Internet Marketing | eMarketing Innovation in Pittsburgh PA

Is It Time for a Redesign?

November 8, 2016 Leave a comment

A redesign of a website or email campaign is often considered when the aesthetic of the layout has become dated or unsuitable. By all means, if you find yourself repulsed by the look of it, then it’s time to make an update. But what if you’re just indifferent toward the layout? Is it worth the time, money, and effort to do a redesign? To answer the question, analyze what problems the redesign can solve and whether there is a likely return on that investment.

The most prevalent mistake in doing a redesign is starting from scratch. A new look doesn’t need to completely remove all previous elements. This is counterintuitive because the point of a redesign is to get something updated and fresh and the assumption is that the previous layout is neither of those things.

If you are running continually improving campaigns then there should be plenty of data on what elements improve performance, which elements hurt performance, and what elements have no tangible impact on conversion. Your redesign should incorporate all the elements that improve conversion and shun those that do not. That becomes the design constraint and any redesign needs to fall within those boundaries.

The second overlooked aspect of a redesign is whether it presents an opportunity to improve the technical competency of your website or email. Technology changes quickly so almost every redesign should incorporate updated technology that brings the items up to speed. In this way the redesign has the added benefit of keeping the infrastructure current.

If you are considering a redesign of a website or an email that is performing well and has no technology shortcomings, it’s often not worth the effort. If your redesign becomes a technology upgrade coupled with an evolution of your tested design elements, then it will almost always generate a tangible business impact.

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Web Maintenance

Digital Marketing: Is Doing Nothing an Option?

October 26, 2016 Leave a comment

Getting started with digital marketing is often the hardest step to take. We speak with many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches that know they need to do something but there’s always one more thing to square away before launching their digital marketing plan. There will always be one extra element that could make digital marketing better but if it will cause an indeterminate delay in launching your digital marketing activity, it’s best to take a few initial steps and build on that rather than trying to craft a perfect scenario before getting started.

A marathon runner doesn’t wake up the day of the race and pound out 26.2 miles. They work up to it via a training regimen. The training regimen is often a result of just experimenting with running in general before discovering they had a passion or talent for it. In other words, they had to try out the activity before they started becoming proficient at it.

Digital marketing beginners should have a similar path. If you’re starting from scratch, get a basic lead generation mechanism (like a website, social media page, or affiliate form) established. Then start experimenting with channels to drive traffic to that lead mechanism. Will the implementation be perfect? Absolutely not, but it will provide some baseline discoveries to guide you into what digital marketing activities have the most value for your business. Furthermore, some early progress and results will motivate you to get other digital marketing elements together and launched.

The same guideline applies when contracting out digital marketing services. If you can meet a pre-requisite list for a particular digital marketing activity but not others, start there and then build up to others. For instance, we have a client that wanted SEO, website lead generation landing pages, email marketing, and social media to be in their digital marketing plan. However, they didn’t have a sufficient database of contacts to launch an email marketing campaign and content for SEO was in a state of disarray. Instead of hitting the brakes on everything we started out by updating the website and setting up landing pages, starting social media posting, and set up a temporary pay per click campaign while the SEO elements were being developed. In this way the foundations were started and the elements with missing pieces could be develped using data and insights from the iniatial digital marketing.

Procrastination in launching digital marketing efforts is often a smokescreen for being overwhelmed or unorganized. The volume of information about digital marketing can make a launch seem like a more daunting task then it needs to be. Doing nothing ensures that you will fall further behind and gives the competition even more time to fortify their position as market leader. Take a simple first step with your digital marketing and build from there. Otherwise doing nothing might be a permanent decision.

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Site Conversion

Website Content and Social Media Content Offer Unique User Experiences

September 28, 2016 Leave a comment

It’s common for trainers, consultants, and professional coaches to think of social media and their website as the same thing. This false assertion often leads to mirroring navigation and content that rarely suits either channel. While social media content and website content are related they are two very different channels that will result in very different user experiences.

Social media content is like a festival market shop where your website is like a store in the mall. Both have a certain product offering surrounded by a larger market but the environments are much different.

