Website Development Archives - Page 5 of 9

18 February 2016

Can’t see the fundamentals for the trends?

Creating a meaningful website

Natural photos and bold colours. Hero sliders and parallax feature strips. Material Design and micro-interactions. These were among the trends to watch in 2015 and the predictions for 2016. Trends are ever-changing – otherwise, they wouldn’t be trends! – and it’s important to keep up with current design and navigation preferences to give your website visitors the user experience they are seeking. However, in our rush to keep up with the online Jones’, it’s important that we don’t get lost in the trends and forget about the basic principles of a good website. If you fail to deliver meaningful, relevant content and a welcoming, accessible user experience, you’ll end up with a pretty-looking website that still fails to engage your target audience.

Giant redwood trees, Felton, California — Photo credit: Jupiterimages / Creatas / Thinkstock / 86532049

So, what are the fundamentals?

Above all, identify your business objectives: What does success look like for your business? What does your website need to offer to help make that happen? What do you want visitors to accomplish on your site? What unique value do you offer them?

Next, define your target audiences: Who are you ideal customers? What do they want to achieve when they come to your website? What sort of content are they looking for?
Develop a strategy and stay focused: How will your website help your leads, qualified prospects, and customers achieve their goals? What web elements will complement your customer engagement efforts and facilitate your sales process? How can you make your site inviting and useful without being cluttered?
Develop your site structure with the user in mind: How does your target audience want to interact with you? How should your site menus be set up so that your valuable content is easy to find? Does your site navigation enable your visitors to achieve their objectives each time they visit?
Invest in the creation of compelling, intelligent content: Is your content written specifically for the web to ensure easy scanning and readability? Have you added engaging graphics, video, and audio to augment the text? Is your content truly relevant and valuable to your target audience?
Make it easy for your audience to communicate with you and share your content: Do you have easy-to-use contact and feedback forms? Sharing buttons? Links to your social media channels?
Incorporate SEO: Did you consider Search Engine Optimization, with relevant and on-trend keywords, tags, and messaging throughout your website? Have you identified where you can provide links to external content and expert resources, and which of those expert sources are willing to provide links back to your content?
Foster ongoing lead generation and nurturing: Do you have Calls to Action (CTAs)that drive visitors to your website in all your promotional campaigns, social media activities, and events? Have you published blogs or articles that establish your expertise and set you apart from your competition? Have you implemented workflows that nurture leads through your sales funnel?
Evaluate and respond to your website traffic– Have you set up analytics tools to assess site traffic, performance and achievement of goals? Have you asked your audience for feedback on whether your site is meeting their needs? Do you have a process in place to follow up on that feedback and the results of your analysis?

Whatever the current trends or the “next big thing” may be, these essential building blocks for a successful website never change. So go ahead and add that widget or wiz-bang feature that you heard about on Twitter, but make sure they are building on, not taking the place of, your strategic, content-driven foundation.

One last thought worth mentioning: In some cases, the lines between trends and fundamentals are blurred. Case in point: Responsive Web Design has held a prominent spot in “Top 10” lists of trends for the last few years, but this has moved beyond trendy to become a design imperative – a fundamental – given the predominance of smartphone and table browsing today. Similarly, well-implemented micro-experiences promise to make a user’s interaction with your site simple, streamlined and personal. For example, “web applications where, instead of transferring to a new screen to enter some data or complete a task, the cell simply adapts to allow the task to be completed right there on the spot.”^{^[i]} Think also “of funny images, expressions, hidden functionality, smart personalized data and more.” [ii] But as appealing and user-friendly as these elements are, they will still fall short if the proper groundwork isn’t laid first.

A shrewd strategy, well-crafted content that delivers real value to your prospects and customers, and carefully considered measurement and follow-up are the roots of an effective website that will convert leads, close business, and delight customers. Make sure you can see the forest despite the trees.

[i] Source: “Web design trend predictions for 2016 – 2017” by Matthew Mombrea for Bytestream, IT World.

