May 21st, 2009 by Steven Leung

“I’m intrigued but my company already has a website,” he said.  Most do.  This one was a well-made site with clean copy and crisp graphics that downloaded quickly and we browsed most of its 10 pages while we were sitting at the coffee house.

We got to the page about their consulting services and I stopped for a moment to bring up a new browser window.  I asked him to describe what they did, while I opened up one of his competitors’ sites.  He read about what the competition said on their website and sighed, “Well, that’s exactly what we do too — I know we’re better but I’m not sure how we’d differentiate ourselves.”

In a way, that was true.  You could run down the checklist of all the services his company provided and it would look the same as his competition’s.  Which is one reason why their websites said basically the same things and had similar slogans.  If it weren’t for the images, you couldn’t tell them apart.

“Tell me about one of your happy customers.”  He talked about how he’d managed to save a company he was working with 20% on their labor costs because he installed an automated system to take care of something very manually intensive.  We talked some more and he had literally dozens of these types of stories that showed how his service was different than anyone else’s.

He then interjected himself and said “Well, I can’t put that on our website, we’d have to change everything every time we put one of those case studies up.”  I smiled a bit and fired up a demo of how to add content to a blog and how the navigation would adapt to fit whatever content his team added.

Then I showed him how his website can be your blog or it can be a part of your blog.  In fact, the main website can be built using the same software as your blog.  That way, he wouldn’t necessarily need a daily webmaster: the entire site is manageable by point-click-and-type.

“It’ll also make your web presence easier to find,” I said, showing him how search engines aggressively index content from blogs.  It wasn’t just search engines.  “You can also cross-promote your content automatically, on services like Twitter and LinkedIn.”

I often say that when websites are created, they’re born alone — where that proverbial tree that falls in the forest where no one hears it.  A blog is born connected to potential readers through ping services that notify dozens of websites around the world that you have new content, and through social media where your content can be integrated.

“My blog posts automatically show up on social networks like LinkedIn, where people get to know my credentials.  Then they visit my blog to get to know my company’s style and capabilities.”  He wasn’t a Twitter user so we didn’t go into this, but I’ll often cross-promote some of my articles there and get traffic and subscribers from folks doing Twitter searches.

“I’m not really into this social media stuff,” he said and then he paused.  He looked at the computer, took a sip of coffee and looked back up, “But I can use what we write for the blog in my newsletters, so we don’t have to do that work twice, right?”  I nodded and sensed he was thinking about the next step.

“And if I can email people the newsletter instead of mailing it them, I don’t need as much labor or stamps?”  Then I showed him how he could draw people back to his website and blog to provide more upsell opportunities for his sales force.

May 19th, 2009 by Steven Leung

There are many metrics that businesses use to measure the success of their websites.  As we discussed in our last post, almost all standard web analytics deployments will have more than enough reports to keep any busy marketer, business owner, or executive from their day jobs.

But if the purpose of your website is to generate more business, then your most important metric is your conversion ratio.  The first step to getting your conversion ratio is to define your goal: what are you trying to get your visitors to do?

The visitors who succeed in doing so are called conversions.  And your conversion ratio is the percentage of your visitors who convert.  The reason why I used the word “succeed” above is because you might have visitors who wanted — and, in fact, tried their best — to convert, but didn’t or couldn’t.

There are the websites that literally dare you to buy something by requiring you to fill out a sign-up form before putting an item in your shopping cart.  There are the websites where the contact form is temporarily broken and there isn’t a phone number as backup.  I’ve even seen business websites without contact information.

Most sites have a more subtle issue: they don’t clearly communicate a mutually beneficial offer to their visitors.  This offer is the call-to-action, and it encourages visitors to convert.  Your call-to-action should be easy to measure and appropriate for a person surfing the web.  If your website isn’t generating as much business as you’d hoped, you may want to understand common reasons why some calls-to-action don’t work.

The easiest way to understand how your visitors see your call-to-action today is to work backwards.  Start from what you consider success, whether it’s filling out a contact form, making a purchase, entering a promotional code, etc.  Then map how a visitor might be instructed to get there and trace how a visitor might have seen those instructions.  Many site owners find it’s not as easy to convert as they’d envisioned.

Conversions don’t have to happen on the web.  Many times, you want to get a phone call.  The main issue with getting calls is that they aren’t as easily tracked as web conversions.  After all, most people put their main business phone number on their site.  How can you tell where your caller got your number?

As part of any good integrated marketing campaign, it’s a best practice to have a separate phone number for whatever initiatives you run.  The best part is that you can bypass the phone company altogether and get a forwarding phone number for a nominal cost.

It’s easy to see how the Internet has become more ingrained into business.  Over the next few articles, we’ll discuss integrated marketing techniques that combine the immediacy and measureability of the Internet with social and traditional media.  Our next blog post talks about how to create websites that already have communication mechanisms with Google and other websites built-in.

May 18th, 2009 by Steven Leung

Integrated marketing activities, by definition, require coordination across a company’s lines of business.  But sometimes the metrics data needed to coordinate and optimize these campaigns is managed by another department.

The most common example is web analytics, which is often managed by IT in mid-sized companies.  IT departments typically have a number of priorities that range from thankless basics like ensuring running email and network security to coordinating and executing the technical requirements of product and marketing initiatives.

