ACS Creative Inc

Why Integrated Marketing Matters

Integrated marketing matters because—simply put—your customers and prospects lead integrated online and offline lives. They move seamlessly between online and offline venues and expect a unified, cohesive experience wherever and however they encounter your business.

So how do you ensure continuity for your customers and prospects? Through executing highly integrated marketing initiatives across specific channels that your customers frequent and ensuring that your company delivers complementary cross-channel experiences on the backend.

Choose the Right Communication Channels for Your Customers

Successfully communicating with your customers and prospects depends entirely on how well you understand them so that you can choose the most effective channels for your marketing campaigns. Do you know the habits, motivations and expectations of a “typical customer” in each of your audience segments? What do your customers watch, listen to, notice, read or participate in? Where do they go for information (e.g., search the Web, contact friends, read reviews, get on the phone, go to a store) when they want to purchase a product or service?

The ways that you might reach your audience are many—through your Web site; TV, radio or print advertising; direct mail; email; search ads; organic search; blogs; online ads; social networks; mobile messaging; outdoor media and more. But if you market through channels that your audience fails to access on a regular basis, you won’t, of course, reach them—no matter how creative your marketing campaign might be. So first understand your customers—inside and out—so that you can focus your efforts on the set of communication channels that provides the best chance of reaching and connecting with them to ultimately drive business.

Provide a Cohesive Experience Across Channels

Customers build trust through experiencing consistent and seamless interactions with a company over time. Regardless of whether they visit your store, access your Web site, read email, call customer service or engage with you through social media—or any combination thereof—they expect to encounter consistent messaging, a predictable company “personality” and complementary information and support across channels.

Delivering consistency starts with an integrated marketing plan that not only coordinates messaging and offers to customers across channels but also ensures that campaign information percolates throughout your organization. Everyone who might interact with customers and every place where your customers might interact with you—customer service, support forums, sales channels, your blog, social interactions—need to get on board and incorporate that information to provide a familiar, connected customer experience. Few things will undermine customer confidence in your company more than encountering contradictory information or experiences.

Finally, if you’re incorporating social media channels into your integrated marketing plan, be prepared to do preliminary work in those channels before you launch your campaign:

• Listen
• Learn the culture
• Establish a presence
• Spend time cultivating conversations and relationships
• Build a reputation of helpfulness
• Share relevant, meaningful content when appropriate to deepen understanding of your company, build trust in your brand and help more people find you through search

The key across these channels is still consistency—of message, intent and service—to reinforce your company as a trusted and reliable partner. Then, when you finally do deliver that compelling call to action, you’ll stand a much better chance of triggering a response because it comes from a familiar and trusted source.

No One Said It Would Be Easy

Building cohesive experiences is the hard part of integrated marketing, but it’s also the part that most influences customer trust in your business or brand. Your customers have integrated their online and offline worlds. Now it’s up to you to integrate your marketing campaigns to meet their needs and expectations—and align your business processes to ensure that you deliver a cohesive customer experience across all your marketing channels. Let me know how we can help.

Why You Can’t Keep Ignoring Social Media

Social media is here to stay. And B2B and B2C companies that currently rely on only traditional marketing tactics can’t afford to ignore social media any longer. Consumers and B2B buyers alike are spending more and more time online to research potential solutions and services, seeking decision-making information and recommendations through user-generated content and reviews, microblogging platforms such as Twitter and social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn.

And like it or not, in the coming years social media will play an ever-increasing role in the way your business must reach out to attract and nurture prospective buyers and turn one-time purchasers into loyal customers who return time and again—and bring along their friends.

Do you need to make the case for social media marketing within your organization? Do you still need convincing yourself? Here’s a roundup of the latest facts and figures about the impact of social media on business—and why it’s so important you get started today.

Isn’t Social Media Just for B2C Companies?

Not so, reports digital marketing agency White Horse. B2B companies are participating in the social space but just aren’t as engaged as their B2C counterparts yet—and they face greater internal obstacles:

• Overall engagement is comparable: 82% of B2B companies and 86% of B2C companies engage in social media activity at some level
• More than 95% of marketers across both B2B and B2C indicate they have a social network presence (e.g., a Facebook or Twitter account) or plan to have one in the near term
• 40% of B2B—and 54% of B2C—companies devote one or more fulltime marketers to social media marketing
• More than 33% of B2B marketers report low executive support for social media, compared with only 9% for B2C marketers
• Top 5 internal obstacles to social media marketing projects—
• B2B: Insufficient personnel to maintain presence, lack of organizational knowledge, preference for traditional marketing, perceived irrelevance to field, need to prove ROI
• B2C: Insufficient personnel to maintain presence, concerns over negative feedback, need to prove ROI, lack of organizational knowledge, concern over loss of brand control

How Are Your Customers Using Social Media?