The primary difference in the social media environment is that it is constantly changing and competition for attention is immediately prevalent. Like a festival, it’s difficult for a user to define exactly what they want to buy because the environment is not well suited for a targeted search. You rarely see a festival market with a map of shops because the vendors, products, and availability are too fluid to map out. Likewise, social media does not provide that structure, so the experience needs to draw people in.

Users are guided by what is current and interesting to them. What makes festival markets compelling is the excitement in discovering unique items that aren’t widely available elsewhere. In that way your social media channels need to provide timely, relevant, and unique information to your target audience. Like a festival, the next shop is right next door so if your content is dated or irrelevant then the next more compelling shop is immediately available.

Alternatively, your website is like a store in the mall. There are other stores available in the mall but there is a barrier that makes the store your own defined place. A store at the mall is typically calmer with less outside distraction. Well organized stores help shoppers find a particular item that they have already defined. Websites should function in the same way. There should be an orderly flow for visitors to find what they want or get assistance. Search engines serve as the mall map, so once people arrive in at the site it should be obvious how to find what they are seeking.

A word of caution not to use the analogy to celebrate one channel over the other. Reactions like “social media is a flea market of crap,” or “websites are stuffy stores with no excitement,” miss the point. Unlike physical stores, digital channels have an opportunity to leverage the strengths that each channel offers. Crossing these channels so that users can get distinctive content and then switch to a structured environment to gain specific content allows you to appeal to a larger user base.

Internet Marketing, Social Media, Web Maintenance

B-to-B Digital Marketing: Setting a Budget

September 14, 2016 Leave a comment

Digital marketing is a business development activity which means it should directly or indirectly generate revenue. For trainers, consultants, and professional coaches that sell their services to other businesses, the contribution typically comes in the form of leads. Since marketing’s goal is to generate revenue the budget should not be set higher than a reasonable projection for generated revenue. Establishing a clear vision of projected return on the digital marketing investment serves to set a budget cap that makes facilitates profitability.

To set a budget start from the end state and work backwards. Here are the steps and an example of how to work backward:

Step	Description	Example
1.	Start with an estimate of viable prospects in your market.	10,000 prospects.
2.	Estimate the number of prospects that might become a lead based on industry data. The below chart is broken out by industry for website visitors so it’s best to halve these numbers as half your prospects likely will not even take an initial step of engaging your marketing channels.	6% is average, so let’s work from 3%. 300 Leads.

3.	Divide that number by the number of years you believe it will take to engage your entire market. Be realistic, anything less than three years is aggressive.	5 years for full engagement, so 60 leads per year.
4.	Divide your leads by your average rate of turning an interested party into a real sales opportunity via a meeting or phone call. Hopefully your leads will be more engaged than average leads and meet at a higher rate but use the average to stay conservative.	A 30% meeting rate results in 18 meetings from the leads.
5.	Divide your meetings by your close rate.	33% close rate is 6 sales.
6.	Multiply your expected number of closes by your average sale.	$6,000 average sale is $36,000 in revenue.
7.	Use ¾ of that number as your annual budget cap to give some buffer for marketing to generate positive ROI.	$27,000 (¾ of $36,000).

In this way you are providing a guideline on how much you can spend on digital marketing and have it remain profitable. Remember, it’s a guideline and doesn’t mean you should spend that much. It means that’s your cap. For example, if you are a sole trainer, consultant, or professional coach with annual revenues of $100K, it wouldn’t make sense to budget a third of your revenue to digital marketing.

Also keep in mind that this would be your total expense, so marketing tools, data, and labor would need to fall within these parameters.

The primary reason for this guideline is to avoid setting your digital marketing up for failure. Many trainers, consultants and professional coaches get caught up in branding themselves or their business without considering the potential return. If you set a budget that is higher than a reasonable expectation on your return then the marketing effort can’t fulfill the baseline goal of being a business development activity.

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing

Digital Marketing Bias: “Digital marketing tools should always be free.” or “Free tools are ineffective.”

