Marketing Automation: The Next Step Beyond Google Analytics

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When we launch a new website, nearly all clients opt for us to include Google Analytics. It would be foolish, really, not to. . .it’s free and offers a great deal of insight about your web traffic sources, number of page hits, what parts of your site are drawing the most interest and more.

But Google Analytics is not and was never intended to be a marketing automation platform. That is, a tool designed specifically to give your marketing (and sales) departments a way to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, track leads, and create forms and landing pages, to name a few.

However a number of powerful and surprisingly affordable marketing automation systems are now available and catching on fast. Most are sold as cloud-based services that integrate pretty easily into a wide variety of sites. One that we’ve used for several of our client sites is called Pardot. And our clients swear by its effectiveness.

So what’s so great about Pardot and other marketing automation systems? I’d put being able to track leads to marketing campaigns high on the list. Say, for example, you send out a Pardot-enabled email blast about your latest new product. When readers click through to the items in the email, Pardot automatically records this in its database. If that same reader then returns two weeks later on the site in order to read more, Pardot will track that too.

Best of all, the information becomes actionable. Because Pardot (and similar systems) are designed to easily integrate into the major CRM systems (Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, etc.) your salespeople will always have that detail at their fingertips when they follow up with a phone call or email.

With Pardot, your whole website becomes more sales and marketing driven. Say for example a prospect never responds to your emails, but one day decides to download a white paper from your site. Once they fill out a form for the white paper, your golden. From that point forward, Pardot will track when they come back to your site; how often and where they go to visit; and whether of course they decide to download any more information.

With that kind of intelligence your sales and marketing people can better grade the quality of your leads and follow-up at the most appropriate times. And an increase in sales is sure to follow!

Until next time…

CRM: The Missing Link to Your Website?

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Most smaller website use forms to gather leads. Information collected by the forms is then sent via email to a mailbox (e.g., sales@companyX.com) where they are then distributed to salespeople or manually entered into a CRM system.

As sales pick up that email system can become a bottleneck. A few days may slip by before the leads get entered in. Some names and names might be entered wrong. Or worse, leads could be lost altogether. Relying on any manual system like this once a certain level of traffic is reached is risky. Here at Radar Media, we’re seeing this more as our smaller clients grow up into larger, more successful ventures.

Fortunately this problem has been solved many times before, so there’s no need for you (or your integration partner) to reinvent the wheel. What’s needed is an automatic link, or integration, between your company’s CRM system and the website forms. These days, many companies use one of the leading CRM systems such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics or Zoho.com to keep track of their leads. Many such systems are sold on a service basis and are in the cloud. They help salespeople enter customer information, track pipeline activity, set up reminders, share leads and even calculate commissions.

Getting the information from your website into the CRM is a standard request that these CRM systems have been getting for several years now. So it’s no surprise that virtually all of them have developed plug-ins and other pieces of software that make the process pretty easy, especially if your site is built on one of the popular content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. This code is typically installed on your website, often in tandem with your forms, so that the information being entered into the form is then passed automatically into the CRM.

In some cases, the form itself will reside inside the CRM system and will be “framed out” on the website. To make this work, developers typically use an “iframe.” In this way the form appears to be seamlessly integrated with the rest of the site, even though the form part of it is “in the cloud” running on, say, Salesforce.com servers.

Whichever way the CRM integration is handled, suffice to say it’s been done before. If your sales department is constantly asking about the new leads in the email pipeline, perhaps it’s time to automate the problem away.

Until next time….

Web Content: Why Less Is More

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One of the mistakes that many companies make when redesigning their websites is trying to say too much on their product pages. It’s understandable how this happens. Company insiders work in a bubble where much of their day is spent talking about product features – what they have now, how competitors stack up, and where they need to be when the next release or big customer comes along. From this vantage point, it’s easy to assume that outsiders want this detail as well.

Problem is, it’s mostly not true. Some readers may stay longer and drill deeper for information. But most prospects want the big picture. They want to quickly learn what business you’re in, what services you offer and whether you may have something to solve their business problem.

Trying to cram in too much content can be counter productive. Eyes glaze over and it becomes tempting to surf to another site.

Based on our experience, companies are better served when they follow a philosophy of “HTML light” for most pages. Liberal use of subheads to break up content blocks, short paragraphs and shorter, more conversational sentence structures generally work best on the web where attention spans are short.

That said there are some ways to organize your site better so that your pages can easily be scanned, but more details are still available for those that want them. One technique we use is to break up longer product pages into tabbed information buckets. Readers scan the top paragraph or two for the main messaging and drill into the tabs below for detail. The tabs keep the pages “clean” and easier to navigate. And they are less intimidating to the average reader. Here’s an example of a tabbed product page we built for client Covaris, Inc.

