Mar 11, 2015 | Change, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Designing websites requires the skill of a master juggler
Often I find myself working with a small business to specify a website and digital strategy, and sometimes I am actually taking a brief for a website design. Either way, the same questions keep popping up, so I thought it sensible to list them down.
For some unknown reason, I stopped at 69, although I am sure you can add a number more that have been missed.
Background information.
- What is the purpose of the site?
- What is it about your current digital marketing that needs to be changed, and why?
- Who are your most aggressive competitors?
- Where are the new competitors going to come from?
- If you were to start in business again today, what would you do differently to what you are doing currently?
- How has digital technology changed your competitive environment, and what impact do you think it will have in the next few years?
Your strategy
- What are your corporate values, mission, purpose, however you choose to articulate the reasons you are in business?
- What problems do you solve for your customers?
- What makes you different to your competitors?
- What do you do better that your competitors?
- Why should people do business with you rather than others?
- What are the things you will not do to attract or keep a customer?
Customers
- Describe your most valuable customer.
- Describe the customer journey, how do they typically end up with you?
- What are your levels of customer churn and retention?
- From initial contact, what are your conversion rates?
- What is your conversion cost?
- How do customers find you initially?
- How much is a good customer worth to you over a period of time?
- How long is the sales cycle?
- Do you have a good database of current, past and potential customers, and how is it managed and refreshed?
- Do you know why former customers stopped buying from you?
- Do you have a referral system that captures benefits for the referrer?
Competitors
- What elements of your competitors sites do you like/want?
- What elements of competitors sites do you want to avoid?
- What are your competitors doing to attract your customers and potential customers?
Technical considerations
- Do you have a site architecture or is it part of the design exercise?
- Do you have hosting, domain, email management services to be continued?
- Are the current arrangements if any, compatible with the needs of the new site?
- Are there any specific mobile requirements needed? It is assumed that “mobile friendly” rather than just “mobile compatible” is required.
- What analytics do you want?
- Do you have preferences about the CMS system used?
- How will the content management/ approval system work?
- Do you require log in and chat features, and will they be password protected?
- How will user names and access to the site CMS be managed?
- Are there content on demand requirements, i.e. hidden content becomes visible after a series of actions.
- Are there digital commerce and shopping carts to be managed?
- How will inventory and fulfillment be managed?
- Are there any general functionality requirements you need, such as data bases, and data base interrogation processes, site search facilities, calendars, maps, et al?
- What other digital systems are needed to be integrated, CRM, MRP, order/invoice?
- How will you manage SEO?
- What sort of content download requirements are there?
- What levels of skill are there in the business to apply to the site maintenance?
- Are these compatible with the requirements of the site or is training and outsourcing required?
Design elements.
- What are the most important three things in the design?
- What content and design elements of a current site are required to be carried over?
- What information will go where?
- What corporate logos, colours, designs and style elements must be present?
- How do you want the inclusions that are required, such as calendars & maps to work?
- Will different parts of the site have a different look and feel?
- Are there taglines, market positioning statements or other such marketing elements that need to be incorporated?
- Do you have the original artwork files of elements you want incorporated?
- Do you have photos, video, or other material you want incorporated, and if “yes” do you hold or have paid for the copyright use of them?
- What font sizes and styles are preferred?
- What contact information and automated functions do you want, and where do you want it?
Marketing strategies.
- How are you going to create the content for the site initially, and on an ongoing basis?
- Who is going to maintain the site?
- How does the site integrate into other marketing activities?
- When someone is on the site, what do you want them to do?
- What sites of any type do you like, and why?
- What are the pages you require?
- What social platforms do you want connected, how prominent should the connections be, and which pages do you want them on?
- How are visitors to the site going to be converted?
Project management considerations
- When do you want it? (oh crap)
- Who in your organisation is going to provide the content agreed?
- What content will the contractor provide, and at what cost?
- How will the approval process work as the project progresses?
- How much do you expect all this to cost?
- What are you now prepared to do without?
When you need someone who has successfully juggled in the three ring circus, and knows how to deliver you a great performance without stealing your shirt, give me a call.
Feb 12, 2015 | Marketing, Social Media
Social media is usually lumped in with digital marketing, as if it is all the same stuff, part of the same marketing toolbox.
There is some overlap, significantly around the advertising that occurs on social platforms, but not as much as most just assume.
Think about being at a party, the bloke in the corner holding forth to a small group of people, arguing a point of view, taking questions, and debating the foundations of his views. The person on the right is not talking, not asking questions, but they are listening.
Are they engaged in the conversation??
