Marketing

Mobile Website Design Tips

No Comments » Written on March 15th, 2011 by
Categories: Digital Media, Marketing, Strategy
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Sample Mobile Website screen shotSo we know that two things are hot in business communication and marketing in 2011:  mobile and video.  And of course mobile video but that goes without saying since it’s a combination of the two.  But with the increase of smartphones and mobile web usage, more and more people will start to access your site via a mobile device during the next several years and beyond.

Creating a mobile version of your website can be a daunting task but it does not have to be.  Like all projects it requires some planning and design with realistic expectations.  With this in mind I’ve created some tips on building your mobile site without too much frustration.

First determine what the mobile web experience should be for your customers, prospects, partners, etc.  If you’re a local business that has a storefront, then you need something that will provide directions and easy to find phone number.

Determine what information you want on your mobile site. If you have a large site you don’t need to put everything on your mobile site.  You can put a link to the full site for anyone that has to have it but determine what the key information you need on your mobile site an build pages around that.

Have a simple and easy to use navigation in place.  Mobile web browsing is not easy and even more difficult if it’s hard to go from one page to the next.  Have simple icons that links to your mobile pages and maybe a Home link that can take the user to the main landing page.

This seems redundant but after reading the previous two points, you don’t want more than 6-8 pages on your site and no more than two levels deep including the home page.  Again look at what the mobile user experience is.  Most of the time it will be to do a quick lookup to find your contact information or directions.

Keep the design clean and simple.  Don’t use complicated backgrounds or image backgrounds.  Use solid colors and icons sized for mobile use.  If you designed a favicon for your website use that where you can.  Or if you have created a good avatar for your brand use that.

If your site has a WordPress blog there are some great mobile themes like WPTouch, Carrington Mobile, News Press that will create a mobile version of your WordPress site.  I use WPTouch and like the fact that I can upload my own custom icon for saving to the phone’s desktop!

If you don’t use WordPress that’s OK.  Creating a mobile webpage requires some simple coding and scripts that can be placed on the main landing page to direct traffic to the appropriate site based on what type of device is viewing the page.  Also check to see if your script allows you to specify mobile device types. For example can you allow iPads and tablet devices to view the site as a normal web browser resolution?

Remember to keep it simple and develop a basic mobile website with your first design.  After testing, review and feedback from visitors then look at how and if you should add more to your mobile website.  Chances are you may hit a home run with the first iteration and a few minor changes.

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Posted in Digital Media, Marketing, Strategy

Align Your Marketing Goals and Metrics

No Comments » Written on March 9th, 2011 by
Categories: Marketing, Strategy
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With all the available marketing channels we tend flood ourselves with too much data and statistics around our products, brands and campaigns.  Although it’s important to be tracking and analyzing as much data as you can you have to prioritize what key metrics align to your strategies in order to properly measure how effective you campaign is.

The past few years has seen an explosion of analytics for several reasons.  First and foremost the web has made it quick and easy to gather data for anyone from a single blogger to the largest companies and governments.  But even with an easy capture, all the data in the world is just that, data.

Strategic planning that defines your goals is the first step to defining your metrics.  “What are you trying to accomplish?” can be the simplest questions to ask.  By vetting and grouping the responses into definable and achievable objectives will define your project metrics as well as ongoing measuring.

For instances if you are trying to increase awareness of your product to get more customers your goal is too broad.  What kind of customers?  Everyone wants more revenue and wants every marketing dollar spent result in a profitable customer relationship.  You must further define what you want to accomplish with short and long-term expectations.

For instance, if your marketing campaign is going to employ email marketing the first objective is to get the recipient to open and read the message.  The second objective is for them to click on your link to a landing page.  And the third objective is for them to convert.

Now here is where it can get tricky.  You must define your conversion funnel; the necessary steps are to convert a prospect to a lead and a lead to a sale.  If you have an ecommerce site it can be identified online with the final result being a purchase.  But what are the steps to the purchase? How many visits result in an abandoned shopping cart?  Are you getting the clicks to the landing page? Are special offers being used or ignored?

So each of these steps has a metric from the number of emails that are actually received and opened to how many click through to the landing page.  Once on your site, how many visitors put items in their shopping cart?  If they purchased did they buy the item your promoted in the email or did they buy other items?  When purchasing did they use any special offer codes or coupons?

