How to Successfully Market Your Website

How to Successfully Market Your Website

Digital marketing is very finicky. You are not just contending with customers; you have impartial algorithms to contest with, the attention market, your competitors, technological glitches, and so much more. Knowing how to successfully market your website means more than simply knowing the basics. Yes, email newsletters help. Yes, social media marketing is an option. Knowing how to successfully implement these tactics is the real challenge, and to help you overcome the common hurdles of these marketing hurdles we have put together a great beginner’s list to guide you: 

Improve the Quality of Your Website 

The first step to successfully marketing your website is to improve your website. All marketing efforts will be wasted if you do not improve it. Consider this – if you have a treasure map, and went through the effort of following it, how would you feel if you turned up to an empty field or a busted down house? Your customers follow a similar path to your website. Sometimes it is direct, other times it takes several attempts to get them to your site, but if your site is not worthwhile, they will leave immediately. 

Example: A Slow Website 

If your website is slow, then all the marketing efforts in the world will be a waste of money. That is why one of the first steps you should take is to switch to Krystal, which offers 300% faster speeds than most other competitors. 

Improve Your Social Media Approach 

To improve your social media approach, you need to understand how each platform works. Optimizing a post is standard practice, but you will want to go beyond and see how your competitors have succeeded or failed. Once you have that information, work on creating an account that provides users with the experience they are looking for in a company such as yours. 

Example: A Technical Social Media Account

Take a company that offers technical service, like computer repairs. How can you possibly market such a company on a social media site like Instagram? What if you were an accountant? 

The answer is to provide information. Create simple yet well-designed text posts. Be unique with your photography – a computer repair company has plenty of interesting textures you could photograph, for example. Try to be a source of information so that people follow you to get tips and tricks daily.  Collaboration and PR is one of the best ways to market your company, as it gets your name out there and brings in high-quality inbound links. 

Example: Collaborating With Another Business

To collaborate with another business, you will want to first see if there are any opportunities in your business model. If you sell high-quality phone cases, for example, partner with local artists that have a healthy, dedicated, and real community of their own. They create phone case designs for you, you give them a healthy chunk of the profits (after costs), and in turn, their fans know about you, buy from you, and then go on and advertise your product to their friends and family. 

There are so many ways you can improve your marketing efforts, and hopefully, with these examples, you have a more concrete idea of how you can grow your community and reach. 

Apple Podcast analytics beta

Apple has launched a beta service to analyse listenership of your podcast episodes on Apple devices and via Apple services.

I took a quick look – log in to iTunes Connect and select the drop-down next to the header. [Note the URL – since podcasts are being split off from iTunes, it’s now got its own URL podcastsconnect.apple.com]

The service obviously only works on Apple devices and so this will in all likelihood be a small segment of your audience. But the data has all the normal data points [#devices, #total time listened, time listened per device] defaulting to a past 60 days view.

The most interesting data point for me is the percentage “Average Consumption” measure defined as

The average percentage of the episode that was played across all devices. Playback duration is compared against the episode duration as reported in the podcast feed. If a device plays the duration time of an episode more than once, the consumption from that device will be greater than 100%

Apple podcast analytics beta

Trends, episodes and overview

Neatly summarising most of what you’ll want to see – the Apple Podcasts Analytics beta has a nice dashboard showing Total time listened, a country analysis and split of subscribers and ‘not subscribed’. This is neat as I’ve always wondered about the proportion of my listeners who are not subscribers but do listen.

Partial audience analysis

In the analytics help documentation I noted the following:

  • Podcast Analytics begins gathering data as soon as users play content in the Podcasts app (iOS 11 or later), in iTunes 12.7 or later (macOS and Windows), or on HomePod. [NOTE only recent app versions]
  • Apple only displays data from users who agreed to share their diagnostics and usage information with providers. [NOTE Reduces total audience size]
  • To collect data, the duration of a play event must be at least five seconds. [NOTE fair enough]
  • To display data, more than five unique devices must play the show or episode content. [NOTE fair enough]

Final thoughts

Get on to Apple and take a look at your stats. Compare it to other analytics services [I use Podtrac] and compare the data points and your absolute numbers.

My Apple numbers and Podtrac numbers are not directly comparable as one is included in the other. But for me the average consumption metric is pretty neat and will be something I add in my media pack for advertisers.

