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website value

Top 7 Things to Do Now to Maximize Website Value

What do I mean by “maximize website value?” I mean now is a good time to look at how to maximize the business value of your website.

I recently needed to shop for new homeowner’s insurance on my home island of Kauai. Being a digital marketing guy I started searching with Google for who might be local agents that I would want to speak with. I was surprised to find that not all local agents had a website. I was also surprised to find that some gave no information on their website as to whether they could assist with the type of insurance I was looking for. And even more surprising was that some of the websites failed to have basic contact information, like email, phone, and address!

I assume that if you don’t have accurate contact information on your website then you may not be a very professional agent to handle my insurance needs. (One insurance company that did have a professional looking website asked me to leave a voicemail for a return call and they didn’t call me back for over two weeks!…..but that’s a different business issue….)

So if you are a small business without a website, the number one thing to do is to get one. You are missing out on new business!

If you do have a website, it’s a good time to check over updates you may need to make to maximize its marketing value to your business. You may have spent money to have a website that really isn’t driving business value. Here I have compiled what research and my own personal experience have shown to be the top 7 things you should do now, if you haven’t already. Now is the time to check the list and make any updates!

1. Content is up to date, accurate, and informative

Does your website clearly lay out the value proposition for your prospective customers? Does it clearly communicate the benefits to them of doing business with you? For example, in my business a web design is not a benefit. Being found online and growing your client base is a customer benefit.

Does your website clearly communicate what differentiates your company. Why should a prospect do business with you versus your competitors?

Does your website make it easy and clear to contact you via email, phone, and social media? Does it have your address if you serve customers at a brick and mortar location?

Does your website have lots of photos? Most people don’t read very much. They are scanning and absorbing visual information before they may read any text. Are you posting to a blog on your website that helps to provide insights and demonstrate your expertise in your particular business? It also signals to search engines that you are a relevant and up to date source for key words related to your business. It’s a business blog, not what you had for breakfast or the fun thing you did on Saturday night.

2. Responsive for mobile devices

Half of all Google searches are done on mobile devices. More than 60% of emails are read on mobile devices. Younger generations live on their mobile devices. Your website now should be using responsive technology to adapt to various devices.

If you are found in a search, but your web page is not easily readable, your prospective customer may just move on to the next company. And Google has started to tighten down and penalize some pages in ranking if they are not mobile-friendly. Expect that to get even tighter in the next couple of years.

See my related blog posts: Mobile First Marketing, Responsive Web Design Critical to Your Bottom Line, and How to Avoid Mobile Website Meltdown.

3. It is easy to find information and navigate your website

If your website still looks like it’s 2010 or before, you’re cheapening your brand image and dissuading potential customers from contacting you. The look and feel of websites is evolving. If you haven’t already, it’s time to declutter. White space is in! Focus on relevant images and key information. Make it simple, clear, and relevant. Your menu and navigation should be simple and easy for people to follow.

4. Social Sharing should be enabled and easy to use

Your website should be the content hub about your business. Social Media is a channel to help drive prospective customers to your content. And it should also be easy for people to share content from your website to social media. They will actually help you to market and spread awareness with their family and friends if they find interesting and useful content and an easy share button.

5. Email capture

Someone who visits your website today may or may not be ready to make an immediate purchase. But they have shown interest in your brand. Give them an incentive on your web page to opt-in to your email list. If you offer them some information of value in return for opting-in, you will see a much higher signup rate. By opting-in they are giving you permission to market to them over time in a personal way. They are much more likely to open your email than they are to see one of your social media posts.

6. Speed and performance should be optimized

If your website is too slow to load, you may lose a prospective customer. There is a trade-off between lots of images that tell your story and the speed and performance of your site. A tool set like Google PageSpeed Tools will analyze your speed and give specific recommendations for improvement. Make sure you are using a web host with adequate performance relative to others. Also make sure that all images are highly compressed.

7. Optimize for search engines

Check Google Search Console to make sure there are neither errors nor resource blocking for your site. Follow best practices for focus keywords, titles, snippets, photo alt text, and text so that search engines will recognize and reward your valuable content with higher rankings. Reach out to other relevant high value websites to request a link back to your site. Create relevant links between different pages of your website. Make sure your address and contact information are consistent across all sites and social media. Search Engine Optimization experts may chuckle at this simplified list, but these are good first steps to address or to discuss with your web designer.

Maximize website value

If you started the new year without updating your marketing plan and checking the health of your website, now is the time to maximize website value!

mobile

Easy Steps to Create Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

The way we look for information continues to evolve quickly. A few years ago a mobile marketing strategy was nice-to-have. Now it is a must-have. In fact, it should be your marketing strategy, not an addition to it.

