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Mobile-First Indexing and Mobile Site Performance Optimization – A Checklist

Posted on January 17, 2017 - 9:09 PM by

With the recent mobile-first index announcement by Google, mobile site optimization needs to be taken more seriously than ever before. As Google, rightly so, looks to mobile sites first for search engine indexing and ranking, mobile site SEO strategy, mobile content and user experience has become critical to digital visibility.

Standard UX Enhancements:

In order to bring visibility to your mobile site, first start with standard mobile UX enhancements such as:
 Improved site speed by reducing bandwidth – Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content, optimize images, leverage browser caching – for starters.

 Remove floating elements (which do not render well on mobile devices)!

 Adjust font size and accommodate the “fat finger”

 Use mobile-friendly navigation patterns (drop downs that appear on hover are a bad idea on mobile sites).

 Make menus short.

 Reduce number of hyperlink texts in the mobile site to prevent accidental clicks.

 Keep headlines and body copy short, effective and relevant.

 Eliminate flash that does not render on iPhones and is slow on Android.

 

Conversion Optimization features:
 Map conversion paths for mobile devices and associated UI elements.

 Add geo-locators and contextual keyboards to provide a richer and more relevant individual experience.

 Add clickable phone numbers.

 Make Calls-to-Action Prominent by featuring it in the most prominent space on your mobile site.

 Be Available – Add Click-to-Call buttons for complex tasks.

 Keep forms simple and fields down to a bare minimum required.

 Reduce the number of task actions to a minimum – no more than 2 to 3 steps to get the user to convert.

 Add social proof.

 

General SEO Elements (mostly applicable for parallel mobile sites, but some elements are relevant for responsive and dynamic serving sites as well):

 Define goals and success metrics before developing an SEO strategy.

 Research mobile use patterns and intent of users.

 Add geo-specific and mobile specific keywords to optimize your mobile site for location-based searches.

 Reduce dead ends.

 Use concise but useful page titles META descriptions to work with the small screen space limitations.

 Use mobile-friendly URLs.

 Use canonical tags to signal that your mobile and desktop are two versions of the same business.

 Finally, track mobile site analytics to track visits, bounce rates and conversions – If metrics fall short of goals, trouble-shoot possible mobile UX conversion roadblocks.

 

New Mobile-First Indexing Optimization:

Other than the basic, common-sense SEO strategies mentioned above, there are some specific SEO strategies that should be implemented to meet the requirements of mobile-first indexing, as the primary ranking signal will now come from your mobile site and not your desktop site:
 Ensure your structured data is set up on your mobile site.

 Make your mobile site content rich and SEO friendly. Many dynamic serving and mobile sites can suffer from too less content or content not optimized for search engines.

 Speed has become more important than ever, as slow-loading mobile sites are abandoned faster than ever, as our attention span has dipped below goldfish-span levels. Optimize images, leverage browser caching, and enable AMP (Accelerated Mobile Project) pages on your mobile site.
o (NOTE – Even though these lightweight web pages are not likely to boost page rankings in any significant way in the near future, and Google has indicated that it will index desktop pages over AMP pages, if no alternative mobile site exists, at the very least AMP pages will improve user experience and reduce speed load significantly – both positive boosts for search engine rankings).

 Focus on local search has become more important than ever. 4 out or 5 searches on search engines are local searches. Ensure your mobile site is optimized for local search.

 Stop redirecting desktop pages with no mobile equivalent to the mobile home page. That will ensure that those desktop pages are not indexed as Google will first index mobile pages unless there are no mobile equivalent for desktop pages, in which case Google with index desktop pages.

What has helped you achieve top visibility for your mobile website? Drop us a line at info@webtage.com or comment below to let us know!

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7- Strategies to Ramp Up your Online Marketing ROI in 2017

Posted on January 10, 2017 - 10:28 PM by

2017 is the year where digital marketing will become the most dominant advertising medium, overtaking the currently predominant TV advertising. This is not a sudden takeover – digital marketing has seen a massive surge in popularity and effectiveness since 2010. From a 6% of total global spend in 2010, internet advertising has grown steadily and is expected to command 36% of total global advertising spend making it the single largest advertising medium available to businesses in 2017.

