VAR102: Web Presence - Optimizing for Online Lead Generation
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This document discusses optimizing a company's web presence for online lead generation. It covers defining target audiences through personas, creating helpful content for common questions, organizing content by topic on the website, and ensuring the site is user-friendly and mobile-optimized. It also addresses the importance of search engine optimization through consistent business listings and reviews, as well as engaging prospective customers through social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The key takeaways are to deeply understand audiences, educate prospects through content, maintain consistent online profiles, and embrace new engagement opportunities.
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VAR102: Web Presence - Optimizing for Online Lead Generation
- 1. VAR 102: Web Presence Optimizing for Online Lead Generation Simon Poulton Manager of Inbound Marketing - Laserfiche
- 2. Scope ‣ Inbound Marketing ‣ Define Your Audience ‣ Content Creation ‣ Website Strategy ‣ The Role of Social Media
- 3. Who am I? ‣ Simon Poulton ‣ Manager of Inbound Marketing @ Laserfiche ‣ BA Psychology – UCLA ‣ Top 25 Social Business Leader
- 4. What is “Inbound Marketing”? ‣ Coined by Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot ‣ Providing the right resources to the right people at the right time.
- 6. Customer Executive Board “57% of a typical purchase decision is made before a customer even talks to a supplier.” Customer Executive Board, 2013 Survey of 1,400 B2B customers across industries.
- 12. Audience Who are we marketing to?
- 13. Personas
- 14. 3 Core Personas Admin Amy Manager Maria IT Ian
- 15. Persona – Admin Amy ‣ Pain Points • Current system is disorganized & time consuming. • Work is unrewarding—filing, printing and data entry tasks are boring! • Hard to find any older invoices when requested. • Not sure how to drive change.
- 16. Persona – Admin Amy ‣ Pain Points • Current system is disorganized & time consuming. • Work is unrewarding—filing, printing and data entry tasks are boring! • Hard to find any older documents when requested. • Not sure how to drive change. ‣ Goals • Stay employed. • Have less stressful workdays. • Find a low-risk solution for a process-related problem.
- 17. Persona – Manager Maria ‣ Pain Points • Spends too much time manually approving documents. • Her department is spending a lot of money on offsite paper storage • Knows department could be more productive, not sure how. • Wants to improve operations, but has no time.
- 18. Persona – Manager Maria ‣ Pain Points • Spends too much time manually approving documents. • Her department is spending a lot of money on offsite paper storage. • Knows department could be more productive, not sure how. • Wants to improve operations, but has no time. ‣ Goals • Reduce departmental spending. • Improve communication and transparency between employees and departments. • Make more time for strategic work and valuable management duties.
- 19. Persona – IT Ian ‣ Pain Points • Is very risk averse and doesn’t want to implement new software he is unfamiliar with. • IT department is very small and already stretched thin. • He gets blamed for system problems that users create.
- 20. Persona – IT Ian ‣ Pain Points • Is very risk averse and doesn’t want to implement new software he is unfamiliar with. • IT department is very small and already stretched thin. • He gets blamed for system problems that users create. ‣ Goals • Keep the lights on. • Keep the department heads happy. • Provide simple solutions that regular employees will understand and actually use.
- 21. 3 Core Personas Admin Amy Manager Maria IT Ian
- 23. Content Creation What are the top things visitors are looking for?
- 24. General Code
- 25. Content Creation What are the top questions your customers ask you?
- 26. Content Creation “If customers are asking you the same questions over and over again offline, they probably have the same questions online as well.” - Aaron Weiche, Spyder Trap Marketing
- 27. Content Creation What’s unique about your audience and the areas you serve?
- 28. Content Creation
- 29. Content Creation Do you have case studies, or customer interviews?
- 30. Solbrekk
- 31. Solution Exchange & Case Study Portal
- 32. Content Creation Do you have value propositions for download?
- 33. Content Creation
- 34. Example: The ECM Blog I
- 35. Example: The ECM Blog II
- 37. Content Organization What do you do? Products / Solutions / Services / Partners / Blog
- 38. Content Organization Targeting a specific key phrase or group of related phrases on each page. Google Keyword Planner
- 39. Content Organization What do you do? Products / Solutions / Services / Partners / Blog
- 40. Content Organization Where are you? Contact Us / Footer
- 42. Content Organization Why should I trust you? Case Studies / Testimonials / Blog
- 43. Content Organization Who are you? About / Company
- 44. Content Organization – Unity ECM
- 45. Content Organization Your most important content should be featured on/linked to from the homepage.
