Posted by Vanessa Knipper on Mon, Aug 23, 2010 @ 07:59 AM
Most businesses are jumping on the inbound marketing bandwagon. Facebook, Twitter and other social media marketing tools are proving to be far more effective -- and faster -- at marketing businesses to consumers and promoting brand identity. Compared to traditional outbound marketing methods like cold calling and direct mail, inbound marketing is targeted, rapid, interactive and the only way to reach today's Internet-connected consumers.
In the rush to move online, businesses often neglect to fully define their inbound marketing goals and develop a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy. Without careful forethought and planning, Internet marketing efforts can be ineffective and appear to be disjointed, failing to produce the desired results. Without proper goal definition and a well-planned strategy to meet those goals, inbound marketing experts warn that social media campaigns can fall flat and produce disappointing results. When Internet marketing campaigns fail, the fault is not in the inbound marketing techniques used but in their execution.
In order to connect with consumers, you must first figure out what consumers want. There are 3 tried and true methods of determining consumer needs relevant to the product or services you sell:
- Ask. Pay attention to consumer questions asked via twitter, comments made on blog posts and surveys conducted on your website. See which web pages on your site have the highest click rates. Review sales statistics to see what consumers are buying. All of these efforts can help you gain a better understanding of what consumers are looking for when they access your site.
- Tune in. Stay current on happenings and developments in your industry. Subscribe to competitors' blogs, follow industry experts on Twitter and subscribe to industry-related news feeds.
- Track. Sign up for Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a particularly productive tool for monitoring the effectiveness of your keywords and fine tuning them to more accurately target your desired customer pool. Google Alerts shows you how other people on the Internet are using your keywords, providing you a window to competitors using the same words. Knowing who is using your keywords and how they are using them allows you to tweak your keyword list quickly if it isn't resonating correctly with consumers.
Professional inbound marketing experts have the technical expertise, Internet savvy and social media experience to ensure that your inbound marketing campaign is effectively designed and executed to produce the results you desire.
Posted by John McTigue on Sun, Sep 20, 2009 @ 08:30 AM
OK, it's simple. You want to rank on certain keywords, put them in your blog or page title. In our case, we want to improve our Google ranking on the phrase "advertising agency cleveland". As of this writing, we are ranked #87, which isn't great. We have lots of competition, but how can we do better?
How to improve our ranking on Advertising Agency Cleveland
Yes, it's cheesy to put the keywords in the title without some kind of context. Yes, Google will actually penalize you if you don't follow-up with an article related to those keywords. So write a clever article about the subject and include your keywords in headings (see above) and image "alt" tags (see image).- Be realistic - do your keywords actually describe what you do? Yes, we are an advertising agency based in the Cleveland, OH area. Check.
- Be realistic - do you have any hope of ranking on your keywords? OK, we're starting at 87, so there is hope. If we tried to rank on "advertising agency" alone, forget about it. The cool thing is, as we start to improve our ranking on the long-tail keywords "advertising agency cleveland", we also improve our chances with "advertising agency". Maybe someday...
- Lather, rinse, repeat. One blog isn't going to drive thousands of visitors to your keyword rich page. Do it repeatedly, but keep it subtle. Don't try the same (some might say stupid) tactic that we used for this blog every time. Move your keywords around in the title and blog, try different word order and monitor results. As you track your keywords and page views you can see what combinations work best.
Let's see how we do. I will monitor our progress in ranking on these keywords and add them to the comments periodically, so stay tuned.
How does your website stack up against your competitors?
Click here for a free report.
Posted by Walt Winchel on Fri, Sep 18, 2009 @ 11:31 AM
As a graphic designer, we all strive to provide our clients with the most effective and up-to-date website designs, but, over time, there is a need to come back and look at how we can change the elements, content and design to keep our clients’ online image from becoming stale.
Clients typically become attached to their current design (“if it’s not broke, don’t fix it”) and fail to grasp the importance of the benefits of a website re-design. It may look great to the client, but to the reader it may be overlooked when they revisit because everything looks the same as it did last year. Think of the website like an article of clothing. After a year it could be that your site looks like it is wearing the web design equivalent of a pair of legwarmers and stone washed jeans, i.e. completely out-of-date.
If you’re thinking about a re-design of your existing website, here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Does the site do what I originally wanted it to do? And do I still want it to do that?
- Has the audience for the site changed?
- Does the site pass accessibility and usability checks at the W3.org site?
- Do I still like the look?
- Do I need a new logo?
- Has my site that started with 3 pages become a large multi-tiered navigation site?
- Do I need help maintaining it?
The answers to these questions can help you determine if your site needs a small update or a complete overhaul. If you designed your site just a few years ago, you may not have had the opportunity (or cash) to set up your site using a Content Management System (CMS). However, advances in technology and the evolution of off-the-shelf CMS products make it much more affordable for anyone to use today.
Here are four tips to keep in mind when planning your re-design.
- Simplicity = Good.
Both in terms of functionality and design, it’s hard to go wrong with a clean and simple site that is easy to navigate.
- Know your audience.
Use applications such as Google Analytics on your existing site to see where your visitors are coming from, what browsers they are using and where they go on your site. This can help you figure out exactly what they want.
- Build your brand.
