The Web Marketeers' Blog

What makes a website effective?

Edward — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 00:09:58 +0000

I doubt many people would argue that Website design can play a critical role in a business’ success online, but few understand it also can play a critical role off-line. To understand this, we need to first understand what constitutes an effective Website design, how the target market arrives at the Website, and how they take action (i.e. make a purchase at an ecommerce site or provide contact information at a lead generation, also known as a “brochure”, site.

What Goes into an Effective Website Design

The fundamental purpose of the Website is to get the visitor to take action, whether that is a purchase in an ecommerce site or a form fill-out / phone call/ email in a lead generation site. However, let me be clear on one critical point. The attractiveness and user friendliness of the site should not suffer from designing the site from a marketing perspective. In fact, the user friendliness in particular should actually benefit since the navigation and content of the site will directly address the market’s needs. All this sounds simple, but can require a good deal of research. Would it surprise you if I told you that many businesses don’t fully understand their target market?

Next, let’s consider how visitors find the Website. Just about 90% of all first visits to a Website are the result of a search, typically in one of the major search engines like Google or Bing. That’s right, almost 90%. Many people that have evenly previously visited the site or learned about it via off-line advertising will type the name of the company in a search engine since this is easier than remembering the company’s URL (i.e. the actual Web address) or phone number.

This leads us to the next critical element of an effective Website. It must be search engine optimized and easily found on either the first page or second page of the major search engines. Statistics indicate that 65% of searchers stop after looking at the first page of search returns. Only 35% will look at the second page. Anything beyond the first two pages of search results essentially means that your site is invisible.

It is also vitally important to understand what terms your target market will use when looking for your products of services. For example there is no point optimising for the very generic search term “Solicitor” if you provide a very specialist employment law service. Even if you can get the site up to the top of Google, a huge majority of visitors to your site will not be relevant and will bounce straight back out of there. It would be far better to optimise for the term “redundancy solicitor london” for instance; you would have have far more chance of getting to the top due to the less competitive nature of the search term and the vast majority of site visitors will be qualified.

Now we’re ready to answer the two key questions:

1. What gets the target market to take action?
2. What form will their actions take?

What gets the target market to take action?
The answer is deceptively simple. You must satisfy the visitor’s need with a compelling offer. I told you it was deceptively simple. The real challenge is creating a compelling offer that satisfies the visitor’s need. This is where the pain points come in. If you’ve developed the Website to address the visitor’s pain points, then providing compelling solutions becomes easier. Notice, I didn’t say easy. I said easier. Compelling offers can be developed in a number of ways, including information learned from the Website visitors’ pain points, competitive research, and even focus groups. The right compelling offer can change the visitor’s action rate immensely.

What form will their actions take?
The answer to this question is also deceptively simple. They are going to respond in the way they feel most comfortable. For some, that means they will do the entire transaction online. These people feel comfortable with the security of the Internet and rightly so. If properly constructed, online transactions in a properly secured Website are among the most secure transactions on the planet. For example, if you use your credit card in a restaurant, you have no control on how the credit may be used or copied when the server takes it to process your bill. Online, you have total control over how it will be used; if the Website transaction is secure (i.e. special coding that encrypts the transaction).

However this will not prevent fraud. Therefore, it is important to have confidence in which companies you do business with online. Many people still don’t trust Internet transactions and would prefer to call the company directly. You can use trackable phone numbers that redirect to the company’s actual phone numbers. In that way, you are able to tell exactly how many calls you’ve received from your Website. Some people want the company to call them. In that case, you can provide a call back option. They can specify their number and the time they would like to be called back. Lastly, provide a faxable form. Yes, some people actually like to fax the information and trust faxing more than an Internet transaction. The key point to all of this is to provide the visitor with numerous ways in which they can take action and let them pick the one they are most comfortable with using.

Before I conclude this blog, remember I stated that Website design can play a critical role off-line. That’s totally true. It takes several forms. Two have already been mentioned above, namely telephone calls and faxing. There is an important 3rd option. Consumers, in increasing numbers, are researching online before buying offline (ROBO). The visitor may choose to visit the “store,” especially if you have a retail location near them and if part of your compelling offer involves a coupon offering discounts on merchandise or services of interest to them. In fact, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project 2007, 81% of Americans typically do research online for a product they may buy offline.

The Next Big Thing

Edward — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 12:45:11 +0000

Hello again! I thought I’d build on my initial posts by talking about what I think will be THE big growth area in online marketing over the next 12 months… Facebook and Linkedin paid advertising.

It’s been possible for some time to advertise and market on these platforms, however not many companies have taken advantage of the fantastic opportunities these present, and stick to more ‘traditional’ forms such as Google Adwords and display banner ads. Don’t get me wrong, these are great tools, and if managed effectivly can be very cost effective and provide a fantastic ROI. However I see Linkedin and Facebook advertising as fitting in alongside these techniques to ensure that you get the widest possible coverage for your organisation.

