Focusing Your Site with Your Users In Mind
If you are like most, your company priorities are constantly changing and your site gets pulled along with those changes. New products, re-branding, promotions, newsletters, the list is endless. And somewhere in the midst of all that noise, clear customer paths can get lost and the whole purpose of your web site can be dampened. If you are setting out to provide a product or service, often the path to that product or service is overtaken by all of the company efforts to sell products. It is all quite ironic.Lastly, with the onset of multi device usage, it is more and more important to focus your site towards web standards to accommodate your users and make their visit to you site familiar and easy to navigate.
Site Review to the Rescue
You won’t be able to stop all changes to your site to re-strategize. But you can take a look at customer paths to the actions you want them to take and work to clear those paths. Managing a corporate web site is not for sissies. You have to line up with corporate strategy and revenue goals and guide content contributors accordingly. This can be very tricky.
6 questions to ask yourself and your team, to refocus your site:
Clarify the Purpose of Your Site
Is the one thing we want customers to do, still a clear path on our site. For example, is buying from us easy? Accessing promotions, logging off and on our site no matter what browser? Sometimes the most basic functionality gets broken amidst all the changes.
Buying Process
Does our method of reviewing products and services and buying – the cart style, etc., fit all of our demographics? Have we added technology that we need to remove to clear the path for older folks or does our site only accommodate millennial or phone shoppers? Research continues to support that yes, 60% plus are viewing sites on mobile devices, but many still transact at home on their desktops. Which brings me to the next review item.
Device Strategy
Does your mobile app, mobile site, tablet and desktop experience work together? Or are you making assumptions for all mobile or desktop sales? Responsive design allows for a flexible experience, but is not perfect. Make sure you know the devices your key prospects are using and cater to them. The below Comscore chart shows that somewhere between desktop and mobile, the majority of users are now using several platforms within a month. What is your target market using and are you reaching them optimally there?
Visitor Paths
When people arrive on your site, do they know what you do? Is your logo posh and hip from a design stand point but say nothing about what your company actually does? You only have 3-5 seconds to engage online, especially initially so make your logo say something about what you do and support it with tag lines/imagery that make it clear.
Social Media
Is it easy to share your site and articles on the top social media properties? One share can expose you to thousands of new prospects. Make the social media icons obvious and easy to access.
Best Practices
Does your site use design and content best practices? The world of web standards has not reached perfection, by a long shot. But there are strong trends based on usability and providing a consistent experience for web users world wide. This Orbit Media article provides strong visuals that show you the direction to take. 50 is a LOT of standards. Just tackle 5 at a time and you are on your way to a more effective web site.
Moving Your Organization Towards Web Site Standards
It is human nature to resist change. And this includes changes to a corporate web site! As with any change process, provide information to your content providers to support a shift towards web standards and best practices. Information moves people over the change “hump” in organizational development and it will work to smooth resistance to changes on your site. Make sure your VP of Sales knows why the product area has been rearranged, or the content rewritten. Be sure your operations team supports the changes to how shipping options appear. Educate and gain buy in early and often and you will have success increasing the effectiveness and results of your site and overall web presence.
Resources
If people understand the “why” behind the direction you are going, they are more likely to support the change. Marketing Sherpa, Marketing Profs, Social Media Examiner and Media Post are all great sources for informative web site design and strategy articles that you can share with your team leaders. The Beyond Brand Collective site is full of informative articles on most aspects of online marketing, including how to optimize a site. The above best practices article is a great place to start. Good luck and let me know if I can help you through your site review and improvement process.
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Chicken or the Egg? Putting Your Start Up Web Site Launch in Order
Building a New Site …Where Do I Start?
It's easy to attack too much at once when you are launching a new site. You can get lost in the details of one project and forget the basics of site structure, content your visitors will love and making sure they know how to buy from you. Share on XThe chicken is the site structure and your plan to appear on the search engines. The eggs are the digital marketing campaigns you will plan and execute against your site , blog and social events to bring in qualified traffic that leads to great conversations and sales.
Build a Site and Go is No Longer Enough
You need a general wire frame or skeleton of what your site will look like when it is done. Better yet, a plan for all of your web presence including social media properties and the campaigns planned against each. Old school fake SEO and the days of having only your web site to draw attention online, are gone. You have to have an integrated approach between your site and social media and a creative and messaging strategy that speaks with relevance to your audiences on each. Do research on your audience’s search engine activity and create a site and social media presence with focus around keywords that reflect how your audience talks about your business. (avoid advertising with the words you use, they won’t respond) Start with a basic site that contains the basics of What We Do, Who We Are and How to Contact Us, plus a generously populated blog that is relevant to the types of problems your audience(s) are trying to solve.
Drive Qualified Traffic
Next you want to figure out what will drive the most qualified traffic to your site and your social media presence. Is it contests? Email marketing? Social Games? Traditional marketing like post cards or letters? You will need to test some of all of these ideas to figure out where your audience’s sweet spot is – and then grow and optimize those efforts.
