Hubspot founders Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan are the authors of Inbound Marketing, an insightful, short and easy-to-read guide to enhancing your website and thinking about it as a key tool in attracting clients. They compare their now-popular “inbound” techniques to the giants and show neophyte business owners how to improve their web presence, increase their sales and conversions, and how to do so in a short time on a small budget.
The book is full of bright ideas and pithy examples but I recently took the time to extract what I thought was a must-have list of tools and concepts any business owner, at any stage of a marketing plan, can learn from Halligan and Shah.
Time for a website audit?
It is quite common – and often essential to success – for us to offer a quick appraisal of a website’s performance before delving deeply into any action items or scoping any big campaigns.
If you want inbound success, here are the 14 questions you will want to ask yourself. I’ve written the explanatory answer to each question too because this is what Creative Agency Secrets can do for your website. We know how to make your website work harder to achieve your goals.
Do you, or your website, do these?
1. Are your title tags designed for humans?
The <title> tag is an HTML element that doesn’t actually show on your webpage. It does, however, show in the top of your browser and, more importantly, it’s that blue clickable text in Google. Marketers used to load these up with keywords before Google got wise, and clever. These days the best thing you can do to succeed with inbound marketing is to make sure you’ve got human-readable title tags, that say what your business does (not who you are) in 70 characters or less.
2. Does your website pass a basic mobile-friendly check?
It doesn’t have to be perfect but it has to work. With something like ⅔ of website use now conducted on a mobile or tablet device, you’ve got to be ready. More than 90% of people say that access to information is important to them. Give your users the information they need in an easily accessible format, also known as mobile devices.You don’t want your readers squinting to see your value-add! In fact, more than 80% of users believe a seamless integration between devices is important. This is why Apply is so successful. Make sure you pass a basic check and talk to your webmaster if you don’t. Not only will your readers thank you but Google will prioritise traffic to your website if you’re optimised for mobile.
3. Do you update your site regularly?
Ideally you run a blog, not at blogspot.com or wordpress.com, but on your domain name. You publish content a couple of times a month and you provide real value, not sales jargon, to your readers. Don’t know what to write? Become an authority in your field, comment on recent happenings in the news. If you’re on top of this already, ask yourself, do you have: onsite search, related articles, and buttons for readers to share your stories on the most relevant social media?
4. Do you have a sense of the core industry keywords and pages to match?
Often you’re so deep in your industry niche, product or service that you have your own language for talking about what you do. Yes, in part it’s your job to educate your prospects about that, but you also have to be found for those keywords they’re using to search. Get some basic research done on what people search for in your industry and write pages that speak to those searches.
5. Does your site load in about 3 seconds?
Try a test for yourself at Pingdom. We don’t all have fibre yet, and large loading speeds will put people off. If you’re a photo blog, or some other website that has a heavy number of assets to load with good reason, look into Cloudflare, and yes, they have a free plan.
6. Do you have a security certificate?
An SSL certificate confirms for the client that you are who you say you are and that they are reading and communicating securely with the genuine owner of the website. It prevents “phishing”, people pretending to be you to steal credit card numbers or email addresses, and confirms for the user that their personal data can’t be intercepted by a third party. In years past online credit card providers took away the hassle of having to pay for and install an SSL certificate each year, but now many providers have on-page solutions (meaning that the user doesn’t even leave your site to pay). Even if your payment solution is still off-site, you add reassurance by making the process seem secure to your user end-to-end. Finally, Google itself opted for a security-first approach, serves all its own content securely, and prioritises websites that themselves prioritise security.
7. Is your website ‘paired’ with its social media properties?
You probably already have a Twitter account, or a Facebook business page, or a YouTube channel, but have you told the world this is your official account, representing your business on this platform? Take a look at some guides to link your accounts: Google+, YouTube, Facebook & more.
8. Do you have a contact form?
You probably have an email or phone number on the website, and you might have tried a contact form only to find it got a lot of bogus submissions. But persist with the contact form. It allows you to collect and database your prospects much easier than you could do via email and it allows you to protect your personal email address from ending up on unwanted spam lists. Finally you can ask important questions of your prospects. E.g., are they contacting you for sales or support; are they interested in Widget W or Gizmo G?