- 46. Your Website User Experience & Technical Considerations
- 47. Laserfiche Website Circa 1999
- 48. UE & Technical Considerations Make your website mobile-friendly
- 49. AMI Paperless
- 50. UE & Technical Considerations Focus on headlines, sub- headlines and images, not text.
- 51. UE & Technical Considerations Have a goal in mind for every page.
- 52. UE & Technical Considerations Make sure you can track the results of your hard work!
- 53. Your Website Getting Found Online
- 54. A question to consider… “If a website is published online, and no one can Google it… does it even exist?”
- 55. Did You Know? “In 2014, there were over 20 billion searches performed per month on Google in the United States”
- 57. NAP – Name, Address, Place Needs to be consistent across all mediums.
- 58. Citations & Reviews Used to understand the relevance & importance of your website.
- 62. Example: Laserfiche.com ‣ 75% of visitors scroll beyond the first section on the page.
- 64. Website – Learn
- 65. The Importance of Being Social Do you really need to be on social media?
- 66. Twitter ‣ Bi-directional engagement (conversations) ‣ Trusted resource ‣ Not a strong traffic driver
- 67. LinkedIn ‣ Generally static medium ‣ Great for identifying sales opportunities
- 68. Facebook ‣ Everyone and their dog is on Facebook ‣ Organic reach is slowly dying ‣ Great for promoted content marketing
- 69. Facebook – Unity ECM
- 70. Google+ ‣ Used as a strong citation ‣ Claim both Google+ local & places ‣ It’s okay to be static
- 71. Key Takeaways & Next Steps
- 72. Key Takeaways & Next Steps ‣ Know who your audience is and understand their needs. ‣ Build a website with a strong focus on educating prospects. ‣ Ensure your online listings & profiles are all consistent. ‣ Embrace new online engagement mediums!
- 73. Resources & Tools ‣ Let’s Connect: ‣ Email: Simon.poulton@laserfiche.com ‣ Twitter: @Spoulton ‣ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/smpoulton ‣ Course survey: www.laserfiche.com/EmpowerSurvey
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon and welcome to VAR 102: Web Presence: Optimizing for Online Lead Generation. Today, we’ll be discussing the foundational elements of online marketing for small & local businesses. In particular, we’ll be covering…
- ... An introduction to the field of inbound marketing as the modern approach to online marketing. This, in turn, will be used to guide us through the most important parts of online marketing, including: How to define and research your target audience in order to better understand what type of Content you should create. We’ll then cover how this content should be organized on your website in order to make the maximum impact on your website visitors and search rankings, before finally discussing the role of additional online marketing mediums independent of your website including social media and review websites. While this session will predominantly focus on the theory behind online marketing, I’ll have a set of practical resources available at the conclusion of this presentation. First though, I’d like to take a moment to introduce myself…
- … my name is Simon Poulton and I am the Manager of Inbound Marketing at Laserfiche. I have a BA in Psychology from UCLA and was recently named by IBM & the Economist Intelligence Unit as one of the global top 25 social business leaders of 2014. If my name sounds familiar, but you’re not sure why, there is a very good chance you’ve received an automated e-mail from me after downloading a resource from the Laserfiche website. Although I’m only 26, I have been in the online marketing field for over 13 years after I started developing and promoting websites for local bands in my hometown of Auckland, New Zealand. I formally entered the field 3 years ago after discovering the modern concept of Inbound Marketing. If you’ve never heard of Inbound Marketing, it is often considered to be synonymous with Content & Social Media marketing – but its much more than that. While those are both tactics, inbound is a strategy…
- …Originally coined by Brian Halligan in 2004, inbound marketing is simply the act of providing the right resources to the right people at the right time. It is a fundamental belief that education is your greatest tool when marketing. This is different from more traditional marketing which in comparison is considered to be interruptive due to the lack of alignment with the majority of the audience. So what does this traditional, or “interruptive” marketing look like?
- Well, it looks like this. It comes across in the form of billboards, tv ads or banner ads online. Inbound, on the other hand, focuses more on looking for behavioral intent signals from prospects and sharing educational content as appropriate. The end goal of inbound marketing is to help prospects make informed decisions. This aligns very well with the traditional B2B software sales cycle where the procurement process can be long, and the decision is based on a large amount of analysis by a number of people within an organization. In fact, buyer’s are already exhibiting behavior that aligns with the principles of inbound marketing..