According to a recent Harris Interactive report,

• 64% of online adults use social media, including
• 78% of 18- to 34-year-olds
• 71% of 35- to 44-year-olds
• 59% of 45- to 54-year-olds
• 43% of adults 55 and older
• 84% reveal important information about themselves through social media
• 23% talk about companies, brands or products they like
• 19% provide product reviews and recommendations
• 26% reveal their dissatisfaction with companies, brands or products
• 34% of all online adults (and 44% of 18- to 34-year-olds) use social media as an outlet to rant or rave about a particular company, brand or product
• 45% of online adults say reviews from friends or people they follow on social networking sites influence their decision to use—or not—a particular company, brand or product; 33% are influenced by reviews that appear on blogs and message boards
• eMarketer estimates that in 2010, 57.5% of Internet users (127 million people) will use a social network at least once a month; by 2014, nearly 67% of all Internet users (164.9 million people) will be regular users of social networks
• From The Nielsen Company, more unique users (20% growth) spent far more time (45% growth) on social networks in March 2010 than in March 2009:
• Unique audience grew from 261.7 million to 313.7 million
• Total global minutes spent on social networks more than doubled
• Average time spent per user grew from 3.5 hours to just over 6 hours

What Are Your Competitors Doing About Social Media?

According to MarketingSherpa, 56% of organizations think social media is a promising marketing tactic that produces or will eventually produce measurable ROI and, perhaps most surprising, recommend increasing budget for it.

• Forrester Research predicts that B2B firms will spend $54 million on social media marketing in 2014—up from just $11 million in 2009
• Outsell estimates that marketing on social networks will grow 43.3% in 2010
• eMarketer reports that B2B participation in social media marketing is steadily increasing, and marketers are beginning to see opportunities to generate quality leads and position themselves as thought leaders in their industries
• 61% of businesses implement a social media marketing strategy to increase lead generation; 27% monitor the conversation about their brand, says R2integrated
• Onesource reports that B2B salespeople prospect on LinkedIn
• Unisfair declares that social media is the top emerging channel for lead generation among technology marketers
• eMarketer reports that when companies budget for social media marketing this year and beyond, a substantial portion of their expenses will go toward creating and maintaining a branded profile page, managing promotions or public-relations outreach within a social network and measuring the effect of a social network presence on brand health and sales

Stop Hiding Out—Join the Conversation

The fact is social media marketing will play a significant and increasing role in your marketing strategy for years to come. And that means you need to start participating now—in addition to using the tried-and-true traditional tactics that have worked so well for your business in the past. You’ve just been handed a fresh new set of marketing opportunities that are capturing the interest and actions of customers and prospects, so make the most of it! Toss your hat in the ring and join the conversation.

What Visitors Expect from Your Web Site

Have you ever wondered what visitors expect to find when they come to your Web site, whether through search or inbound links or by directly entering your site URL? Recent design and usability research completed by OneUpWeb shines a light on what’s important to people when they visit particular types of Web sites. Let’s take a look at what the findings reveal that might influence your next site redesign.

Great Expectations

In How Well Does Your Web Site Cater to Your Customers? we identified the general attributes that customers require—and desire—from a business Web site. This new research adds specifics for common types of businesses. Table 1 summarizes the findings about visitor expectations for ecommerce, B2B and travel and hospitality sites.

The top five expectations in each category tell the tale. For ecommerce sites, it’s all about easy-to-access pricing and total-cost information, a site design that elicits credibility and trust and visually appealing product presentations.

For B2B sites, information matters most. Prospective customers want to fully understand what your business provides and how your products or services will solve their particular problem or fulfill their need. B2B site visitors also expect to find a simple way to contact you when they’re ready to take the next step in the purchasing process.

Not surprising, travel and hospitality sites need to look good, but they also must provide exceptional functionality in key areas. Prospective customers want to see the rooms—not just read about them—and learn about the amenities you offer. But they also want to easily check on rates and availability and quickly book online if they choose to do so.

Use This Data to Revitalize Your Web Site

The next time you’re ready to redesign your business Web site, keep customer expectations top of mind and design your site to better meet those needs. For example, if your ecommerce site provides total-cost information only at checkout, perhaps letting prospects access that information earlier in the consideration process becomes your top priority. On B2B sites, maybe adding a glossary or FAQ or presenting your content in a more online-reader-friendly format will make the information you provide more accessible to prospects and first-time buyers. Likewise, if aesthetics matter in your line of business, make sure you provide high-quality—and highly efficient—media experiences backed by exceptional site functionality in the areas that matter most to your prospects.

Finally, remember that the more information you can gather firsthand about what your ideal customers expect from your Web site, the better. Understanding what they want to find and do on your site, then meeting—or better yet, exceeding—those expectations will make their decision to do business with you that much easier.

Strategies to Strrrretch Your PPC Budget

Ever wish you had a bigger budget for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or that your existing budget would go farther and produce better results for your business? If so, then it’s time to charge up your routine with some deliberate actions to stretch your budget and pump up the return on your PPC investment. Here are 10 strategies to set you off in the right direction.

1. Let ROI guide your spend

Suppose the PPC advertising cost for one of your keywords is $40 and produces $130 profit from sales, while a second costs $75 and produces $150 from sales. What’s your best strategy? Because the first’s ROI is ($130 – $40) / $40 = 2.25 or 225% and the second’s is ($150 – $75) / $75 = 1 or 100%, you can benefit from directing more of your budget to the first keyword to take advantage of the higher ROI.