The reason these techniques are so powerful is that they don’t rely on people activly searching for a particular product or service, instead ads are shown to highly select groups through very refined targeting systems. To give you an example, a client of mine offers CD duplication which can be used for marketing purposes (company brouchures etc), one of his target markets are business owners of small companies (medium and large companies have marketing managers). We set up and run a series of micro ads on Linkedin targeting this market, the parameters of which were: companies of between 0 and 20 employees in the London area, in the marketing industry with the ads only being shown to Owners and Directors, running on a pay per click basis. Although I can’t divulge figures, the campaign has seen a fantastic return on his investment. The beauty of the campaign is that we started very small, with a low budget in order to testfeasibility, then when we saw that it was working well, we were able to scale it up and it’s clear to say that it really is making a huge different to the business.

A word of caution however, it is very easy with online advertising campaigns to throw a lot of money at them and see very little, if any reward. For a campaign to besuccessfulit must be designed with a clear target market, the micro ads must be individually tailored to your audience and most importantly, the whole campaign must be continually assessed and improved, reacting to opportunities that present themselves and changes in the cost of each individual ad.

To find out more about paid search opportunities on Facebook or Linkedin, here are the direct links: http://www.facebook.com/advertising/ and https://www.linkedin.com/directads.

If you want to have a chat about how best to promote your business or organisation on Facebook, Linkedin or any other online advertising platform, please fell free to get in touch!

Google & Site Load Speed

Edward — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 12:43:17 +0000

This post was going to talk about Facebook and Linkedin advertising as I believe them to be the next big thing in online marketing, however the news in the last few days that page loading times would be taken into account when determining SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions) by Google is too big not to talk about!

Traditionally Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been all about two main factors: Relevance and Authority. Relevance refers to how relevant a particular page or site is to a particular subject, for instance if a site talking about football has been well written and optimised, Google will know that it is primarily about football, and therefore when someone searches for Football, it will appear somewhere in the results. The other factor is authority, authority refers to the democratic nature of the web; Google sees each link to a site or page as anendorsement of that page. If the link is from a relevant source it will be seen as a high powered link, if it comes from an irrelevant source, it will be seen as a low powered, or even an irrelevant link (sorry link farmers, you are worthless!) To give you an example of a relevant link, a client of mine is a solicitor, a link from a leading legal journal will be seen as relevant, a link from some link farm will not. I obviously have simplified both areas here, Google use a very complicatedalgorithmto determine SERPs, but up till now the broad factors explained above sum it all up nicely.

Now of course, Google are taking into account site load times as the third factor. This obviously will give sites a natural advantage or disadvantage with regard to their Search Engine Optimisation depending on how well the site has been built, how much content their is on each page, and how good the server is that the site is hosted on.

My opinion, is that while it will be difficult for existing sites to take advantage of this when looking to improve their optimisation without a significant technicaloverhaul, when an organisation or business owner commissionsa new site they should take into account the quality of their hosting provider and the methods their design/ development agency use when building the site to make sure the new site is fast loading, this should ensure thet get a natural advantage when compared to their competitors who haven’t taken this into account.

If you would like to test your own website, www.webpagetest.org is very good andthorough. If you would like help evaluating how your site is performing from a speed or Search Engine Optimisation point of view, then please do get in touch, I’d be delighted to have a chat!

Paid Advertising on Twitter!

Edward — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 12:40:07 +0000

So lets kick this new blog off properly with a biggie!

Twitter have announced that they will soon let companies advertise on the microblogging service, in order to start making a profit. Initially these adverts will only appear when you search on the site, however over time it is expected that these ad tweets will show up in users regular feeds, based on what they themselves have been tweeting about.

Starting today Twitter is rolling out ads from selected corporate’s including Starbucks, Virgin America and Best Buy to it’s 45 million regular users, and it will be interesting to see how users respond to ads they are exposed to.

What is key from my perspective, is how accessible the system is to smaller business’s. It could be a great way to promote your products and services, and like all new marketing channels, those who move fastest will see the most reward if they act appropriately.

What are your views on paid for ads on Twitter? Let me know how you think the system will affect twitter users and also how companies will use the system.

Look forward to hearing from you!

Welcome, do come in!

Edward — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 08:50:05 +0000

Welcome to my new blog! Since leaving my old online marketing agency just over a month ago I have been working flat out to set up my new online marketing and web design agency called The Web Marketeers. It’s been very exciting, but there is so much to do!

Having to balance puuting my own marketing in place, with business development and also with undertaking project work for my new clients as certainly kept me very busy. Happily now that my graphic designers have created my new branding and identity, I can get cracking on the most important marketing vehicle of them all, the website! It’s coming soon, watch this space!

Now having a fantastic website is all well and good, in 99% of cases it is the most important piece of the marketing jigsaw for companies both big and small; however your website very much needs to be ‘on-brand’, relevant to your target market and following your ‘corporate tone of voice’, it’s not always appropriate to talk from a personal perspective. This is why I am setting up this blog; there are some things you can say and do on a blog that you can’t do on your site, it’s a better platform to give opinions, hints and tricks, and useful little bits of advice.

So please do come back, even better subscribe to the blog via the RSS feed, even better still, get your friends, colleagues and family to subscribe as well . Over the coming months I’ll be discussing everything I think is relevant, new and exciting in the world of on-line and sometimes off-line marketing. If you want to get in touch, please do, I’d love to hear from you!