9. Does your website have a call to action?
You want visitors, but once you get them you want to know for yourself what path you want them to take, or what actions you want them to take. These are your ‘goals’. Make sure you have clear buttons that direct your user to your goal: e.g., “Start a Free Trial”, “Sign up”, “Become a member”, “Check out our product range”, “See what our customers think”. Make it bold and clear, and remember, “Contact us” is one of the least effective calls to action, it requires too much commitment on behalf of the casual browser.
10. Do you do A/B (split) testing for important calls to action?
A/B testing is showing two or more groups of visitors two or more variations of page at random. This allows you to gather stats on which layout, button, wording or offer is the most effective.
11. Do you convert 15% of your visitors?
Conversion is the difference between a contact in your database or not; a sale or no sale. Do you keep track of how effective your marketing is and do you get three out of 20 people on your site to make some kind of commitment? Commitment doesn’t necessarily mean a sale, it could just be downloading a PDF or joining a newsletter.
12. Do you spend more time actively seeking new traffic than tweaking and changing?
The plumber’s sink is never fixed and the web marketer’s website is never perfect. But don’t let that worry you. A/B testing is great, it’s insightful and it’s important but you have to have someone to test it on. Make sure you’re spending 80% of your time on strategies to get new traffic and 20% of your time on what they see when they get to your site.
13. Do you regularly communicate with your prospects?
Once you’ve got traffic and you’ve got conversions you’ll need a way to communicate with them. That’s usually an email newsletter. People are used to hearing from their favourite brands, sometimes as regularly as weekly, but if you’re not communicating with your prospects at all you’re not building trust. Equally important is not alienating yourself from your clients. Put a face on a corporation. Send your emails from an address that’s personal, not a noreply@corporatebusiness.com-type address. Include your personal contact details in your email signature. You want your communications as natural as possible.
14. Do you have a reminder when someone leaves a purchase incomplete?
Over half of the checkouts on most industry-standard carts do not get completed. That is, someone puts a product in a basket, enters their email and name but not their payment information. When that happens, most good shopping carts will let you automate an email to the client, checking in to see how they’re going and why the payment was never made.
If you’re nodding along and answering yes, then you’re on track for a successful inbound marketing strategy. If not, give us a call and we’ll do a review of your website.
In-House Vs. Freelance Writers: The Pros and Cons
/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Sudip MuttMarketers rely heavily on high-quality content to drive traffic to sites and landing pages and forge a strong relationship with their target market. And while lots of content is visual and auditory, like videos, infographics, photographs and podcasts, writers are still essential. Content writers don’t just work on blog posts and website content; they’re also needed to write compelling descriptions or explanations of the other content that you are sharing, like videos, and any other written copy that’s essential to encouraging interest in a product, like landing page sales pitches. Whether to hire an in-house writer or a freelancer is a bit of a debate between content marketers, so we’ve discussed some of the pros and cons.
Freelancer Vs In house
Pros of In-House – You’ve Always Got a Writer
Well, unless they hand in their notice, one of the most obvious pros of hiring an in-house writer is that you have a writer on your payroll. You can go to them in the office at any time of the working day and ask them to write something for you and since they’re right there, explaining to them what you want in person can be a lot easier than trying to make it make sense over an email. On the other hand, freelance writers often work for a variety of different clients so you might not always get an answer from them immediately and it might be necessary to wait a little longer to get your content.
Cons of In-House – It Can Get Expensive
Depending on the amount of writing that you need doing, hiring an in-house writer on a salary can get expensive compared to working with a freelancer, who’ll usually charge you only for the work he or she does. Unless you are churning out tons of written content on a day-to-day basis, hiring an in-house writer might be a totally unnecessary expense for your business.
Pros of Freelancers – You’ll Get More Choice
Contrary to hiring in-house, where you need to hope that there’s a talented writer looking for work in your local area, working with a freelancer means that you can choose from talented individuals across the country or even abroad. It’s not uncommon for freelancer writers to work with clients overseas, so your top writers could be a thousand miles away.
