Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

How often do you look at your website’s analytics? Weekly? Monthly? It’s really important that you understand how users are interacting with your site. Collecting site data and being aware of trends can help you assess how successful your website is as a marketing tool. It can also give you insight about your users – what information they are looking for, where are they coming from to find your site, and how likely they are to become a lead or even a sale.

The more you know about your users, the better decisions you are able to make about your internet marketing strategy.

Here are five things you can learn about your users by paying attention to your site data.

1. Are they intrigued? Your bounce rate, the percentage of single-page visits, indicates visit quality. Higher bounce rates tell you that the entrance page is not intriguing and does not have relevant content, causing users to leave the site. If you use landing pages and you see that they have a high bounce rate, you can conclude that the landing page is ineffective. Entrance and landing pages should provide the information that your users are seeking. A normal bounce rate threshold is 40%-60%.

2. What are your users most interested in? Analytics show you the most visited pages on your website and typically, after your home page, the most popular page is your “About Us” page. Many people are already looking for a product or service and want to see who they could possibly be doing business with. Make sure to humanize your About Us page as much as possible – use photos and show personality with biographies.

If you notice that your products or services pages are the most visited, have strong calls to action on those pages. Chances are, if they are looking deep enough into your products/services, they are interested in what what you are offering.

3. Are they bored or engaged? The bounce rate can be a good indicator of this, but if you do have a good bounce rate, the average time on site is another trend you need to be aware of. Your bounce rate may be 42%, which is good, but if the time on your website is less than 30 seconds, how successful is the content on your site? Web content is they key to engagement. Whether it is time spent viewing images, reading a white paper, or filling out a form, the average time on site is a valuable analytic to consider. Make sure your website offers useful content to its visitors to support engagement.

4. Do they want your products or services? Completing goals or “calls to action” are the best indicators to tell you if a user is interested in your products or services. Calls to action should use active copy that compels users to take some action – download a white paper, fill out a form, purchase something or sign up for a newsletter. High goal conversion rates shows that your users are interested in your products and services.

5. Where are they coming from? It is important to look at your top traffic sources and understand where users are coming from and how they are being led to your website. Are they coming from social media sites? Typing in the URL to the address bar (direct traffic)? Finding your site through a Google search?

When you know where your visitors are coming from, it suggests where you should be allocating your resources. If you see you are getting a lot of traffic from Facebook referrals, then you should be as active with Facebook as you can. You could even create a landing page specifically tailored to your Facebook traffic as an entry page to your site.

When collecting your site data, it is more valuable to look at it as a whole rather than focusing on one particular statistic. You might have a really low bounce rate, which is good, but you see that the average time spent on your site is minimal, which may imply poor content quality. Being aware of how your users are interacting with your site and learning trends can be very beneficial when making decisions about your internet marketing strategy. For example, if you notice that your site has particularly high traffic on Tuesdays, you could make a strategic decision to post a new blog every Tuesday.

The more information you can collect about your users, and assess and adjust based upon that information, the better your website can perform as a marketing tool for your business.

You have finally made the decision to create a new website or redesign your current one – great! Now you just need to hone your web strategy, figure out the best methods to deliver your content, and dive into the technical details of how your site will be maintained and updated. Overwhelmed yet?

There is a lot of planning you need to do before your development team even touches any code; including figuring out how often you will be updating your content and who will be making the edits once your new site is up live.

What is a CMS?

A Web Content Management System (CMS) is an application, often web based, that allows you to access a database which stores content that appears on a website. Users log into an administration area (often referred to as the back-end) where they can create and manage content that shows up on the front-end of the site, where everyone browsing the web can view it. Editing a site without a CMS involves opening pages of code to make updates or hiring a development team to perform the maintenance for you.

Building your website using a CMS gives you many advantages:

• You are able to instantly update your website anywhere you have internet access. Through the administration area you have control over how your content is laid out as well as the ability to upload images, documents, and video.
• With the correct system, updating content is easy and does not require knowledge of web programming languages.
• Areas can be set up on your website to automatically pull in and showcase the most recent content items such as news and events. With a CMS you simply add the information once and it will automatically show up in multiple places.
• User permissions can be set so that some people are not able to publish items, but can write articles that a publisher will later approve. With multiple user accounts, anyone can be given access to help update the site.
• You will reduce costs spent on maintenance updates with the ability to update content yourself.

Why Wouldn’t You Want a CMS?

Being able to update your content and have complete control over your website seems like a win win situation. However, a CMS is not the best solution for every website.

• There is often a learning curve involved with learning how to use a CMS. Some systems are easier to use than others, but it can be daunting at first.
• It takes time to edit a site. You are the one inserting the content, arranging the images, and uploading documents to each page. There is a lot of planning required before adding a new content page so that you know the most effective way of linking it into your content.
• Content has to be optimized and properly inserted so that your pages appear on search engine result pages. This includes writing good titles, keywords, and descriptions for all your new content pages.
• The upfront costs of implementing a CMS are typically more expensive.

Many companies do not have the time or resources to learn how to use a new system and how to create web optimized content. In those scenarios they often invest in a CMS but do not end up using it, leaving the content on their websites to stale.

