Online marketing news and resources.

It is only by being aware and responsive to site visitor behaviour that you will know what your customers are looking for and at the same time tell them you have exactly what they seek!

Website design is a precise and versatile instrument! Your online presence should be engineered to communicate. Your community of potential customers have to know: who you are, what you do, why you are different, your unique value proposition and real benefits.

If you communicate these key attributes effectively with the right design, the right words, and with a compelling call-to-action you’ll convert a visitor into an inquiry either by phone or online.

Insight-driven online marketing is increasing through digital channels as businesses start to understand web behaviour and combine this information with customer value and potential.

If you want more inquiries from your website, you’ll have to create a compelling call-to-action. Don’t assume people will search for your inquiry form. If you present an online inquiry form that is highly visible, then you’re influencing behaviour to a required outcome.

Instant response and actionable personalised email marketing campaigns based on online browser behaviour plus personalised website content are just two examples of the key goals your site should be enabled to provide. This can be critical in localised competitive marketplaces, such as here in Manchester and the North West, where rapid response will convert a lead to a sale.

Immediate follow up is absolutely essential! A potential customer extending a visit to read through your website and, who then makes an inquiry, will give you a much better chance of connecting with them and actually closing the sale if you follow-up immediately. Follow-up after 24 hours may be too late!

Communicating through your site marketing channels still means the three intentions you have for your potential customers: acquire them, develop them and retain them!

When the average online consumer visits up to five different sites before deciding to actually complete a transaction, it makes perfect business sense to ensure that awareness of your company branding places you absolutely into those five visited sites!

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are critical to understanding and acting upon the behaviour of your marketplace to achieve a desired outcome. Monitoring the response to your online marketing means looking at web traffic, conversion rates, average order values and website surveys.

Customer profiling by means of created ‘personas’, which act as a visual and mental model of the different types of people you want to use or buy your products/ services, can be ‘brought to life’ and used to test the entire site–user journey.

In the age of inexhaustible online consumer choice, the key to customer retention is understanding your customer’s real motivations and marketing to their needs, thereby creating a strong relationship. Whether through email marketing, newsletters, opt-in subscriptions and exclusive offers, the online medium allows you to engage and react in real time. You can quickly respond to behaviour changes, concerns, enquiries and requests and demonstrate how customer loyalty brings real value.

When a customer receives a service or product they like, they tend to come back – “can’t be bothered looking elsewhere”, is the usual reason given! However, examining a little closer, we can identify the underlying strategy your website design and marketing company should employ – and are the real reasons a satisfied customer is transformed into a repeat customer.

Here are the top four tactics :

- Basic User Testing
Try out your strategies with a few volunteers first before going ‘live’ or emailing to your market audience.

- Analytics
Visitor site data gives you constant feedback. Evolving your business is dependent on keeping attention on changing behaviours and modifying and adapting in response.

- Niche Communications
Target your email so they are always relevant rather than spam.

- A ‘Push & Pull’ Site
This translates as, “ I’m happy to give you more data and information if you give me value in return”.

If you don’t know exactly what works best on your individual web pages then your online marketing company must continually split-test every version so you really know what produces the response you want!

Split testing is an effective method of using software to determine which of two versions of a web page will produce the highest response. It allows you to identify the combination of factors that produce the highest conversion rate and return on investment (ROI) from your advertising budget.

Ideally carried out on a regular monthly basis, your web design company should be creating two separate variations of anything that a visitor or a prospect is exposed to which requires them to take an action, such as a web page, a PPC ad or a banner ad.

Split-testing takes the guesswork out of your online marketing campaigns by determining an ad’s click-through rate, form submission, enquiry request, newsletter opt-ins, special offer uptake and online purchasing. Splitting traffic between the two variations of the same element shows you which one produces the best response rate in order that results may be improved over time.

The split-test should be applied to the following items on your highest traffic web pages:

Headlines / Call To Actions / Offer / Sales copy / Images / Testimonials / Button styles / Navigation styles / Background colour / Phone number versus no phone number / Any prominent item positioned on the page.

A PPC campaign should split-test the text ads, SEO keywords and landing pages.

It’s important that the changes made are tracked so split-testing is not applied continually to the same version. One change only should be made and split-test where something is working. The exception being where something is not working. Then two very different sets of ads or web pages should be split-test to see which one produces the best results.

The explosion of social media has been great for growing the online community but time spent on content rich sites still dominates!

Even in our age of communication, which is everywhere all the time, people still of course, need the content which is communicated, to be real, relevant, interesting, useful and be acted upon! Great website design has to mean quality content too! From the site branding message to product/services information, newsletters, blogs, article downloads and outbound links.