- …a recent survey of 1400 B2B customers across industries performed by the Customer Executive Board found that on average 57% of a typical purchase decision has already been made by the time a prospect initiates contact with a company. So why has this shift occurred? The internet has changed everything. Not only has it democratized access to information about products or peer reviews, but it has also provided superior analytics and more intelligence on the buyer’s journey than ever before. Reference: http://www.executiveboard.com/exbd/sales-service/the-end-of-solution-sales/index.page?hs=sns
- We are now living in the age of the “informed buyer” and it is our job as marketers to complement their buying process as much as possible. Why? Because we want to be seen as a trusted informative resource. This trust forms a bias in the mind of the prospect – just like a when a good sales person befriends & supports the needs of prospects during a sale. It is important to remember that ultimately people do business with people, and you want to be nurturing them every step of the way for this connection – even before they engage with sales. So let’s take a step back for a moment and understand how this idea of the “informed buyer” changes the sales funnel.
- Here we have an example of a traditional sales funnel. The roles of marketing and sales are clearly defined with the core marketing responsibilities focused on driving awareness and interest. Sales is then responsible for taking the lead of “Consideration” all the way through to “Purchase”. This is really hard on the sales team, and ultimately ends with them telling marketing how bad the leads are. Why? Because they can’t find the needle in the haystack – the majority of these leads are not ready to buy. They are just learning about the solution offered. It’s not that these leads are bad, they just need to be nurtured along the process. The modern sales funnel takes this concept and changes the distribution of responsibilities…
- … here we see a sharp shift in the role of marketing. The buyer still goes through the same stages of the funnel, but is able to do so without feeling pressured and forced to engage with sales – one of the most common comments I see on form submissions through our website is “I do not want to speak with sales, I just want to watch this webinar” or something to that effect. So, why do people feel this way? Well it’s this idea of the informed buyer – they are no longer held to ransom over product details or information, because it’s everywhere - the buyer can do their own research and come to a decision on their own.
- In a similar way to how the sales process was designed to nurture, marketing now takes this role. This allows us to better separate the signal to noise ratio, where previously you would get maybe 300 leads to sales – this new approach would look to provide them with a 10% of that, but all highly qualified and ready to speak with sales. This is particularly important in industries like ours where a sale can take anywhere from a few months to a few years.
- Organic lead generation like this is very unique – there is a high upfront cost (in the form of work) with gradual payoffs and rewards that appear over time. Some of our posts generate 5 leads a month – which is just a drop in the bucket, but when we look at these on aggregate, they can generate up to 60 leads a year… each and what’s more? – they don’t stop! When we look at the ECM blog overall, it not only produces the greatest number of leads, compared with paid online marketing, and tradeshows, but also the highest quality. This is such an important element, and why I am such an advocate for this approach – when you pay to advertise, that’s it, you are paying for that exact moment in time, once you’ve paid it’s over. These evergreen blog posts and informative content, however, allow us to constantly keep growing our lead generation avenues. This is one of the hardest arguments you’ll come up against for inbound marketing – simply, it doesn’t work – but that’s not true. It needs to mature! For the rest of today’s session we’ll take a look at how we can apply this inbound methodology to your marketing initiatives….
- The first thing we need to do is define our audience. We need to answer questions like, who are they? what industries do they work in? and what problems do they face? This is easy to do for individuals, but becomes much harder when we look to identify general trends across groups within our target audience. In order to identify these groups, we need to develop group profiles, or…..
- … “Personas” as they are more commonly known. The persona development process involves mapping out the needs and concerns of your target audience at each stage of the sales funnel. This process is going to be different for every organization, and I recommend you take some time when you get back to your office following Empower to perform a modeling exercise with your team. I’ve included a link in the resources section for future reference to help you with this process. Earlier this year, our marketing team sat down and performed this very exercise….
- …during the process we determined there are 3 core personas that represent our target buyers. To help you remember them, we’ve chosen some alliterative names for our 3 key roles: Admin Amy, Manager Maria & IT Ian. Each of these personas has unique interests and needs, but they all play a role in the sale of new software. The end goal of modeling these personas is to provide us with a stronger sense of direction for content aligned with meeting their needs at the right time. To provide some context, I’ve aligned each persona with an example relating to accounts payable processing. This is by no means a limiting factor, and this personas have been designed to map across processes and across industries. Now, let’s jump on in and take a look at Admin Amy….
- Let’s start by starting a look at Admin Amy – she is the one who is in the trenches every day. In our example, she will be the AP Clerk. She often gets blamed for a slow process, even though it’s not her fault that she has to deal with a legacy process where all invoices are printed. Even though she is the most aware of the problem, she is also the least likely of our 3 personas to be able to make decisions regarding changing the process or software procurement. She does, however, play an important role in the decision making process regarding any new systems as she will be the one using them everyday. It’s important that you get her onboard early as she will be doing most of the research and can serve as an internal advocate for you throughout.
