Understanding the traffic visiting your site is a key metric, not just in terms of your Internet marketing efforts but also for building a effective social media campaigns.  Too many clients come to me wanting to bring more business through the website but without knowing anything about the traffic they are currently getting.

Do you know how many visitors your site gets as a result of your Facebook or Twitter presence?   Which blog posts or comments drive the most traffic to your site?  How much traffic your site gets overall and is it from your target audience?

Fortunately our friends over at Google have just the solution. Google analytics is a free web site traffic analysis tool that tracks traffic to your website. It works by having you enter some code on your web site and it should be the first thing on your to do list before embarking on any Internet marketing or social media marketing effort.

Using Google is a great way to understand your on-line community: how they find you; how they navigate your site and where they come from. Website owners can monitor and improve web site results by honing in on their specific community.  The service includes a dashboard containing vital visitors stats and the ability to drill down on these to find out more; score cards to assess traffic; conversion rate tracking analysis for keywords targeted; targeting by region (for example); the ability to create and share (send and schedule personalised e-mail reports) and export data.

Analytics is a free service that is used to attract customers to Google’s fee paid Ad Words and Ad Sense offering but those are optional – the benefits of this free data at our marketing fingertips are unquestionable.

Landing pages are the pages on your site where you want users to go after clicking an ad or a search result link. If you’re running any sort of online effort, you should at least have identified a landing page and its purpose.

Landing pages are a critical part of your site because it’s the place where you’re supposed to close the deal – have a user make a download, provide you with an email, make a purchase, or service the reason your business exists online.

While every landing page depends on an overall strategy and past performance, there are a few things that, with time, have become best practices. Not all of our landing page optimization tips may apply to your case so look at these objectively and take what works for you.

Here are our top 10 landing page optimization tips.

1. Make a Clear Offer or Proposition – What do you want your visitors to do: sign up for the news letter? Join a community? Try the new demo? Constantly ask yourself what it is you want your visitors to do and optimize for it. This is important to help you understand your strategy and avoid including too many choices or unnecessary information.

2. Careful With Distractions – Some even to the extent of removing page navigation to help focus attention. Though this might or might not work for you, have in mind that it’s easy to distract your visitor with less relevant options like company information, certifications and other products for example.

3. Size Matters  (Call To Action Buttons) – Have you noticed these buttons keep getting bigger? That’s because they perform better. Seth Godin calls them “bananas” and your visitors are the monkeys. The objective is to make it easy for the monkeys to find the bananas before they give up (less than 3 seconds).

4. Contrast (Call To Action Buttons) – Contrast for call to action buttons is good.  Use colours like red, yellow and green or a colour not widely use on the rest of the page to attract attention. Careful: contrast does not mean annoying. For the love of all that is good, avoid the flashing “YOU”RE THE 1,000,000th VISITOR!” style banners.

5. Above and Bellow (Call To Action Buttons) – Make the offer visible above the page fold and at the bottom. Perhaps your visitor has already done enough research to make the decision and want to buy right away. If the button is only at the bottom of the page you risk losing the lead to unnecessary actions.

6. Add Peer Validation – If you have previous client reviews or testimonials, this is the place to showcase them. This is important to add credibility and trust. Customers believe peers much more than they believe you, the seller.

7. Deliver The Offer – Don’t just hand them offer, email it to them! Yes, it’s an extra few minutes of waiting time for your customers, but it’s a great way to ensure you’ve got a valid email address.

8. Say Thank You – Take your customers to a “Thank You” page. This important to track conversions, an opportunity to ask for more information, and it’s just plain good manners.

9. Track It – Use tools like Google Analytics to track how your visitors come and interact with the page. A great way to do this is by creating funnels.  Funnels will help you understand where to make changes to improve conversions.

10. Test It – Use tools like Google Website Optimizer to try out new variations and see which one performs better. Making minor changes – e.g. colour, text and position - can sometimes boost your conversions beyond your expectations.

Thinking about your business bottom line? Contact Out-Smarts Marketing about creating a solid Internet Marketing Strategy.