August 4, 2016 Leave a comment

The amount of tools available for digital marketing is growing exponentially. The quality and prevalence of these tools varies greatly. This often makes it difficult to identify and effectively implement the tool that’s best suited to your marketing campaign’s needs. One common factor that drives a decision to adopt a tool is whether it’s free or fee based. This factor seems to have two opposing viewpoints that either requires a free version or fosters mistrust in the tool if it’s not a paid service.

Digital marketing tools should always be free.

There is often an expectation that digital marketing tools are free. There are useful free tools but each should be carefully analyzed. The old saying, “you get what you pay for” can often be applied to no cost options.

Free . . . Sort Of – Many marketing tools offer a base level service at no cost. Sometimes that base level is sufficient, but many times it is not. Survey Monkey is a tool I’m regularly told by trainers, consultants, and professional coaches that they want to use because it’s free. I’ve yet to complete a digital marketing campaign with the free version. The purchased version always becomes necessary due to the setup and data limitations of the free service. The free services will restrict how you deliver your message and often times will hold your data hostage without an upgrade to the paid service. Nothing will eat up time and money like false starts with tools that end up not meeting your needs or requiring unexpected fees.
Support – Tools are worthless without someone that is proficient in using them. Proficiency is often gained from self-teaching through user guides and FAQs, which most free tools offer. However, sometimes the tool doesn’t work as expected or some additional guidance is needed to use it effectively. Most free tools offer no support, either user error or system error. So if there is a problem, users are on their own to figure it out or work around it.
Extra Services – Steadfastly sticking to no cost options can blind digital marketers to additional services that might benefit them. For instance, almost every social media platform offers a paid ad service but it’s often ignored due to the cost. These services obviously need to be leveraged intelligently so that unnecessary expenses aren’t created, but it should be an option on the table if it’s likely to benefit a campaign.

Free tools are ineffective

Some trainers, consultants, and professional coaches have a general mistrust of free tools. The thought is generally that no cost equals no quality. Neglecting valuable free tools hurts effectiveness and the marketing budget.

Bait and Switch – This is the opposite view of those that jump at “free” services without getting the details. The thought is that every free service is a useless dumbed down version that will force users into getting the paid version. While some healthy skepticism is valuable, too much will have you miss out on valuable services. A good example of this is Google Analytics. Google Analytics can be set up for free and provides valuable tracking data consistently and accurately without a need to upgrade.
Neglect Options – Many tools are offered only on a no cost basis. Disregarding them outright eliminates an option that could very well meet your needs. A common example of this is plugins for website content management platforms. Many developers create a solution for the platform and provide it to the platforms store for those that might have similar need. Many of these are free and do an admirable job at a certain function. If you steadfastly need to pay for any tool you use, you might be able to make a donation to the developer but don’t disregard it outright because the developer made it publically available at no cost.
Too Much Work – There is often a complaint that free tools require too much work to be implemented. This can be true in some cases but is true just as often for many paid tools. All tools require time and effort to get setup and utilized in your digital marketing campaign. When seeking a tool for a particular function know that it will take work to implement and base your analysis on functionality and feasibility rather than if it’s free or not.

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Media, Web Maintenance

Digital Marketing Bias: “A website is no longer necessary.” or “A website does everything a social media page can do.”

June 21, 2016 Leave a comment

The role of the website has become a lot more convoluted over the last several years as social media platforms build in more and more functionality for business and user pages. This complexity has led to two simplistic and opposing views of the landscape which boiled down is “Social Media platforms can handle my entire online presence.” or “My website can do everything social media can.” Neither view is the most advantageous but let’s look at them individually.

Social Media platforms can handle my entire online presence.

This is most often stated from someone who does not want to invest the time, energy, and/or money into a site build or rebuild. And to be honest, if your website is a brochure site with an intro message, a few photos, and a contact page then social media can do all those things. But to say that social media can do everything a website can because it’s able to mimic a half-assed website is flawed logic.