2. Stop using automatic bidding

Automatic bidding is attractive—especially to PPC newcomers—because you set a monthly target budget and the tool takes care of the rest, adjusting bids to deliver the most clicks possible for your budget. Unfortunately, with automatic bidding you have no control over which keyword bids are raised or lowered, so you can’t adjust spend to take advantage of keywords that produce a high number of conversions or exceptional ROI.

3. Start campaigns aggressively so keywords build Quality Score

Don’t get off on the wrong foot by designating too small a budget to a new campaign. It takes a while for your keywords to build Quality Score, which results in better ad positioning at lower bid prices for you. Early on, watch but don’t worry if your ROI isn’t where you want it to be, but if that trend continues, take measures to improve the relevancy of your ad and landing page to increase click-through rate (CTR) and conversions for that keyword.

4. Gear your budget to top-performing keywords

Find the keywords that perform best for your business—those with high CTR, conversion rate and ROI. That doesn’t mean abandon all other keywords in your campaign (since you never know when the winds might change) but rather direct most of your spend to the keywords that pay off over the long run.

5. Pay attention to longtail keywords

In general, longtail keywords cost less in bidding and convert better than popular keywords. The reasons? Searchers using longer keyword phrases are generally fewer in number but are farther along in the buying cycle, know exactly what they want and convert more readily. If you simply must be present for popular keywords, try to find longtail versions to benefit from lower bid prices and higher sales.

6. Bid to secure optimal ad positions

Contrary to what you might think, you don’t necessarily need to be in the top 3 ad positions on the search results page to be successful. Check your analytics to determine the highest converting position for your keyword and adjust your bids to secure that position.

7. Stop advertising during unprofitable times of the week

Just because the Internet runs 24/7 doesn’t mean your ads need to. Schedule your ads to run when your customers shop, not during unprofitable times of the week. If you show few sales over the weekend or overnight, schedule your ads to run outside those times. This is an easy action to take that can lower your costs while only minimally impacting your sales.

8. Separate the wheat from the chaff

It’s advantageous to keep high-performing keywords in separate ad groups from low-performing keywords so that Quality Score doesn’t suffer. Remember that a higher Quality Score often rewards you with better positioning at a lower CPC.

9. Give local advertising a try

Often, targeting local markets for your ads pays off in finding customers who are looking for your products or services now. You’ll likely find that local advertising (i.e., geo-targeting) provides you with more impressions, a better CTR and a higher conversion rate.

10. Choose Yahoo! or Bing

If you must cut back on your budget or correct for an overspend, you might consider PPC programs in other advertising networks than Google. For example, because Yahoo! and Bing have a smaller share of the search market, CPC rates are typically lower and less competitive. You can always pause your AdWords campaigns while you invest your budget elsewhere or run campaigns across multiple networks if it makes sense for your audience.

Stay Nimble!

Most important, when it comes to PPC advertising you can’t become complacent in your routine and expect to succeed. The Internet is dynamic—what worked yesterday might fall flat today and what works today is likely to need tweaking in the future. To succeed, you don’t necessarily need more budget, but you do need to be nimble to adjust your strategy on the fly to get the most out of your budget and improve the ROI of your campaigns.

Don’t Overlook the Power of Local PPC Advertising

If you’ve shied away from targeting your PPC advertising campaigns for local search because you want to reach as many potential customers as you possibly can, now might be the time to rethink your strategy. People typically use local search because they have a problem and they’re specifically looking for someone in a particular geographic area to solve it. Furthermore, according to SearchEngineWatch,

• 54% of Americans use Internet and local search instead of phone books
• 90% of online commercial searches result in offline transactions
• 61% of local searches result in a transaction

Isn’t it time to reconsider local PPC advertising?

Ideal Candidates for Local PPC Campaigns

Localizing PPC ad campaigns can prove useful for local businesses that don’t want to attract customers outside the region they service. For example, if you’re a plumbing, heating and air conditioning company in Washington DC, you might create a local PPC ad campaign based on a 25-mile radius from your office location. Anyone in that area (as determined by the location of their ISP) who searches for your keyword phrases would see your ad; people outside your service area would not. So, you get in front of the most relevant prospects with a specific (and likely immediate) need for your services.

Localizing also can be useful for national businesses that want to target specific geographic locations. For example, if you’re national coffee retailer that wants to run a special PPC campaign just for the World Series champion’s hometown, you can do that through local targeting. Your special ad will only display on search results pages of searchers in that hometown or those who include that city in their search queries.

3 Ways to “Go Local” in Google AdWords

Google AdWords offers three ways for you to address a local market through PPC advertising: geo-targeting via campaign-level settings, geographically modified keyword phrases and managed ad placements within the Google content network.

Campaign-level settings. Probably the simplest and fastest way to target a specific location (or bundle of locations) for your PPC ad campaign is through the campaign-level settings that you provide when you set up your campaign. You can target the audience for your ad by country, state, city, distance from a specific map point (e.g., your company address) or a customized region that you specify. These settings will affect all ad groups within the campaign, so you might find it useful to set up different campaigns for different target locations.

Modified keyword phrases. Modifying the keyword lists in your ad groups to include geographic descriptors is an effective—if not tedious—tactic in local PPC advertising. The advantage is that your ads can entice people who have taken the effort to search specifically on location and seed keyword (i.e., they’re highly qualified prospects who quite likely will respond to an ad that targets their long-tail query).