Customers are on the go and inundated with possible sources of information. To succeed now and into the future you need to be able to engage them seamlessly across social media, your website, and email. You also need consistency across all the devices they use. For small and mid-sized business people that can be a big, complex task.

Your customers may be at home on a desktop, traveling with a tablet, or walking or driving in your neighborhood with a smartphone. Will they find you? Will their experience with your brand be good on each device and each touch-point? Let’s try to boil it down into a some easy steps to think about to create your (mobile) marketing strategy.

  • Get insights into your customers’ buying behaviors. Marketing and strategy start with understanding exactly who your target customers are and their behavior for making a purchase decision.
    • Who are they?
    • What kind of devices do they use when?
    • When do they make a decision to contact you or come into your business?
    • What information is most helpful to them to engage with your business?
    • How do they most often contact you?
    • What times of day do they look for information about you?

Answering these questions will help to guide your strategy. Don’t know the answer to these questions? Then it’s time to start asking. Ask your customers individually. Conduct an online survey. Look for market research online relevant to your location and industry.

  • Only invest in a mobile app if you have business justification. Most small and mid-sized businesses will find the cost and usage of a mobile app to have a negative return on investment. While smartphone users spend a lot of time using apps, they primarily use about five very popular ones, like Facebook, Google, etc. Don’t worry if you don’t have a mobile app. Many people prefer to use a mobile web browser rather than load up their device with niche apps.
  • Create a consistent experience across channels. Your brand image and value proposition should be the same across the web and social media platforms. Your customers interact with you across multiple channels even for one purchase decision. Make sure they can easily link back and forth. And make sure the key information about location, phone number, and email are consistent.
  • Time some content posts to customer behavior. Do you have customers streaming off a cruise ship at certain times? Do you see most of your business late afternoon and early evening?  Timing some of your content posts to those times may engage people in social media or email at just the time they want or need to interact with your business.
  • Run mobile ads on social media. Facebook is now a pay-to-play platform for businesses and other are moving that direction. But you can reach your on-the-go audience by running pay per click mobile ads on the social media platforms where they spend their time.
  • Test and refine. Try out your strategy. Use the data on what works and what doesn’t work to refine or modify your strategy. Ask customers for feedback in person and online to guide what adjustments you may need to make.
web design company choice

How to Hire the Right Web Design Company for Your Business

Hiring a web design company that fits you and your business is key to your success. You’ve heard the old saying, “you only get one chance to make a good first impression.” That stodgy old proverb is as true in the internet age as it was before the advent of computers. So far as the website user is concerned, the face of the company is that website they see when they surf to your URL.

The website, how fast or slow it is or what it has to offer, is the only thing that they know about your company. It’s representing you. How do you hire the company that is going to design and create that site? In short, how do you hire the company that is going to be responsible for the growth and success of your online presence?

It may be the wrong decision for you and your company to use the first web design company that a friend mentions or that you see in an ad.

Here are a few tips that may help to guide you in the right direction. As you read these, bear in mind there are exceptions to every rule, but they are few and far between. Make sure before you hire your company that they really are the exception.

Review sites they have created. Check out the sites that they have created and how fast or slow they are as well as how well they work.  You’re looking for quality of work.  Do the sites load quickly?  Do they make use of modern web design trends?  Is navigation simple and clear?  Is it easy to find desired information?  Do they work on mobile devices as well as desktop browsers?

What type of websites have they designed? If the site is designed in custom code, or in code such as Flash ( a very poor choice for SEO purposes incidentally) it’s going to get quite costly for you to have them update the site every time that you require a small change or a photo added. CMS or content management systems such as WordPress or Drupal are the best option. Find out if they are willing to design in this type of platform to allow ease of use for you.

Ask them a few questions about search engine optimization and marketing. SEO is imperative today and knowing something about it means creating a site that will rise more quickly in search. The ideal designer has done at least some rudimentary studies in SEO and can offer you solid insights. Those insights are invaluable when your site is designed. Having the site reflect best practices in SEO from the ground up can make a huge difference when it comes to how well the search engines receive the site.

What other marketing expertise do they offer in addition to web design?  Maybe you only need a designer to execute your vision.  Or maybe you would be better served by someone with marketing expertise who can challenge and add value to your thinking and plans.  Do you have a winning marketing strategy? Do you have a consistent brand across traditional and digital marketing?  Do you have a social media marketing plan?  How will you develop and populate content to your site?  Will you have a blog?  What will you use for email marketing?

How Reliable are They? Find out how long it took for them to create other sites from start to finish. Do you work with the same designer from beginning to end? How responsive were they to the needs of the customer and how long did it take them to respond to questions and concerns regarding the design or the process?