Cons of Freelancers – Communication Might Not Be as Easy
Tools like Slack, Zoom, Google Hangouts and even Skype have made it easier than ever to communicate with freelancers, so don’t think that communicating with your freelance writer is going to be hard – it probably won’t be. But bear in mind that if you’re working with a writer who sets their own hours, or is in a different time zone to yourself, they might not always be available at the times you want them to be, compared to an in-house writer. Of course, this can be made as easy as possible to deal with from the start by making your needs clear and working with a writer who can fill them.
So, there you have it – the pros and cons of hiring in-house and freelance writers. Which is the best option for your business?
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Digital Day Out #ddo16 conference notes
/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Rebecca CaroeDan Waugh, Comvita
Marketing is about creating emotive experiences with a product or service. Dan Waugh works for Comvita as a ICT / futurist.
Virtual reality enables you to create an emotive experience that’s better than video. Dan showed us a real video they shot in 360 video of Manuka bee hives to get experience as a test. They had 6 Go-Pro cameras on a helicopter. The test shoot showed it was possible.
Mark Pascall, 3Months
The more we transact with global databases the more vulnerable we all are to hacking. Local walled gardens of unique logins / byelaws and reputation management are challenges.
Blockchain allows a transfer of value to happen without a trusted middleman in a distributed ledger. Rooted in Bit Torrent peer to peer distribution, Everyone can become a node on the network. The genius of blockchain is to associate the P2P with a ledger. Its immutability is its strength. The ‘experiment’ worked – it’s unstoppable too.
The insight was to store non-transaction information. Anything that has importance to humankind e.g. birth and deaths. You want an un-hackable record. Insurance claims, house ownership, medical procedures, voting – are all projects going onto the blockchain now.
Ethereum is a new blockchain platform for smart business contracts that are set into the blockchain timeline. Ether is the currency that pays for contracts to go onto the Ethereum and they execute – nobody can block them.
DAO distributed autonomous organisation the first one is TheDAO who raised $150m from the crowd. The money started being siphoned out last weekend and everyone is watching…. the contracts are being executed but nobody knows where it’s going.
IOT (internet of things) that talk to the Ethereum network enables the disintermediation of merchants e.g. AirBnB. Users having control of their medical records could be a good blockchain application. Also cross-brand rewards loyalty cards bypassing the loyalty organisation.
A marketplace using smart contracts and enabled by bots buying and selling. IT could allow power / wealth / control to be more evenly distributed.
Richard Thompson, Kpex
New business 2015- a premium advertising exchange group owned by NZMe, Fairfax, Mediaworks and TVNZ with other inventory too. Kpex’s goal to protect premium advertising sites through programmatic. From Mad Men to Math Men
The new competitive set is social use (100% of the room) versus print newspaper readership (5%).
He sees his path to “wrestle control back” to enable publishers to compete credibly for the advertising dollar. Continuity plus change in media – high trust in old brands, TV is important news source and print employs most and generates the stories. Change in the old financial models not working, cultural change plus understanding the new audience habits.
He estimates that 90% of all advertising will flow programmatically within a decade of which the spend will grow 40% this year over 2015 to $21.5 Bn globally. The shift is from buying mass audiences to buying individuals and their actions. More focus on the “scalable audience of one” as the objective changing the message to match the audience.
It’s growing fast because buyers can buy efficiently, data and audience targeting plus avoidance of advert fraud from low quality websites.
Cassie Roma, Social Media for Air NZ
Air NZ is the country’s most-loved brand and so success is engagement, reach, community size. Goal is to be top 10 airline in social in the world (now 11th).
Show, Don’t Tell is the mantra.
Audiences growing Instagram is part of her brief. Images are crew, influences, causes they support. Facebook drives conversion and sales, Instagram is an oasis of brand. Audiences love plane porn!
Facebook focus is in the story we are telling – people first and the social side of social media. They joined Tinder as a brand for Valentine’s Day “Swipe Right, Take the Flight”. Video push with partner from movie Hunt for the Wilder People – we support kiwi artists – they spent $250 boosting the Facebook video.