The disadvantage is that generating the list of modified keywords (and quite likely modified ads and landing pages) can be tasking. For example, let’s say that you’re an Internet marketing firm located in Virginia, and you want to specifically target customers in Washington, DC. If your keyword list contained the phrase “Internet marketing,” you would need to add geographic descriptors in multiple ways to cover all the possibilities searchers might use in their queries:

• internet marketing washington dc
• internet marketing dc
• internet marketing in washington dc
• internet marketing in dc
• washington dc internet marketing
• dc internet marketing
• internet marketing 20001
• 20001 internet marketing
• internet marketing 20002
• 20002 internet marketing

While geo-targeting through campaign settings removes portions of a potential customer base, targeting through keyword modifications more assertively pinpoints prospects who stand a very good chance of becoming your customers.

Managed ad placements. The third way to take advantage of localized search is through manually identifying which content sites in the Google network you’d like your PPC ads to appear on. This tactic is particularly effective if there are certain sites in your community that your target audience frequents on a regular basis. These sites might include news sites, newspapers or magazines, sports sites or other highly trafficked sites—good places to advertise your local services.

Give Local PPC Ads a Try

If you haven’t tried out local PPC advertising, there’s no time like the present! As with all PPC advertising, you can start a campaign quickly and limit your spend to easily stay within your budget. Local PPC advertising can be more economical, too. Because the audience for your ad will be fewer in number than that of a US or global campaign, your CPC price will likely be lower. All in all, local PPC advertising just might provide the boost you need for your business.

Convince and Convert Your PPC Ad Traffic

Successful pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns rely on superior interplay among three key components: relevant keywords; specific, focused text ads and well-optimized landing pages. Finding the right keywords that resonate with your target audience and writing compelling ad copy that get searchers to click your ad on the search results page affect how well you generate traffic to your site. But the job of convincing and converting that traffic into leads or customers falls on your landing pages. Are yours up to the task?

Characteristics of a Great Landing Page

A landing page is simply a Web page that displays when a potential customer clicks your PPC ad. As such, any page on your site could serve as a landing page. But the best landing pages are those that you create and customize for the specific keyword and ad that will bring the potential customer there in the first place, with the single purpose of driving him or her to take the precise action you want taken—order a product, register for a white paper, sign up for a newsletter, get a free estimate, fill out a form.

And that’s not all: A great landing page also needs to engage the potential customer, build credibility and trust with your company and motivate that person to take action. That’s a tall order for any Web page to fill, but because a great landing page can significantly improve your conversion rate, it’s worth your while to spend the time and effort to make it as effective as it can be.

So what makes a landing page great? Check out the following 7 tips to help you create an effective landing page for your customers and your business:

• Simple is best: Build the page around a single offer and call to action. Resist the urge to pack the page with lots of other information about your company, other products/services you offer and similar information. Remove any distractions, such as unnecessary graphics or images that compete with your call to action, primary navigation links and anything else that might direct the visitor away from the task at hand.
• Ensure continuity with your ad: Your ad has set up an expectation for your customer that needs to be fulfilled on the landing page. Therefore, it’s important to incorporate both the language and the tone of the ad on your landing page and deliver on the expectation in the most efficient way possible.
• Make it easy for your customers to take action: Make sure your call to action is obvious, clear, direct and easy to understand for your customer. If your landing page is too complicated or your call to action doesn’t stand out from the rest of the content on the page, you run the risk that your customer will simply exit the page instead of trying to figure it out.
• Write copy that’s easy to scan and digest: Headlines, bulleted lists and image captions are all-important on landing pages because those are the elements that visitors first scan to determine relevancy to what the ad promised. Keyword use in headlines and text, lists of benefits and easy-to-understand descriptions that persuade are important components of landing pages. You can always include further details in a pop-up box if more information is necessary to convince your customer to take action.
• Keep your forms short: A good rule of thumb is to ask for and collect only the information you absolutely need to complete the transaction. If forms are too complicated or long, customers might decide the offer isn’t worth the effort—and move on.
• Build credibility and trust: Including a customer testimonial, logos of companies that endorse you (e.g., the Better Business Bureau) or a list of satisfied customers all help to reassure your customer and help convince them to convert.
• Put a thank-you page to work for you: Be sure to display a thank-you page after your customer has taken action. It’s a good opportunity to share additional information with them, provide another offer or invite them to click again to visit your blog, download another white paper or view other resources that they might find useful. You might even ask them to complete a simple poll or survey to collect additional useful information.

Test to Make Your Landing Pages Better

Once you’ve set up a landing page and established a base-line conversion rate for it through a tool such as Google Analytics, you can begin to experiment with different components and configurations to determine the composition that yields the best conversion rate. Plenty of companies provide tools and services—some free, some not—to help you optimize your landing pages for best results. For example, Google’s free Website Optimizer tool lets you perform powerful A/B and multivariate testing through an exceptionally easy-to-use interface. But, that’s a topic for another post!

In the meantime, focus on reviewing your existing landing pages and creating new ones following the tips presented in this post for (at least) the key ad groups that you target in your PPC campaigns. A little effort on your part will go a long, long way to increase the number of conversions you can get from PPC ad traffic.

Pay Attention to Good Website Design!