Another technique is to shift more of the “speeds and feeds” and other feature/benefit-type information to PDF downloads, such as datasheets, product brochures and white papers. The added benefit of this approach: When users want more info, they must fill out a request form. Leads, anyone?

Until next time….

Helping to Achieve a More Sustainable Client

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Radar Media has always been about providing outsourced marketing services to busy executives who don’t have the time or wherewithal to create top quality sales and marketing materials on their own. That said, we’ve learned from our years of experience that our most effective clients are those that choose not to outsource their entire marketing effort — but work with us on providing quality tools that enable them to update their marketing materials on their own.

Think of it as Radar helping to create a more sustainable client.

When Radar was starting out 11 years ago, “marketing sustainability” was harder to achieve than it is now. A company’s website was obviously a high priority then, but the technology available at the time didn’t make it easy for you to update a site on your own.

Today it’s a different story. With nearly all Radar websites today powered by a content management system (CMS), clients have the tools to publish their own content without outside help. With greater control over their messaging, many customers today more frequently update their sites with press releases, news stories and blogs. This keeps their sites fresher and their marketing message current. Social media updates are easier to update, too, which in turn drives more traffic back to the website.

Other tools are available for our most sustainable clients. For example, affordable desktop publishing tools, like Microsoft Publisher and even PowerPoint, are far more capable and easy to use than they once were. That’s a good thing, because the need to frequently update data sheets, create more case studies and white papers is greater today than ever. For many of our clients we design custom marketing templates that allow them to generate frequent updates on their own. Creating a PDF for their website posting becomes fast, easy and affordable.

Finally Radar Media itself enters the new year in a highly sustainable way. We now generate nearly 60 percent of the power we use for lights, computers and other appliances with renewable solar electricity from panels installed on our building’s roof. And if you host your website through us, you’ll be pleased to know that much of the energy that runs your server comes from sustainable wind power down in Texas.

All for now…’til next time.

Thoughts Behind the New Radar Website

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We launched a newly-designed Radar Media Group website late last month. The previous design was still perfectly serviceable and less than three years old. It had lots of examples of Radar’s work and was fully SEO-optimized. That all said, it had a few issues that made us want to start fresh.

Making sure the new site was designed for ease of updating and maintenance was job one. Although we are writers and designers by trade, most of our waking hours are dedicated to client work. Finding time to update our own site with the latest portfolio work was always something we put off until last.

Our new site makes routine maintenance a lot faster and easier. Unlike before where we had to manually prepare multiple image files for each new entry, the new site automatically creates thumbnails from a single image and presents the work neatly in a slideshow arrangement. Like our previous site, the new site runs on a modern content management platform, so making everyday text edits and entries is a snap.

We also wanted the new site to be more socially-aware. While the Radar Media blog remains our primary means of communicating with clients and prospects, here too our creation of new blog entries sometimes took a back seat to client work. We’ve made a promise to update the new blog more frequently. But just in case, we’ve also added a realtime Twitter feed to the Radar Media homepage.

One nice thing about Twitter is that each entry is no more than 160 characters of text. That makes the challenge of coming up with fresh content a whole lot easier — not just for us, but for millions of users worldwide. Since we now have Radar’s Twitter feed prominently positioned on our homepage, that fresh content should make the entire site look more timely than before.

There’s more to our redesign than just the above, of course. We hope you like the clean layout, the new Radar logo and our commitment to green energy (more than 50% of the electricity we use at Radar is from our own solar panels) and a better environment for all.

Until next time. .

Customer Scenarios — Why We Like Them

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Here at Radar Media we do a lot of work with Microsoft and its partners. While you can easily argue about what it does wrong in marketing (remember Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld? Ouch.) one thing we’ve learned from Microsoft — and incorporated into our own practice — is the regular use of customer scenarios.

A customer scenario is really nothing more than how a particular type of customer is most inclined to use your product or service. If you build high end mountain bikes, for example, a likely customer scenario would be a male between the ages of 35 and 45 who values good design and quality components (as found on your pricey machines) and has the money to pay for them. Based on your sales results or other market inputs, like pay per click ad results, you will likely identify other customer scenarios that are similar or even quite different.

Once your key customer scenarios are known, it’s time to put them to work on your website and other marketing materials. We’ve found it helps to write down characteristics that apply to each customer type (a simple bullet list works fine) and then to refer to this as you think through the content and design of the project.

In the case of the mountain bike manufacturer, your message can really be well targeted once you know that your high end mountain bike is a luxury purchase most likely to be made by a successful male who is married, drives a luxury automobile, and appreciates fine craftsmanship like quality welds. And because even well-off individuals must still justify their purchases, targeting an email marketing campaign during those times when cash frees up, like when tax refunds are in the mail, makes sense.