In other words – and you’ve been told this to death – content is king, or, to put it more forcefully, omnipotent! It simply isn’t good enough for a website to be no more than a basic sales vessel – tested for SEO – but without content usability!

According to a recent online publishing survey, ‘content sites’ continue to command the majority of attention of internet users – from a total time spent of 34% in 2003, now up to 42% in 2009 – a 24% increase!
The percentage of time spent online with ‘content’ websites providing news, information and entertainment has grown despite the overwhelming popularity of sites like Facebook.

Following a six year analysis gauging time spent with commerce, communications, community, content searches each month, it was discovered that internet users are spending significant time with community sites, i.e. social media – rather than with communication sites whose main functions are email and instant messaging. Their 41% decline in the share of online time spent is because we now have the ability to conduct these activities more efficiently elsewhere

The emergence of Social Media and the development of online communities means consumers are significantly changing the way they spend their time online. This has caught the attention of businesses and is influencing their approach to online marketing strategies.

Whilst time spent on ‘community’ sites has grown, data from the survey proves that seeking out ‘content’ is predominantly the main activity and chief interest. It is ‘fresh content rich’ sites that continue to be places where visitors spend the majority of their online time. Most importantly, they provide a compelling environment, to which, businesses can attract visitors, e.g. by email marketing and develop significant CRM to increase sales conversion opportunities.

Seen by many as the latest sign of the relentless ‘rise of the machines’, Wikiasari is a search engine taking the next evolutionary leap forward to where human meets algorithm!

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The client is always right but a web designer knows best! They should listen to each other to avoid failure!

A website exists for ONE reason only – to generate leads.

If you have conducted an effective online marketing campaign, you will have achieved the following results:

- attracted a high volume of word search visitors
- received increased genuine enquiries
- followed up on quality leads
- successfully increased sales conversion

However, this all looks good in theory but we all know how difficult every step of the way can be, especially if your website fails to perform. The key is to unmasking the real reasons why websites fail. One of the most common reasons is the inability of client and designer to really understand each other.

Time and time again, a client will endlessly emphasise that the website should present their organisation as ‘professional’ and get hung up in the “look” instead of concentrating on a website that:

- focuses on results (i.e. inquiries)
- attains high search engine rankings

Finding a balance between what someone wants and what will actually work is often the biggest challenge. Often web designers will just carry out what the client wants. The results can be disastrous! The website will be go live for months on end and be almost impossible to find on Google, Yahoo or other search engines.

Website design must be left to the experts! Yes, it should reflect your organisation, who you are, where you are, what you do, but a professional and experienced designer will be careful to carry out the right research by asking many questions about your company.

Understanding the answers to those questions, and then working closely with you to design a website that delivers results and creates a great return-on-investment for you, is the sole objective you should be both working towards.

And remember, websites will not and do not close sales. This is a very common misunderstanding! There is no substitute for the skilled sales professional who will promptly follow-up on inquiries via email or telephone!

Businesses get into the regular habit of sending the company marketing email when they have nothing new to say and don’t even stop to think about what or why they are emailing in the first place!

Incredible, but sadly, all too true amongst many businesses, sleepwalking through their regular online marketing schedules!
Developing and sustaining customer relationships is a technique to be constantly refined, and email marketing is a great way to stay in contact and call your customers to action.

A campaign has to be carefully pre-planned if you want a decent return on your efforts.

At the outset, clearly define what your goals are. If you’re launching a sales campaign, too much content will either confuse, dilute and ultimately weaken the key message, distracting the recipient from the main goal of sending the email.

A newsletter should only be sent when you have something to say. Yes, real original news! People are subscribing to you to receive genuinely new, informative and relevant content and will opt-out almost immediately, to prevent having their inboxes cluttered up with any more spam, if they see a lack of real purpose or interest in your mailouts. Content really is king!

It will boost your response rates to place subscription forms on your site with an outline of what your subscribers can actually expect to receive. Just briefly stating exactly what you are intending to send them will help them to decide whether to sign up. Some might just not bother if there is a lack of info or if you are too vague about what they will receive.

Always remember that ‘Less is More’. Emails that are too long will rapidly lose the reader’s interest in what you have to say. Most recipients just skim across the sentences, picking out keywords that they find of specific interest to them. Obviously, your meticulous pre-planning will have ensured those all-important keywords are put strategically into place!

Any additional info can always be put into a summary article that has many links in it, directing them to the full articles on your site.
Linking through to interesting media from your own newsletter will obviously depend on your business type.

An experienced and professional web design and development agency will always stress the importance of linking to interesting articles, relevant and funny news stories and videos. Mass appeal content will have your subscribers forwarding on the email to their friends and colleagues – a sign that your email marketing campaign is actually working!