What is good Website design? If you Google good website design, you’ll find 35,600,000 or so results that you can peruse for helpful—and in some cases entertaining—information about how to make your Website just that—good.

Well, here at ACS Creative, we discuss and explore good website design all day – everyday. Working with clients from start to finish to ensure that their web properties provide the best possible user experience. But rather than start out by foisting our opinions on you, we thought it would be an interesting exercise to see what wisdom might turn up in that aforementioned Google search. So, my strategy for this introductory post about good Website design is to do precisely what you might do: Search on good website design, check out the listings on page 1 of the search results pages and see what nuggets of information rise to the top. It’s amazing that so many of these sites take only a “do as I say … not as I do” approach to good Website design. Despite that peculiarity, here are the nuggets (in no particular order):

1. Amy Zipkin, writing for the International Herald Tribune (the global edition of the New York Times), provides the why, if not the how: Good Web Design Can Mean Good Business.

2. eBizwebpages.com warns that if you “make a bad choice [on layout and design], it won’t matter how great your content is or how much advertising you do. If your site looks bad, no one will visit and those that do won’t stay long or buy anything.”

3. Taking a more can-do approach, Smashing Magazine’s article, 10 Principles of Effective Web Design, teaches you (among other things) how the folks you’re designing your Website for think:

• Users appreciate quality and credibility
• Users don’t read, they scan
• Users are impatient and insist on instant gratification
• Users don’t make optimal choices—they choose the first reasonable option
• Users follow their intuition
• Users want to have control

4. Vincent Flanders, who has studied bad Web sites for 13 years to formulate his ideas about what makes a site good, offers the following perspective:

"Great Web design is an art and occurs when design and content are seamless and you don’t notice its greatness. With great web design, it’s easy to find the information you need. The content makes you want to return again and again and, most importantly, great design gives credibility to the company/organization.”

5. Author Robin Williams, known for her style manuals The Mac is Not a Typewriter and The Non-Designer’s Design Book, takes a similar approach. She claims, “It is easy to make a dorky web page. It’s also easy to make a very nice, clean, professional-looking web page even if you don’t have much design experience. Often the difference … is simply a matter of eliminating certain features that are guaranteed to make a page look amateurish. … Keep in mind that the point of eliminating bad features is not just to make the page prettier, but to communicate more effectively.”

6. Ben Hunt, from ScratchMedia, offers these practical pointers about current Web style:

• Simple layout
• Centered orientation
• Design the content, not the page
• 3D effects, used sparingly
• Soft, neutral background colours
• Strong colour, used sparingly
• Cute icons, used sparingly
• Plenty of whitespace
• Nice big text

7. Matt Brown, the Dreamweaver Community Manager for Macromedia, states (in 3500+ words, mind you) that the key to good Website design is usability.

8. Usability is also the topic that has occupied the mind of Jakob Nielsen since 1994 (at least). Dr. Nielsen is an industry-leading author, researcher, and consultant on user interfaces, especially Web usability and Web design strategy. He’s the expert that many people love to hate because he doesn’t practice what he preaches on his own Website, UseIt.

Nevertheless, Dr. Nielsen’s research-based approach to Website design has provided the industry with some valuable insights about how “regular people” (not yourself, your company peers or your CEO) interact with the Web. In an Alertbox article, Aspects of Design Quality, he observes that a Website user’s experience is no stronger than its weakest link. “If any one usability attribute fails, the overall user experience is compromised and many users will fail.” The usability attributes he identifies are:

• Navigation—how users get around your site
• Content—what they’ll find there
• Features—what they can do
• Homepage usability—users spend 30 seconds or less here and only 50% will scroll down
• Search—the user’s lifeline for complex sites
• Accessibility—site ease-of-use for people with disabilities
• Web presence—how easily people can find you

9. Collis of PSDSTUT offers no fewer than 9 Essential Principles for Good Web Design because “Web design can be deceptively difficult, as it involves achieving a design that is both usable and pleasing, delivers information and builds brand, is technically sound and visually coherent."

10. At goodpractices.com, the recommendation is threefold, though vague:

• Choose a Web site design standard for your pages like “world wide accessibility” versus something less universal.
• Test, test, test to make sure your design features degrade gracefully in diverse Web browsing environments and screen configurations.
• Use commonly accepted good site design practices

Beyond Page 1—But Worth the Read

An excellent, timely article that did not show up on the coveted first results page (or on any of the top 10 results pages, for that matter) for good website design is the BNET article Obama v. McCain—Online! by Danielle Novy.

Curious about Website design tactics that the top two presidential campaigns pulled off the best, BNET asked CBS Interactive Art Director Marc Mendell to click through the Barack Obama and John McCain campaign sites and analyze their effectiveness, from a business point of view. His conclusions, well-supported by examples from the two sites, offer a blueprint for effective Web design today—an integrated approach to content, community and marketing:

Smart Design Guides Eyes to the Most Important Content…
…While Too Many Elements Confuse

A Consistent Look Encourages Readers to Consume More Information…
…And an Inconsistent One Can Drive Them Away

Subtle Visual Cues Can Reinforce the Brand…
…Or Confuse It Altogether

Easy-to-Use Tools Encourage Participation…
…But Difficult Ones Inhibit

Prominent Links to Social Networks Drive Viral Marketing…
…But Limited Options Kill the Potential

Happy browsing!