Keep Content Fresh!

Generating quality content for viewers is the most important aspect of a website. It is important to come up with a solid content marketing strategy and stick with it. Once you have made the decision to take control of managing the content on your website it can be very rewarding and beneficial to use a CMS! Having the flexibility to easily and quickly add content can really put you ahead of the competition. Providing great, relevant information that is updated often will keep visitors coming back to your site for more.

In a day and age where online users devour information at an alarming rate, it makes little sense to keep the beast from the feast. One of these obstacles keeping users (especially B2B’s) from accessing important information is the flash introduction page.

You know…those fancy animated movies when you get to a website that were a GREAT idea in 1998 before any of us really knew how to leverage a website as a marketing tool? If you’re not selling the hot new product that all the young kids love, a Animated Flash intros have got to go.

Even Google has a system to detect Flash intro pages and SKIP them in search results! What does this say about Flash animated introductions? It says “I have become such an annoyance to usability that corporations are developing options to bypass visual presentation to get to my content.” This immediately classifies this situation as a bad practice. This is just another way Google is changing the way businesses market themselves online.

In the B2B environment where you are trying to convert visitors into partnerships and sales leads, there needs to be a strategic way to make graphic presentation compliment your valuable content. This strategy is not executed using animated loading spinning globes, “techie” styled designs and running water.

Effective ways to use flash within your online marketing strategy :

• Create a low file size, animated header with key points and calls to action within the top 1/3rd of your index page.
• Relocate those creative animations within a product demo or tutorial as a segue between scenes or talking points.
• Integrate animation within a call to action piece for user conversion.

Navigation and usability is important. The user wants to be in control of what they can and cannot view. Failure to provide that freedom can lead to an increase in bounce rate. If a simple 20 second animation is getting in the way of a user and your contact form or buying decision, you have potentially lost a valuable networking opportunity or sales lead.

Use design to compliment, not complicate!

Photo credit: Incessant Flux

I had such a great time at my first #blogchat on Sunday evening. Created by Mack Collier, #blogchat is a hashtag you use on Twitter to turn a series of tweets into a chatroom like atmosphere to talk about blogging. Held at 9pm EST it is a great way to meet some new people who are also interested in blogging and to learn a few things from your peers.

This week the topic was how bloggers deal with burnout. We have all been there. Stuck. Frustrated. What better way to brainstorm ideas then with other people just like you? I came away with some great ideas that I think could help all of us out!

10 Things to do when you feel like you have nothing to blog about:

1. Make sure you are writing about what you are passionate about (if possible) – Writing regularly about anything you don’t care about will just seem like work. If you can, write about a topic you genuinely care about. If you are writing about something broad, narrow your topics down to something more specific that you really care about.
2. Freshen up an old post – Things change, your opinions change, the internet changes, subscribers change. Pull an old blog post deep from the archives and give it new life. Expand on it, disagree with it, add new case studies to it.
3. React to someone else’s blog – **Listen carefully on this one** Take someone else’s blog and REACT to it. Explain what they said and add your thoughts. Feel free to disagree, add a real life example, agree and add to it. Find a way to make your post original. Do NOT repost someone else’s blog and do NOT repeat someone else’s blog without adding original thought by you! People posting mindless blogs just talking about what someone else has said drive me bonkers!

   

4. Read other blogs – perhaps one of the best things you can do for your blogging career is read (and I mean actually read, not skim or read the title and ReTweet). I have my Google Reader jam packed of smart blogs that help keep me inspired. I also try to keep my Google Reader very tidy. If I subscribe to a blog and don’t find they are giving me much value I have no problem unsubscribing.
5. Read outside of your industry – Don’t fall into the trap of only following the most popular bloggers or just people in your industry. You will be surprised at where inspiration to write comes from. Check out books, biographies or some good old magazines or newspapers. Sometimes remembering to connect with the “real world” opens some neurons for some great blogs.
6. Themes and Events – One of the most interesting things I learned at #blogchat is that next month is Pet Dental Month. Who knew? Themed months, holidays or events are a great spark for some creativity. At the end of last year we had the final quarter blues so Kasi and I created the Internet Marketing Advent Calendar. We made a commitment to write one blog post a day. It was fun, we got rave reviews and a bunch of new subscribers from it.
7. Answer Questions – Take some of your most frequently asked questions and make blog posts out of them. Browse LinkedIn’s Question and Answer sections and find some inspiration. If one person is asking about a topic I bet hundreds, if not thousands, have the same question too.
8. Interview Someone – Take the day/week/month off; instead of cranking out another post, interview an expert, colleague, business partner or someone who can offer new perspectives to your topic.
9. Don’t write! Make a Video – Web video is increasingly becoming an important part of your marketing mix. Take your thoughts and make a quick video instead of writing a post!
10. Lighten up – Many of us take ourselves way to seriously. Remember why you started this blog in the first place. Lighten up and just provide something that people will find useful.

    

I hope one or two of those examples is useful. If you want to see many more ideas check out the full transcript from #blogchat last Sunday.