From a long term view, how are you going to market to the different types of customers with the next email campaign.  For those that did not open, are you going to adjust your subject line to increase open rates?  Visitors that clicked through but did not purchase may get a better incentive.  Those that abandoned their carts may be prompted to revisit and complete their purchase.  And finally those that did purchase can be offered different incentives based on what they bought.

Each of these steps should have a defined measure in the plan that aligns to the goals and objectives of the campaign.  Now instead of getting more customers and more revenue, there are several achievable goals of increasing delivery and open rates, increasing click through and cart abandonment thereby increasing sales and revenues.

By defining each measure and metric in the planning stage you have the ability to increase the likelihood of achieving your overall goal.  Each measure should be aligned to a specific action item or deliverable in the plan and vice versa.

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Posted in Marketing, Strategy

Are Mommy Bloggers Taking over the World?

No Comments » Written on March 3rd, 2011 by
Categories: Digital Media, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
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Mommy Bloggers Represent a Growing Trend in Online Advertising and InfluencersThe New York Times ran a great article about Heather Armstrong last Saturday called Queen of the Mommy Bloggers. Who is Heather Armstrong you say and why should we care? Well Heather is better known in the online world as Dooce (@dooce) and is one of the most influential women in media reaching an estimated 100,000 readers everyday.

Of course it’s easy for men to say so what? Unless you’re in the consumer goods industry where influential mommy bloggers have the ability to make or break your product.  Bloggers with large audiences like Dooce can turn off millions of potential buyers and existing customers with one bad post.  Of course a bad posts should be the result of poor quality or service and that was the case with Dooce and her  Maytag washer experience.

But mommy bloggers are nothing new in terms of how women have communicated about their purchasing decisions since the 1950s.  Traditionally women have been the key shopper in families and seek other other women’s opinions about specific brands and services in order to justify their decision as well as possibly explore other avenues.  Men do it too but men’s purchases  tend to be larger, less frequent items, not the day to day consumer goods and staples.

One of the lines that struck me in the Times article was:

..countless other banalities of one mother’s eclectic life that, for some reason, hundreds of thousands of strangers tune in, regularly, to read.

What struck me is the “for some reason” part. The reporter should have thought about why do so many mothers tune in to Dooce or other parenting blog on a regular basis? There are several reasons why mothers, especially new mothers are going to these sites and social networks:

  • It gives them an opportunity to connect with others in the same situation, especially if they are new mothers and facing the challenges of being a parent for the first time.
  • They can talk to adults versus children and even see what their non-married, childless friends are doing.
  • It gives them a platform to communicate and document their thoughts in written form.
  • Sometimes people just need to vent and express how they are feeling.
Many times mothers are stuck at home dealing with children, household responsibilities and social networks offer them an opportunity to connect with the outside world in real time.  Generation X and Y moms are the first generation that can seemlessley integrate technology into parenting.
Savvy marketing and advertising execs have caught onto this trend and are pushing online ads on popular blogs like Dooce that reports $30,000-$50,000 in monthly advertising revenue.  Ideally local companies can use apply the strategy by identifying local online influencers and partnering with them for product reviews, special events and other marketing activities to reach customers.
Are mom and parenting blogs a part of your online marketing plan? Are they key influencers in your market?

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Posted in Digital Media, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy

8 Tips For LinkedIn Company Products & Services Pages

6 comments Written on February 1st, 2011 by
Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
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LinkedIn rolled out some new features for company profiles last week. The new features allow you to do more than list your company location, description, Twitter ID and recent blog posts. The is a new link at the top of the companies page called “Services and Products” where you can list your company’s specific product and/or services.

While creating a service listing for my consulting practice I noticed some areas that can stop you in your tracks if you do not think ahead and came up with these tips.

