Archive for November, 2011
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, November 09th, 2011
Not a bad view!
We’re feeling all grown up here at Out-Smarts – like we’ve come of age or something. After almost nine years in business we’ve made the leap from the virtual office to a bricks and mortar premises and it feels good (I knew that it would). It’s a big milestone for us and we are just settling in – adapting to life in the office is going to be fun.
When Out-Smarts (Outsmart Sales and Marketing Co. as it was called then) was founded in 2002, I had the idea that it would be neat to be location independent and be able to work from anywhere. For the last 9 years I’ve worked from coffee shops, beaches, parks, arenas – you name it. As we grew; Corrie, PJ, Jan, Sam, Prianka and Jose all work(ed) from their virtual locations, aka from home, and it worked really well for us.
So why did we finally cave in to the more ‘normal’ work set up, and have we taken a step back in time, or what? We haven’t, we still have home offices and spend time meeting in coffee houses and being virtual, but there comes a time with a growing team that it becomes more productive to be sitting close to your colleagues. As well as to have a boardroom to bring clients, and a place to train.
The boardroom
When our friend and mentor over at Raspberry Kids, Sue Sinclair, mentioned that we should check out the space Xomo (her husband’s company) were subleasing, we were initially wary. However, when we came to see the office and found that not only does it have a Skype screen in the boardroom, but also a touch screen too (not to mention Indian food on Thursdays and beer Fridays) we were sold on the spot.
We moved in last week, sharing the space with the lovely Leigh Striegler, our design partner from Olive Design. Our office has wall to wall windows, a view of the mountains and, even better, Granville Island is just steps away (so we will never go hungry). We’re still moving our furniture and equipment in (and around) and settling in – we have no art on the walls, yet.
Celebrating our first office
Some things change and some remain the same. Out-Smarts is still a progressive organisation (lifestyle means a lot to us!). As long as the work gets done and our clients are uber happy, it doesn’t really matter when or where we are, but it’s extra nice to go into the office and find that your colleague has baked a cake to celebrate (not so easy when you’re virtual). Did I mention that Corrie is a cake master?
Our new office is located at #202 – 1650 West First Avenue. You should pop by for a visit.
Written by Corrie Scott, November 07th, 2011
We really like this blog post from our friend and business colleague, Michele Soregaroli of Transformation Catalyst, she makes some excellent points! If you’d like to see the original post, click here.
In a previous blog post, I talked about the 3 pillars of business – Visibility, Connection, Delivery.
But where does engagement fit? Aren’t connection and engagement the same thing? I get this question a lot…and it’s absolutely critical to your business that you not only understand the distinction between them, but that you also develop your strategies and actions with these distinctions in mind.
If you haven’t got a good sense of the basic 3 Pillars of Business, I would suggest that you start your reading there, and then come back here for more learning. Today’s post is dealing only with Connection and Engagement.
I’m going to use Facebook Pages as the example in this post, but keep in mind that these principles apply to all strains of your business where you are communicating with your target market, prospects and existing clients.
Let’s assume that you have a Facebook Page set up. If you don’t have one, you’ve probably ‘Liked’ one, or have seen some that you can refer to here. A Facebook Page is essentially another platform to create Visibility…people know that you are in business and that your doors are open. But it’s much more than that!
If you’re like most business owners, your main focus for your Facebook Page has been to generate LIKES…lots of Followers who are willing to read your posts and are interested in what you have to say. Sometimes they will ‘Like’ your posts. In that case, they have established a CONNECTION with you.
However, this is where it gets interesting!! Business Pages gathering ‘Likes’ believe that they have now established permission to ask for the business from their audience. If you have ‘Likes’, you have a connection, and the next step is to sign the deal and start delivering your service, right?
Not right…not even a little. I’m guessing that those ‘Likes’ on your Page are not converting to Leads. If you see yourself here, you’re probably wondering the value of social media at all. Here’s why it’s not working – you haven’t actually ‘engaged’ your followers!
A Connection is established when someone indicates, in the moment, that they are in agreement with you and identify that you share something in common. But only in that moment. They aren’t all in, by any stretch. They just think that whatever happened in that moment was worth ‘Liking’. Then they move on…NO engagement. Read more
Written by Corrie Scott, November 02nd, 2011
We like Google Analytics because it reveals a ton of 
useful information about your website, and did we mention it’s free? A frequently asked question regarding social media is, what’s the ROI? Installing Google Analytics on your website makes it much easier to track the ROI of online marketing than its offline counterpart. You can see where your traffic is coming from, whether or not your recent Facebook campaign caused a spike in traffic to your website, what pages people visit most often and spend the most time on, and much more.
For advice and tips on setting up Google Analytics on your website, check out our earlier blog post.
Why you should be using Google Analytics
1. Measuring your website performance over time. Using Google Analytics, you can easily compare your site’s performance with its past performance over a specific time period. We like to compare both this month versus last month, and how we’re performing this year versus the same time last year.
2. Visitor loyalty. It’s great if your website is getting tons of hits, but if those people visit once and never return then something isn’t resonating with your target audience. Analytics tracks all visitors to your website and determines how many are first time visitors versus returning visitors.
3. Integrate your adwords account. If you already have a Google AdWords account, you can integrate it with analytics to collect campaign, ad group or keyword specific data. The data collected includes cost, conversions, impressions, clicks and whether the ad resulted in a sale. You can even see your profit margin for each ad that led to a sale.
4. Dashboard customization. The basic Analytics dashboard comes with all kinds of useful tidbits of data; including, most popular pages on your site, visitors, bounce rate, time on site, traffic sources, etc. But, there’s a lot more to Google Analytics than the dashboard. These other metrics, such as the Adwords overview, top landing pages, goals, and the keywords entered into internal search must be accessed manually from the left hand navigation bar. If you find you use manually accessible features often, you can add them to your dashboard using the ‘add to dashboard’ button at the top of the page. Once you’ve added something to your dashboard, it will stay there until you choose to remove it. It’s also possible to rearrange your dashboard to your preferred layout.
5. Internal search. If you have an internal search bar on your website, Analytics tracks exactly what people are typing into that field to find things on your website. It also tracks what page they were on when they made the search, and where they ended up after completing the search.
6. Assign access to your account. You can give people two types of access to your Analytics account. Administrator access gives key people full access to your account, whereas read-only privileges allow people to run reports, but they are unable to make any changes or access your website specific Analytics code.
7. Set goals. It’s easy to set up a goal for almost anything you would like users to do on your website; including, visiting a certain page, making a purchase, signing up for your newsletter, ad conversions, etc. This will give you a clear idea of whether people are taking the steps on your website that you would like them to follow.
8. Scheduled reports and easy exportation. If you can never remember to check your Google Analytics account, it’s possible to set it up so that regular reports get emailed to your inbox. Or, you can schedule reports to regularly be emailed to key employees, in a variety of handy formats. It’s also possible to export your data in a CSV file where you can view and manipulate it in Excel.
9. Funnel visualization. This is a great tool that allows you to see when visitors are backing out of the conversion process on your website. For example, it lets you know if most people quit trying to buy your product at the shopping cart step, or if people stop signing up for your newsletter when they realize how much personal information they have to divulge. This information lets you know what it is about your conversion processes that are deterring your customers.
10. Bounce rates. The bounce rate is the number of people that immediately leave your site after landing on it. You can look at the bounce rate for each individual page to determine which ones are ‘sticky’. If the majority of people land on a page of your website and leave right away, you may want to rethink the copy or layout of that particular page.
Need help installing Google Analytics on your website? Contact us; this is one of the many services we provide our clients.