[ii] Source: “Top Web Design Trends To Watch In 2016” by Tomas Laurinavicius for Forbes.I

11 February 2016

The Marketing Process Has Changed – Has Your Content Kept Pace?

It’s old news that customers have changed how they shop and buy. Thanks to the Internet, customers have a massive amount of information, reviews and feedback on virtually anything they want to buy, and they seek it out prior to making a buying a decision. Consumers are more in control of their purchasing behaviour than ever before. This changing dynamic has developed a new approach towards the marketing and sales process.

Companies like SharpSpring realized this discrepancy and created software tools to help create, manage and analyse inbound marketing tactics. A new perspective has evolved out of necessity to better address consumers needs. Sales and marketing are starting to work in harmony to provide a seamless experience along the prospect – consumer – brand ambassador journey.

This never-ending process is aptly depicted by Altimeter’s Dynamic Customer Journey (shown below). It’s not so much a marketing funnel or sales cycle, but an ongoing experience controlled by the customer as to how and when they choose to seek information and buy.

So what does this shift mean for your organization? How do you attract, convert, close and delight new customers? Radical inbound marketers will tell you that the old ways of marketing (e.g. broadcast media, such as newspapers, television, direct mail, cold calling) are falling on deaf ears and a waste of time. Obviously, that isn’t totally true. But, it is true that consumers are less likely to listen to uninvited messages that tell them why they need something. Consumers are now motivated to seek out the information they want, whenever they feel they need it. The intent and tone of what they seek will be to inform and enlighten, not to sell them.

Your target market may be more interested in a blog, review or rating, than a corporate brochure online. In fact, prospects often seek out information provided by anyone other than the manufacturer/seller of the product/service. They are seeking seemingly unbiased opinion (yes, I realize that is an oxymoron) to help clarify their buying decision.

For this reason, content generation has become one of the primary marketing efforts to inform, educate and subtly persuade. (Yes, marketing is still about persuading.) A mind-numbing plenitude of content is poured into the ether every day in the form of web pages, blogs, reviews, whitepapers, posts, comments, ratings, videos, presentations, animated graphics, photos, emails, texts, podcasts… Realizing that you need a content strategy to help position your information with your target market is the easy part — how do you effectively get your message to the right people at the right time?

There is no quick fix or easy means of successfully reaching out to your desired audience. Being noticed among the clamour of content relies on several skills (strategic marketing, product/service/industry knowledge, editorial strength, creative prowess, online media familiarity, SEO expertise), time (it is largely an organic process) and money (unless you are capable of doing it all yourself). Hence the growth in content marketers, strategists and experts. Taking advantage of such a professional or competent agency is probably a smart marketing investment. Certainly, including content as a central component of your marketing plan will help you to successfully reach your target audience and maintain a relationship with them.

27 January 2016

Twitter’s Changing. Are You?

Twitter recently announced changes to its icon and banner sizing. On top of changing the dimensions of the images themselves, they have made their visible area 1260 x 330 pixels, not counting what your profile picture covers.

As a result, you will likely have to resize your images and maybe even redesign them. While you’re at it, what better time to do a brand audit and evaluate your visual presence across social media?

PROSAR has created an infographic to help ensure your new and improved designs meet specifications. Do keep in mind the visible area could be smaller than actual dimensions and keep important branding to the centre of the images. Here are some tips for conducting your brand audit:

1- Look at All Your Properties

This will help you determine what the best visual language for your brand is. While most social properties follow the general principle of “square profile image, wide but short banner”, some properties have much smaller profile images (such as Instagram, not to mention the size of icons within the feed itself) while others are rectangular. You want to create a design that can seamlessly integrate across channels you’re actively using.

This is also a good time to evaluate the usefulness of each social channel and either revitalize or cut any that have lapsed.

2- Ask Where You Want to Go

Your brand should reflect your audience, current position, and future aspirations. It could be you’ve had to grow your company slowly as you start out, or your direction has changed. As you evolve, your brand should evolve with you.