  1. Have a thumbnail image ready if you want to include an image. LinkedIn will re-size the image to 100 x 80 pixels so I suggest you re-size the image yourself to avoid any klugey resizing and image distortion. Also when resizing down to thumbnail size you can also trim out unnecessary white space and determine if the image will work at smaller size. If you do not re-size your image your file size limit is 2MB.
  2. For each product or feature you can add a bulleted list of features. Each bullet item is limited to 45 character so trim the fat and keep your bullets short and to the point. You can add more features but the limit is 10. So plan out what you want to communicate in less than 450 characters.
  3. There is an option to include a landing page for the product or service so if you have a large website go ahead and find the link before entering the form. I also noticed that short links don’t work here so have the full URL address.
  4. You can add contact names from your company but you must be linked to that person to include them on the form. So make sure you have identified the proper contact(s) and that you are connected to them on LinkedIn. Also communicate to them that you are listing them as a contact so they are aware when requests are sent to them from the site.
  5. The coolest feature is that you can add a YouTube video to the listing. You have the option to list a title and the video URL. Again short links won’t work here so have the full URL and create a title that not only reflects the subject matter but also has keywords for search optimization.
  6. As much as I don’t like the level of litigation that exists in our society, you can also add a disclaimer about the product/service. If yo have specific language around your company’s offering make sure you include it here to cover yourself. Better safe than sorry.
  7. After you have created the listing you can ask for recommendations from customers. I wish this feature allowed you to share existing recommendations on LinkedIn but if you have good relations with your customers take their existing recommendations and tailor it for the product or service.
  8. What would a social media site be without sharing? LinkedIn allows you to share your new product/service listing on your status and you can push to your Twitter account. The one thing I noticed is that it will create a tweet with the title and a short link to your new page. Below is what I pushed out when creating my first page. It’s very basic and ideally I would add more text and call to action in the tweet.

Sample Tweet for LinkedIn Company Service

I hope these tips help you update your company’s product or service offering pages on LinkedIn. Below is a screen shot of what my first service offering looks like. You can see the page on my company’s LinkedIn Profile.

LinkedIn Company Services Page

LinkedIn Company Services Page

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Posted in Marketing, Social Media, Strategy

Movember Interview: Protea Digital Marketing

No Comments » Written on January 26th, 2011 by
Categories: Digital Media, Marketing, SEO, Strategy
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I had the opportunity to meet and interview Steven Kent (@proteadigital) in December.  Steven took me up on my offer to interview anyone that donated $50 to my Movember fund and I was glad he did.  After meeting with Steven and learning about his business I found out that he really knows his stuff.

Steven Kent

Steven is the Director and Owner of Protea Digital Marketing, which provides integrated digital marketing services to small and medium sized businesses.  Steven started Protea in November of 2009 after spending a few years at an email marketing company.  Now he serves as an outsourced marketing department for small to medium sized business primarily focusing on pay per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) services.

Originally from South Africa, Steven came to the Triangle to attend Duke University where he studied public policy.  After finishing his degree he spent a few years working for an enterprise software and business process consulting company.  During his tenure he was able to travel around the world working on projects in far away destinations like Malaysia.

I asked Steven how much of the marketing role he performs for his clients.  He told me that the dose most of the work himself and hires graphic designers when he needs design work and or developers for custom applications.  He likes PPC and feels that, “basically it works, very controllable and targetable,” for his clients.

We discussed how PPC works for B2B companies and Steven’s view was that it helps with company and brand discovery and awareness as well as keeping potential customers interested.  One of his biggest successes has been being able to demonstrate results on PPC campaigns that can drive revenue upwards of 55%.

I asked Steven what some of his challenges have been.  He stated that it’s hard to find people that understand the technology as well as the marketing aspect.  “You tend to find people that are one way or the other.”

Steven believes that being ethical in marketing is critical.  There are too many horror stories of how businesses hire digital marketing consultants and have nothing to show for the costs.  Steven’s approach is to do quality projects and do them well.  There are too many companies that cut corners or don’t perform in a good way.  He’s also not afraid to turn down business if the company does not have a quality product or service.

Protea Digital Marketing

I also asked Steven where he sees Protea in the future.  He wants to grow his business and sees a need in 10-15 employee sized companies that done have web marketing expertise.  Protea can offer them top quality we marketing at an affordable price.

I want to thank Steven for his donation and time.  I enjoyed meeting him and learning more about his business and background.  Needless to say if you are a small company that needs web marketing expertise, especially in PPC and SEO, Steven is a great resource.

Disclaimer: Steven donated $50 to my Movember Men’s Cancer Raising Fund based on my offer to interview anyone in the Greater Raleigh Area that donated $50.  I in no way received any compensation for the interview.

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Posted in Digital Media, Marketing, SEO, Strategy

Create Your Own URL Shortener

14 comments Written on January 18th, 2011 by
Categories: Digital Media, Marketing, Strategy
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Bit.ly, ow.ly, tinyurl are just a few of the free services that allow you to shorten your links for social media and analytical tracking. But you can now have the power of these free services with your own custom short URL using YOURLS which stands for Your Own URL Shortener.

