Category: Site Conversion

When Digital Marketing Dogs Technology

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ID-100296232Technology that doesn’t work can be very frustrating. However, some digital marketers have let their frustration boil over into a prejudice. If technology does not work in exactly the way they envision, they bemoan inconveniences or small inefficiencies as if it’s a critical error. Setting up marketing systems for a website, social media, list management, and email marketing can get complicated. If it’s so complicated that tasks can’t be done or are laborious, then it’s worth investigating a new setup. If however, the system runs fairly well but does not meet a few small desires from marketing, it’s best to find a way to accomplish the task within the technology’s confines.

The fact of the matter is that for most trainers, consultants, and professional coaches, changing platforms or underlying technology for digital marketing is time consuming and can be expensive. A deficiency needs to be severe enough to justify the investment of time and resources to correct it.

As an example, a consulting firm we work with was launching an eBook. The campaign had been mapped out with an ideal process flow. A specific layout was set up for the landing page that included a form to download the eBook. In testing the process flow we discovered that the consultant’s web platform would not accommodate the layout and a form on the same page. So we outlined two workarounds, a simpler layout that included the form or the more complex layout with a button that linked to the form.

The marketing director for the firm adamantly refused either workaround stating that, “It’s a best practice to have our landing page mirror our communications and to have a form on that landing page. We have to figure it out.” While we agreed that was the ideal solution, the technology involved was not accommodating. Still the marketing coordinator was not swayed.

So we launched a project to build a separate landing page that was not built on their website’s pre-existing platform. Since the new page was off platform, it required a custom setup to report to their lead database to integrate with the rest of the process flow.

We were able to bend the technology to our will, but was it worth it? The workaround options were so close to the desired outcome that conversion rates were unlikely to suffer much, if at all. In the end, we can’t know for sure as testing an on-platform version didn’t make much sense after spending the time and effort to build the custom off-platform solution.

Don’t let technical irritations derail or delay your marketing campaigns. Part of digital marketing is working with technology to drive sales or leads. Technology rarely functions exactly how we want but with some patience and creative solutions it will often get close enough to deliver the desired result.

Image courtesy of  hywards / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Site Conversion, Social Media, Web Maintenance

Calls to Action – Under-Promise and Over-Deliver

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ID-10079297In an effort to entice target audiences, the value of a call to action can get inflated. This often causes two problems. It erodes future credibility and can make transitioning a lead to the sales process difficult or contentious. It’s best to be realistic with calls to action and to error on the side of under-promise and over-delivering.

In some instances a trainer, consultant, or professional coach can’t help if a call to action doesn’t meet expectations. An event for example, might not go smoothly due to technical glitches, an off day, or style differences with an audience member. That doesn’t mean the core value was not delivered.

A more common example of overpromising on a call to action comes with products, reports, or whitepapers.

A blatant case of this came up with a client that had previously offered a free download for an “eBook”. While the landing page accurately described the content of the document, calling it an “eBook” was a stretch by almost everyone’s definition. It was a 10-page report and the formatting had been set up to stretch it to 10 pages. That’s not to say it wasn’t valuable information but “checklist” would have been more accurate than “eBook”.

To further confuse the matter the cover page of the report had been photoshopped onto an image of a book that looked to be at least 50-pages long.

Not surprisingly they received several complaints from users that were contacted after downloading the document. The expectation was for a meaty whitepaper rather than an overview guide. So not only did the document not help transition into the sales process, it actually detracted from it as the leads felt they had been manipulated.

In resurrecting the report, we changed the landing page to call it a “report” rather than an “eBook”. The image was also replaced with just the cover of the report without the photoshopped book behind it.

That treatment garnered the same level of response but none of the hard feelings when the leads were contacted.

It’s a great illustration that exaggerating a call to action is often not required. Offer something valuable, describe it effectively, and over-promising is not necessary.

 

Image courtesy of  David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Site Conversion

Is Your Style Conducive to Digital Marketing?

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ID-10044044Putting personality into blog articles, email campaigns, or social media posts can be a unique and engaging way to approach your target markets. But if not done tactfully, it can also be alienating to the group you hope to interact with.

Trainers, consultants, and professional coaches often have magnetic personalities that serve them well in training sessions or consulting meetings. Since their personality is an asset in front of people there is often an assumption that it is equally advantageous in digital marketing. That assumption is not always the case.

A client we have worked with for years is a straight talking, to the point, type of person. However, when speaking with him, he will soften his statements through tonality or with a smile. So his directness is often appreciated because verbal or visual cues clue people in that while he is bluntly pointing out an area that needs improvement, his intention is to help.

Those subtle cues don’t translate to digital marketing.

After some encouragement to be more active with his social network this client made his initial post to Twitter, “Sales people: If you can’t stop talking in a sales call you should be punched in the face.”

His intended point was that sales people should listen a considerable amount of the time. I have no doubt he’s said this same thing to a group of sales people he has trained and it went over well. However, on social media, with none of the subtle cues to emphasize the humor in his statement, he just wished that his target audience suffer a random act of violence.