Other resources:

Lee Munroe, a web designer from Ireland, has put together a great list of good call to action buttons here: http://www.leemunroe.com/web-design-trends-call-to-action-signup-download-buttons/

Wider Funnel, a Marketing Optimization company in Vancouver, works with a very effective principle for page optimization called the LIFT model. Learn about it here:  http://www.widerfunnel.com/conversion-rate-optimization/the-six-landing-page-conversion-rate-factors

Elastic Path, an enterprise ecommerce software company in Vancouver, published this short experiment on their blog about call to action button size.  http://www.getelastic.com/cta-size/

Whichtestwon.com – Anne Holland’s weekly optimization test. It’s not only insightful but also very cool! www.whichtestwon.com

Omniture, a popular web analytics platform, also has a landing page performance guessing game here: http://www.omniture.com/en/pickthewinner?cms_site_lang=1&s_rtid=25460&etlink=gra_sub2&sfid=0033000000WN28AAAT&elq=0d8c9eeab87e4680b981e1ff4831ddc4&s_iid=25443&ct=email&cp=lead%2520acquisition

by Jose Uzcategui

I recently had the opportunity to attend a leadership round table headed up by Judy Bishop of Bishop and Associates. Judy has been a key player on the Vancouver business scene for 20 years and her discussion surrounded building your personal brand.

During the conversation Judy pointed out that “branding” is not a term that should be used in a business context and that it in fact should only relate to cattle or livestock. Its an interesting point and got me thinking about the process we go through as marketers trying to influence our audience.  A mistake is often made in focusing on “us” (ie the company, product or service) and not “the audience”.

Taken literally as a verb, using -ing to form the progressive tense: branding,  is grammatically correct.  However, I think  its not the grammar that Judy has a bone of contention with but the implication.  Branding implies that we actively seek to make our mark on  the audience when in actual fact its not marketers who are in control of our brands but the audience itself.  Many marketers fail to recognize this and go about building their brand from the inside out without giving too much thought to the audience who is on the receiving end.

So what has all this got to do with social media I hear you ask.  Well, since you asked, I think its vital.  You shouldn’t go about using social media as a means “to burn your brand”  into the minds of your audience.  Social media users are particularly sensitive to manipulation.  Rather, look on social media as a great tool for making contact with your audience, to understand them better (what makes them tick)and to allow you to build better products for them.  Use it as a tool to build better relationships with them so that they, in turn, build a great perception of your company in their minds and are more likely to turn to you when in need. The best way to do this is to constantly be on the look out for ways that you can help your target audience and add value for them.  The key point here is that it is all about them not all about you.

Unlike Judy, I may use the term branding from time to time to categorize the efforts we make as marketers to build awareness but I do see her point.  Branding is something that is done to something else – the word implies a lack of respect.   Building a brand is all about respect: understanding your audience and catering to their needs.  By placing your customer front and centre and catering to their needs not yours, your marketing efforts will be more likely to succeed.

Related posts:

Branding – with Isabelle Mercier

And thanks Michelle for the great Highland Coo image!

This post is in follow up to our post last week about the risks of social media, this time we are looking at how to avoid them.

1. Litigation – to avoid the threat of litigation put HR processes in place so that your staff knows what can be said and what can’t.  Never spout off in social media in the heat of the moment and always stop to ask if what you are posting is professional, fair and representative of your brand.

2. Brand Killer – Avoid diluting your brand by using the same corporate or product name, logo, corporate colours and messaging  in all these forums.  Ensure that the brand remains consistent across all touch points and that your presence is easily recognizable.

3. Forever and Ever - always remember that what you post is out there forever so refer back to point one.

4. Time Waster - schedule time for social media marketing and stick to it.  If you want to play, do it in your own time to avoid the big time suck.

5. Pushy -look for opportunities to add value, to answer questions those in your community ask that are relevent to your area of expertise and always share links, posts and sites that you  think might be valuable to your audience.  This really helps in building your rapport online and mitigates any risk of looking too pushy. Oh and remember not to blatantly sell – it just puts followers off.

6. Disclosure – again make sure to put in place policies so that staff know what is expected of them in social media, what can and can’t be said.

7. Negativity – if someone says something bad about you in these forums, respond quickly and professionally – state your case or address the concern.  This will have the counter effect of showing that you are listening and that your company cares about what people think.

8. Just Because – Don’t build a social media presence just because its the latest buzz technology.  Before you start ask, what is in it for me or my company, do I have the time and resources to do this, how are my competitors using it, is my target market on there or is there an opportunity to reach new markets.