Ill-fitting imagery to your current situation will make your social media properties hard to recognize and inspire less confidence. Refreshing your brand regularly to reflect your current market position helps you stay current and relatable.

3- Look at Trends

While it’s never advised to follow every trend to the letter, looking at what other brands are doing can give you an idea of what to take advantage of and what’s here to stay. It can also give you a point to stand out by going against the grain.

You don’t want to be formulaic, but you do want to be current. Even the most timeless brands need updates every once in awhile.

Overall

Social media changes are a perfect opportunity to refresh your brand. Take the little extra time to create an engaging, fresh approach to continue engaging with your target audience.

13 January 2016

Is Astroturfing Smart Content Generation?

We live in a time when most consumers, for both B2C and B2B, search the Internet to find information and solutions. They may not buy the product or service online, but they’ll often know exactly what they want to buy before they contact the supplier.

This demand for information has fostered a new era of content generation; and in a myriad of formats: blogs, articles, press releases, white papers, case studies, PDFs, interviews, chats, posts, texts, infographics, animated graphics, photos, slide shows, webinars, RSS feeds, videos, podcasts… An overwhelming and never-ending deluge of content designed to entertain, inform and educate (and ultimately persuade) you. Your expectation, as a consumer, to find an abundance of relevant and available information has spawned more information in the past decade than the world has ever produced in its history. This content generation is all for you, do you feel special?

Marketers would like you to feel special. They would especially like you to heed their content, see the wisdom in their information and subscribe to their solution. But, more often than not these days, you’re not listening. And, it’s not just the deafening cacophony of all this content shouting for your attention. Many consumers aren’t listening because they are distrustful of branded sources of information.

Corporations are working hard to build their brand online and earn your attention, maybe even your loyalty. While many consumers are skeptical of corporate motives, preferring instead to place their faith in the online reviews posted by strangers. The Internet has democratized the age of information.

What’s a corporation to do to cut through the noise and gain your attention, when your ear is tuned to other consumers rather than corporate messaging? It may be tempting to help sway public opinion with some guided content masquerading as consumer-posted blogs, comments or testimonials.

From Wikipedia: Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by grassroots participants.

Essentially, astroturfing is corporate content posing as unbiased, public support to positively position a product, service or brand. This is done via a fake blog (flog) or website, fake reviews, endorsements, comments, etc.

Some marketers may simply see this as a form of online guerilla marketing. Marketing is about persuasion after all, what could be better than packaging information in a manner that will readily be accepted by the targeted audience? If the information is correct and true, does it matter how it is presented to the public?

I believe that it does, and that consumers see it this way as well. Astroturfing is disingenuous; it is the opposite of grassroots support, which is a primary objective of most branding efforts. Along with n aspect of information democracy, the Internet has facilitated greater transparency. Consumers may not expect more from their brands, but now they can often determine how well brands are living up to their messaging. It is incumbent on corporations and marketers to proceed with integrity. When it comes to building awareness, trust and positioning a brand — fake it ‘til you make it is not a good philosophy.

Engaging in astroturfing is misleading at best, and never a good way to try and build a consumer relationship. Establishing a strong brand and earning consumers’ attention and loyalty takes time and money to do it right. The corporations that invest in insightful and worthwhile content, who listen to their audience and invite a dialogue, who are genuine in serving their consumers’ needs — these are the brands that will rise above the cacophony and build loyal relationships.

For some guidelines on creating good content, check out Donna Kind’s Back to School: Content Generation 101.

For some thoughts on using social media to engage your consumers, check out Alexa Oliver’s Customer Service Is Social.

What are your thoughts on astroturfing; where do you draw the line when creating content for consumers?

6 January 2016

Sharing Across Demographics

There’s a lot of talk about how to gain traction in social sharing spheres. “Engagement” has an almost buzzword quality to it, something important but you’re never quite sure what it means. It’s a very broad term that encompasses a large number of best practices, from including photography to what time you send out your posts.

But have you considered that you should engage differently based on age?