Customer scenarios are especially important when you have two or more different target markets. One web redesign project from a couple of years ago was like this. Our client offered an online loan service to help its customers cover the cost of tuition for children enrolled in private middle and high schools. Two quite different versions of the service were offered. One targeted the parents sending their children to private schools. The other package was targeted to the schools themselves, particularly the principals and administrators at these schools, who would then resell the service to parents.

Because our client did not segregate these different customer scenarios well on its old site, people found the site confusing. Messages that were not appropriate for parents were being read by the schools, and vice versa.

For the new site, the first thing we did was to model these two customer scenarios. Next, we decided to create a new homepage with two distinct doorways — one for parents, the other for school administrators. Once visitors went through these doorways, they entered “mini sites” that were targeted 100% for them. Needless to say, the new site was much easier to understand and navigate.

Until next time….

Three Reasons to Hire an Internet Marketing Firm

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When it comes to the world of Internet marketing, it’s becoming increasingly hard to stand out. With sites like YouTube, Twitter, Blogger and Facebook, people everywhere have the immediate power to broadcast themselves to the world. How can you stay competitive with everyone shouting to the masses?

Here are three major reasons you should hire an Internet marketing firm to help you:

1.Time is Money. The more time you spend focusing on the aspects of your business that you’re not professionally trained in, the more money is going to drain from your pockets. It can be tempting to try to learn SEO in an afternoon. Don’t. Focus your energy on the core of your business and let people who do this every day for their clients handle it for you. You’ll have peace of mind and better search engine rankings, and you won’t throw your laptop out the window in frustration.

2. Nobody Knows Your Brand Better Than You. This probably sounds backwards, doesn’t it? If nobody knows your company’s values and services better than you do, shouldn’t you be the one branding everything? The answer is usually a big fat NO.

We don’t want to let go of control of our companies because they’re a part of us. Sometimes, you’re so closely involved with something that you’re unable to remove yourself and look at it objectively. Having an Internet marketing company help you step back and see your business in a new light will help you to feel less caught up in its image, and you may actually feel less burdened by being able to pass over the responsibility of coming up with the ‘right’ image or marketing approach.

3. Doing Everything Is Ineffective. It can be all too easy to feel sucked into the Internet marketing/social media vortex, signing up for every new service and site you can get your hands on that promises networking, backlinks, or traffic.

Sometimes, less is more. In addition to the “time is money” mantra from above, there comes a point when trying to attack from all angles isn’t effective. There are only so many bases you can cover before you can’t focus on anything wholeheartedly.

If you want to really use Twitter as a business tool but would also like a blog and Facebook page, pass one to a professional so you’re not juggling so many things. Don’t be afraid to delegate, and don’t feel pressured that you have to participate in every new Internet marketing channel just because it exists. Different approaches work for different businesses, and it’s important to find the ‘right fit’ for you.

What do you think? Do you agree with these reasons for hiring an Internet marketing company to help you? Do you have any reasons you’d like to add to the list? Leave us a comment by email!

Metatags – Rankings Essential or Search Engine Has-Been?

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Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a term that more and more businesses are familiarizing themselves with, and if your business hasn’t yet, it’s about time! SEO has been a real hot topic for marketers, web designers, and web writers who are working to help their clients (or their own companies) climb the ranks of the search engines.

Beyond optimizing page content with relevant keywords and long-tail focused subject matter, there’s been quite a bit of debate over the effectiveness of metatags.

In the earlier days of SEO, metatags were a big deal. Plugging important keywords and descriptions in that precious ‘head’ space in your HTML page meant that you were leagues ahead of the competition that didn’t know to do that. Search engines learned where to categorize your page from your metatags, and that directly impacted your rankings. What a simple solution!

But there’s been a shift. As you can imagine, as search algorithms have evolved and the very way users navigate the web has changed, many of the earlier effective SEO techniques are no longer valid. Some were quick to write off metatags altogether when they realized that metatags aren’t all that responsible for rankings anymore, but don’t be so quick to abandon them!

While including your most competitive keywords in your “keywords” tag won’t guarantee you a #1 spot on Google anymore, strategically fleshing out your meta section can do nothing but help you reach your target customers online.

SEO gurus at SEOMoz.com provide some great tips for approaching metatags in a modern SEO environment and say that the only metatag that is still really relevant is the description tag, which serves 3 main purposes:

  1. To describe the content of the page accurately and succinctly
  2. To serve as a short, text “advertisement” to click on your results in the search results
  3. To display targeted keywords,not for ranking purposes, but to indicate the content to searchers

By crafting your description like an ad, you’re customizing the message that’s shown in search results to your target customers, and you’re helping them to determine whether your website is the place that holds the information they’re looking for.