Most companies track web metrics, but if yours doesn’t, you don’t necessarily need to purchase an expensive analytics package then have your IT department install it.  There are many hosted web analytics systems available, like Google Analytics, which are available for free — and have more reports than most marketers and executives have the time or patience to read.

Installation is simple and may not require IT.  It just needs several lines of JavaScript to be added to each page on your site, and this is usually very easy if your site is backed by a content publishing system.  And with these hosted web analytics systems, you don’t need special software or IT intervention to generate reports.

If your IT department manages your site, they might be picky about which system you use.  Should the system require software installation, it means they have to dedicate the resources to learning and maintaining it (i.e. they have to bless it).

With a hosted system, you might encounter resistance because the data is stored by a third-party or because it requires minor modification to the website.  But these generally aren’t showstoppers because of how important it is to measure the success of web initiatives.

It’s so important that in many organizations, web analytics reports are a subject unto themselves.  Creating these reports becomes its own job, with increasingly complex graphs and figures being presented.  It’s very easy to get bogged down in analysis paralysis either sorting through all the different reports, or spending time trying to choose between analytics packages that have one type of report over another.

The reality is that for most mid-sized companies not doing retail on the web, there’s not enough traffic or variation to provide all the data needed for an expensive analytics package to bring you measurable results.  What’s more important is knowing you need the right metrics, like conversion ratios and return on investment (ROI).

Web analytics will capture the information you need about your web visitors, but your site needs to be structured correctly and substantial enough to put the information in a relevant context.

In our next blog post, we’ll talk about how to create more successful websites by avoiding some common pitfalls and encouraging visitors towards the path you’d like them to take.

May 13th, 2009 by Steven Leung

Integrated marketing is the planning an execution of all your company’s marketing activities, online and offline, in a way that is consistent across all of your customer contacts and creates more value than when those activities are performed separately.

It’s very much based on the concept of gestalt, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  In order for that to happen, your marketing messages must be consistently reinforced at every point where you interact with customers.

But integrated marketing goes beyond integrated marketing communications, which focuses on consistency of messaging across different mediums.

Instead, integrated marketing as a whole uses a number of different mediums to convert people into leads and provide data to support turning those leads into customers.

The campaigns center around a strong web presence — usually a website or a blog, sometimes a microsite — but may also include email, print, direct mail, television, radio and social media to support and publicize that web presence.

Integrated marketing also combines the data you get back about your customers from those mediums to give you a more complete picture of your market and the segments you’re targeting.  This information is used to identify how well the campaign is performing in those segments and can sometimes be detailed enough to help close individual deals.

With integrated marketing campaigns, your best data comes typically from web analytics and email response measurement: the reason is that the information is easily, reliably and automatically measured without using special phone numbers, printed promotional codes or coupons.

But it’s not always easy to get the right metrics and interpret them correctly.  In our next blog post, I’ll tell you a real-life story about how one company picked the wrong metric and encouraged its employees to make that division unprofitable.  Then I’ll share how other companies measure their integrated marketing success and use that information to grow their businesses.

December 2nd, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article:

• SearchWiki Overview: What’s Important for Businesses
• How SearchWiki Impacts and Reflects Your Online Reputation
• Why SearchWiki Deserves Only Minimal Investment For Now

The folks up the street in Mountain View recently launched the ability to customize and comment on search results using its Google SearchWiki. Because the comments made on SearchWiki are public, business and website owners need to adjust to these new features in order to maintain and cultivate their online reputations.
» Read the rest of this article »

October 7th, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article:

• The difference between building a website and creating opportunities
• Designing websites with search engines in mind (CATTLE)
• Using technology to build an online reputation

Fundamentally, business is about creating value that customers are willing to pay for.  And at its most base level, customers buy products and services for what they help accomplish and how they make them feel.

But rarely do customers buy for technology for technology’s sake — most don’t even want to think about it.  A cell phone is a great example.  It helps people keep in touch with their family, friends, and colleagues in a way few would have imagined just a few decades ago.

People don’t want to think about cell phone towers and radio spectrum.  They want to communicate with other people conveniently and immediately.  Even technologists who always buy the latest phones aren’t buying the latest EV-DO capable handsets with MP3 capabilities — they’re buying a satisfaction to their curiosity, which makes them feel like they’re on the cutting edge.

So when people come to me with their businesses, I feel it’s critically important for me not to emphasize the technology (which is my responsibility for my clients), but to translate the technology into the opportunities it provides.
» Read the rest of this article »

October 5th, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article:

• Understanding the goals behind your web presence
• What makes a web presence successful
• Investing vs. advertising, and doing both at the same time

When I talk with people about their Internet presences — not just their websites but the development of their reputation on the Internet — I almost never talk about the underlying technology first.

To me, it’s more important to understand their underlying goals and what people want to accomplish by establishing a presence online. Their goals usually fall into one of three categories, which help shape the framework of the project and how much potential is has for their businesses.
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October 5th, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article:

• Why some websites won’t return your investment
• What a good-looking website can and can’t do
• The 5 C’s for building productive websites

One of the most common issues I hear from clients is that they built a website but aren’t getting any return on their investment.  The complaint is the same from clients who spent a small fortune at an ad agency to ones who tried to cut a few corners: no ROI.

The problem is so pervasive that many businesses not doing e-commerce think of websites purely as cost centers or online brochures and not as a steady source of leads and revenue.  Companies using this type of conventional wisdom are leaving money on the table.
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