The Safety Videos now are uploaded direct to Facebook (embedded player) before they used YouTube. Gee in the team is the Air New Zealand Fairy!
Twitter is very productive for brand, conversion and interaction – the cost per view in Twitter for video is sometimes is better than Facebook. It’s the first touchpoint for customer service. 8 team work 24/7 in customer support on Twitter.
Use #AirNZShareMe hashtag when you fly and the team re-shares customers’ pictures.
Snapchat is the place where it’s about a real true form of communication – quick and genuine. AirNZ use MishGuru to share Snapchat but it’s quick and fast and allows deep engagement – most engaged channel. Lots of User Generated Content UGC. Destination features on Snapchat quickly – can post a lot and not overwhelm.
Used social media influencers – Logan – his Kiwi OE on Snapchat – managed locally. Selfies are big and engaged stories are strong performers.
They give a big destination picture for #AirNZ/BrainTrust We know one thing about (Santa Monica) what do you know? Very successful content streams across channel. We go where people recommend and then mention them again.
Millennials – be relevant and genuine, know what you stand for, concentrate on the experience, make digital easy, influencers, make the journey one of self-actuation and self-discovery.
#AirlineWager agreed times of day when the teams would communicate online (not what we’d say). Ran for 2 weeks. and #projectblackout against the Quantas Instagram feed – use black emojis to comment or like their images.
Air NZ Social Team uses these tools
Monica Bloom, Getty Images USA
Zig when others Zag.
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How to get testimonials for your business
/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Case Studies, Marketing ideas /by Rebecca CaroeFirstly get a page set up on your domain where you can drop in all the quotes we get from clients.
Recommendations:
Here’s a case study of a cute campaign we ran to get testimonials and support a good cause.
Now, where else can you get testimonials….. Linked In, Facebook, Neighbourly (NZ local media), Yelp, Finda….. over to you to share yours.
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Case Study: feel good joint venture for sporting website
/0 Comments/in Case Studies, Marketing, Social Media /by Paul AtkinsonRecently Creative Agency Secrets oversaw a joint venture campaign between our client, Rowperfect UK, the premier rowing education website, and manufacturer Crew Stop. The goal of the campaign was threefold:
Planning & Execution
Planning began in early May, when Rowperfect reached out to Crew Stop and proposed a partnership. As part of the joint venture, Crew Stop would provide gloves to give away to Rowperfect’s readership and art and assets to promote the awareness campaign, whilst Rowperfect staged a global social media campaign, tapping their 6,000+ twitter followers and 4,000+ Facebook fans.
The partnership between Rowperfect and Crew Stop made perfect sense. It allowed Rowperfect to continue to serve as a source of rowing advice and education whilst reaching the wide audience of watersports enthusiasts who had need for the Crew Stop gloves: Rowers, Scullers, Kayakers, Crossfitters, Dragon Boaters, and Waka Ama canoers.
As well as the competition to win gloves in the week that lead up to the weekend of the 4th of June, Rowperfect offered a discount code to new rowers and Creative Agency Secrets helped the client curate a new section on their website specifically targeted at learning to row for the first time. This new niche will be of value to Rowperfect readers into the future and allows the client to recruit new organic readers and clients. This approach aligned with ongoing project of creating new portals for the client’s key readerships: athletes, coxswains and coaches.
On the blog, Rowperfect published a series of articles about the purpose and uses of rowing gloves and advice around reducing the stigma of glove-wearing. On social media, Creative Agency Secrets coordinated the publication of posts advertising the three goals and the use of the hastag #NLTRD (national learn to row day). Rowers around the world adopted the use of the tag to share their rowing experiences.
Results
By strategically targeting followers of English-speaking rowing clubs with Facebook boosted posts, Rowperfect more than doubled their social media reach in the course of the campaign, increased awareness and engagement with their brand by adding over two hundred and fifty followers to their regular network, and hit internal sales targets.
For advice on arranging running joint ventures in your industry, or launching digital awareness campaigns, give us a call.
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Step 5: Relationship development
/0 Comments/in B2B, Sales, Strategy /by Rebecca CaroeThis fifth step is where the hard work, diligence and persistence pay off in your search for success in new business development.
