Building Blocks of Online Marketing (OMS Conference Notes)

Digital Landscape

• You can now target a very specific group because of all of the data out there
• Reviews and recommendations influence buying decisions more than any other media – viral vs. traditional
• Real time planning overtakes “annual market budgets” – constant creation and implementation of ideas. Can’t set it and forget it. Videos, blogs, podcasts, tweets, microsites, updates…
• Smart phones are now at 50% penetration
• Analytics can be more specific:
• track ecommerce – see the per visit value – really measure your investments
• see how many whitepaper downloads or video views you get
• LinkedIn
• Over 52% of users are located outside the US (India, UK, Canada, Brazil)
• More men than women (60/40)
• Most users in the 25-54 range (Older)
• Great for B2B
• Facebook
• Most users
• 50% of users log on every day
• they spend over 700 billion minutes per month
• 900 million objects that people interact with each month
• Average user has 130 friends, is connected to 80 pages/groups/events
• Twitter
• 182% increase in number of mobile Twitter users in the past year
• Digital technology has changed the way we plan, make decisions (shop, learn, experience, entertain, date), communicate and market

Web Strategy Fundamentals

• Does your site:
• Support your business?
• Look like an electronic brochure?
• Integrate with other marketing efforts?
• Have a clear set of success metrics?
• Define your business objectives – what is your business’ reason for existence? Where does digital marketing support it? – your website will be around for 2-3 years. What are you hoping your business will accomplish in the next 2-3 years.
• Categories – target each of these with different tactics (google ad, email campaign, landing page, seo, link building campaign, whitepapers)
• Revenue – acquisition, retention, winback
• Operations – support, it, production, finance
• Stakeholder – employees, customers, shareholders
• Rules:
• Be specific
• Be measurable
• Be realistic
• Be relevant
• Set timeframe
• Make sure all of these things point to the overall business strategey
• “We want to see a 20% YOY increase in new web site registrations originating from search by the end of June 2, 2012.” is better than “We want more leads”
• What are your customer’s objectives
• Why do they visit the site?
• What are they doing on the site?
• How did they get here?
• what stage of the buy cycle are they in?
• What signals are they giving?
• How well are you aligned with sales? Are they following up on leads?
• Map your external stakeholder touch points
• trade show booth
• web site visit
• whitepaper view
• lead generation form
• qualification follow up
• sales call
• email
• presentation
• signed contract
• support
• post purchase add ons
• Have them tell you how good the leads are!
• Conversion Types
• Hard conversion – you get the name, follow up action required, varying degrees of value
• Soft conversion – set them up for another visit, later sale
• Stack Rank: List the possible strategies and rank on a scales of 1-5 in the following categories to figure out which you should implement: impact on revenue, operational efficiency, positive impact on guest support, scalability, ease of implementation, executive visibility
• What does success look like? Define the sort of metrics the company wants up front

Benchmarks

• Qualitative
• surveys, forms, etc.
• heat mapping (http://www.crazyegg.com)
• mouse movement (http://www.clicktale.com)
• 5 second usability test (http://fivesecondtest.com)
• Quantitative
• analytics platforms (google analytics)
• 3rd party site analysis (http://www.woorank.com)
• social media monitoring (Scoutlabs, social mention, ClickZ)
• Create monthly dashboards reports to show off the data – don’t just give them the link to the analytics page (http://www.shufflepoint.com, http://www.nordicclick.com or create your own)
• Key Performance Indicators (KPI) – ranked in order of importance
• Compare at least two dates/months/years
• % change (make green and red)
• trends
• key takeaways – use visuals to call out problems/highlight success
• orders vs. revenue
• charts
• suggested action items
• list out the original business strategy
• Bounce rate high? See the bounce rate per source/city/keyword etc.

Site Optimization

• What’s your end game objective – the business outcomes
• Should the site be optimized for:
• leads
• sales
• traffic – search, referral
• branding
• customer service
• Alter your content
• Provides for instant segmentation
• Can be set up for virtually any segment and/or traffic source – make landing pages that speak specifically to that user:
• Organic/Paid Search
• Email recipient
• mobile user
• loyal customer
• reseller
• Fire up the tracking
• Dedicated pages – send them directly to the appropriate sub directory – make the call to action from paid search very simple and obvious
• Look at your competitors
• Google the name before selecting it – you may find the competition is too strong for that name
• Remarketing
• Follow site visitors that came but didn’t complete the action and target them with ads (http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/remarketing.html)
• Test what you know and what you don’t know
• Integrate all of your various marketing campaigns
• Don’t sit still – keep content fresh!

Tools

• Site architecture and usability
• GoMockingbird – wireframes – $9/mo
• Gliffy – flowcharts, IA and other diagrams – $5/mo
• UserTesting.com – $39/test
• Feedback Army – ask people questions – $15 for 10 responses
• Competitive Analysis
• compete.com
• quantcast.com
• alexa.com
• websitegrader.com
• heardable