- Her goals are simple, she wants to reduce her stress by making the process more efficient. She is cautious about new initiatives, and fears the idea that she might be replaced by a computer – losing her job is a very scary and real prospect to her.
- Next, we have Manager Maria, this is Amy’s boss. She is the Finance Director, and while not as close to the process as Amy, her sign off is required on all final invoices. This is a time consuming process as some invoices get lost along the way, or are filed late by other departments. As a result, other department heads complain to her about the turnaround time on invoices and the impact this has on their department. Maria is the most likely person to lead the initiative, however she is not very likely to be doing the research herself.
- Like any good manager, Maria is always looking for ways to decrease the spending of her department. She also wants to make the Accounts Payable process more visible and transparent to other employees. In an ideal world, she wouldn’t need to spend so much time chasing paper around the office, and instead she would like to spend more time with her team, helping them perform at a higher level.
- Finally, we have IT Ian, he is your typical IT guy and is very risk averse. To him, risk comes in the form of unknown products, he is cautious about new software as he doesn’t want it to become a massive burden to support. He ultimately cares about the goals of the organization and hears how people complain about time certain processes take, but is worried the blame will land on him if new software projects fail.
- Ian’s goals are quite different from both Admin Amy & Manager Maria. He is focused on keeping the lights on – if the ship doesn’t sink, he has achieved his goal. Why? Because IT failure for this organization would be catastrophic. If systems go down, no one in the organization will be able to work and the blame will ultimately fall on him. He is interested in keeping department heads happy, and is therefore willing to look into options to help them solve problems. He also wants to work with them to make sure they don’t go around IT when procuring new software.
- There we have it – although these 3 personas are not entirely exhaustive, and there are hybrids that exist – like IT management, they should give you a good sense of the major players in the buying process. Ultimately, you need to convince all 3 of these individuals you are the right choice. In order to do this, we need to understand what type of content each of these audiences needs to see to help make an informed decision. In sum, this will create the content mix for your website.
- The content you include on your website is the foundation of digital marketing success. You’re probably already well versed in talking about your business to friends, business partners, prospective customers etc. but it can be hard to find the time to write down these concepts or find the exact words you’d like to use online. Your website doesn’t need to be perfect though – in fact, it can even appear more authentic to prospects if it isn’t filled with refined marketing language & actually focuses on providing answers to questions visitors might have. So how do you get started?
- Start by asking the basic question, what are the top things visitors to your site are looking for? An easy to find out what people are looking for is by searching for a term, say “Accounts Payable Aut” and looking at related search terms that come up. While some of these terms might not align with the audience you’re trying to reach, they will provide a good context for aggregate searcher intent. These suggestions aren’t just pulled out of thin air, they are based on the most likely searches a user will perform when starting with the root keyword. Using this method, we can understand what a page on your website about accounts payable should include…
- Here is a great example of this concept targeting from General Code. I recently spoke with Kate Squires and asked her about the content creation approach her team applied to their new website. Just a little background – their new website has been designed specifically for the document management arm of their business – which is great as they can provide highly targeted pages of content. The approach they took was focused on education prospects, and the first section of their site goes in depth into “What is ECM?”. They include terms like “Benefits of” and link to pages focusing on each of the key benefits.
- Next, you’ll want to think about the top questions customers ask you. Do you hear the same questions from multiple people? If so, you should address these questions in the copy on your website. We’re going to take a look at structure and organization shortly, but its important the theme of problem solving is pervasive throughout.
- Here’s a quote I love from Aaron Weiche of Spyder Trap Marketing: “If customers are asking you the same questions over and over again offline, they probably have the same questions online as well” – Your top pages should focus on these questions and provide a strong, clear answer. Right? This stuff is very intuitive
- Next, we need to think about the unique elements of your audience. Are you focused on small government organizations or major finance services firms? This is going to help guide the language you use and the examples you cite. If the industry you serve uses a particular term, say “Document Management” instead of “ECM” then use that terminology. Since the VAR community is by nature geo-centric, you should also include local relevant content. This includes your address and additional information. These are big indicators to search engines about local relevance. Look what happens when I type “Laserfiche Reseller” into Google…
- I’m immediately given geocentric information – these are the most popular searches. People are actively looking for Laserfiche resellers near them. If you don’t have a page about Laserfiche on your website, or any other software/products you sell, you seriously need to start including this in your content. There are a number of VAR websites out there that don’t mention Laserfiche at all, this is a rookie move and one that is very easy to correct.
- Next, you need to think about showing proof of solution success. Include insights into previous projects, like: what was the problem, what was the solution and what was the result? Case studies have amazing potential, as do interviews with customers.