9. Spam – you can limit this by being extremely strategic and careful when building your following, by using software like Akismet and Captcha and by making sure you don’t click on links from untrusted sources.

10. Ignore It - A social media presence might not be right for every company but that doesn’t mean you should ignore social media completely.  Use these forums to listen and learn and to hear what is being said about your industry to help you stay ahead of the curve.

I did a search for “risk” on Flickr and up came this wonderful photo of a tiger from Ian Michael Thomas’ fabulous photostream.  Social media may be risky but thankfully it doesn’t have such sharp teeth!  Thanks Ian.

Other related posts:

Is Social Media Losing Its Lustre?

Business circles are a buzz about social media right now, not surprisingly since these tools are much more cost effective than traditional marketing functions and in many ways more targeted.

However, it is important to remember that social media is simply a component of an effective marketing strategy.  It should not be your only one because not everyone is active in these online forums even if they have a presence.

The best marketing campaigns are still the ones that build on the basic marketing foundations of product, price, promotion and place.  Once you know these basic components your message should be the same across each delivery point.

Great marketing efforts leverage different channels to build interaction with clients and prospects across various touch points.  Incidentally, interactive marketing, according to Forrester, is expected to reach nearly $25.6 billion in 2009.

Campaigns that promote interaction across both traditional and online marketing are sometimes called hybrid campaigns.  By reaching out to people in different ways, your company builds stronger brand awareness.  By interacting or encouraging interaction in all forums, you enhance loyalty.  Witness IBM whose campaigns typically combine traditional and online marketing.

To encourage interaction you should:  interact and contribute, build your community strategically, be geniune and timely and look for opportunities to add value.

When it comes to marketing and social media in particular, you should never put all you eggs in the one basket.

Thanks to Sunblossoms for the image.

Having a social media presence is vitally important these days. With 300 million users on Facebook, over 20 million on Twitter, not to mention millions blogging, it really gives you access to a wide audience.

A social media presence is an important addition to any marketing arsenal but the key to successfully using social media to build business is not in the technology itself but in the relationships you build  and how you use these tools.

Social media is all about connections, about being social. The more social you are (with the right people in the right way) the more successful you are likely to be.

Social media allows you to:

• Reconnect with old colleagues, friends and business partners – to build awareness of what you do now;
• stay in touch with existing members of your network – helping you maintain awareness of what you do and get to know these people better, forging stronger relationships;
• Build new relationships with peers in your industry, prospective partners and customers -  to identify and connect with new people you would like to do business with or even learn from.

As with any marketing or business development effort, using social media to build relationships should be done in a strategic and targeted way. You should know :

• the types of businesses or people you want to work with (i.e. old kindergarten friends may or may not be your best prospect so check them out first).
• the industry segments – what type of industries are they in (are they companies you would like to work with?).
• the target geography – i.e. connecting with people in Asia/Europe might not be the best use of your time if you don’t have a business presence there or if you don’t speak their language.

The bottom line is that your social media efforts should reflect your basic marketing strategy in terms of your target audience and your offering: always always bear that in mind.

Perhaps the biggest factor in successfully using social media is interaction.  There’s no point in having thousands of followers if you simply push information out to them all the time, interacting at them rather than with them.  You will simply appear automated and this will damage your efforts.  Join the conversation.  Read others’ posts to see which questions you can answer and how you can add value.  Share information that is valuable to others by linking to it via your social networks.  By thinking about how you can assist people you will find that these people are more likely to remember you and think of you when the time is right.

Finally, when using social media, remember that it should not be the sum and substance of your marketing or business development efforts.  Social media is at its best when it complements and reflects your real world networking, marketing  and business development efforts .

Thanks to Luc Legay for the image.

Social Media Listening Tools

Social media content is a great source of information for research, customer service and planning purposes.  Its important to use tools to effectively listen to what is being said about: your company, its products services and representatives; your competitors and clients; your market niche as well as your target geography and other marketing considerations.

With millions of people on-line every day exchanging opinions, thoughts, feedback and other information – this data source shouldn’t be ignored.

But how to listen effectively, what to listen for and how to do so in a timely manner?  As with any other market research initiative, it is important to have a social media listening strategy or plan that outlines what you are hoping to learn, the information you want to track and how you will analyze and use it.

