Archive for the 'Business' Category Page 2 of 3

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

The Art of the Landing Page

Published by
Don
2 years, 10 months ago in Business, Design and Marketing. Closed

Landing page optimization and testing can have a dramatic impact on your online marketing profitability. But even without testing you can quickly eliminate several common mistakes that can instantly skyrocket conversion rates. These approaches work across a surprisingly wide variety of circumstances and industries:

Remove choices.
You should be very clear about your desired conversion action, (whether it is a sale, download, form-fill, or simply a click-through to another page). All other clickable links or choices on the page should be eliminated or at least visually de-emphasized.

Keep your promises.
Your visitors arrived from somewhere, and an expectation was set before they even landed on your page. This could have been in your pay-per-click ad, a third-party blog posting, or a comparison shopping engine. Make sure that you understand the context from which they arrived. It is critical to align the content of your landing page with their intent and expectations.

Don’t be loud.
Minimize visual distractions as much as possible. Do not use a wide variety of font styles, colors, and sizes on your page. Remove images and interactive rich-media content unless it directly supports your conversion goal and is a clearly superior way of conveying important information. Sometimes minimally designed landing pages are often the best converting ones.

Reduce anxiety.
Unless you work for an internationally recognized company, you have no brand-strength or credibility with your online audience. You should do everything possible to reduce anxiety on your page by using safe shopping seals, and other indicators of your trustworthiness. The logos of trade associations, acceptable payment methods, and money-back guarantee seals can all be powerful ways to make your visitors feel safer.

Enhance affinity.
People want to feel an affinity for your product or service. By transferring recognition or goodwill from other sources you can help reinforce their desire to act. Liberally use logos of well-recognized client brands. Add the badges of media sources that have covered or mentioned your company. Prominently display glowing testimonials from existing customers.

Have a clear call to action.
Have a prominent and clear call to action. Make sure that you spell out exactly what will happen if someone fills out the form or clicks on the desired link. Do not clutter the area around the call to action, let it stand out by its isolation on the page.

Cut down your text.
The Web is an “at-a-glance” medium. Study after study has shown that less textual content on a landing page leads to a higher conversion rate. Ruthlessly edit your text down to simple headlines and short bullet lists. Cut out the self-promoting marketing speak that people will not read anyway. Detailed information can be linked to on supporting pages.

If you follow these best practices you are guaranteed to make your cash register ring more often, so to speak.

Email = Profits?

Published by
Don
2 years, 10 months ago in Business and Marketing. Closed

While the Internet has opened new marketing channels for small-business leaders, it also has generated challenges. One of the biggest challenges is identifying, contacting and keeping customers.

In two recent surveys by Information Strategies, Inc. (ISI), respondents indicated that they can increase new business by as much as 20% on an annualized basis by creating effective e-mail campaigns. Moreover, from existing clients, the increase in new business generated by creative-contact e-mail campaigns was nearly 40%.

These studies, and others by e-marketing groups, show that maintaining constant contacts with potential and existing clients via e-mail is an effective sales tool, even in this economy.

Said one Midwestern parts supplier during a focus group, “We instituted a program that touches our clients once a month, and we saw the results in under three months.” He added that the initial cost, in terms of dollars and employee time, was repaid within four months. “We then took every e-mail lead we had and sent a biweekly fact sheet that included a tip on using one of our products and a listing of one or two specials we were running,” he added. “From this initial seed list of 1,400 names, we got 24 new orders in the first six weeks, as well as 620 new sign-ups.”

Another focus-group participant, the owner of an upscale salon chain, said she used e-mails collected at her physical locations to start up a new e-mail program. “We started with a prom special in June of last year offering a special ‘prom party’ program that went to 7000 teenage customers,” she said. “From that group, we got twenty five ‘parties’ that generated $12,500-plus in sales that week,” she reported. This Syracuse, N.Y., entrepreneur then launched a Thanksgiving and Christmas program to which she directly attributed $53,000 – and probably more – in additional income.

Experts suggest that companies do the following:

* Always ask for e-mail addresses on orders and requests and on the company Web site.
* Keep the list up-to-date and mail at least once a month.
* Always offer the opt-out option on any mailing.
* Train employees to ask where the order or sale originated, and track results.
* Encourage recipients to refer other possible recipients.
* Make sure to use a reliable agency, like Evolve Media, to manage the e-mail accounts. The relatively minor costs will be repaid with efficiencies and avoidance of problems with Internet regulations.