- Here’s an example from Larry Phelps, the VP of Sales & Marketing at Solbrekk, a VAR based out of Minnesota. They do an amazing job of following up and speaking with customers about their solutions. In addition to the library of case studies, they also have 10 customer videos on their website associated with their use of Laserfiche – this is huge and goes a long way to explain why Solbrekk has been a winner’s circle VAR for several years now! I know this isn’t going to be possible for many of you, but Larry effectively outsources the creation of these videos to freelancers via oDesk – I highly recommend checking out this website as there are all kinds of professionals offering their services – which might make it a little easier if you’re the only marketer within your organization. Of course, Laserfiche.com also provides many resources for you to use…
- …like articles on the Solution Exchange and Case Study Portal – we currently have over 300 articles live and actively encourage you to link to these from your website.
- Finally, you need to think about how you are going to generate leads via the website. While it is important to provide educational content, you will want to think about placing your extremely high value content behind a form, or a gate as it is commonly referred to. It’s important that you make the value large enough to overcome the friction threshold we all feel when filling out a form. This concept is akin to using your personal information to “pay” for the item you’re downloading. I’m sharing this as it is important not to gate everything on your website and to be very cognizant of when and where the forms live on your website. You are welcome to use any of the …
- …Laserfiche eBooks, White Papers & Analyst Reports that are made available via the VAR Sales Tools Repository – if you do not already have a login, please see the link at the end of today’s presentation to register. We have a number of eBooks that are very good for lead generation including, the Document Management Buyers Guide and The Ultimate Guide to Records Management among others. It’s important you understand how to position these on your website. You need to provide some informative content first in order to pique the interest of prospects, for example…
- … we use the ECM blog as our primary medium for organic lead generation. Our blog serves as a living resource to anyone investigating ECM software or associated solutions. This is where we provide answers to the most common questions prospects have, like “How do you automate Accounts Payable processes?” or “What is the difference between Document & Records Management?” – These posts allow us to rank on Google for a wide variety of terms, and in turn drive highly qualified prospects to our website…
- … where they are invited to download a value proposition. We use a landing page to collect their information – these are very easy to build with a software like Unbounce or HubSpot and do not require much technical web knowledge at all. So now we have a good idea of our audience, and the type of content our website should have…
- …but if your content lacks organization, it’s going to be hard for prospects to intuitively find what they are looking for. content is useless if not organized effectively. I see a lot of websites that make this mistake all the time. Amazing content, but no one can find it. In particular – you think about organizing your website around these questions…
- What do you do? In particular, what solutions do you provide? What products do you use for these solutions? Who do you work with? When developed well, these pages will act as a honeypot for visitors who may have heard of these other ideas via word of mouth. It’s particularly important to align each of these pages with a specific key phrase of group of related phrases…
- ...for example - Let’s say we have a page on audits – we can include a variety of key terms all clustered around this central idea. This is how we get things to rank. Now I’m not expecting to see you all go out and start ranking on the term compliance audit, but we saw Google search results are becoming more geocentric and it is a very real possibility that you could rank well for “Compliance Audit” in your local region. Using a tool like “Google Keyword Planner” will help you take a page concept and give you the types of searches they are seeing around this. Why do they give you all this data for free? Well its because they want you to start using AdWords and paying them for promotion on the search engine results page.
- You should also think about how you plan to include a page about Laserfiche here. As we mentioned earlier, it’s very important you have this to capitalize of geospecific searches for Laserfiche resellers. Blogging is great if you have the time – this is an excellent medium to use for explaining concepts in the Document Management space, or promoting upcoming events like User Groups or workshops.
- You will also need to address the questions, where are you? Your contact us page should offer multiple options for visitors to connect with you. This includes a form they can complete, a number they can call, as well as your social channels. Be sure to also include the addresses of your office locations and areas served. You should look to include your company name, address and phone number in the footer of every page.
- Check out this example for the new AMI Paperless website where this information is included in the footer very clearly. As mentioned earlier, you’ll should focus on building trust with prospects across your whole website. In particular, you need to think about including..
- …some specific trust-building pieces of content. If you don’t have your own case studies, then this is where you can leverage the Laserfiche name and track record of success. The more specific these examples are to your prospects the better, and in addition to promoting the software, you also need to promote your own track record of driving customer success. The example from Solbrekk earlier is an excellent way to do this. Larry even included those case study videos on his LinkedIn profile helping drive awareness around these items as he connects with new prospective clients.