There are thousands of social networks, millions of blogs, how do you sift through this information to find the gems that are relevant to your company and industry?    It’s important in advance to know what you want to listen for.  Identifying and listening for keywords pertaining to your company name and product or services names is a good start.  This allows you to get going with something concise and manageable and get a feel for the type of information you will return.

There are a number of tools available to effectively listen some are free, the obvious one being Google and some charge.  If you expect that you will use these tools extensively or if you hit the wall with free tools then you may want to consider the paid options as they provide structured and strategic solutions.

Here are some more specific services:

FREE

Google Alerts – this service sends e-mails outlining Google search result for your keyphrases.

There are a plethora of Twitter tools like Twitter Search, Monitter (my current favourite) and Tweetlater that allow you to monitor for keywords via email or online.

Pipl – great tool for assessing your personal brand online across multiple social networks

Backtype –  search terms, follow conversations.

Facebook wall comments Lexicon.

Trendrr – social and digital media tracking

Technorati – blog monitoring

PAID

Radian6 – this is a paid service but word on the street is that it’s worth paying the price. Radian6 tools

Trackur – another tool for social media monitoring.  Starting at $18 a month with a free trial.

Visible Technology’s Trucast – Social media and blog monitoring.

Our friends over at FM Walsh and Associates always post great blogs and the latest is no exception. Its about the considerations companies should take into account when creating their corporate Internet brand:

When creating a web presence, many companies think of technology and web design first with marketing as an afterthought when in reality, their major concern should be the latter: after all the web site is often the first point of contact you have with your potential customer. It’s imperative therefore to consider marketing (and branding in particular) a priority when creating your Internet presence. If you don’t, you could risk damaging this substantial asset considerably. In part one of this two part series I provide some key points that companies must consider in order to create a successful internet brand:

1. If your brand is already working well for you, there is no need to reinvent the wheel:
In most cases companies have already made considerable investment in building brand awareness. Don’t discard this; rather use it to your advantage. Always extend your existing brand image to your on-line presence so that people who are already aware of your brand recognize it easily on the web.

2. Consistency is key:
The company brand should be consistent across all touch points. Use existing corporate logos, taglines, fonts and colour schemes on your website to mirror the colours you use in your letterheads, signage and tangible marketing materials (or vice versa). Always include the internet domain or home page on existing corporate materials because driving traffic to your website will serve to further enhance your brand.

3. Brand Impact:
The top portion of your website is the most important area – it’s the first thing visitors see when they click through to your site: use it to your advantage and make sure what they see has impact. The company logo should be displayed prominently here along with a short tagline that describes concisely what you do. Content should be clear and concise and should quickly get to the gist of your offering. This makes it obvious to prospects immediately that they have come to the right place (or not as the case maybe) saving them time and effort.

4. Keep it simple and clear:
Many companies make the mistake of trying to put too much on their home page making it look busy and all that results is information overload – visitors are confused as to what the company actually does. Bear in mind that the most successful Internet brand is Google (link to www.google.com) whose classic website is plain white with the Google logo prominently displayed then the simple search functionality – it seems stark, but it really works.

5. Your domain is part of your brand too!:
Your domain or url should either reflect your company name or your function exactly: I don’t know how many times I have come across a company in a magazine or newspaper article and have tried to find them on the Internet using their company name but to no avail. When I do finally track them down it turns out that their domain is completely different and has no apparent similarity to the corporate identity. Had these organizations chosen a domain that encompassed their company name or at the very least one that describes concisely what they do it would have been so much more obvious and easy to find.

The keys to building a strong Internet brand include consistency, impact, simplicity and clarity – make sure that the look and feel are consistent with existing marketing efforts; that your message is obvious and apparent; that your brand has impact and your domain is obvious and as a result, your organization you will avoid potential pitfalls, ehance brand awareness and build more brand loyalty.

Our SEO copy writing  partner Louise Desmarais of Mud Creative recently wrote a great article in their newsletter that discusses the key elements that make your website attractive to visitors.  Louise kindly agreed to allow me to share it with you:

As your site’s welcome mat, the elements of the home page are critically important in terms of communication and usability.

What’s your story? Just say it.