Of course they are.
Do they want to be sold to?
Probably not, they are just listening, at some point of they want some clarification, to actively instead of passively engage in the conversation, or to be sold to, they will ask a question, make a comment, or otherwise change their engagement from passive to active.
Social media is the same, a few people are engaging overtly, liking, retweeting, commenting, sharing, and so on, but those “listening” can also be passively engaging, absorbing the flow of the conversation, and they matter.
By contrast to social media platforms, email or digital marketing takes a message, information, or a sales pitch and sends it to you, expecting an outcome, one of which can be that you ignore it and perhaps unsubscribe.
The response rates to email marketing are way better than stuffing letterboxes as we did in the old days, which delivered 1% if you were really lucky, had a great offer and a good copywriter, simply because it was almost random. The best you could do to profile the potential customers was broad brush demographics of the location of the letterboxes to be stuffed.
Email or digital marketing however can be hugely more effective, as you market to a list, people who have expressed some interest in hearing what you have to say, and which you can slice and die in all sorts of ways to have a highly targeted and personalised communication that offers the option to becoming a conversation, at the initiation of the receiver.
The other point to remember is that everyone influences someone.
Feb 2, 2015 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
courtesy toprankingblog.com
The purpose of a website is either commercial, or it is a hobby.
Assuming in most cases it is the former, the usual commercial rules apply, just because you have a website does not mean everyone apart perhaps from your mother will be excited.
So, to have a successful web presence the same 5 basic rules of marketing that have always applied, still apply:
- Understand the drivers of behaviour of those in your market
- Have a clear objective.
- Have a plan that lays out the “roadmap” to achieve the objective.
- Execute against the plan, but enabling learning from experience to occur whilst you do.
- Have a few key metrics to track performance towards the objective.
You can make this as complicated as you like, but it will generally not help, just confuse. Nowadays however, navigating through the digital tools and options available has become a job for a specialist, and that does not mean the pimply teenager down the road who is a Facebook maven.
A website is just another tool of commerce, the starting place that enables small businesses to communicate and compete in ways unimaginable 20 years ago. The digital revolution has also spawned a host of further tools to enable relationships and transactions, but the basics of finding a customer, engaging with them and moving towards a transaction have not changed one bit.
For small businesses too compete, they need to do a few things well:
- Have a really detailed customer profile. Demographic, geographic and behavioural knowledge and insights are what enables them to target messages specifically, as if to one person.
- Create and/or curate information of interest to this specific audience. Information that alerts, informs, and demonstrates your knowledge, has the opportunity to at some point in the targets future, to give them a reason to engage. There are myriads of tools to do this, from those that scrape social media platforms for key words, to following thought leaders and repackaging their ideas, to creating interest focussed newsletters automatically. However, don’t believe that any of this is easy, as you will be sorely disappointed.
- Open the chance of engagement. By simply making the target aware of the content, and giving them a reason to stay on your site or platform, you open the opportunity for engagement. This is where the tools really come in, to sort, organise, and direct the appropriate content automatically once set up. The reach of social media into most segments is now extremely deep, but increasingly the platforms are seeking to be paid for the provision of that reach to you. Advertising, but once you have someone’s attention, by whatever means, you need to make sure you do something useful with it, as you may not get a second chance.
- Engage the targets with the content, by demonstrating that you are the one who can and will deliver value at the time of a transaction.
- Enable the transaction. Often this doe not mean buying over the web, it is much broader, and encompasses all the elements of the sales as well as the logistics channels and after sales service.
- Retain the faith of the customer for future sales, and turn them into a source of referrals for you to their networks.
Again I say, none of this is easy, but the point is that none of it was available to small business just 20 years ago. There has been an immense democratisation of opportunity, make sure you use it, and when you need assistance, call me.
Jan 20, 2015 | Branding, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Interactive content adds greater value
The mantra “Content is King” is now about three years old, geriatric in web years.
Now almost everybody is doing it, certainly almost everyone small businesses need to compete successfully against to survive.
Content is rapidly becoming a commodity, something to be “sourced” as you would a new printer cartridge, or replacement part for a bit of machinery, the only real challenges left are to know where to look, how to sort through the options, and how much to pay.
Given this is the case, how should forward thinking marketers, particularly those on small budgets set about differentiating themselves amongst the welter of competing attention grabbing options available?
The answer is pretty easy to say, but not so easy to execute.
Find ways to actively engage the individuals in your market with your content . Just getting them to read a post, or even download a white paper is no longer good enough, you have to find the means to put their brains into gear, rather than just letting them operate on autopilot.