The Numbers

Adweek published an infographic outlining how sharing changes by demographic and social channel. While there are trends in the data — those over 70 were the least likely to engage period— there are some nuances that can influence your social strategy.

Facebook is the overall most trusted media source, outranking newspapers and TV for branded information. But if you’re looking to reach the 18-22 market, you might want to consider YouTube or even Snapchat.

Surprisingly, the 18-22 market and 23-30 market engage with branded content much differently than each other, and even more differently than their non-millennial counterparts. 18-22 year-olds were tied for second in answering “I am unlikely to share any of the above with my network,” meanwhile 23-30 year-olds ranked last in agreeing with that statement.

For marketers, this simply emphasizes researching your audience before you dive in with the strategy you think will work. While some principles of engagement can apply across the board, the nuance of working with millennials and digital natives can be difficult to grasp.

What to Do About It

Your online marketing strategy should reflect your audience, but this data reveals just how nuanced “your audience” is. Even within millennials there’s a divide around mid twenties.

Some of the trust statistics might also come as a surprise, especially with branded blogs ranking so low. While this doesn’t devalue the importance of a blog, it does point to needing diversity in your content generation strategy.

The younger your audience, the more you must base your online content strategy around them. Social media has always been about relationships, but this is doubly true for those who have grown up on the Internet. Sales tactics tend to make them mistrustful, and they want content that serves them instead of feeling manipulated.

This makes inbound principles even more critical. You have to delight your audience for them to keep engaging and trust your brand. Obvious sales tactics are out for the younger audience skews; and since they are slowly but surely taking over the market, you can’t afford to be left behind.

18 December 2015

To be or not to be Social? That is the question

When I first started working in Social Media, it was still an option to be or not to be social. Some companies chose to remain off the radar in social media (and might have suffered, let’s remember the Toyota recall crisis) and others like Starbucks, went all out on social and offered any possible fun thing to do to their customers. Nowadays, it is no longer an option not to be on social media. Although some have tried (and failed) to take down Facebook or offer another alternative, like Ello, it has become an apparent truth, in the last year, that social media, and its advertising, are here to stay and have become an important part of any online strategy.

Last year, I wrote an article about what to prepare when doing your first social audit. Since then, I have worked with different clients in different industries and one thing constantly came up: Managers all want to do the audit and recognize its value but have no time to look over competitor accounts and the hundreds of posts that are being published and shared. Another thing that became obvious was that a social media audit cannot only be done once at the beginning but should be part of a strategy and an exercise that is done throughout the year.

So, instead of going through the steps again, I have some new advice and reasons why you should follow it!

Top Tip of the Day (and only one today):

BE ON SOCIAL MEDIA and

seek help to do it right!

Now, here are the top 3 reasons why you should choose that route:

The landscape is always changing

My number one tip is always to look at the competition and what they are doing when starting your social media audit. The only difference that I am adding in now is that your competition is not stupid and will also be adapting their strategy. I have often seen a competitor that wasn’t doing much on social turn it around almost overnight and you feel that by the time you give your report, the information in it is just not right anymore. Now, of course you cannot predict what your social landscape will look like but when dealing with a Social Media Consultant, they have been on the networks for a while and can pick up on certain trends or know what to look for when looking at your competitors. They can provide you with social media best practices based on what your competition is doing right and could be doing better or that could help you stand out from the crowd. And as a professional, even after the first look, you keep a close watch on the accounts you’ve been auditing to see if there are any surprising turn of events or a piece of content that went viral. Indeed, I spend my days on social networks, following the news, looking for the trends and managing my communities. Those many hours spent online give you a certain edge and a different perspective or approach when looking at a new landscape for a client. As a business owner, you are constantly in your industry and not always able to look at it with a fresh pair of eyes and compare it to other industries and their best practices.