Your “one” number?

Published by
Don
2 years, 10 months ago in Business, Google, Tech and Tools. Closed

Google Voice is about to change your life.

If you’re a busy person who’s always juggling several phones (your work number, your cell, your home number, etc.) you’ll never have to worry about which number to give people again.

Google Voice applies the principles of e-mail to telephones. All calls will go to one number, but you will get to set rules about where and how to route them.

It will work like your personal switchboard. If your cell phone is out of range, you will be able to forward calls to your other line without a caller being aware of any change. You will even be able to switch from one phone to another mid-call.

That may mean the end of interruptions like, “Are you still there?” and ” Can you hear me now?”

Google Voice (previously known as Grand Central) is being released to the general public soon. You can sign up now for it so you’ll be first on the list.

Other features that may make life easier for any road warrior include voice mail transcripts and the ability to access voice mail online or off.

Google Voice has been endorsed by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, king of online trendsetters, as Google Voice’s Secret Weapon: Number Portability.

“Once you’ve jumped in head first … it will straighten out your phone life forever. Give them one number …your Google voice number .. . and then use rules to determine where your calls go, based on who’s calling and what you are doing,” he wrote.

Another great benefit: Google’s planning to introduce number portability later this year, so you will be able to transfer existing phone numbers over.

Read more about Google Voice.

Evolving from old media

Published by
Don
3 years, 1 month ago in Advertising, Business, Internet and Marketing. Closed

I was recently talking with an aquaintence the other day about his experience in dealing with new media and it was very eye opening. I think the issues we talked about are things many can relate to.

By way of introduction, my friend is a public relations and communications professional with more than 14 years in the business, six of which he’s owned his own company.

He was working on a political campaign in Arizona last year — his first comprehensively statewide effort in a few years — when, in his words, he was “smacked across the face with a new reality”.

“There is almost no local media left in Arizona anymore”.

We’ve all read plenty about the struggles of conventional media in the new age, especially those of newspapers, but interacting with the media drove it home, for him, in an alarming way. He had a story to tell…there was simply no one in the conventional media to tell it to.

He went on; “Don’t believe me? Guess how many newspapers in Arizona have a dedicated presence at the Arizona capitol? The answer is…two. The Arizona Republic, of course. And the Daily Star. The rest of the state relies on two wire services for any capitol news. That means that for any given press release, there were only three beat reporters in the print market to send it to”.

What about radio? Well, with the rise of syndicated talk radio shows, there are now only a handful of live, local-issue talk radio programs in the state that air on a regular basis. The two big Phoenix talk stations have a handful of shows each; the Tucson market has a total of two, and there are maybe two or three more statewide. The same holds true for stations that actually do their own news — almost all the others rely on wire sources.

Television? Good luck. The competition is so cut-throat, and the stations are so short-staffed, that unless you have a truly compelling visual angle or sensational story, it’s not going to happen.

So now what?

Good marketers and public relations professionals are increasingly learning how to master new media, including the ever-so-trendy social networking sites and blogs. Any good PR pro’s distribution lists now include relevant blog sites that cater to the target audience. In politics, that’s easy to find, but for traditional or product marketing it can require some diligent research.

And while everyone seems to have a Facebook or MySpace or Twitter presence these days, the key is to get people to follow you. So there are a few cardinal rules you have to follow:

1) Just building a page doesn’t ensure people are going to see it.

2) In order to keep people interested, you have to continually feed the content beast. And don’t make it dull, or people are going to drop you.

3) Have an endgame in mind. “Increasing awareness” is not it. Social networking programs work best when they “drive” the user somewhere, such as to your organizational/product web site. Once there, you have an opportunity to make sales pitches, capture data, or interact with the consumer in other ways. If you don’t do that, the effort is pointless.

Even in the new age of media, there is no magic bullet — although if you have the budget, Facebook and MySpace’s advertising programs allow you to target your audiences extensively. It’s still a mixture of savvy, creativity and luck to start a viral marketing phenomenon.

But by opening up your marketing and public relations programs to new media outlets — with a few key caveats in mind — you can overcome the shrinking of traditional media outlets by maximizing your new media opportunities.

Is The Digital Agency Dead?