Your Competitors Are Doing WHAT on Their Web Site?

An important part of maintaining an effective business Web site is keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing. Not only can you get ideas for improving your own site, but you also might discover niche opportunities that can elevate you above your competition.

What areas should you look at when you review a competitor’s site? For starters, try using the same criteria that the Web Marketing Association uses to judge entries in its WebAward Competition. Let’s take a look.

Design

Design isn’t everything, but how a Web site looks influences a visitor’s expectations of the Web site as well as the business it represents. In a split second, a visitor makes the decision to stay or move on, and an obviously outdated design can undermine visitor confidence that a company is dynamic, professional and serious about meeting customer needs. So, how does your competitor’s site design compare to yours? Is its design extremely outdated, about the same or more up-to-date than yours? If the latter, then you’ve got some work to do.

Ease of Use

How easy or difficult a Web site is to use also affects whether a visitor stays or moves on. If navigation is clumsy or difficult to figure out, visitors will give up and find another site that makes sense to them. Put on a “customer hat” and check how easy your competitor’s site is to use. Do you have to scroll down to find information or take action? Is the text too small to read easily? Is the shopping cart atypical? And most important, is your site comparable to or better than the competition’s?

Copywriting

Readability and optimized-for-search are the two most important factors to evaluate in copywriting. To be effective, copy must resonate with existing and potential customers and enable them to find what they’re looking for from a search query.

When evaluating your competitors, use one of the online readability tools (e.g., The Readability Test Tool) to determine how readable its site is compared to yours—and most important, to your customers’ reading level. Does your competitor write directly to the customer (e.g., use second- vs. third-person language)? Does your competitor use industry jargon or the language that your customers use? How does your site compare?

To evaluate what your competition optimizes for in search, you have a number of alternatives to use. For example, you can scan the page titles, headlines, subheads and text throughout their site to identify the keywords they’re focusing on (if any). You can also check the page source (right-click anywhere on a page and select View page source) to see what keywords they’re listing in the keywords Meta tag. And, you can use a variety of tools (e.g., WebsiteGrader, SpyFu) to see what keywords those tools identify that the company is using for organic and paid search.

Content

In this day and age, content is king for a couple of reasons: search optimization and visitor satisfaction. Staying healthy in the search engines requires adding keyword-optimized original content to your site frequently, and satisfying existing and potential customers means that you need to provide valuable content that helps them solve a problem.

Blogs, white papers, reviews, video demonstrations, audio interviews and similar content all add to the user experience and the leads that your Web site can generate. So, what is your competitor doing with respect to content? Is its site merely an online brochure? Does your competitor offer a compelling collection of articles or user-generated content that’s popular with customers? (Use Alexa to measure traffic to a particular Web page.) And most important, what content are you providing that sets you apart from the competition?

Interactivity

Providing easy ways for site visitors to interact with your business is increasingly important for today’s Web sites. Whether you offer a blog that lets readers comment—good or bad, a nifty application that visitors can use or a white paper or video that visitors can pass along, providing the means for existing and potential customers to engage with you is of utmost importance. What do your competitors provide? What can you do to distinguish yourself from the norm?

Technology

This factor is tricky: Incorporate too much technology and you might turn off your visitor; use too little and you risk being perceived as outdated or out-of-touch with your customer. Look at a broad set of sites in your industry and consider what they offer. For example, check out the WebAward sites to see what’s considered “state of the art” for your industry. Then, compare that use of technology with what your specific competitor—and you—are using and adjust from there.

Innovation

Maybe the toughest factor to evaluate is innovation, the “wow” factor. Whether achieved through unique design, content, technology or interactivity, it’s often a difference-maker that elevates one site over another. How innovative is your competitor compared to you? Is there a way to turn your innovation into a value-add for your business that you can promote like crazy? Word-of-mouth (WOM) promotion is powerful, and offering a truly innovative feature on your Web site is one way to capitalize on WOM.

Compete and Win on the Web

Monitoring your competitors’ Web sites isn’t the be-all, end-all to an effective Web site by any means, but seeing what you’re up against will help you be more competitive in what you offer to existing and potential customers. Customer needs, design, content, personalization and “wow” all play a part in differentiating you from your competition. Make sure you keep your Web site in a position to compete and win online.

Who’s Driving Your Social Media Efforts?

Social Media 101 author, Chris Brogan, once blogged, “Social media is a set of tools and tactics that people use as part of their larger business communications efforts. … What are people doing taking titles like “Social Media Manager?” To me, this is a scary thing. Why? Because it’s like being the fax manager or the email manager. You’re naming yourself after a tool."

But if your business is just starting to incorporate social media into a conversational marketing strategy, establishing a point person to spearhead your efforts can make all the difference between “merely functional” and “highly successful.” Let’s look at the type of person best suited for a social media manager role and the responsibilities that person must tackle to successfully drive your social media efforts forward.

Who’s Best for the Role?

Whether you decide to tap an existing staff member, hire out for the position or work with an outside agency to manage your social media efforts, you need to focus on people that bring specific attributes and skills to the table.