- Finally, you need to answer the question – “Who are you?” People like doing business with people and the more upfront and transparent you are about the people behind the company, the easier it will be for prospects to trust you. There are too many websites that will provide an overview that could apply to any company. This should be unique otherwise prospects will see right through you. The team from Unity ECM…
- …do an excellent job of being transparent about who they are as a company. Not only do they include pictures of their team members but they also include their depth of experience and expertise in the page copy. So, how does this all come together to form a website? We’ve covered the key pages you should have, now let’s think about structure & hierarchy…
- Your most important pages are going to be ones that inform and drive conversion. Think about including an introductory, “What is Document Management?” page for prospects and linking to the Document Management Buyer’s Guide. You do not want to create a cluttered website, and the hub & spoke model here will allow for easy linking between major sections. Here’s a fun little anecdote that is actually very applicable – when Walt Disney was designing Disneyland, he placed the castle in the middle – why? Because it’s the focal point of the park – no matter where you go, you can almost always see the castle, from here you can choose to go to any other land. This is just like the homepage of a website – you shouldn’t have to go through multiple sections to find what you need… just like needing to go through multiple lands – this helps guests at Disneyland by allowing them to intuitively navigate their way around the park. There is no “one structure to rule them all” but using this model will help you understand how all the pieces of your business can fit into your website. Now that we’ve covered audience, content & organization, we need to think about the finishing touches by ensuring a high quality user experience…
- Now that we’ve covered audience, content & organization, we need to think about the finishing touches by ensuring a high quality user experience. Does your website look like it was from 1999?
- …hopefully not! Here is a little blast from the past for all of you – the Laserfiche website circa 1999. There’s a certain nostalgic value to these types of pages. They make you remember the dial up tone and how slow 56k truly was. But the year in not 1999 and the internet is now the most powerful communication tool of all time. Your website is your most important marketing asset and it should look fantastic. An important concept to note, is that websites are living marketing mediums – it can be hard to go beyond the idea of print as a static medium, but websites by their nature are designed to be constantly iterated upon. If you constantly keep this in mind and take small steps, you’ll never need to go through massive large scale redevelopments. It is with this idea, that I encourage all of you to prepare for the mobile web…
- …Mobile use is growing and trends are suggesting this won’t be slowing down anytime soon. In fact, 12% of web traffic to laserfiche.com during the 4th quarter of 2014 was from a non-desktop device, this is up from 9% during Q4, 2013. Notice, I said non-desktop and not “mobile” – this is because the number of devices people are using continues to grow exponentially – be it a tablet, a watch or even Google Glass, you should think about ensuring your website is responsive and prepared for the future. This is up from 9% during Q4, 2013. While many early-adopters developed 2 sites, one for desktop and one for mobile, the common consensus is to ensure your website is responsive and can be viewed on any device. This is something you should do sooner, rather than later. Most WYSIWYG website builders and wordpress templates include the ability to develop responsively. This is not something you want to put off.
- AMI Paperless just redeveloped their website with responsive support. In general they do a great job of organizing their content – “Services, About, Testimonials, Contact” – it’s not overcomplicated and promotes these pages as being the most important. I spoke with Sarah recently about the work she has been doing to optimize the AMI Paperless web experience as a one-women marketing show. This kind of stuff might seem difficult, but even the smallest teams can take on these kinds of large scale projects.
- One of most common issues I hear from people about their website is that no-one reads it and they a very low average, “time on page”. This is often as a result of word-vomit or very large amounts of text all placed on a page. Think about aiding comprehension by focusing on key sections of the page and distill those long paragraphs down into bullet point lists for easy skimming. Your headlines & sub headlines should be clear and direct – these elements take on more page weight and are viewed by Google as a stronger indicator of the actual content on the page.
- This is very important – before you develop and launch a page – what is the goal? What do you want visitors to do? Your website doesn’t have to be huge, in fact it could be as small as 7 pages, but its important to think about everything being very goal-centric. Are you looking to drive demo leads? Are you promoting a value proposition? Are you simply looking to educate? Are you looking to help visitors navigate? It’s important to tie these closely to lead generation so you can show the success of your marketing initiatives with actual numbers.
- No matter how amazing or how badly you think your website is doing. The truth is always in the analytics – before you get started with any kind of website optimization, be sure to use some analytics software. There are so many out there on the market, but I recommend using Google Analytics – it’s free and there are a lot of very smart people out there online who have written extensively about customization and getting meaningful data. If you’re interested, check out one of my favorite blogs by Google Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik – Occams Razor – Avinash was actually kind enough to sit down with us for an interview on the Simplicity 2.0 blog last year! Even if you think you don’t have the time to get started with this kind of analysis, you should still apply the tracking code to your website for future reference. I’ve included a link to a tutorial in the resources section to help you get started! At the very least, you should know how many people are coming to your website, where they are coming from and how many are converting.