Published by
Don
3 years, 11 months ago in Business, Future and Marketing. Closed

After taking part in several 2009 interactive planning sessions for various clients over the past few weeks a common question between the sessions was asked repeatedly. What are you going to do for us online? The question seems quite simple and benign on the surface, but it has almost infinite intangibles, influencers, dependencies and possibilities. And because of all those things that basic question becomes very difficult to answer and requires a very complex response. Clients are asking for their digital and online agencies to provide more than just a strategy for building a website. We have moved into a new era with the digital agency landscape and the agencies that prosper will need to respond with an evolved view of online marketing and how to integrate with other marketing mediums.

I generally break the evolution of interactive marketing strategy development into four eras;

1) The ‘hot sh*t’ era, other wise knows as the first bubble. This is when every .com start up was an IPO away from glorious riches. Accountability, for both budget and strategies, took a back seat to industry buzz and popularity. The money and BS flowed freely and everyone was trying to be the next one to cash in/out.

2) The ‘we are a serious business, seriously’ era. This is the void between the first bubble and then now ubiquitous Web 2.0 establishment where interactive agencies and ideas had to fight for credibility, and budget, to prove that online marketing was more than putting .com at the end of your name or asking for something ‘viral’ in the campaign.

3) The ‘seat at the table’ era. The bubble burst, we proved that interactive marketing could work, we had the metrics to prove it, and now we want to participate (even lead) the creation of marketing strategies and not just be the production shop building a cool website.

4) The ‘what are you going to do for me online’ era. This is the next big step for digital agencies. We’ve gotten our seat at the strategy table and now we are expected to do something that pure play digital agencies haven’t been equipped to do…think like traditional marketers.

This last era is where the simple questions start to get complicated.

Higher value clients with larger cross channel campaigns and complex business drivers are demanding a different kind of thinking from a digital agency. The go-to solution of ‘hey, lets do a website redesign’ has become antiquated and narrow…a site redesign is not an interactive strategy. Clients are asking for a true online marketing plan similar to what traditional agencies deliver for offline campaigns or brand development – a holistic solution that is more than the sum of its parts.

This is the real growth opportunity for digital, the opportunity to move upstream to the point where the overall marketing strategy is defined, it’s the ability to get ahead of the solution (and production request) and establish value as key business partner. The problem is that most digital agencies don’t have a process or resources to support that upstream mobility. Typically the digital shop has been a downstream vendor executing on an already formed marketing campaign and translating pieces of it into some sort of a web property/presence. And most digital shops have gotten very good at that role and can pull out their proprietary process, tools, strategies and technology for building you the best darn website you’ve ever seen. But what were once differentiators for digital shops have now been codified and are becoming more and more commoditized as generic production vendor services.

I have also seen the antithessis of this within the larger traditional or interactive creative agencies. They are being driven to provide more integrated solutions that go beyond the big idea which require them to own the entire interactive delivery model. Online development is very messy and requires a rigorous process that not as easy as just plugging in a production vendor and saying go. We’ve all see the traditional agency try to bolt on their ‘interactive services’ department and more often than not it is a failure. Why? Because interactive needs to be an integrated component of a strategy or campaign and not just a after thought tossed to a downstream vendor.

It will be this critical ability for agencies to demonstrate and excel at full cross-channel integration that will separate the new breed of agencies. Interactive is the future, I’ll argue that with anyone, and because of that I envision a couple of paths that digital shops can go down. The standard development/production orientated digital shops can bring in true marketing strategy services, the big idea, game changer creative types to elevate them to a lead spot at the table and drive a companies overall marketing strategy. Or these digital shops will get absorbed into larger more established creative shops to serve as integrated in-house strategy and production teams.

Either way the key is integration. To evolve pure play digital shops need to start thinking in terms of campaigns and not projects – i.e. if we are planning a Microsite for a product we can’t just focus on the creative concept and execution, but go to the clients with everything from how we drive traffic (PPC, banner, social) to what the conversions are on the site, to how we track and report to how we extend the conversations and bring them back. So it’s less about individual projects and shifts to blending communication messages across all available online media channels into a continuous brand experience. The next evolution once we move to campaign planning is to look at Integrated Marketing Campaigns were we blend all media channels, not just online. The easiest example of this is HP’s “The Computer is Personal Again” campaign. They utilized a wide range media with great consistency, and capitalized on each of the media’s individual strengths. Business Week has a great article on it here: “The goal: to do away with HP’s fragmented marketing strategy of the past and build a cohesive campaign that will work across many product lines, in all regions of the world, using print, online, and broadcast media.”

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

test