People buy from people they know, like and trust and so having an active relationship with prospects who remember your name when they want to and can get in touch with you easily when they want to is very important.
How memorable is your business?
People are forgetful. What are the ways that prospects use to remember your business?
I know people save the newsletters that I mail out. I find people write replies to Newsletters that I sent months ago and the reason is that they keep them “just in case” they need to get in touch again. Many businesses do not use a business database and this is a shortcoming.
There are many ways to stay in touch with people and it’s beneficial, as your mailing list grows, for you to have some that are semi-automated and do not require a lot of your time in order to fulfil.
Good examples of these are autoresponders and newsletters. We also use social media as a way of staying in front of people we have a set-and-forget process of feeding RSS feeds through to our social media profiles so that we can appear to stay ahead of the news and on top of new developments even though we are not actually watching social media every hour of the day!
Staying memorable
Every business owner should have some form of regular networking in their diary. This could be as simple as a trade professional membership group, your chamber of commerce, or some specialist group for your area of expertise. Meeting people regularly is a very good way of staying front of mind. But beware, these people must be your prospects, not your competitors!
One way to find out if you are doing well in your relationship development is to track the number of new people we put into the business database. I collect business cards from as many people as I can who I think maybe of potential future interest to the business. This includes suppliers as well as prospective clients.
How and where do you get business cards? And what do you do with them?
It is important to have a careful plan to stay in touch with new people you meet. Some of them you want to spend time with and have a slowly developing individual relationship, others you can use mass communication. When planning your marketing, you need to think through these processes and organise all the communications necessary.
I have two special face-to-face relationship development techniques which I use. One is my circle of influence. The other is unhurried conversations.
A circle of influence is a small group of people who regularly feed new work through to us. These are people in parallel businesses whose services precede ours in the business service cycle. I meet with them on a quarterly basis or speak to them on the phone and they send us new enquiries and we are also able to reciprocate work back to them.
Unhurried conversations work on a slightly different format. It is a social event in the evening where I gather a group of interesting people around our board table for some afterwork drinks and nibbles. We use a format whereby only one person may speak any time. This forces everyone to listen carefully to what is being said. There is no agenda. The conversation takes whatever direction it wants to go. Learn more about the unhurried conversations format at this website. It is interesting that in this busy age of connected people and individuals so many people value a slower pace of talk, chat and interaction. Working at the slower pace allows my guests to take their time in thinking and considering whether they might work with us.
In summary – formalise all methods of building relationships between the business staff and prospective customers.
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Should I accept Guest Articles on our website?
/2 Comments/in Blogging, Marketing /by Rebecca CaroeDo you get emails from content marketers offering to give you articles to publish on your website?
Guest Bloggers Welcome image by Trafficado.com
Sometimes these can seem suspicious because they come from an unfamiliar email. And so I thought this was a good time to review the opportunity that guest articles offer to business websites.
Is it on-topic?
A client of ours just got approached to see if they’d run a guest post on their blog. The article offered is on a relevant topic to their area of expertise. So that’s an easy first step.
Why Guest Posts can be good
There are two sides to guest articles – one is to be the writer and the other is to invite others to write for you.
I see any invitation to guest post as a very positive step for a business website.
Firstly, the writer recognises your brand is an expert on this topic. And they also see that you have an audience for these things (that’s the power of marketing and social media). Our client got their approach after using the hashtag #growthhack on some social media updates – this brought them to the attention of the writer.
Here’s what I wrote to my client who had been approached
The bigger picture on guest articles
As a professional business you need to be cautious about accepting articles because of brand value alignment and the potential for the unscrupulous to use your respected website for inappropriate means.
But if you are a business seeking to grow your audience, finding an aligned partner who accepts your articles in a reciprocal arrangement and who is not a media outlet (newspaper or social media site) this is a very good idea.
When their audience sees and reads your opinion, they may be enticed to get in touch and buy your services.
What if their views don’t match your own?
Any topic has more than one point of view. The mature, business approach is to be balanced. If your website is seen as a trusted resource, it can also be a platform to amplify the public discussion on these matters. These do not have to be the opinion of you or your staff.