YOURLS is a free application that contains the PHP scripts to shorten URLs and track their clicks. Much like WordPress, YOURLS requires a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) configuration and installs quickly and easily. After it’s setup you can integrate with your WordPress blog, use to shorten URLs on the fly or even make your own public link shortener.

The first step is to find your short domain. One site that I found is Domain Search that allows you to search the many country specific extensions. Instead of .com or .net, you can find extensions that fit your brand. For example my short URL is sqjw.me for Square Jaw Media. You want to play with phonetic and abbreviated versions of your brand or product name to find the right short URL.

Once you have purchased your URL and directed the name servers to your web server it’s time to install YOURLS. Much like WordPress YOURLS install code does most of the work. After downloading you want to set up your MySQL database and enter your login information to the YOURLS config.php file. The YOURLS site has good documentation to walk you through the process and explains the configuration options.

The final installation step is to copy all the site files to your web server. After logging into the administration at http://yoursite.com/admin/ your ready to create and test your first short URL. I recommend testing a few YOURLS with someone you know via email or IM before posting out on social media sites. That way you can work out any bugs before going public.

YOURLS link shortening screen

You can also customize your short link. For instance I created a short link (http://sqjw.me/web) to use on my Twitter profile and track how many people click from my Twitter profile to my website. You can create a customer short URL for each of the sites that you link to your website to determine which site drives the most traffic. From the YOURLS admin interface you can also share your links to Facebook and Twitter.

Once you have shortened and shared your link you can then see how much traffic and from where the clicks came from. The reports include geographic as well as time period statistics. Direct and referrer clicks are also tracked.

YOURLS statistics

There is even a WordPress plugin that will automatically create the short URL when you publish a page or post. The only downside I’ve encountered is that the plugin can create multiple links for the same page or post. Luckily there is a support forum where you can log your bug and I hope the developer fixes this bug soon so I can take advantage of the integration.

Overall I really like how YOURLS gives greater control over short links and accompanying data. The creative marketer in me loves the branding aspect. Try it on your blog or website and let me know what you think.

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Posted in Digital Media, Marketing, Strategy

2011 Social Media Predictions

No Comments » Written on December 29th, 2010 by
Categories: Digital Media, Marketing, Social Media
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Myself along with several other smart folks participated in Jason Peck’s (@jasonpeck) e-book. Online Marketing Predictions for 2011

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Posted in Digital Media, Marketing, Social Media

Beyond The Basics: Creating Great Short Online Video

8 comments Written on December 20th, 2010 by
Categories: Beyond the Basics, Digital Media, Marketing, Portfolio, Social Media, Strategy, Video
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For my third episode I travelled to Chapel Hill and met with David Rose (@dbrose67) COO of Magent Video (@magnetvideo) to talk about how to shoot short corporate video.  David and I talked about the challenges of producing a great 30-60 second video for your website that keeps your audience’s attention.  Some of the interesting tactics I learned were:

  • Keeping your script down to 150 words and clearly communicating your core message.
  • How to use analytics to see how your customers are looking at videos and then interacting with your company.
  • How and where online to manage your video library.

David’s office had some great places to shoot.  His partner has several motorcycles on display and we chose the sweet BMW in the front lobby to use as our shoot background.  Thanks again to David and Magnet for participating!

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Posted in Beyond the Basics, Digital Media, Marketing, Portfolio, Social Media, Strategy, Video

End of the Year Blog Checklist

1 Comment » Written on December 14th, 2010 by
Categories: Marketing, Productivity, Strategy
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Blog Tune Up

Time for end of the year blog tune upAs the year winds down we typically find ourselves reflecting on the events of the current year as well as dealing with all those tasks we’ve put off.  Now is a great time to review your blog and perform your blog tune up to maximize performance and review any enhancements you put in place this year.

Check Your Links

We tend to add links in many areas: in posts, on pages, to our blog roll.  But have you checked those links lately to determine if they are still working?  There are many link checking tools available to see if links are broken, not resolving.  The one I use is from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).  It will run a comprehensive analysis of all links on the URL you enter.  If you have a large site with many links this will take some time but review the report and fix or remove any broken links.