SEOMoz urges readers to not immediately assume that the meta description should resemble a PPC (pay-per-click) advertisement, as often visitors that are likely to click on that type of ad aren’t the same as visitors who are searching organically. Making sure to include key terms in the description without keyword stuffing will promote a higher likelihood of clicks because when a user searches in Google, search terms in the results descriptions are bold, catching the searcher’s eye.

So, while writing that perfect meta description might not trick search engine spiders into catapulting you to the #1 spot in search results anymore, don’t abandon your metatags! Taking a few extra minutes to customize your meta description could be the difference between getting passed by in the search results, and making that next big sale.

Video Done Right

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If anyone has any doubts whether video has come of age on the web, I have a simple answer to help them see the light: YouTube.

With nearly everyone and their grandmouther routinely posting vidoes on YouTube these days, it’s clear that users not only enjoy this kind of content – they expect to see it. That’s why we, and countless other agencies no doubt, encourage our clients to develop and post short, informative and (as much as possible) entertaining videos to round out their oher marketing content.

Most web videos are created in Flash, which has the advantage of working out of the box on over 95% of the browsers out there. The Flash format works great and allows for “progressive” streaming – that’s tech talk for allowing the video to download ahead of the player. In most cases, this allows the user to view the video without waiting for the whole thing to first download.

Flash works fine for short videos that are posted at a relatively small size and where web traffic is light (say one or two users viewing the video at once). Where problems arise is when traffic increases or the video is longer or in HD format. Most small to midsize websites running on an inexpensive shared server (probably 90% of our clients) will find their videos can’t keep up.

Aside from using YouTube to host your video and simply linking to it, there’s a fairly easy and relatively inexpensive answer to this problem. Use a content delivery network, or CDN. A CDN is a hosted, “cloud” offering, where multimedia content like Flash videos are not posted on your site at all, but on a very fast and specialized network optimized for video. Use a CDN, and visitors to your site viewing a video can then see it full size, in HD and all its glory without any download problems at all.

For one of our newest clients, we are building a photo and video-intensive site, and we’ll be using the Amazon CloudFront CDN to serve it in style. More options, and video player software, are becoming available all the time.

See you at the movies. .

Keeping Your Website Current

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Keeping your website up to date is obviously important. Most business people, me included, think first and foremost about updating the content. Equally important is the need to keep your website platform up to date. If you don’t, you run the risk of getting your site hacked, increased junk email, or worse.

The need to regularly update your site’s platform is particularly important if your site is built on a content management system (CMS). Most CMSs these days, including open source leaders Joomla and Drupal, are fairly complex systems built themselves on top of constantly-evolving technologies. A database management system, for example, is almost always used to store your content (HTML text) apart from the structure. Meanwhile, an active server language like PHP or Microsoft’s .NET is used to connect the front-end design with the content and images that together make up your website.

All of this happens behind the scenes, but it’s this very complexity that hackers love to exploit. Whenever a new version of a CMS platform comes out — or for that matter, the underlying databases or third party add-ons are updated — hackers go to work to find the weakest links to exploit. Once they do so, word spreads quickly, and websites that are using those technology versions become vulnerable.

Does that mean that you are always at risk? Not really. There are a few steps that anyone, no matter how technical they are, can take to prevent problems:

Back up everything frequently. There’s always a risk that no matter how frequently you update, your site may be compromised. In many cases it won’t be hackers that are the problem. Somebody may accidentally overwrite files, or your ISP may experience a server crash. If you regularly back up your site to a local computer (that is itself regularly backed up) no such accident will ever put your business at risk. Here at Radar, we recommend backing up sites at least once per week. HTML sites can be backed up simply by copying the files locally to your hard drive. A CMS site can also easily be backed up, typically using a backup add-on, or module. Our client sites all have this module installed, and clients can run it any time themselves.

Update your platform software often. A CMS makes backups a little more complicated, as the data is stored both in directories and in database tables. Here, too, add-on modules designed specifically for backing up can make this a one or two-step process. Often there’s more than one way to successfully back up a site. We recently described one reliable way to do so with the Joomla CMS. You can see the video on YouTube posted here:

Buy some cheap insurance. Before going on vacation when I was a kid, my father would always be sure to leave a few lights on. He said that was cheap insurance, and he was right. The best way to protect your website is to back up locally and then back up the backups. I recommend keeping a few inexpensive USB drives around for this purpose, including at least one stored off site with your latest web and other business-critical files safely filed away.

Enjoy what’s left of the summer. Until next time….