For example, you definitely want to find someone who is passionate about your business and equally passionate about using social media to enhance customer relationships. Experience using social media—and using it well—in daily life is also an advantage. Other desirable attributes include:

• Inside-out knowledge of your company, products, services and customers
• An understanding of your business goals—and an appreciation of the roles marketing, PR and customer service play in helping your business reach those goals
• Ability to organize, lead and inspire a team
• Tech savviness, coupled with a zeal for engaging people
• Helpfulness, caring and the ability to look at things from another’s perspective
• Ability to handle a fast pace—and stress—effectively
• Discipline to stay on top of multiple demanding projects

In terms of necessary skills, your ideal social media manager must be able to think strategically to determine what to engage and invest in today to develop business for the future. Strong writing and communication skills are also a must, and the ability to build and retain relationships and foster trust in your company is crucial. Because your social media manager will handle a variety of projects and cross-functional teams, demonstrated project-management and people-management skills are important to look for. Finally, your social media manager will likely spend a lot of time training and mentoring others, so finding someone with effective training skills is imperative.

You’re Hired—Now What?

A social media manager’s job responsibilities can vary greatly, depending on factors such as company size, your organizational structure and the scope of your social media strategy. For example, perhaps your marketing director will determine your overall social media strategy, so your social media manager’s role will be to implement that strategy throughout the company. Or, if you’re a small business, the social media manager might wear numerous hats, from strategist to implementer to social networking ambassador.

But, job responsibilities typically fall into one of following five categories:

• Strategy. Strategy includes devising and communicating the direction your business will take with respect to social media. It also might include analyzing what’s already being done, organizing and streamlining existing practices and planning how to integrate tactics into existing job roles (e.g., marketing, PR, customer service) within the company. Strategy also might include establishing a social media policy or setting up guidelines for communicating effectively through social media channels.
• Content Creation. At the heart of social media is content, whether in the form of conversations, blog posts, podcasts, videos, Tweets, webinars and the like. Don’t look for your social media manager to “do it all”—but do expect that person to set up and manage the procedures and people necessary to ensure that your company produces compelling content consistently and reliably to fuel your social media efforts.
• Listening and Engaging. Social media is all about conversations and conversations are all about listening and engaging in the exchange of observations, ideas, sentiments and opinions. People converse with people, and your social media manager will ensure that your staff is inspired and prepared to actively listen and meaningfully engage with customers through social media channels.
• Measurement. Setting up and monitoring analytics to measure the impact of social media initiatives on your business goals is another important aspect of your social media manager’s job. Don’t skip this less-than-glamorous responsibility—establishing measurement tactics from the get-go will provide valuable information to shape your future strategy.
• Training. Your social media manager’s job is not to take away individuals’ responsibilities for online communication but to help them use social media effectively in their jobs. To that end, your social media manager might need to train people in using specific platforms and tools, social media etiquette, how to carry on a conversation, how to connect conversations to your brand, ways to handle negative interactions and similar topics.

Drive Your Business Forward

Integrating new communications practices into your business via social media is a necessary step your business can take to stay competitive in today’s markets. Finding the right person or agency to drive your efforts and ensuring that person or agency has the necessary skills and authority to carry out their responsibilities is an important first step to successfully putting social media to work for your business.

How Well Does Your Web Site Cater to Your Customers?

“Technology is changing your customer, and your customer will change your company,” reports Forrester Research CEO George Colony in a recent blog post. “The 2009 customer is unrecognizable from the 1999 customer. … If your business looks the same now as it did in 1999, you are risking irrelevancy."

How different is your business today than it was in 1999? And more specifically, how different is your Web site now than a decade ago? Because online technologies and consumer use of them has grown rapidly in the past several years, if your Web site looks and acts the same as it did even just a few years ago, you might not be supplying what your customers require—or what they desire—to do business with you. It’s a good time to revisit exactly how well you’re catering to your customers online.

What Customers Require

You might be tempted to think that what customers require from a Web site today isn’t much different than what they required 10 years ago—but that’s certainly not the case! The development and adoption of new (and superior) Web technologies since 1999 has escalated customer expectations—and often customers are quick to reject a business that doesn’t provide the functionality that they’re accustomed to using.

Here’s a short list of requirements that today’s customers expect a business Web site to deliver:

• Easy “findability” through search
• Valuable content that presents objective information to help with purchasing decisions
• A direct and clear path for completing specific tasks and actions as quickly and painlessly as possible
• A secure, easy-to-use interface for online purchases
• Interaction with you and others in brand-based and industry communities
• Experiences (e.g., authoritative content, authentic engagement) that build trust
• Compatibility with major browsers (e.g., Chrome, FireFox, IE, Safari)
• Accessibility in all screen resolutions
• Consistent messaging and seamless experience with offline channels
• Easy accessibility to your presence in social networks

What Customers Desire

Desirable Web site features are many and frequently focus on factors that help customers save time. Some desirables, though, are unique to specific types of businesses or industries. For example, if you’re an online retailer (think Amazon.com), customers might desire a custom, “smart” checkout system that takes advantage of personalization and past-purchase history over a basic shopping-cart system.