How do they communicate with clients? Do you want someone who can take your vision or brief, go away, and come back with a completed product?  Or do you want someone who can discuss, iterate, and review with you the direction of the project and make any mid-course changes or corrections?  How often will you hear about and see progress on your web design?  What will be the checkpoints and milestones for you to review and approve?  How will changes to the original project be handled?  Do you feel comfortable with the amount and style of the communications?

Check references. A good web design company –even if they are relatively new in the web design business– will be able to offer you references from both individuals and businesses.

The Cost of the Work. Other considerations in choosing the right company will of course be the price. Is it fair and how closely does it fall into line with other designers. Regardless of where you are located, the designer should at least be close in price to other designers in their area and of their experience. If they are a great deal higher, it may be that they are far more skilled, or it may be that you’re paying for the name and not the actual cost of their work. If they are a great deal lower, you should be asking yourself–and them–why that is the case.

Last, but certainly not least, take a look at their own site. Chances are that if they didn’t take great care in selecting the style, designing the layout and creating the text, they aren’t going to do that for yours either.

Taking the time and doing the due diligence that it takes to get a well made website says a lot about you and your company. Unwieldy or poorly constructed websites speak volumes to those who may be considering doing business with you. If your website is going to speak about your company, make sure that it’s saying what your prospective customers want to hear.

mobile first

Mobile First!

Today it is about being mobile first!  If people cannot access your content easily and clearly on mobile devices, you are missing the boat!  This is true all over, but on the island of Kauai, this can be a literal statement.  I was recently chatting with the owner of a rental shop near the port where cruise ships come in.  He was telling me that he had developed a web site, but he had not thought about it being mobile first.  But his target customers all arrive with mobile devices.  He said, “I see them coming off the ship all looking at their smartphone or tablets.”  The same is true of nearby hotel and timeshare visitors.

Nielson reports that over the past year, the average consumer spent nearly seven hours more per month with their mobile phones, and more than 70% of mobile users use smartphones.

Mobile first email marketing

According to Movable Ink’s Q1 2014 US Consumer Device Preference Report email opens continue to migrate away from the desktop.  In fact, two thirds of emails are opened on a mobile device.   Within that, the tablet share of email opens continues to grow.

Movable Ink said that 66 percent of emails were opened on either a smartphone (47.2 percent) or tablet (18.5 percent) in Q1 2014. That’s up slightly from the 65 percent in Q4. By contrast PC email opens were down to 34 percent.

What an opportunity for online, digital marketing.  This means that your email reaches your target audience anytime and anyplace.  Think about that.  But also think about how it must be designed for the customer on the go.  If you don’t grab him/her with the title and the first five lines of your email, they will move on to the next one.   It has to be attention grabbing, get quickly to the value for your customer, and then to the call to action.  In a previous role, I wrote many such emails to be used by the salespeople in our company.  Many of them were surprised that they got a quick response from a senior executive.  It was because it was targeted at them, designed to be read on a mobile device, with a clearly stated value proposition and an easy call to action.

Mobile First Blogs

Don’t be surprised if mobile devices are soon the primary way that people read your blog posts.  You can use Google Analytics to see how they are being accessed today and what the trend line is for mobile devices for your particular site.  Have you looked at and thought about how someone will access your blog from a mobile device?  Do your sharing icons work on the mobile device?  Can users comment?  Is there far too much scrolling to the right required?

The best way to find out is to test your site on a variety of devices. But Google also provides a website called Make Your Website Work Across Multiple Devices which helps you test your mobile website for mobile compatibility.  There is also a link to their PageSpeed Insights tool where you can test performance on mobile and desktop devices and get suggestions for improvement.

Mobile First Design

How do you get mobile first design?  If you are designing a new web site, make sure your developer is enabling responsive design.  There are many tools and themes available now to automatically enable web sites to be responsive to mobile devices and to optimize the display and performance.  If you have an existing web site that is not designed for mobile, you have a few choices:

  • Do nothing – your customers will have to enlarge and scroll on a mobile device
  • Re-design to be responsive – if your web site is a few years old, it may be due for a re-design anyway
  • Create a separate mobile site – you could have a separate mobile site, but then you have to maintain two sites

Mobile First Features

The rise in use of mobile devices also opens new opportunities to think about exploiting unique features of those devices.  A common example is being able to link to mobile turn-by-turn directions.  Not only can they find your business online, their device can guide them to you.  They can touch the screen and immediately call or email you.  They can check back in with you during the day and at different locations.  You may also want to make use of location awareness to push certain information or promotions.  And mobile devices are also good for social media integration.  Making it easy to share on social media directly from a mobile device may increase your reach.