There are a few things to think through on a website that social media pages can’t or won’t do well:

Dynamic functions or apps – social media platforms won’t be able to support any dynamic web builds. If you plan to use the site for anything outside of the pre-set social posting framework or API builds, a website is necessary.
You own it – Content you place on social media pages isn’t really yours. It becomes part of the platform. The reverse is also true. Associated content and ads are becoming more prevalent and more sophisticated in correlating to similar subjects. You are giving up a level of control on what content is associated with your pages as these automated feeds are placed.
User Experience – Social media pages are template driven. While those templates can be customized, you can’t break out of the framework. The framework is often much more convoluted than a focused website and can result in a much poorer user experience.

A website does everything a social media page can do.

This view is typically stated by those that don’t like or don’t understand social media. It’s often an excuse to stay off the platform because it’s not “me”. Many people don’t like using social media personally, and that’s fine, but eliminating your business from this valuable channel is foolish.

Here are a few things that your site will not do as well as social media platforms:

Generate an Audience – No matter how good your blog or content is, you’ll be able to generate an audience for it more effectively by including it on social platforms. It’s impractical to build the amount of exposure social media offers independently.
Information Exchange – Social media is designed for intercommunication. Furthermore users have embraced the platforms and are comfortable with interacting through it. Even if you built a sophisticated posting and communication application on your site, you would never achieve the same mass acceptance and sheer volume of users that can be accessed through social media.

As with all biases, a balanced view is likely the most advisable. Set your website up for a comfortable user experience and for any advanced functions you aim to build. Use social media to drive target audiences to that content and interact with them on a ready built platform. In this way both channels support and improve the other for maximum effectiveness.

Internet Marketing, Social Media, Web Maintenance

Systematize Your Digital Marketing

April 12, 2016 Leave a comment

Technology is evolving at a rapid pace and that rate of change has filtered into digital marketing. We wrote a post on simplifying your digital marketing systems but some training, consulting, and professional coaching firms make the opposite mistake of not sufficiently automating their digital marketing. It’s important to review your processes to eliminate unnecessary manual processes because the repetition will suck up the time necessary to stay competitive as new digital marketing technologies become available.

Sometimes it can be difficult to know how complicated it is to automate a process and whether it is worth the time, money, and/or energy to do so. There is a simple way of judging if a marketing process should be automated or not. How much and how often is data being duplicated? If it’s a significant amount of data that is often manually manipulated, then an automated process will likely be well worth the effort.

This dilemma recently came up with a client’s new website platform. The platform updated the layout to a modern design but lacked many of the back-end marketing systems that had previously allowed for automation.

The initial plan was to use a varied mix of vendor automation tools. For instance, email newsletter registrations would link to a form on the email marketing platform. However, it became apparent that segmenting all the data to different platforms was going to make for a disjointed user experience and require manual compiling and reconciliation into a central data source. That was adding an administrative process with no value add to a marketing team that was already stretched. Instead we created a system of embedding the forms on the site so that they would populate the individual platforms but also be available in a central data source.

Sometimes automation isn’t as obvious. On this same website platform, a set of a few dozen calls to action were regularly used on any new content page or blog post. That process had always been manually added to the page but was identified as something that should be a clickable embedded item on the upgraded platform. So rather than setting the CTA up each time, the poster could select which CTA they wanted and it would appear on page.

Repetitive processes should be automated. They tend to add little value for improving digital marketing and are often a boring line item on someone’s task list. Remove that manual process and free yourself up to implement or explore new digital marketing tools and tactics that are now regularly becoming available.

Internet Marketing, Web Maintenance

Map Your Call-to-Action Visitors Flow

March 29, 2016 Leave a comment

Is your site sending visitors on a path to nowhere? The answer to this is always “no” but the reality is that many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches have digital marketing offers that ultimately lead to nowhere. It’s important to review your site at launch and then periodically to make sure that calls to action lead visitors step-by-step to the offer they have expressed interest in. If there is any gap in that process, even a small one, it’s likely that you are losing a significant portion of your audience along the way.