Another blog tune up task is to check on links is your blog roll if you publish one.  You should be doing this on a periodic basis anyway, but now is a great time to verify and review the sites you have linked.  For instance is that NING community that you were active in six months ago still around?  If not, then take appropriate action to deactivate or remove is the site is inactive.  Find out now before your readers do and you lose credibility.

Review Analytics and Use for Upcoming Year Plan

If you are using Google Analytics or any other website tracking tool, take a look at the whole year and each quarter to analyze traffic and find trends.  Was March a great month for traffic and July terrible?  Was it due to end of the quarter and vacation?  Or did you publish more in March and less in July?  These questions should be asked and draw some conclusions about the data and how it related to content published and viewed on your site during the timeframe.  This information is what you need to start planning for the next year so you can potential repeat success and avoid downturns.

Talk to Your Readers

Sure we comment with readers on posts and via email newsletters, but when was the last time you polled your readers?  Take the end of the year to ask them what they liked and disliked about your site this year.  What would they like to see more and less of?  This data and feedback is crucial to your content strategy planning going forward and can be compared to your site analysis outlined above.

Clean up the Clutter

Did you add a bunch of ads, links to contests, social networks profiles, etc. during the past year?  Have they resulted in any action, revenue or something of value?  If not determine if they are worth the real estate and clean out the ones that are not providing value.  Too many blogs just keep adding and adding to the sidebars and it gets messy and distracting to your readers.

Another great task to do this year is to look at special pages you may have set up for video or other content.  Did you create a page that is now very long and lengthy?  Can the content be put into posts and grouped by category or tag so that the CMS will handle the greater amount of content?  Is it easy to find this content and should you create a unique menu heading for it?  These are some of the questions you need to ask yourself when reviewing your site.

Update your Tools

If you did add any special functionality to your site like an image gallery or a web application does it need to be reviewed and updated?  Does the data need to be backed up and archived?  If you’re not backing up your site the end of the year is a great time to do this and save the backup data to an offline storage device like a DVD or CD for safe keeping.  If you have not updated your CMS and its associated tools, plug-ins, themes, templates, etc. you need to perform a thorough backup and then start upgrading.

Now you have some blog tune up tasks, have they worked for you?

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Posted in Marketing, Productivity, Strategy

Is Your Share Social Friendly?

3 comments Written on December 8th, 2010 by
Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Uncategorized
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I was on a major company site the other day and wanted to share a page link for an event that a friend and former coworker was going to be featured.  I clicked on their share button and selected Twitter as my network.  I was then transferred to Twitter with the following text as my message.

Note that I changed the company name as my purpose is not to embarrass them but instead demonstrate how to do it properly.

Sharing content via email and social networks

This is a major fail for several reasons.  First the link takes up most of the 140 characters, it should be shortened using a link shortener like bit.ly.  Second the title of the event is missing along with the date, company name, speaker, etc.  If I want to share this I have to go and copy and paste the info as well as shorten the link.  Why have the share button if I’m going to share it the old fashioned way like way back in 2008?

We all want our content shared on the social web.  Plugins and tools that allow you to click on an icon and easily share a blog post, video, website link or other content make it easy to do this.  So why have a share tool that does not easily do this?

Many times large organizations IT departments don’t look at what tools will best work in the situation.  They tend to look at the requirement and fill it.  It’s up to the marketing and communication teams to define the requirement in greater detail and provide examples of how share functionality should work as well as how it should look and if tracking is required.

There are several third-party tools that can handle social share including:

  • ShareThis: is a great sharing tool that offers several styles of buttons and analytics on your clicks.  I used ShareThis until it interfered with my WordPress theme that had similar style codes.
  • AddToAny: I use this tool on this blog, you can see their buttons at the end of this post.  The only drawback is lack of analytics.  The styling of the buttons is nice and clean.
  • AddThis: Claims to be the most popular sharing application and offers analytics.  I used this on my first Blogger site and it worked well.

Some other questions you may want to ask when selecting a share tool are:

  • How does it display the link and accompanying information?
  • Do you have the ability to customize the message and link?
  • Is the link being shortened and if so what link shortening tool is being used?
  • Does the tool add text that you don’t want shown like “via @addthis” at the end of the message?
  • Does the tool easily integrate with your website and platform?
  • Does the tool work on mobile devices?

As with any technology you will need to test, test and test again how the tool works with not just social networks but email messages and any communication channel you want to connect to.

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Posted in Marketing, Social Media, Uncategorized

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