So it really is a new world.  I now carry the Internet in my pocket via my smartphone.  When I travel, I stay connected with my tablet to use in the airport, on the plane, and in my hotel room.  I may search for information about a business anytime and anywhere that I have a connection.  If you are not mobile first, you are missing the boat! (maybe literally!)

 

 

10 ways to create compelling content

Want 10 Ideas for Compelling Content?

A lot of people doing online, digital marketing are focused on the tools and channels.  But it’s compelling content that causes someone to look at and engage with you.  As you are faced with hundreds of blogs, Facebook posts, and tweets some catch your eye and some don’t.  Here are 10 ways you can catch the attention of your reader with your marketing content:

  1. Tell a story that is relevant – We all like to know how other people have solved problems successfully.  What was the problem/situation?  What did you do?  What was the result?  We all like to learn from these mini case studies.  They establish your credibility.
  2. Write in the language of your customer – I see a lot of web sites, blogs, and Facebook posts aimed at small and mid-sized businesses that use the jargon of tools and acronyms for compelling content marketing.  But their audience are business people, not necessarily technologists or marketers.  To engage your customer, speak their language, not yours.
  3. Provide compelling content that is timely and relevant – It’s about issues and problems your customers are dealing with now.  It’s current.  It’s up to date.  It’s not information on a web site that you last updated 2-3 years ago.
  4. Help solve a problem or give tips and techniques – You provide compelling content when you educate and supply information that assists your audience to solve a problem.  By teaching, your audience solves the problem on their own and remembers your assistance.  Or they may reach out to you to solve the problem on their behalf.  Or your content may be compelling not because it solves their entire problem, but it aids your audience to improve and increase the return on their investment.
  5. Analyze and summarize data for decision-making – Your target customer has multiple competing priorities.  Helping them with data and insights from that data will assist them to make better decisions.  And that will lead to more sharing of the data and visibility to your expertise in the area.
  6. Be concise – The more senior your target customer, the less time they have to consider your information.  Don’t expect them to read a long white paper to get the key points.  Summarize the conclusions/recommendations first and then give the option to read the longer report.  Make your text easy to read.  Use bullets, lists, and graphics.
  7. Create an emotional connection – People love to read and hear heart-warming stories.  Maybe it’s about one of your employees.  Maybe it is about one of your customers.  Maybe it is about something going on in the community in which your business is involved.  Not only do people love to hear a heart-warming story, they also love to share them with others.
  8. Give a peak behind the scenes with insider information – Part of a strong customer relationship is the customer knowing a lot about your company and the people that make up your company.  We feel more connected when we know more about individuals working in your organization.  We also feel valued if you give us a peak behind the scenes.  Do you have an innovative process or interesting equipment or a new technology that would engage me more by becoming an insider with you?
  9. Be humorous – Poke fun at yourselves, your industry, your employees, your pets, but in a positive way.  Be “punny” about your business.  We all love to laugh and to share things that will make other people laugh.
  10. Provide a picture worth a thousand words – In the crush of online blogs, posts, and tweets, pictures grab our attention and compel us to stop and look.  Many pictures are worth a thousand words.  They communicate concepts and ideas succinctly or they at least stop our eyes to read the text.

What are your thoughts?  Have these 10 ways worked on you?  Can you think of examples of marketing content that caused you to stop and take action?

online marketing

What is Online Marketing? Inbound? Digital? Content?

When I moved from the mainland to Kauai, I needed to find new resources to assist me.  I didn’t listen to broadcast ads or read a newspaper.  I went online and searched for information.  In the process of searching for information, I formed impressions of service providers based on what I was learning from them.  I also was looking for providers who had simple, well laid out web sites, with up to date information.  Not only did I search the worldwide web, I also searched on Facebook for local businesses.  I “liked” some that I found interesting.  I signed up for email newsletters.  I read blogs and learned a great deal that influenced how I planned my move and possible vendors for me to contact that would fit my needs.

It’s a new world for marketing your business. Consumer and business behavior is evolving to be much more like my personal experience above.  Will your potential customers find you and be compelled to engage with you?  Will your online, digital content show up high in their searches?  Will your existing customers feel that they have an ongoing relationship with you, recommend you to others, and do more business with you over time?

If you are presenting no online information or stale, out of date information, I would not probably contact you.  I would look to your competitors who provide me with information and insight and who show they want to have an ongoing relationship.

If you already have a Web site for your business, that’s great.  Is it easy to find information?  Is it regularly updated?  Do you have a blog that provides background, context, information, and insight?  Are you educating your audience, not just selling to them?  It’s a new model of marketing that goes by different names such as online marketing, digital marketing, and inbound marketing.  It’s not just a technology project. It’s a new way of engaging prospects and customers for your unique business.

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