Visitors expect to find out in three seconds or less if a site has what they’re looking for. Jakob Nielsen, a web usability consultant, says that not explicitly stating what you have to offer is #1 of The ten most violated home page design guidelines.

If the headline on your home page says “Welcome to company X,” that’s only telling your visitors who owns the site – not what you can do for them. If your company story is buried in generic corporate speak, it is a one-sided pitch that visitors quickly see through.

In plain language with purposeful words, explain what your product or service is and how it can help your visitors. Use first person so that it feels like a comfortable conversation. Then casually direct them to other pages for more information.

Keep the important stuff above the fold – that is, above the point where visitors have to scroll down to continue reading. They may not get that far, so you want to make sure to make an impression early on.

Make the reading easy with subheads and bullets

Web readers tend to scan on-page content to decide if they want to stay or move on. (Did you know that the back button is the third most-used button on the keyboard?) To make it easier to scan and to hold visitors’ attention longer:

• Break up your story with intriguing subheads
• Use bullet points to separate thoughts
• Incorporate links into bullets to direct visitors to other pages

Where do they go from here? Don’t leave them hanging.

There are many ways for visitors to navigate your site. But it’s up to your site to show them where to go and how to get there.

Does your site have a global navigation – defined as a set of top-level navigation links (for example, Home, About Us, News, Contact Us) – that appear on every page? This helps to orient your visitors. The global navigation should be in about the same place on every page, with the page or section that visitors are currently on highlighted.

Don’t rely on your global navigation alone to be your site’s road map. Include links to important pages in the content of your story. At the bottom of the page, give readers an option to go elsewhere, such as “Contact us for more information.”

Let visitors know they’ve landed on a happening site
Today’s websites are dynamic, engaging and interactive. When people arrive, convince them that there is real value in sticking around. Some ideas for doing this are:

• What’s new? – showcase your latest projects
• Newsletter sign-up – offer free information
• Recent blog postings – prompt visitors to read and comment
• Social media widgets – invite them to follow you on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
• Post your latest podcast
• Link to your latest press release

Say no to digital barriers – open the doors wide
You want to eliminate any and all frustration around your site, so avoid the following:

• Splash landing page – you know you hate these. So do your visitors. What’s more, splash pages make your site virtually invisible to search engines
• Pop-ups – unless there’s a good reason for a pop-up, don’t go there
• Embedded scroll-down boxes – these can be confusing to visitors, and they’re not pretty
• Long sign-up forms, surveys and password requests – too much work and your visitors are reaching for that back button

When visitors arrive at your site, they already know what they’re looking for. Will they find it on your home page?

Louise Desmarais is an SEO copywriter with a loyal following of web clients from across North America. Louise operates Mud Creative, a writing company based in Calgary, Alberta.

Last night I went back to school, summer school that is. What dragged me off to school of all places on a fine summer’s night? The prospect of learning more about social media from a non profit perspective, because the session was hosted by one of my favorite branding houses in Vancouver: Kontent Creative and also as social media strategist for Hippo Water Roller I was keen to find out some new tricks and tactics specific to the non profit arena.

The presenter was Doug van Spronsen a fresh faced twenty something who is a co-founder of Water Drop: a non profit organisation dedicated to raising awareness of the world water crisis.   Doug’s presentation entitled “Why Social Media is Essential and How Non Profits Should Embrace It” introduced social media for non profits (what it is and what its not), he talked about why you should bother (you have to; fostering transparency;to gain a new audience;to control your brand), and how to be effective.

There’s something invigorating about watching a younger presenter.  Its almost as if you are seeing things all over again for the first time through their eyes.  You can’t fail to be infected by their enthusiasm.  The presentation itself, whilst falling slightly short of my expectations (I had hoped to get some really specific non profit tactics and to learn more about off the wall strategies to build an audience of donors in these forums), was ideal for its intended audience (which I am decidedly not given my social media experience).  It gave a great introduction to social media from a general perspective and touched on most of the points that a not for profit organisation should consider when building their soc med presence, I also came away with some blog and tool gems to explore.

At the time of posting I am not sure what is next for Kontent Creative’s summer school (I will update this post as the information becomes available).  I would highly encourage you to keep and eye open for these events especially if you are new to social media and considering your approach.