The images below show the respective analytics for 7 recent episodes.

Podtrac podcast analytics
Apple podcast analytics

Podcast RSS automatic update

The RSS feed helps people subscribing using a podcast app (like Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts etc) to receive your episodes.

Each time you upload a new episode, the RSS feed updates the app.

Then the listener downloads a local copy of your episode to listen to.

So you don’t need to do anything else.

NOTE: I always subscribe to my own podcasts so I can check the feed is working. I had a client recently whose feed stopped working and I logged into Apple Podcasts Connect [https://podcastsconnect.apple.com/] and you have the option to refresh the feed manually.

This “force refresh” re-started the downloads for my client.

How to refresh the RSS feed in Apple Podcasts
podcast, economy watch, interest co nz, David Chaston, NZ Economy

Another Podcast launched

Today we announce the Economy Watch podcast by Interest.co.nz has launched. It’s a daily summary of the key overnight news that affects the New Zealand economy.

Short podcasts for news

In scoping the content and audience for this podcast, we decided that a short format podcast was a good choice. Listeners are on their way into work and can catch a 6-10 minute update quickly during their commute to work.

Authored by David Chaston, Editor and voiced by me (Rebecca Caroe), we are really pleased with the early listener feedback.

Please go and listen and tell me what you think. Appreciate it!

Tongue twister podcasting

Now here are the things I’ve found hard to say coherently in the episodes so far. See if you can spot them in the audio

German government bonds sold at a record low yield overnight. They sold 10-year Bunds [bund / bond]

India imposed higher retaliatory tariffs [why was retaliatory so hard?]

China’s Central government coffers [coffers was the issue here]

at the Japanese-hosted G20 summit [not sure why I can’t say summit]


seth godin, purple circle, marketing easter egg

Marketing using easter eggs

Little surprises that reward your customers are a really nice way of helping them to feel special.

Today I got a marketing easter egg from Seth Godin.

The benefits of careful reading

The message was short, barely formatted and it’s one I have waited a year to receive. Hidden in the fourth line was a surprise.

Don’t forget to look for the purple circle on the website to get the best price.

Seth Godin, The Marketing Seminar

…. and so I took a look.

It looked like a pretty piece of graphic art. But one of the circles had an embedded link. NICE….

Seth Godin, purple Circle, marketing easter egg, link hidden,
Hidden Marketing Easter Egg Link

How do you reward your loyal customers?

Sometimes I get frustrated when we make an offer and few people take it up. I think “That’s an AWESOME deal – why isn’t everyone paying attention and buying?” But I realise that I’m looking at it the wrong way around; I should be delighted that only the most savvy, the most loyal and most deserving customers are the ones who take up the offer.

I think of these as my “ultra-loyal” customers. They care enough to read. They don’t skip my messages and so I can give them a reward that others don’t take up.

Can you use an Easter Egg Marketing Strategy for your best customers?

Get insights into Seth’s thinking with his latest book This is Marketing – the course above is based on it.

Linkedin, company page, social media tips

10 LinkedIn Company Page Ideas & Suggestions

  1. Create a Showcase page – with updates just for these sub-sets which allows for segmentation of viewers.
  2. Add Company page link to email signatures – update monthly with the pinned post.
  3. The BEST imagery on the Company page – include your logo watermarked into the image. 1,536px x 768px.
  4. Re-write the company overview text to reflect a niche positioning
  5. Check hashtags to follow.  https://www.linkedin.com/feed/follow/?filterType=channel&focused=true
  6. Refresh your pinned post 2x per month.  And re-share it to other channels.
  7. Share your top 5 articles from the blog one every 2 weeks…. Yes repetition is worth it.  And in 6 months change to new articles.
  8. Get more comments by asking questions.  “Are you watching the Cricket World Cup? What’s the best activation you’ve seen?”; Formula 1 Fails at Monaco – did you spot the bad branding in the Casino Tunnel?; What do you do to promote athletes in their off season?
  9. Use URL Builder tool to track web links from your company page updates https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/
  10. Set up Content Suggestions so you can do the 4-1-1 model of sharing 4 pieces of content from others to every couple of your own.

What are your top tips?

LinkedIN new feature, company page linkedIN

2 new LinkedIn Tools – Saved search and Article title edits

Today I came across two new features in LinkedIn which will definitely help marketers and pro-active networkers. And one negative feature.