With that in mind, here are typical desirables that customers want today’s business Web sites to deliver:

• Readable text (e.g., large font size, dark text on light background)
• Professional design that supports and enhances task completion
• Easy-to-find information (e.g., onsite search functionality)
• Familiar, intuitive navigation
• Quickly scannable content (e.g., short paragraphs, bulleted lists)
• Obvious access to a corporate blog and social networks (e.g., large, easy-to-find tabs, links, buttons)
• Fast-loading pages
• Content and features (e.g., blog, tool, game) that spark and sustain interest and encourage exploration, engagement and visitor contributions
• Enhancements for mobile accessibility

Become a Caterer

So, how well does your Web site cater to today’s customers? If you’re like most businesses, on close inspection you’ll likely find there’s room for improvement. Perhaps you’re very good at meeting basic customer requirements, and for that reason, you’ve been content to maintain the status quo. But keep in mind that if you’re not taking strides to evolve with your customers online—and your competitors are—you won’t retain or grow your market share. Take time to determine how your Web site can better serve your customers. They—and you—will be glad you did.

Find the Right Web Design Firm for Your Next Project

Designing or redesigning your business Web site should be a positive experience that results in a finished product that looks great and performs superbly to meet your business goals. But with so many design firms in the marketplace, how do you find the one that’s right for you? With a little preparation, you can narrow the field and find a perfect match for your business needs.

Professional, Appealing Style

When considering a design firm, first check out its Web site. Do you like what you see? Is it appealing? Professional? Easy to navigate? Does the company provide a portfolio of work that you can readily find and browse through?

When you study the portfolio, look at the range of designs and the variety of businesses the company has designed for. Are the site designs unique to each business? Do the designs bring each business to life? Do the sites in the portfolio demonstrate that the design firm has experience creating features—shopping carts, custom Web applications, mobile accessibility—that you have in mind for your site? The portfolio provides examples of past work, so also ask to see examples of recent work to be sure that the company can deliver what today’s businesses need.

Many Skills, Deep Experience

Look for a Web design firm that offers deep experience in marketing strategy and graphic design and up-to-date technical expertise. You need a firm who knows how to partner your business goals with style and functionality so that you get the most marketing value for your investment.

Your ideal design firm will also have the knowledge to help you take advantage of Web marketing opportunities through blogs, search engine optimization (SEO), PPC advertising and social media. And it will design your site with “tomorrow” in mind to provide you with the greatest flexibility for updating your site in the future—whether you choose to continue your business relationship or go with another firm.

Friendly, Communicative—Passionate About Your Business

Most important, your ideal Web design firm must be a company you enjoy doing business with and have confidence in that they will deliver exceptional service. Do the firm’s designers offer a variety of fresh ideas? Do they strive to understand what appeals to you and your customers? Are they passionate about helping your business shine online?

Good communication is extremely important when you’re designing a new site. Make sure the firm you choose is on the same page with respect to how—and how often—you’d like to communicate regarding your project.

Great design firms employ talented, friendly, customer-focused designers who measure their success by the effectiveness of your business Web site. Look for a firm with designers who are patient and helpful, who listen intently to your needs and who help you understand the design process and your range of options. Finally, make sure the firm you choose has a deep enough well of resources to meet your milestones and complete your project on time.

Fair and Reasonable Pricing

Pricing for Web design projects varies depending on the complexity of the project. The larger or more complicated your site, the more you can expect to pay for your site design. Remember that the least expensive estimate you receive is not necessarily your best option—nor is the most expensive. A good rule of thumb is to choose a design firm that;

• Resonates with you
• Can deliver the Web site capabilities you need to fulfill your business requirements
• Provides a fair and reasonable price for the work you want completed

It’s a good idea to get a proposal or contract that spells out the work that will be done and the pricing for that work. Also, establish a price for work outside the scope of the contract that might emerge during the site design process.

Choose Your Best Match

Taking time to identify your needs and review potential Web design firms to find your best match will pay off in the long run—you’ll be happier and so will your customers. One final note—if you don’t already know ACS Creative, I invite you to take a look at our Web design portfolio. If you have any questions about Web design or ideas or experiences to share, feel free to leave us a comment.

Embracing Change to Continue Survival (and Growth)!

I worked for a rather affluent gentleman as a “handyman” throughout my high school years. His name was Mr. Jorgenson and he had a big house in the rich part of town. I would go to his home every Saturday morning and he would have list of jobs for me for the day. Stock his wine closet (I grew up in Florida and we did not have cellars), take his boats down to get fueled up, clean the spa and pools, and – my favorite job – organize and catalog the books and publications in his library.

He had thousands of books and over a four year period I cataloged them ALL (and without a computer, mind you). And, in his collection he had EVERY single copy of National Geographic from the time he was a child. I still stand in amazement at that accomplishment.

Now, what took him a life time of subscribing, receiving, storing, moving, preserving and cataloging, is being offered up for $199 on a 160GB hard drive (plus every other issues that he did not have prior to and after his life) from National Geographic.

What a bold marketing move on the part of the NatGeo. Newspapers and magazines have known for years that their industry as they have known it has been on the verge of collapse because of the new digital age. They have worked tirelessly to make sure that the change that takes place allows them to survive and not die (see what the world on digital magazines are going to look like in the coming years here). The NGS is a perfect example of an organization embracing change in the way they run and market their publication.

Hats off to you, National Geographic, for giving us one more great example of what it looks like to embrace change!