Data, data and some more data

We live in a world where every click, post or word can be analyzed and compared. We have so much data available to us that we honestly don’t know what to do with it. In a recent article, Vala Afshar from Salesforce, was stating that companies were analyzing less than 1% of the data available to them. In that same article, he also quoted that 90% of the world data was created in the last 12 months. All in all, you could try to look at your Google Analytics on your own and interprete the many conclusions that can be extracted but you might want to make sure you still have someone running your business in the meantime because it might take a while and you might not be able to stop once you’ve started. The advantage of finding an agency like PROSAR to help you not be too overwhelmed is that they will have an entire team looking at different sets of data and making it all a little more accessible to you. I always like to say that they translate all the data into human terms!

There is so much that you can do

Finally, one of the main reasons why you should be on social and seek help for your audit is because there are so many options available to you and so much that you can do. Before, it was easy. Whatever would come up in the audit, you could almost predict that there would be some blog posts recommended, social media accounts being opened and a first step into the world of social. In that sense, the audit would help you determine the best topics for your client’s audience to meet their goals. But now, you could be looking at blogs, forums, moving images, videos, webinars, podcasts, soundbits, social media posts, advertising, influencers, lookalike targetting and the list goes on.

So how can you know what’s best? Or what will work? Here is where the perfect PROSAR solution can be a great start. We will work with you to better understand your industry and explain to you what is going on in your own personal social media landscape. You will be involved every step of the way so that the final result is a plan that takes into account your own business goals and has traits of your own personal flair. Because no matter what, on social, the best way to go is to produce content that is true to you and your company values. And we will help you get there!

8 December 2015

10 SEO Strategies to Achieve Higher Exposure in Google

If you were to ask Google

“how can I help my website compete better in the search results?”

you’d likely get their standard response of

“focus on providing excellent, relevant content”.

They’re not wrong. In fact they’re absolutely right, but that advice is not particularly helpful. Is it? So, what is helpful? The following 10 strategies will help you improve your organic SEO. (You’re welcome.)

1) Include Images on Your Product Pages

Having images on your product pages not only improves user experience, they’re also an additional opportunity to send information about your product directly to Google. By adding relevant alt image tags, image file names, and captions – all with important keywords, you’ll help your product page rank better for those keywords and their variations.

2) Get External Links Directly To Product Pages

Getting links from other websites to your website is a vital SEO activity, but to get your product pages ranking well, you need to do more than get links to your homepage. You’ll need to get links from relevant sources to point to your actual product pages. In general terms, the more relevant links you get to a product page, the better that page will rank in the search results. (Also read our article on Google Will Ignore Your Link Building Efforts Unless You Focus on Quality)

3) Properly Describe Your Products

Sometimes companies are too brief when they describe a product. Perhaps all they include is why it’s different from the other products they offer. Perhaps they simply include a few simple specs because they assume their target market doesn’t need to know more. If, however, it’s important for the product page to rank well, it’s best to take a step back and tell a wider version of the story. Discuss the problem your product solves, include the features and benefits, use a variety of keywords related to the product, and give the page’s visitors a compelling reason to buy the product. It’s important to remember that every page on your website is a potential landing page, therefor, for every page, you should endeavor to create content attracts people.

4) Add Customer Reviews and Ratings to Your Product Pages

Google knows that these provide a good user experience so they’ll reward businesses for it through higher rankings. For some industries, such as hotel accommodation, ratings even show up along with your search result, which really makes your search result stand out. It’s therefore worth brainstorming with your marketing people on how to encourage your customers to provide reviews and ratings. Furthermore, the presence of favorable reviews and ratings will boost your sales.

5) Encrypt Your E-Commerce Pages

When purchasing over the internet, there’s a definite advantage to your personal information being sent securely. Many e-commerce websites do this properly. You can tell it’s secure when the URL begins with https. But unfortunately, not all e-commerce websites implement this, so Google has added this as a ranking factor to better promote sites that are secure over those that aren’t. Furthermore, after implementation, you may find your sales improving because people who spot the https, and recognize its significance, now find your website more trustworthy.