This came in the midst of a campaign to generate invitations for key note speaking. A punch in the face is a difficult introduction to convert into a speaking engagement.

Inserting your style into digital marketing is a great way to add some personality to your campaigns. It can help distinguish your communications from other drab marketing messages. But be careful that the intent in your message accurately translates to digital marketing and that it’s not portraying a personality that is counterproductive to your marketing goals.

Image courtesy of  Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Site Conversion, Social Media

If Common Sense Contradicts Data, Use Common Sense

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Email, web, and social media data is a great way to objectively view results.  However, careful analysis is often necessary to accurately gauge what the data means. So where does that leave you when the data doesn’t make sense?  If you find that your metrics defy common sense check to make sure that your analytics program is accurately gathering data.

We were recently working with a company who said that the effectiveness of their internet marketing had really tailed off. While leads and responses had remained consistent, the web reports had seen a noticeable dip that had persisted for months.  With such a decline we asked what had changed when the drop off occurred but the answer was that their campaigns had run as usual.  It was also strange that conversions had not dipped with traffic.  Essentially the data was saying that traffic had dropped by about 40% while lead conversion had increased about 40%, a little too convenient not to raise suspicion. All the project manager could say for sure was that “We have set goals for the amount of traffic on the site and we’re noticeably off the mark, something’s not right and we need to fix it.”

The decline had happened months before our initial conversation so we reviewed the data and found that not only was there a drop off in web traffic but the hits that did trickle in were almost exclusively on weekends.  As this client offered B to B consulting services, weekends were typically a lightly trafficked time.

The data flew in the face of common sense so rather than start making marketing initiatives to increase traffic; we looked a bit closer at the data itself.  It turned out that a server move had disrupted their Web Trends data and a faulty setup was missing a common source of web traffic.  So the project became a technical exercise in making sure that the data was being accumulated accurately.

This is an example of a larger and thankfully more obvious problem.  While “inaccurate data” is often an excuse for poor results, it’s good to place a critical eye on your metrics intermittently. If you’re seeing blatant inaccuracies in what common sense would suggest, then do a technical review on your analytics to ensure they are accurately being populated.  There are few things as damaging as making decisions based on false data.

Site Conversion, Web Maintenance

The December Slump

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The end of the year can be a challenging one for Business to Business marketing. Vacations and time off are paired with consumer marketing’s most aggressive push. The result is fewer people that often have less attention for B-to-B related communications. Don’t let a December slump side-track your marketing efforts, rather plan for it to maintain engagement.

Trainers, consultants, and professional coaches should plan for lower response rates than usual in December.

As an example, a client of ours ran a free seminar every month to generate business. For several years in a row the client would be frustrated at a low turnout for the December event. He went so far as to only do communications for that event, abandoning other campaigns, from mid-November up to the event in mid-December.

The result was always disengagement, less opens, higher unsubscribes, unlikes, and unfollows. Rather than plan for a December slump he tried to overcome it with increased frequency and tunnel vision focus. The result was that he was inundating his target audience with communications at the same time consumer communications were bombarding them, so they disengaged. January and February became a month of rebuilding to undo the damage of December.

Rather than run the event in December we tested foregoing it and focusing on the January event. Doing a few communications in December and then a secondary push in January resulted in fifty percent more attendees. Furthermore the February event didn’t experience the rebuilding period that years past had endured.

You will see a dip in your website, social, and email B-to-B marketing efforts in December. It’s a constant and one that should be planned for. If you have a promotion that is active in the December months it needs to be practically targeted. For instance, a goal setting event toward of the end of the year makes sense for many business development professionals so that offer can seamlessly work in to your marketing plan. Furthermore, since it’s an appropriately targeted calendar event, it will resonate with your target audience.

Don’t give up on December but don’t fight against the inevitable. There are leads to be had but your communications have to work through the holiday commotion.

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Site Conversion, Social Media

Useful Marketing Surveys

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ID-100276593If a survey is leveraged as a marketing tool, what makes the survey useful? In short, quantifiable data that can be used to glean insightful deductions.

Many trainers, consultants, or professional coaches that decide to do a survey spend little time thinking through how they will compile and leverage the responses. All too often, a survey is thrown together with open ended or vague questions that make quantifying the data difficult.

Generally speaking, the best way of compiling quantifiable data is by using a ranking system or yes/no answers. This standardizes responses into quantifiable metrics that you can use to make industry insights or event/presentation customizations. Then make your questions very specific. Make sure each question has a single inquiry that responders can easily understand and clearly choose their preference.

Open ended or input questions are often worthless to use as a marketing tool. While it lets a responder voice their views in a very custom and personal way, it’s difficult to extract usable data from those responses. Typically the only use for open ended responses is as quotes but it can be challenging to get responders to consent to use their survey response in a public manner.

If you decide to use a survey as a marketing tool, make sure that the effort will result in usable data. Map out what the results will look like and have a plan for compiling that data into actionable statistics.

Image courtesy of tiramisustudio / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Internet Marketing, Site Conversion

Surveys as a Marketing Tool

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Surveys have many potential uses and are easier to implement than ever. But, it’s important to use them wisely so you don’t waste your time and resources or frustrate your customers with unnecessary questions. To create effective online marketing, surveys are most useful for evaluating campaigns or using the feedback to create statistics for content.

