to do with search. The search engines don't know what colors you're using. Some otherwise good sources of advice on search will tell you that this means the look of your site doesn't matter. You can ignore aesthetics, they'll say, because that's not what's going to get you those rankings you want.

I'm going to disagree. Because you don't want good search rankings just so you can tell your friends, right? You want your business to benefit. And for that, the reactions of the humans are always important.

Labels: online marketing, web design

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Word of Mouth Marketing Online

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Results of Regular Site Upkeep

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Finding Your Customers

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Your Website is Horrible

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Website Traffic

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Planning Web Forms, part II

Your Website as Salesperson

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Planning Your Web Forms, part I

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When your new site launches...

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PPC vs. SEO

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Only Pay If You're On Page 1!

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Writing E-Newsletters

Monday, June 8, 2009

Where Do Your Website's Visitors Come From?

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Colors and Your Website

Wednesday, May 13, 2009