- So far, we’ve covered everything you need to make a great website, but how will anyone ever know? Here’s a question to consider…
- …if a website is published online and no one can Google it, does it even exist? While not as existential as a question regarding a tree making a sound in the woods when no one is around, your website is useless if no one can find it. You may be familiar with the concepts surrounding “Search Engine Optimization” or SEO – tactics employed by website owners to appear higher on search engine result pages, and in turn drive more traffic to their website. SEO has changed a lot over the past 2 years as Google has started to crack down on manipulative practices like buying links. I prefer to think of modern SEO as “Web Presence Optimization” where multiple channels are taken into account when looking at the multiple ways people look to access information these days.
- Did you know, Comscore reported in 2014 that there were over 20 billion searches performed per month on the web in the United States? (http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics) That’s 20 billion requests for information each month – granted this is not a representative sample of your target audience, but you are deceiving yourself if you believe your target prospects are not online researching solutions. While it is important to simply exist online, it’s useless if you can’t be found. Yet, we still see many companies completely ignoring their search presence optimization. Fear not, there is a secret code that has been cracked…
- … and here it is! Every year, local search experts come together and release the local search engine ranking factors. Before you think of this as a mathematical equation, just know there is no one rule for ranking well online and Google is constantly evolving their algorithm to find the highest quality content and align that with searchers intent. We’ve already covered many of these elements, with the exception of offsite factors. If this kind of stuff interests you, and you want to make a big impact, I encourage you all to go to the Moz Local website as they have a wealth of information. I’m also happy to speak with you all individually following today’s presentation. Of these offsite factors, we’re going to take a look at the 2 most important, something called NAP and something called Citations.
- NAP is an acronym – it stands for Name, Address, Place. As we mentioned earlier, this should be included in the footer of every page on your website. Ensuring your company address and phone number are consistent should be a no brainer, but with the proliferation of online review sites and directories, this can easily go wrong. The internet only continues to become more connected, and as such we see certain sites develop authority that Google relies upon for strength of signal. Is your address on Google maps the same as the one on Yelp? If not, Google might not understand the connection between these two elements and connect your online footprint. Those are just 2 examples, but there are so many to check. The list continues to grow, but at least check, it was around 30 sources that Google uses. Luckily, Moz offers a tool that for a small fee allows you to upload your address and information one time and then they go around the internet ensuring everything lines up. While this may seem small, it might be the difference between your company appearing at the bottom or the top of the search results page.
- Now, on to citations. This isn’t a Google speeding ticket, rather a citation in local SEO is aligned closely with the academia understanding of the term. This is a verifiable source that Google uses to understand the relevance and weight of a website. Similar to ensuring NAP is consistent across mediums, you should also think about your companies online reviews and the links your website receives from others. Do you have any online reviews? Consider including an easy link to do this in an e-mail - it’s very easy to include a link to your business on Google+ and ask politely for a review. Most of your customers will be happy to do this, and given the lack of Google reviews for most companies should help you stand out in the results. Where you will need to look for these opportunities will be highly relevant to the nature and location of your business. If you are looking for a backlink from Laserfiche.com all you need to do is share a case study or solution exchange with us and you’ll be credited on our website! Speaking of our website…
- …Today, for the very first time, you will be the first audience outside of Laserfiche to see the new and improved Laserfiche.com – stay tuned to the Laserfiche VAR News as I will be writing an article all about the new site.
- If you have seen our homepage recently, you’ll notice this design is very similar, as we revised the homepage in a series of experiments earlier this year. So let’s dive on in!
- Right from the moment a visitor lands on our website - we look to convey what we do and who we are early as clearly as possible. This is a critical point in the buyer’s journey – a bounce is only one click away so it’s important we don’t overcomplicate this experience and provide a directed path. Often I’ll see websites using a scrolling marquee where they have 4 panes of content alternating – this is very confusing for a visitor and lacks a focal point – while it may help you diversify your initial engagement opportunities, it also lacks direction. Focus on helping the visitor find their own path through the website by highlighting the sections you think will be most pertinent to your audience – humans need to be guided through a website. You also need to consider how these types of pages will look across devices – if it breaks on mobile, your bounce rate will go through the roof. Our opening gambit needs to be clear, concise and direct while catering to those who would prefer to read as well as those who prefer to watch a video – As many online marketers will tell you – we live in a post-literate world, so you need to make content available in all forms, especially video. The end goal for your website is to drive engagement – your golden ticket is when someone voluntarily fills out a form asking you to contact them or schedule a demo. Not only are they ready to engage, they already have a shortlist of options in mind, and you’ve made the cut! That’s why we have included an initial point of lead collection here at the top of the page – this is particularly effective for collecting information from people who may have heard of us via word of mouth or at an in-person event despite being first time visitors to the website. We have also found including “Contact Us” beside “Schedule a Demo” has led to an increase in leads than either placed there alone. The theory being that “Contact Us” appears to be less of a commitment when placed beside “Schedule a Demo” – you’ll also notice we conveniently include this in the navigation bar, so it doesn’t matter what page a visitor enters on, they will still be presented with this call to action. From looking at our own analytics, we have found that over the past year only 13.46% of traffic has entered our website through the homepage. So we have to keep in mind that 86% of people won’t be exposed to this content initially, that’s why a well-organized navigation is extremely important with various calls to action embedded throughout the website.