The problem that many marketers run into is that the survey is a one sided proposition, “Let us know what you think about . . .” While incentives like rewards are sometimes used, that often is not feasible for trainers, consultants, or professional coaching firms. Rather than offering prizes or monetary rewards, offer what your target audience really wants, powerful insights.

If you conduct a survey let your audience know the purpose of the survey. Will it be used in a whitepaper or report? Offer to email the report to respondents as soon as it’s completed. Is it to gauge interest in a particular event or topic? Offer a special to those that respond.

In this way surveys become a two way street. You receive the information to accurately evaluate a topic or event and your audience gets the benefit of this knowledge. Furthermore, it reinforces you as an expert because current data will keep you at the forefront of your evolving area of expertise.

Site Conversion

Disciplined Early Registration Discounts

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ID-10037554Using events to engage your audience can be a powerful call to action. However, events require much more logistic planning and the number of attendees largely dictates how an event should be structured. So how can you efficiently plan for an event if you don’t know the demand beforehand? If there is a fee for your event and you are uncertain of the demand, offer early registration discounts to prevent registration procrastination and gain a sense of your audience.

Early registration discounts require discipline. If registration is not meeting goals many trainers, consultants, or professional coaches are tempted to extend the deadline or worse, restructure the pricing to generate extra demand.

We worked with a client who chronically adjusted pricing and their events steadily lost attendance. When a poll was sent out about interest in events one comment summed it up nicely, “Your events always drop in price or in some cases become free just before the event so I tend to register last minute. I rarely attend because my schedule gets booked up and I’m not free for a last minute registration but since the events recur, I’d rather miss it than overpay.”

Changing the early registration dates or pricing encourages your audience to procrastinate which makes event planning more complicated. It also taints our perspective on what types of events are in demand. This client declared that they were overcharging for events and slashed fees. However a year later after holding to early discounts they raised the pricing to previous rates and saw no significant decline in registrations.

Early registration discounts can be a powerful incentive for people to register for an event but only if they are consistently applied.

 

Image courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Site Conversion

Don’t Oversimplify Web Metrics

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When viewing web metrics, many consultants, trainers, and professional coaches want to boil things down to good and bad. High counts of visitors are good, low are bad. Low bounce rates are good, high is bad. While some of these principles can serve as guidelines, page or user context is critical in analyzing how to improve a page.

A statement that illustrates this was recently made to us in reviewing a site’s metrics. During the review the client said, “My homepage is doing really well. It has the most hits by far on the site and the bounce rate is comparable to other pages. The time on page is really good; it’s over a minute and a half.”

Following the general principles this statement was true, high hits, reasonable bounces, and plenty of time on the page. But there had been several complaints that content was hard to find on the homepage. So where was the disconnect?

The disconnect was that the numbers were telling a more complex story that the general principles couldn’t illustrate. A homepage being the most popular page is common. This particular homepage had little content, serving primarily as an index to other more robust sections of the site. For that reason, the bounce rate should have been well below other pages because the primary purpose was to direct people to other parts of the site. Furthermore there wasn’t much to view or read on the home page so the time on page should have been quite short, likely under ten seconds.

The numbers were showing that people were struggling to find what they wanted and many were giving up after a minute and a half. Don’t rely on general guidelines when reviewing individual page stats. Rather analyze the purpose of the page to determine if the norms truly apply or if the numbers mean something unique.

Search Engine Optimization, Site Conversion

In Competition with . . . Yourself

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Most trainers, consultants, and professional coaches have plenty of competition but some still insist on adding more . . . themselves. Pay close attention to your calls to action. If you find that your offers are too similar or promoted simultaneously, you’re probably competing against yourself.

We run into this primarily with two particular calls to action.

The first is events. It’s OK to promote events at the same time but there should be a clear differentiator like topic or location. The differentiator should not be subtle. If location is the differentiator then it should be significant, not a ten minute drive from one to the other. If the topic is the differentiator then the presentation should be touching on mostly unrelated topics.

If it’s not readily apparent to your audience, then you risk confusing them or dividing them. If you can’t clearly define the significant differentiator, you’re better served merging the events into a single event and promoting that to both segments.

The second is reports or whitepapers. The only time it’s OK to simultaneously promote different whitepapers or reports is if they are being offered to different segments. The same group of people should not be made an offer for new whitepapers simultaneously. Rather promote the first and get some mileage out of it and then promote the second.

There are only two exceptions to this rule whitepaper/reports recaps where the content has already been made available but a recap is listing all of the items that are available. The second is if one report should follow the second. For instance, if a report references another report it could be promoted as reference material.

If there is any flexibility, avoid promoting similar calls to action at the same time. If the timing of offers requires that more than one offer be promoted at the same time a clear differentiator must be made obvious. Otherwise your audience might skip an offer they would typically be interested in for the competition, your other offer. Worse yet, they might be unsure which offer is best suited for them and skip it all together.

Internet Marketing, Site Conversion
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