If you choose, you can write a response to the guest article putting the opposing point of view. This could start a public discussion on the matter.
Things to ask the guest writer
You need reassurance about the quality of the writer and their authority and expertise.
Be prepared to check
Your marketing or PR agency can help you find suitable partners for joint marketing promotions – we ran these for Hushamok who sell baby crib hammocks using Facebook online contests and very successfully gained brand awareness, direct sales and also grew their newsletter subscriber audience.
In summary, I see this as a very positive, independent verification of your marketing positioning and wide reach into the global audience for your area of expertise.
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How to Get Leads from your Business Website
/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Lead Generation /by Rebecca CaroeThis speech was given to the Grey Lynn Business Association on 10th June 2016. It includes tips on testing how your website is working, 12 ways to make local marketing work including inbound and outbound marketing tactics.
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How to get your business website bringing in leads and enquiries
/0 Comments/in Marketing, Public Speaking /by Creative Agency Secrets TeamFinding a new client can be challenging. Nowadays many prospects look online before getting in touch by email or phone. Without a good website, you are losing sales. Do you know how to test the effectiveness of your website?
To help businesses figure out the best solutions to this, the Grey Lynn Business Association is hosting the seminar “How to get your business website bringing in leads and enquiries” on Friday, June 10th, from 7 am to 9 am. Rebecca Caroe, Founder & CEO of Creative Agency Secrets will be the speaker and give both a quick understanding of the effectiveness of websites and some cheap / free ways to improve it.
This talk is part of the Winter Wake Up Workshop Series, a month and a half long programme focused on business development. The seminars will be every Friday morning at the Grey Lynn Community Centre.
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14 Test Questions For Inbound Success On Your Website
/0 Comments/in Digital media, Marketing /by Paul AtkinsonHubspot founders Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan are the authors of Inbound Marketing, an insightful, short and easy-to-read guide to enhancing your website and thinking about it as a key tool in attracting clients. They compare their now-popular “inbound” techniques to the giants and show neophyte business owners how to improve their web presence, increase their sales and conversions, and how to do so in a short time on a small budget.
The book is full of bright ideas and pithy examples but I recently took the time to extract what I thought was a must-have list of tools and concepts any business owner, at any stage of a marketing plan, can learn from Halligan and Shah.
Time for a website audit?
It is quite common – and often essential to success – for us to offer a quick appraisal of a website’s performance before delving deeply into any action items or scoping any big campaigns.
If you want inbound success, here are the 14 questions you will want to ask yourself. I’ve written the explanatory answer to each question too because this is what Creative Agency Secrets can do for your website. We know how to make your website work harder to achieve your goals.
Do you, or your website, do these?
1. Are your title tags designed for humans?
The <title> tag is an HTML element that doesn’t actually show on your webpage. It does, however, show in the top of your browser and, more importantly, it’s that blue clickable text in Google. Marketers used to load these up with keywords before Google got wise, and clever. These days the best thing you can do to succeed with inbound marketing is to make sure you’ve got human-readable title tags, that say what your business does (not who you are) in 70 characters or less.
2. Does your website pass a basic mobile-friendly check?
It doesn’t have to be perfect but it has to work. With something like ⅔ of website use now conducted on a mobile or tablet device, you’ve got to be ready. More than 90% of people say that access to information is important to them. Give your users the information they need in an easily accessible format, also known as mobile devices.You don’t want your readers squinting to see your value-add! In fact, more than 80% of users believe a seamless integration between devices is important. This is why Apply is so successful. Make sure you pass a basic check and talk to your webmaster if you don’t. Not only will your readers thank you but Google will prioritise traffic to your website if you’re optimised for mobile.
3. Do you update your site regularly?
Ideally you run a blog, not at blogspot.com or wordpress.com, but on your domain name. You publish content a couple of times a month and you provide real value, not sales jargon, to your readers. Don’t know what to write? Become an authority in your field, comment on recent happenings in the news. If you’re on top of this already, ask yourself, do you have: onsite search, related articles, and buttons for readers to share your stories on the most relevant social media?