What are you telling your visitors about yourself? If the visitor can’t figure out what your site is about as soon as they land on the page, there is a strong chance you’ll lose them. People are always looking for something new when they log on. It visually tells the reader that the site is up-to-date, current, and that your company is still doing well enough for you to provide new information and/or products. Old, stagnant, and out-of-date sites say to the reader your company might not even still be in business.
- Improve functionality.
It’s OK to try something different but don’t confuse or annoy users by creating a website that is so off-the-wall that it’s unusable. Stay within your brand, but freshen up the look to current design trends.
Moral of the story: Keep your site current but also make sure the design says, "Hey, were still in business, going strong, and looking to the future!"
It’s amazing what a simple website re-design can do for a company's image and business!
Want a free website design assessment? Click here to get your free report.
Posted by John McTigue on Sun, Jun 21, 2009 @ 03:28 PM
We're all obsessed with "metrics" these days, and rightfully so. Marketing that doesn't produce results is worse than doing nothing, because it costs you time and/or money. So here are the early results after one week of working on inbound marketing, all results are compared to this week last year (shown in parentheses).
- Website Visits: 306, + 606%
- Website Pageviews: 1428, + 871%
- Avg. Time on Web Site: 1:24, +218%
- Facebook Friends - 20, Kuno Creative Page Fans -10
- Linked-In Connections - 23, Groups Joined - 4
- Twitter Following - 32, Followers - 23, Updates - 17
I'm not going to analyze these results yet. I'll wait 'til we have a few more weeks of data, then show some graphs. Bottom line - no new clients yet. The results are encouraging, however. Now we need to redouble our efforts!
NEXT - Why I Tweet
Posted by John McTigue on Fri, Feb 13, 2009 @ 01:00 PM
Now that we have our Web site looking and working better, and we've started blogging regularly, it's time to go social!
As our friends at Hubspot always say, using social media for business is like attending a networking event (i.e. cocktail party) all day every day. Sounds good to me! No really, the idea is that you get two-way conversations going. You look people in the eye, and you exchange business cards. Then you get together later and do business. You can't do that with any other marketing strategy (other than actually going to lots of cocktail parties). So our goal here is to get involved, chat up our blogs and get to know people. Hopefully the word will spread about what we're doing, and real customers will come to our site and sign up for consultations.
So what have we been doing?
- Signed up (a few months ago) at Facebook (yes, facebook), Linked-in, and Twitter. There are plenty of others, but we're learning here so we want to keep things relatively simple. We've done some research, and these seem to be the hottest and most business-prone (believe it or not).
- Started networking through these sites, adding friends at Facebook and Linked-in and following people at Twitter. We started with people we new (our own co-workers, family and friends). Then we joined professional groups, did some Twitter searches and followed people with similar business interests.
- Started chatting up our blog (the page you're reading). All of these sites have updates (what are you up to?), so you start by adding entries like "I've just added a new post to our blog, www.kunocreative.com/blog". Your friends and followers will hopefully see that and surf to your blog.
- Participate in other people's blogs. We add (hopefully) helpful comments and recommendations. If you think you can just invite everybody to your blog all the time, think again! It's all about exchanging valuable ideas and information. If people recognize that you're a reliable source, you're much more likely to attract a loyal following.
- Start measuring success! We're tracking the traffic to our blog through Google Analytics, the spread to other Web site pages, and the growth of friends and followers in our social media sites.
NEXT - Blog 'til You Drop!
Posted by John McTigue on Wed, Feb 11, 2009 @ 01:00 PM
Week 1 - Preparing for the Campaign - Remember the purpose of our inbound marketing campaign - to attract new customers via our Web site (www.kunocreative.com). To do that we first needed to get our Web site in shape and ready to work, so here's what we have done so far:
- Reworked the design to make it easier to read and navigate
- Reworked the content to make it clear who we are, what we do and why doing business with us is valuable to you
- Created a call to action on every page - "contact us today for a free consultation"
- Checked to make sure that we have used h1, h2, h3... tags and image alt tags to highlight our key concepts on every page
- Added metatag titles, keywords, and descriptions that fit the content of every page and highlight our message
- Googled the most popular keywords in our market segment and incorporated them on pages containing relevant content
- Added a Google Sitemap and used the Google Webmaster tools to clean up old pages that no longer exist
- Submitted our site to DMOZ, Yahoo, and ZoomInfo directories
- Created our Blog, of which this Inbound Marketing Journal is a regular featured entry.
- Joined and submitted our Blog to Technorati, Delicio.us, and Digg
- Added bookmark links to our Blog pages (allowing visitors to bookmark and tell their friends about us)
- Added Google Analytics to all of our pages to measure traffic, sources, loyalty, etc.
- Measured our initial results using Website Grader, Hubspot's cool SEO/SEM evaluator.
First Measurements - Baseline vs. Week 1
Before we did any of the steps above we received a score of 44 (out of 100) on the Website Grader. The report showed us many of the steps we had missed in attempting to optimize our site for SEO/SEM and made recommendations. After following through on most of those recommendations, our score rose to 64! This means that we are already in stronger position to attract new business traffic to our site, without even doing any of the social media aspects of inbound marketing. We expect that our efforts on that arena will improve our score even more and lead to increased traffic, retention and new business (conversion).
Next Week - Getting Social
We hope you will continue to join us in our journey. Our intention is to tell you what's really happening as we use the latest Internet marketing strategies on our own business. Your comments and experiences are welcome!