- So what happens next? If a visitor doesn’t bounce, click on the navigation or look to contact us, they begin to scroll. In fact – 75% of visitors scroll beyond the first section on the page.
- Here we have aligned specific calls to action (CTAs) with 3 distinct visitor groups – not to be confused with our content personas – first: learn – this is for people who really have no idea what ECM is, or what we can do – they may have heard about us via a friend or seen us at a tradeshow. This is often the first stop for Admin Amy & Manager Maria, they have a basic knowledge, but this will help them understand their options. Next, evaluate is aligned with those who have determined they want ECM software, but need to research their options a little more (IT will usually choose to start here), and finally, Engage provides an easy springboard for customers and VARs to enter our community side. You may think of this as a way to replace the scrolling marquee and provide direction for all audiences regardless of where they are in the procurement process. This section accounts for 25% of movement away from this page and helps the audience self-segregate to an area of the website where their needs can be met. Let’s take a deeper look at the Learn ECM page here.
- The “Learn Enterprise Content Management” page provides a simple way for us to direct first time visitors to the key sections of our website, while also providing them with a basic understanding of the product. This not only helps optimize our page to rank well on search engines, but helps the newest visitors feel like we can be a trusted resource, it’s important that we can hold their hand through these initial steps as they are forming their opinion of us – something that will be much harder to change later in the buying cycle with they already have their biases. That’s all we can share for now, but stay tuned as this new site is coming soon to an internet browser near you! Finally today, we’re going to take a look at social media …
- …and answer the question, do you really need to be active on social media? In short, you need to consider it very seriously, social is a communication medium just like e-mail and allows your company to expand its online footprint in new ways, it is also not just a trend so there will never be a better time than today to get started. Do you need to be on every network known to man? Definitely not, but you should consider how you appear on the most popular mediums.
- Let’s take a look at twitter – this is a great medium for engaging in conversations and promoting your brand as a knowledgeable, important resource. The team from General Code do an excellent job of promoting their customers stories and sharing up to the minute insights into Government Technology. This works really well with their target audience and serves as an excellent reengagement medium. The average lifetime of a tweet is around 15 minutes. Since they move so quickly, you can share several each day – the Laserfiche twitter account usually shares in the region of 10 to 14 posts per day during the year. Before jumping in or dismissing this medium, start by listening – look at some hashtags, look at what others are posting and see if it makes sense for your brand to engage. It is worse to have an account and never tweet, than it is to avoid having an account all together.
- I make no secret of this, LinkedIn has my favorite audience, and least favorite UI. There is so much potential with this medium though. I highly encourage you to all ensure your company profiles look great and are up to date. There are several online tutorials that will help you get started if you havn’t already. If you have – think about your audience and providing them with great content each day. We will usually do one post a day which gains upwards of 3000 impressions – this is much greater penetration than any other social network will allow for. Posting each day is not required however. The real value in LinkedIn is making sure your team is active. This is such a great medium for staying in touch with business associates and having your internal teams amplify content as it is produced.
- Facebook, the worlds most famous social network, is home to over 1.23 billion active users every day. Your prospective customers are there, however even if they like your page, they may never see you on there. Facebook has slowly been dropping the organic reach of company pages in an attempt to a) make facebook more personal (with friends preferred over pages) and b) make brands pay for sponsored updates. The latter has been very popular, and is also very inexpensive. Here is an example from Unity ECM…
- … who have promoted several articles & updates on Facebook allowing them to hit a wider audience with updates that promote how well the company is doing. Think of facebook as a medium that will help you reach many of your current customers and show off company culture. It is very hard to generate leads via facebook with the exception of remarketing initiatives.
- Finally, Google+ - the social network everyone loves to hate. This is still a strong signal to Google and you should also have an active company profile on there. Link it with your YouTube and other Google accounts, this will help you streamline and standardize the way Google sees your company as this is a direct feed into the search results pages.
- End your presentation on this slide, but remember to ask for questions. List other courses, papers, videos, etc., relevant to your course material.