6) Include Location-Specific Keywords

Ensure you mention your target geographic area on all your product pages and, whenever possible, try to include as many variations as possible, such as city abbreviations, and specific areas as possible, such as neighborhood names and even postal codes.

7) Claim or Create Your ‘Google My Business’ Page

‘Google My Business’ is the most recent name for Google Plus business profiles. Google automatically set up a lot of these for businesses. Many of them have never been claimed, and a significant portion of these have either outdated or incorrect information. Start by looking for yours. If you find it, there’s an option to claim it, and this gives you the ability to manage the content. If you don’t see an existing one, create one. Use as many fields as possible regarding your location, phone number, business hours, and company description. Keep in mind you can add links to your product pages from within the description. Also add some flattering images. Many companies disregard ‘Google My Business’ because it’s not as prominent a social network as Facebook or Twitter, which is correct, but they’re overlooking the SEO potential for local businesses. Often, when people search for local businesses, Google will show ‘Google My Business’ listings within the regular search results, and often this is accompanied by a map with pins for each business. Being here is can really drive traffic. Also, it will be possible that when people search specifically for your business, they’ll see a prominent “knowledge card” to the right of the search results. This is all about your business, includes either images or a map, and can really contribute to the perceived status of your business. Furthermore, if you can promote ratings, as was previously recommended, they’ll have an opportunity to appear in these places too.

8) Be Consistent With Your Contact Info

It’s not an exaggeration to say that “Google Sees All and Knows All”; at least in regards to what’s on the internet. With this in mind, make sure your business name, address, and phone number are consistent throughout your website, across your social media profiles, and in references on other websites such as local directories.

9) Communicate Directly To Google through Schema

You can add background code to your website in the form of “schema”, which will provided information that Google wants to know. For starters, you can clear up any ambiguity as to who your website actually represents by adding schema that includes your business name, address, and phone number. You can then go on to add various types of information such as business hours and even holiday hours. Moreover, there’s schema for specific types of local businesses such as restaurants, dry cleaners, and legal services. Not only will providing this information give Google a better idea of who you are, it may also allow them to display this information prominently in their search results and in their Google maps. This is proven to lead to higher click-throughs, which means more visitors, and more opportunities for sales.

10) Keep “Local” In Mind When Creating Content

If you serve a local market, make sure you write about that fact while you’re creating your various web pages, especially your product pages. Whenever possible, include it in your H1 and H2 headers, your title tag, your body content, and your image alt tags. Furthermore, it’s beneficial to get links from local websites and get reviews from local review sites.

These strategies should not be considered tricks or hacks, they’re simply ways to generously provide information that’s relevant to your target market. This in turn, gives your website, and its product pages, the best chance of ranking well in Google. And this, in turn, helps your target market find you easier. So, there you go – I told you this would be helpful 🙂

25 November 2015

Content Creation: How Hard Can It Be?

The recent release of State of Inbound 2015 hi-lights a number of key takeaways, such as:

“Marketers should create compelling content that reflects their company’s voice and brand while helping the consumers of this content turn into website visitors, leads and customers.”

A nice statement that speaks both on the importance of being true to your brand, and on the importance of helping your audience. All delivered through the wonder of creating online content.

If you’re an expert in your niche and loyal to your brand, you may think it should be easy. But, it’s harder than it sounds.

The reality is that many small to medium business enterprises find it difficult to consistently fuel a content pipeline.

In many cases internal experts are just too busy. Perhaps they know a lot but have difficulty in focusing in on specific ideas and topics. There’s a level of organization and planning required to consistently generate fresh stuff — blog posts, videos, white papers, or help guides. And it takes a lot of time. Every week.

Enter the freelancer or marketing agency.

Those that create valuable and compelling content don’t always have to be your own employees.

Freelancers or agencies specialize in working with companies to co-create content and take some of the burden off. They have processes and schedules built around both independent research and working with your experts to organize and publish relevant content.

You don’t’ have to do this alone.