Influencers
You also need to identify the top 10 on and off line influencers in your industry and begin to court them. You only get one chance to make a great first impression, so be strategic and careful in approaching influencers. You don’t want to irritate the wrong guy and lose a huge opportunity with a key audience. Email, phone calls, and even gifts work, but you and they need to publicize it if you motivated influencers with cash or gifts.
A Step By Step Guide for Launching a New Site might look like this:
- Find and meet with a mentor who has just launched an online business.
- Identify, research and understand your audience personas
- Research and identify your keyword strategy
- Create a site wire frame illustration that reflects the content you will need and the paths your customers will need to contact and buy from you
- Create a content plan. What content is needed on each page? How will the blog be structured and what articles do we need ready to go on launch day? Content=words, images, video, live streaming, graphics.
- Create a traditional and online PR plan. Use a template to create a business launch annouce press release and use PRWeb or another tool to distribute it online.
- Create an off line and online marketing plan
- Decide what tools or functionality your site needs to be effective (calculators, videos, reviews, etc.)
- Plan and initiate test marketing campaigns against social media and your web site.
- Plan your launch date and go live!
Step by Step Guides
If you need step by step guides as to how to identify and activate influencers and launch different types of digital and traditional marketing, stay tuned in the coming weeks I will be publishing those guides as part of this newsletter.
Answers to 5 Commonly Asked Digital Marketing Questions
We get asked a lot of questions from our clients. In this post we share the answers to some of the most common questions we hear.
- Is Social Media important to both business to business and business to consumer efforts? What about Non-Profits?
Yes. Because over a billion people are on social media and your audience is included. Social media requires a strategy based on the audience you are targeting, a decent sized content database and consistent attention. Approaches will differ based on targeting businesses, consumers or potential donors but all of them can be targeted nicely on Social Media. - What about email marketing? Hasn’t that been replaced with Social Media?
Despite social media’s growth and email marketing’s spam risk, it remains one of the most effective means of branding, communicating and generating leads for your company. There are big differences between growing a list organically and purchasing lists – in cost, tracking and approach. Done right, email marketing can yield high quality leads and customers that convert to sale. - Are Facebook ads worth it?
Facebook is under the gun for their prices presently, but it remains the most targeted means to capture your audience’s attention. You can start small on Facebook and build your spend toward audiences that respond to your ad. Start with a simple ad to a small targeted audience and grow from there. You won’t believe what you will learn! - Why is YouTube and video so important?
Because video remains effective at gaining the eyes of web audiences. Want to raise your open rate by 19%? Include the word “video” in your subject line. Getting started with video requires a place to host your video, YouTube, Vimeo to name a couple, a basic studio set up and some stories to tell. - My company just put up a new site – what do I do next?
Invite people to the party. Use social media, online PR vehicles like PR Web and others to get the word out about your new site. After a week, check the traffic and note where people are dropping off the site, what page are most popular – and then respond to that information with changes to your site.
Have a question you are dying to ask? Write us or reply in the comments and we will do our best to address your question in our next newsletter!
Schedule time with Beyond Brand Collective
Many of you after just one hour of brainstorming can move your business forward towards growth using digital marketing. Some things take time only, some money and time. I can help you take the next step.
I have 27 years creating technology and marketing solutions for my employers and clients. I have worked as a director of online marketing and also owned 2 digital agencies. Digital Marketing can be a rough landscape for the newbie and I am here to help you navigate the waters of strategy development, campaign launch, management, vendor management or whatever you are needing help with. And my experience spans web site optimization, online lead generation, design, email marketing, SEO, content development and more. I love start ups and can also work well with larger firms.
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2023 Social Media Trends
2023 Social Media Trends
A long time leader in communicating the details and trends around the social media monster, Michael Stelzner at Social Media Examiner put a sharp and pointed report together that gives you the 2023 facts regarding what tactics are most popular with who and why. The report is called 2023 Social Media Marketing Industry Report: How Marketers are Using Social Media to Grow Their Businesses. The facts are compelling and I hope they help you form a strategic approach to social media for your business in 2023. Until you have time to read the full report, here are the highlights:
Straight from the article – What you need to consider when planning your 2023 Social Media:
First of all, Facebook continues declining:
Marketers have been diversifying away from Facebook steadily since 2018. When asked to select their single most important
platform, only 45% selected Facebook, down from 67% in 2018. Fourteen percent
of marketers indicated they’ll be decreasing their organic marketing on Facebook
and only 37% of marketers plan on increasing their organic activities on the platform.
Secondly, of course, YouTube interest is high: While only 54% of marketers use YouTube, a
significant 59% plan on increasing their use of YouTube video—the largest
percentage of any platform. Plus, 68% want to learn more about organic video
marketing on YouTube.
Thirdly, Instagram remains hot: Eighty percent of marketers are using Instagram. It’s
the second most important social platform for marketing (behind Facebook). A
significant 56% of marketers plan on increasing their Instagram organic activities
over the next 12 months. Instagram is tied with YouTube as the top platform
marketers want to learn more about.
Finally, TikTok is growing: TikTok adoption among marketers rose from 18% in 2022 to
22% in 2023. Thirty-eight percent plan to increase their activity on the platform
and a significant 48% are interested in learning more about TikTok.
Here is the link to the full report – happy reading!
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