4. Do you have a sense of the core industry keywords and pages to match?
Often you’re so deep in your industry niche, product or service that you have your own language for talking about what you do. Yes, in part it’s your job to educate your prospects about that, but you also have to be found for those keywords they’re using to search. Get some basic research done on what people search for in your industry and write pages that speak to those searches.
5. Does your site load in about 3 seconds?
Try a test for yourself at Pingdom. We don’t all have fibre yet, and large loading speeds will put people off. If you’re a photo blog, or some other website that has a heavy number of assets to load with good reason, look into Cloudflare, and yes, they have a free plan.
6. Do you have a security certificate?
An SSL certificate confirms for the client that you are who you say you are and that they are reading and communicating securely with the genuine owner of the website. It prevents “phishing”, people pretending to be you to steal credit card numbers or email addresses, and confirms for the user that their personal data can’t be intercepted by a third party. In years past online credit card providers took away the hassle of having to pay for and install an SSL certificate each year, but now many providers have on-page solutions (meaning that the user doesn’t even leave your site to pay). Even if your payment solution is still off-site, you add reassurance by making the process seem secure to your user end-to-end. Finally, Google itself opted for a security-first approach, serves all its own content securely, and prioritises websites that themselves prioritise security.
7. Is your website ‘paired’ with its social media properties?
You probably already have a Twitter account, or a Facebook business page, or a YouTube channel, but have you told the world this is your official account, representing your business on this platform? Take a look at some guides to link your accounts: Google+, YouTube, Facebook & more.
8. Do you have a contact form?
You probably have an email or phone number on the website, and you might have tried a contact form only to find it got a lot of bogus submissions. But persist with the contact form. It allows you to collect and database your prospects much easier than you could do via email and it allows you to protect your personal email address from ending up on unwanted spam lists. Finally you can ask important questions of your prospects. E.g., are they contacting you for sales or support; are they interested in Widget W or Gizmo G?
9. Does your website have a call to action?
You want visitors, but once you get them you want to know for yourself what path you want them to take, or what actions you want them to take. These are your ‘goals’. Make sure you have clear buttons that direct your user to your goal: e.g., “Start a Free Trial”, “Sign up”, “Become a member”, “Check out our product range”, “See what our customers think”. Make it bold and clear, and remember, “Contact us” is one of the least effective calls to action, it requires too much commitment on behalf of the casual browser.
10. Do you do A/B (split) testing for important calls to action?
A/B testing is showing two or more groups of visitors two or more variations of page at random. This allows you to gather stats on which layout, button, wording or offer is the most effective.
11. Do you convert 15% of your visitors?
Conversion is the difference between a contact in your database or not; a sale or no sale. Do you keep track of how effective your marketing is and do you get three out of 20 people on your site to make some kind of commitment? Commitment doesn’t necessarily mean a sale, it could just be downloading a PDF or joining a newsletter.
12. Do you spend more time actively seeking new traffic than tweaking and changing?
The plumber’s sink is never fixed and the web marketer’s website is never perfect. But don’t let that worry you. A/B testing is great, it’s insightful and it’s important but you have to have someone to test it on. Make sure you’re spending 80% of your time on strategies to get new traffic and 20% of your time on what they see when they get to your site.
13. Do you regularly communicate with your prospects?
Once you’ve got traffic and you’ve got conversions you’ll need a way to communicate with them. That’s usually an email newsletter. People are used to hearing from their favourite brands, sometimes as regularly as weekly, but if you’re not communicating with your prospects at all you’re not building trust. Equally important is not alienating yourself from your clients. Put a face on a corporation. Send your emails from an address that’s personal, not a noreply@corporatebusiness.com-type address. Include your personal contact details in your email signature. You want your communications as natural as possible.
14. Do you have a reminder when someone leaves a purchase incomplete?
Over half of the checkouts on most industry-standard carts do not get completed. That is, someone puts a product in a basket, enters their email and name but not their payment information. When that happens, most good shopping carts will let you automate an email to the client, checking in to see how they’re going and why the payment was never made.
If you’re nodding along and answering yes, then you’re on track for a successful inbound marketing strategy. If not, give us a call and we’ll do a review of your website.
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