Throttle Control is ON

LinkedIn is clearly pushing for greater revenues – many of my favourite work-rounds for search and connecting are now getting blocked. Have you noticed this?

I got blocked from searching for 2nd / 3rd degree connections on 10th May. That was because I had apparently already used up my allocation for the month! It renews next month. So pretty irritating….. Having said that, there are some neat work arounds and some new apps which I’m trialing in beta which may help with some aspects of this.

In the meantime, pay up or go away. The choice is yours.

Saved Search Alerts

New LinkedIn Feature

I was doing some searches and spotted what I think may be a beta release feature in the right sidebar…. I was searching in “People” for a search string. And so I made a search alert to save that search. In fact I made a couple.

The saved search name i18n_rail was default applied by LinkedIn. Probably code for something….. suggestions?

It appears to be similar to Google Alerts but with less functionality. The options are only for weekly alerts and to be received by email which suggests this isn’t yet a fully featured roll-out. But a nice touch, especially if we are all going to have to pay to use LinkedIn Search in future.

Company page article title edits

While uploading an article to our company page I noticed another new feature – you can edit the title so that the URL link title is not the default option.

You have to be in the admin view to use this feature. And isn’t it nice that 140 characters is offered as the link text? Importantly this is only link text, not the URL or destination title. I think this will be great for improved keyword searching and SEO – plus those of us who like to write long headlines will have a field day!

Now go and try these – tell me if you can find them in your profile.

Three audiences, niche brand positioning

Business positioning – do this

Can a prospect tell “at a glance” whether you are the right business for their needs? Web visits last ever-shorter durations and so your positioning [the message about what you do and for whom] is critical.

I was asked by a client to provide examples of marketing agencies who have good positioning on their websites.

Do you agree with my picks?

Good brand positioning copywriting

https://www.disruptiveunicorns.com/ We specialise in inbound marketing and lead generation on the HubSpot platform. Using design thinking, we help businesses scale in a sustainable growth manner.

One way to find out if you don’t want to work with them, is to re-write their offer in the negative. So if I don’t want inbound and lead generation – don’t go here. If I’m not using Hubspot I probably won’t get well-served either.

https://www.digitalmarketer.com/ Tools and Trainings for Digital Marketers

If I’m not a digital marketer needing tools or training – go away.

Below that they have 3 audiences identified – Teams, Marketers and Agencies so they offer further refinement of tools and training offers.

Digital marketer three audiences and offerings aligned to different brand needs,
Digital Marketer agency audiences

https://spur.co.nz/ Creating live experiences that build brand love. We are a full service live-marketing agency. Our areas of expertise include sponsorship, experiential marketing, corporate events and promotional staffing.
We connect brands to people to 
create brand love.

So if I don’t want a live experience – go elsewhere. Using the bold words allows speed reading to focus in on key services and skills. The “Brand Love” message is lovely and slightly fluffy – who doesn’t want this for their brand?

And just for the contrast here’s one which is too broad in its positioning and non-specific in its offer https://www.interactivesponsor.com/

Which niche suits your brand?

Finding your audience and positioning your business to align is not something to do once and leave. The business world changes frequently and so fine-tuning your language, offering and audience is a useful exercise.

Remember – excluding prospects who don’t fit your ideal customer persona is important too.

Followers on LinkedIN, How to use LinkedIn, Social Selling, B2B marketing

Who’s your LinkedIn Follower?

LinkedIn hides some of its best features – deliberately.

So here is my quick tip of the week to help you grow your connection base.

Do you know about your followers and following feed?

Thought not.

Log into your LinkedIn. Then paste this into your browser and take a look at this URL.

It lists everyone who is following you. The image below shows Philip Goffin – he’s following me. But I’m neither connected to him, nor following him.

Woo Hoo – lots of followers, Famous fellow.

Now for the inverse, Following. These are the people you are following.

What’s the use of following on LinkedIn?

Well, many times you want to see the News Feed updates from people, but you don’t actually know them and so connecting isn’t appropriate.

Or you just think you will see their updates for a while before approaching for a connection request.

Or you are hoping to quietly bring yourself to their attention without being too pushy – so follow them in the hope they notice you and send a connection request.

Go forth…. try it for yourself.

P.S. You can no longer export contact information from LinkedIn and so I’m advising clients to build contact lists outside of the platform for every new contact they make.