Turn a white paper into an interactive performance measurement tool,
Build a quizzes and games into your infographics,
Create questionnaires to complement your best practise databases,
Throw out the product brochure, and let customers design their own product and add the extras.
There are a few services evolving to assist the process, several tailored for specific social media platforms, but the hardest bit is to find the creativity, imagination, and market insight that will allow you to understand the interactions with your product and its competitors sufficiently well to know what sort of activity will engage them.
Get it right, and you will also get to gather an extraordinary array of customer behavioural data that can be leveraged, delivering value to your business and your customers.
Jan 12, 2015 | Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Courtesy www.groovehq.com
Writing a blog is hard work, great to do as it forces you to think critically, read widely, seek to question your own preconceptions, and expand your own expertise, so it can be intellectually rewarding. It is nevertheless time consuming hard work.
As such, it can be seen either as a hobby, or an investment, and if it is the latter, there should be a return on the time and energy expended.
For most small businesses, it can easily become a chore, which is why so many fall back on some formulaic way, just to pump out words and fill a schedule, and end up doing nobody, themselves particularly, any good.
There have been many posts about the “10 smart ways to write more blog posts” lots of advice that suggest a process is the way to make blogging both easy and commercially productive, this one from GrooveHQ being one of the better ones (and I borrowed their header photo) but like most others, misses the essential point.
Blogging is now so common, has become such a generic activity that most material out there is “average”. The task of filtering the really good stuff out for comment and further consideration is becoming increasingly automated, adding to the “average” tendency, as the really good stuff always happens on the fringes, and it usually elusive and challenging, just like any other sort of useful innovation.
To me there is really only three ways to be genuinely useful, to attract and keep readers.
- Display really deep domain knowledge, and be generous with it. Mitch Joel, Mark Schaefer, Avanish Kaushik and Ian Cleary are a few that spring to mind that do this consistently and well, and GrooveHQ is rapidly becoming one of my core reading list, listed down the side.
- Be genuinely interested, concerned curious, and yes, passionate, in your domain, and have that communicated simply by demonstrating an independence of mind, generosity of ideas, willingness to kick the sacred cows, and make the elephants visible.
- Be original, prepared to be challenging, and persistent.
My clients, small businesses in the most part, are being increasingly left behind as is the case in most arenas of competitive activity, they lack a depth of resources, so they just have to be smarter, more agile, and personally committed than their larger competitors.
Those that do it well will flourish.
Jan 9, 2015 | Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Courtesy www.searchengineland.com
“Content Marketing” is the new buzzword, something I consider to be a tarted-up label stuck on a set of activities we have always done, in the hope of adding a few more mirrors to the disappearing hall, so quick talkers can extract a premium for what they are supposed to be doing anyway.
Cynical perhaps, but what is copy in a newspaper column if not content, what about the promotion run by the local car dealer, or the ad on TV?
Leaving that grumble aside, the huge change that has occurred is that content no longer lasts as long as it used to, but has the chance of resurrection, for the real thing!
There is some great stuff being produced, truly inspirational material, but as usual there is a lot of crap, and the volume of crap is increasing as the appetite of the new e-mediums increases, and everyone becomes a publisher.
There has always been a 1/2 life for content, but the nature of it has changed radically.
The half life of a daily newspaper used to be a day, after which it became rubbish, of a women’s magazine, it was a bit longer, a week or two as the articles were read (are they really?) and as the copy got handed around a bit, a radio ad was about 30 seconds at best.
Material published digitally has a much longer half life, but much less chance of being seen on being published. The volumes of publishing on Social media platforms limit both the opportunity to be seen on publishing, and usually the reach of a post (facebook is now less than 5% organic reach) 
but do offer the opportunity for a second, and third chance, as it does not become fish wrapper tonight.
The most viewed post on this blog was written several years ago, and just keeps on attracting readers, but on the day it was published, well, suffice to say I did not need to take my shoes off to count the numbers. In addition, good posts can be linked, shared, republished with ease, again increasing the 1/2 life, and occasionally there is the remote possibility of a digital lottery win, the viral post.
Digital phenomena like the video condemning Kony, the African nut job laying waste to swathes of central Africa using children as soldiers swept the world, breaking all records, and Psi, that whacky Korean “singer” who became an internet sensation for reasons I simply do not understand, can happen. The 1/2 life of those two may be short, but the reach was huge, and there is always the chance of a rebirth.
Particularly for small businesses with limited resources, considering the nature of their content, and crafting it to extend and expand the 1/2 life, offers great opportunities for marketing and communication leverage they never had before.