Putting good information out there is all about creating a community of like-minded people who want to see a website resource operating at the best possible levels.

Website designers like to post helpful advice on their own sites and web forums. It shows their true obsession with all things web design related and a genuine concern for their craft.

We would like to think that most business folk have got the message by now, and understand the vital importance of the key design elements that their website must have, if online marketing campaigns are to function correctly, i.e. by directly attracting and keeping them in touch with their targeted marketplace, increasing sales conversion and edging their brand position forward.

A well-designed, attractive and fully ‘optimised’ website is, like an original high street shop window display, the single most important marketing tool to create a formidable online channel bringing in regular and frequent customers through your virtual shop door!

Launching an email marketing drive and investing in a PPC campaign is only going to prove worthwhile if your interested visitors – who are your potential new customers – respond by spending a few moments clicking onto your site and are offered a positive experience.

So, what makes for a ‘bad’ website experience?

A recent online questionnaire produced an interesting set of results which gives a percentage breakdown of what a site visitor finds most irritating and annoying:

• Intrusive adverts (e.g. pop-ups) - 41%
• Not being able to find what you need – 29%
• Pages taking a long time to load – 14%
• Poorly written content – 9%
• Poor search results – 7%

Knowing what visitors seek and expect to find when they enter your site will make the crucial difference to whether they will stay or click away. Google search engine algorithms are now very sophisticated! They are constantly modifying and improving their search word parameters.

A professional web developer will make it his concern to be monitoring the latest search engine behaviour and word search visitor characteristics in order to design the most attractive, compelling and SEO efficient sites.

You will always need the advice of an experienced website designer fully informed of the latest online developments!

“ What’s this all about, does it really work, and how will it make me money?”, are the questions you tend to hear when Social Media is mentioned!

Businesses have set key goals to attract online customers to their web sites. Top of the list is to drive increasing word search visitor traffic by climbing up the Google page ranking. Most businesses understand that search engine optimisation works by means of analysing the history of actual words visitors have used when looking for particular goods and services that you offer.

Pay Per Click campaigns and email marketing are all strategies designed to not only attract attention and position your brand but also to create a relationship with a prospective customer. They are popular because performance is easily monitored and statistics driven.

Social Media is all about starting instant and informal two way conversations in real time. It aims to reduce the distance between you and your audience by opening up multiple ‘destination messaging and listening channels’. It is has become a potent visible messaging and ‘soft’ advertising medium to generate traffic from different social network mediums, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube.

Twitter is a phenomenal success, ranked as one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide. It is the third most used social network, drawing a total number of 45 million monthly visits, of which 6 million are unique !

In 2009 alone, Twitter has seen the biggest growth of unique visitors year on year, up by 1,926%. Contrary to commonly held perception, the largest share of their audience is 35-49 year olds at 33% whilst 77% of audience are 25-64 year olds!

In fact throughout 2009, business has turned to Twitter in a big way. It is recognising the added value of incorporating Twitter into their online marketing mix along with other recognised traffic driving tools.

Daily Twitter feeds, regular strategically published SEO articles and frequent blogging all aim to keep your brand visible through an online presence which is constantly active with relevant exciting, fresh content.

The next generation is now learning how to write HTML in high school, yet some businesses are just getting to grips with CMS!

Providing a professional web design service in Manchester and the entire Cheshire region has a distinctive aspect attached, namely, helping the local businesses to attract and communicate effectively with their immediate surrounding geographical customer base.

Maximising your CRM ( Customer Relationship Management) means truly understanding and knowing the ‘language’ your prospective customer speaks and how and why they are likely to respond. It’s a crucial element to creating successful online marketing campaigns.

But it’s not the only ‘language’ a web developer must get right!

Websites are designed to operate with the efficient use of content, the delivery of which, involves many different implementations like markup languages (HTML, XHTML, XML) and plug-ins (Flash, QuickTime Java). These are used to encode and lay out different forms of media like text, images, videos, Flash, and others into a recognisable and accessible medium for viewing.

Compliance with W3C standards, which drove forward the use of XHTML and XML in relation to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), has revolutionised layout design for incredible website accessibility, in a breathtaking short period of time.

Websites have two types of pages: Static and Dynamic:

Static pages only change form when manually manipulated, which means that they have to be tended to constantly for updates.

Dynamic pages, however, change form and content according to input and interaction, as well as changes in environment, including that of the user, time and changes in database. This means that they adapt to input on the client side, bringing in a more user-oriented development of a website, using client-side scripting languages like JavaScript.

Website design  has come a long way, in just under 20 years!  Before the development of HTML, simple hypertext was limited to the use of browing information on one single computer!