In fact, many don’t. Turning again to the State of Inbound 2015 report, HubSpot found “leading marketer’s content comes from both in-house and out”. This is the sweet spot that can ensure your brand and voice is present but gives you time to look after other parts of your business.

Get the biggest bang for your buck.

It makes sense to use your expertise and best people in a way that delivers the biggest bang for your business.

A lot of content required is to help your online business to “get found” and to help people learn about your stuff (and decide if it is what they want or need). At this early stage people may not be ready to buy yet.

It makes sense to spend your expert time with those that are nearer to buying, after they have consumed some of your remarkable content. Have your out-source work on the “top-of-the-funnel” content while your best people are working on closing qualified leads.

Whatever the case, in-house or out, the experts agree content is the lifeblood of online marketing. Your audience must be impressed with you online and satisfied enough with what they have found in order to give you their business.

Notice I haven’t said that you don’t have to do anything. That would be too easy.

18 November 2015

Planning for 2016: Inbound Trends & Patterns Worth Noticing

As 2015 rushes toward its close, it’s time to start planning for next year. Any business that hopes to succeed will include a marketing plan in their business strategy, but it’s not enough to just pay lip service to it. That marketing plan should be actionable, measurable, and focused on Inbound Marketing practices.

graph paper with rising bar graph and pie chart with 'plan' written on it — Photo credit: Violka08 / Thinkstock / 527478745

Not sure exactly what “Inbound Marketing” really means? HubSpot, the company who coined the term in 2006, refers to it as “the art and science of drawing visitors to your company on their own terms versus obtrusively pushing your messages onto them… [It] is the superset of quality content and other ‘magnetic’ tactics.” And their annual ‘State of Inbound’ Report is rather like the State of the Nation and the Farmer’s Almanac of marketing, combined. The 2015 report identifies trends and patterns worth noticing as you build your business plan for 2016, providing insights that are aimed at helping businesses improve top-line performance.

While I strongly encourage you to download and read the whole document, the State of Inbound 2015 Report has 54 information-packed pages, so allow me to give you a brief taste of a few key ingredients for your 2016 marketing success recipe:

“Getting found” is priority #1 (and #2 and #3) for high performers

When conducting its survey and analyzing the results, HubSpot focused on the segment of inbound marketers who generated positive ROI. They looked at these high performers to see if their priorities were different than those of low performers.

Pattern: They found that high performers focused on programs aimed at getting their content (and thus their company) found. Specifically, their top priorities, in order, were: Blogging, organic search, and content amplification. “Blogging appears to have the most substantial impact on performance.”

Inbound Marketing has become an important, cost-effective source of leads

Trend: In 2015, more than twice as many respondents cited inbound (45%) as their primary source of leads versus outbound (22%).

Trend: 84% of inbound marketers cite organic, “top of funnel” lead sources (social media, blogs, SEO, and email marketing) as rising in importance over the last six months. And the Sales team agrees that these four have become the most important, although they place a relatively higher importance on email marketing, whereas Marketing prioritizes blogs and social media.

Related patterns:

Organizations that source more leads through inbound tend to enjoy an ROI advantage.
Marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI
While cost per lead was difficult to quantify, it was found that leads sourced through inbound programs were consistently less expensive than outbound leads. This held true regardless of company size.

Inbound is on the rise

Trend: The number of marketers who state they are practicing inbound rose from 60% last year to 85% this year, while the percentage of marketers who concede they don’t run inbound was nearly halved to 13%.

Trend: Inbound is not limited to Marketing. Sales, services, and other departments are starting to use inbound practices. Fostering an inbound approach outside the marketing department has the potential to be a big competitive advantage.

Measurement is essential

Measurement is “the first step in developing a plan and the last step in determining results. This is why data is such a central component of the inbound machine.”

Trend: Alignment between leadership and marketers has increased. This is likely due to an increase in the use of measurement and metrics to collect unbiased, objective data that can be used to drive informed decisions and set appropriate priorities.