During a review of a site for a redesign/development process, we followed the navigation paths of the primary offers on the client’s website to integrate into the proposed new development. One of the offers was for visitors to register to attend a free training session. The navigation went like this:

Click the offer for a free training session.
Choose one of six possible class topics from the landing page.
Click to reserve your seat from the specific topic’s page.
Land on the firm’s class calendar page.

The thinking was that visitors would pick a date from the calendar that suited their schedule and then register for that class. There were three problems with expecting visitors to make this leap.

The first is that there was no instruction on what to do, just the calendar of the current month. We need to take visitors by the hand and make sure they don’t get confused. The internet is too chaotic and full of bait and switches. If we don’t show people exactly how to get an offer they are interested in, they will not fill in the gaps on their own.

The second is that there was no administrative plan set for the site after launch. Since there was not a person or process responsible for updating the site, most of the calendar was filled with recurring event information devoid of topic information. So visitors were asked which class topic they wanted to take but were not provided a way of knowing which dates offered that topic.

The third was another administrative error where certain classes would have a registration form. That process was also not developed or adhered to so only public events had a sign up form. The classes that the trainers intended for people to attend as a guest did not provide a way for visitors to register for them.

This is an obvious lapse in the call to action fulfillment process but any one of these items missing would have reduced lead generation. The heart of the matter was that the call to action process was too complex for this firm to maintain. We refined the process by eliminating the last two steps and providing a form where people could input their information, select the topic, and request a particular time. One of the trainers would then contact them to set a date and a meeting with them.

Make sure to review your offers. If you don’t have time or expertise to follow each call to action that is offered in your digital marketing, your analytics can usually point you toward problem spots. Google analytics offers a visitor flow map. If that graphic shows a lot of paths that stop at a particular page then it’s a good bet that there is a gap in the call to action there. Secondarily, your bounce reports can indicate a gap in the process if an offer page has a lot of bounces (This could also point to a lot of friction with the amount of information you are requesting, pricing, or layout). At least it will provide a starting point for your review.

Calls to action are the payoff of marketing. Make sure not to lose interested visitors by not including clear instructions or intuitive ways of taking advantage of the offer.

Visitor-Flow-example

Internet Marketing, Site Conversion, Web Maintenance

New Digital Products and Services: An Elegant Solution to a Problem That Doesn’t Exist?

March 15, 2016 Leave a comment

Digital marketing is often focused on the tools and tactics for communicating to your target audience. However, marketing should play a role in what is offered as well as how it’s offered. This is very true of digital products and services that are often planned and developed without a clear understanding of what the target demographic really wants or needs.

Development of applications as products or delivery of services via digital media has become much more widely accessible to trainers, consultants, and professional services. Unfortunately digital offerings have not advanced to a point of on demand development so a “sell it then deliver it” model is not practical. So if an idea surfaces on using digital delivery for a product or service, it’s important to do some homework on the level of demand and if the intended delivery platform meets your target market’s needs.

How can this be accomplished? There are a lot of well vetted processes on surveying large target demographics and sophisticated techniques to analyze that data for the best development and profitability. However, most of those techniques are unnecessarily complicated for smaller training or consulting firms that want to deliver a digital product or service to a select group.

Instead of a complex process, do a simple survey or checklist call to get client or target prospect feedback. This has three advantages. The first is that you can test the idea on those you hope will use it. This avoids creating an elegant solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. The second advantage is development improvement because target prospects can share their suggestions on how they’d like to use the product or service or features they’d expect to see. The third is that it serves as a teaser to your target market. Getting a sense of how the product or service will benefit the target prospects will help generate a buzz for them and their connections that might also benefit from your digital offering.

It’s not uncommon for a trainer, coach, or consultant to respond that they can’t ask their audience about the offering they intend to deliver because they might steal the idea. The truth is that if your target audience has the capability or knowledgebase to so easily steal the development of your product or service, then it’s likely not a viable solution to be offering them.

As technology continues to evolve in making these digital products and services more affordable and simpler to develop, it will be more and more tempting to build without a go-to-market plan. Rather than guessing at what your target audience wants, approach them with the idea. This will avoid a lot of wasted time and effort and ensure that your market needs your new digital product or service.

Internet Marketing

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