Pattern: Marketers that measure inbound Return on Investment (ROI) are 17 times more likely to see the same or higher ROI compared to the prior year. While this data may be skewed by the fact that high performing marketers are more likely to measure results, “there’s a strong correlation between simply measuring ROI and achieving it.”

Pattern: Proven ROI has a significant positive influence on the size of the marketing budget. In fact, “past success with inbound” had a greater impact on budget than any other single factor.

Putting it all together to create a solid plan for 2016

It seems clear from the results analyzed in HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2015 that Inbound is an essential part of the marketing strategy and overall business plan for any organization. It has been proven to generate leads, lower the average cost per lead, and increase ROI. So, how do you put it into practice?

Include inbound programs in your marketing plan and earmark resources for them.
Focus on Content Marketing as a key component of Inbound Marketing. Useful, compelling content is necessary to drive Inbound success. “Content is the lifeblood of Inbound.”
Establish key metrics, and measure as you go.
Identify the projects, activities that are providing the highest return.

And above all, stay nimble. “Inbound is about constantly reallocating your resources based on performance.”

Does your organization “do” Inbound? Have you noticed any other trends or patterns?

22 October 2015

Grrrr….My Competitor Shows Up When I Search My Company Name!!!

Has this happened to you? Did it make your blood boil? Well, you’re not alone. This does happen, and it’s definitely a very aggravating thing to experience. You are, however, not powerless: you can take action.

Although it’s rare, it can happen in the organic search results. Organic refers to the non-paid listings on the main part of the search-results page as opposed to the advertising listings seen at the top or side.

You might find your competitor’s website showing up in the organic listings for your company name if they write about your company, and their website has some SEO heft behind it. Perhaps a competitor has produced a side-by-side comparison of your product versus theirs (biased of course), or perhaps they’ve taken advantage of some unlucky bad press you’ve received by writing a blog article about it.

When It Happens In The Organic Search Results:

Good news – there’s something you can do about it. Assuming what they’ve written about you isn’t legally actionable, such as being slanderous, your best course of action is to take full control of the first page search results for your company name. To do this, you’ll need to develop a SEO plan geared for this purpose – a plan that involves specific strategies such as:

Make your website’s search result as big as possible by encouraging sitelinks.
In addition to your website, ensure all your other web properties are present, such as your social media pages.
Promote the pages of other websites that are favorable to your brand, such as positive press and reviews.

When It Happens In The Advertising Search Results:

If another company is using one of your trademarked terms in their AdWords advertising, that is an infringement of your rights, and it’s prohibited by Google’s AdWords policy. Google recommends you reach out to the other company in an effort to resolve the issue. If that doesn’t work, Google will accept complaints and action them.

Before you start this process, ask yourself “Are they really infringing on my trademark?” If their ad is showing up in the paid search results for a search on your company name, it may be because there are words in your company name, other than your unique identifier, that are triggering the ad. For example, a search for “Superstar Ottawa Plumbing” will trigger ads for companies bidding on the term “Ottawa plumbing”. In this case, these companies aren’t doing anything wrong.

Blatant Shenanigans?

In some cases, however, your competitor’s AdWords ad actually names your company in the title of the ad. This is enough to make anyone angry, but consider the following before you declare all-out war. This seems like blatant shenanigans, and it might be, but more often than not it’s a Google-system-generated misunderstanding. Let me explain. There’s a feature within AdWords that, when set up by the AdWords user, will automatically place the phrase used by the searcher within the ad title. For example, a search for “Superstar Ottawa Plumbing” triggers an ad for a company bidding on the term “Ottawa plumbing” and, because of their AdWords configuration, “Superstar Ottawa Plumbing” is placed in the title of their ad. Presumably this is unintentional. The AdWords user probably wanted this in place for terms such as “faucet plumbing Ottawa” and “toilet plumbing Ottawa” without going through the effort of individually targeting all the possible terms with uniquely written ads. In this case, a friendly letter to the competitor requesting that your unique identifier, “Superstar”, be added as a ‘negative keyword’ would solve the problem, assuming they take the time to do it.