As everybody scrambles to grab a share of this ever-powerful medium, having a killer marketing plan will help you focus your activities in an area which can feel overwhelming and confusing to many. A rock-solid plan will also help you differentiate your business, improve your top line, allocate resources and track returns.

So follow the plan below to successfully market your organization online.

1. Create Customer Profiles – Before you embark upon any marketing activities, truly understand your buyers, again! To start with, pick your top customers from last year and create buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictionalized, generalized representation of your ideal customers. Include information such as:

  1. Background info (job & title, education, hobbies),
  2. Demographics (location, age, income etc.)
  3. Identifiers (buzz words that they use, online behavior/ where do they go for information)
  4. Their pain points and how your solutions will alleviate their pain points
  5. Their main objections to your services and/or products

Key Takeaways – Use the buyer persona(s) to map your content development to persona needs and their purchase cycles. Also, make sure your website offers a personalized experience for your top-performing and worst-performing buyers.

 

2. Audit your Website & Personalize Your Web Experience – Your website is the foundation of all your online and most offline campaigns. Consider this: 81% of your prospects go to your website to “check you out” before they even think of contacting you. Your website is your online office-front and what’s more important is that 51.3% of your prospects will rule out a firm before even talking to them. (Hinge Marketing, 2015). So make sure your website helps you put your best foot forward, makes it easy for visitors to find the information they are looking for and is designed for conversions.

Need help with website audit? Download out easy 8-Point Website Audit Checklist here.

Key Takeaways – Integrate a Personalized Web experience and work on Conversion rate Optimization.

 

3. Evaluate your Marketing Campaigns – This is a no-brainer. Pour over conversion metrics by traffic source (traffic & engagement, no. of leads, no. of conversions, cost-per-conversion, lifetime value of conversion, bounce rate & exit pages). Evaluate your best & worst performing sources.

Key Takeaways – Take one lead source at a time, optimize returns, then move on to the next source.

 

4. Create Immersive Content – Content is king but customer is God! The way you truly reach and engage your customers is by creating content that they will like, enjoy and use. With endless streams of content from virtually every brand – some good, some bad and a lot ugly – the standard content strategy of consistent, useful and mapped content is not enough.

Key Takeaways –

  • Invest in live video streaming – Customers saw the popularity of live streaming video in 2016 and marketers saw high ROI associated with it.
  • Immersive Content marketing is on an upswing – As Forbes notes, “Users are also craving more immersive experiences, giving them the feeling that they’re doing more than staring at a phone or laptop screen.” If Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) is too experimental for you, try other immersive content experiences, such as live webinars and 360 degree video experiences
  • Create dense content and scrap catch-bait content – It’s better to not create content than to create mediocre content. Create content that is grounded in specificity and not in generality. Let consumer usability guide your content creation and not search engine algorithm technicalities. Don’t forget good SEO strategies when you publish your content though. Add alt tags, add descriptions and instead of stuffing your article with keywords, try semantic search phrases that fit in naturally with your topic and context.

 

5. Invest in Contextual, Native Advertising – Native advertising is inherently a non-disruptive form of paid advertising that is “in-stream” and mimics the context, content and layout surrounding it on the publisher site. Think Facebook ‘Sponsored Stories’ that appear in your newsfeed that closely match your interests, intent and/or browsing behavior. Since this form of advertisement is nondisruptive (since it complements your browsing patterns and interests) and aims to be less obtrusive than traditional non-contextual banner ads (the conversion rate of native advertising is significantly higher than that on traditional display advertising.

Native advertising is only bound to grow. Consider the following statistics:

  • Native advertising click-through rate on smartphones is an astronomical 0.38% compared to 0.08% for traditional display ads.
  • Most individuals want to learn about products through content rather than via traditional advertising
  • The average click-through rate of premium native ad content is now 137 percent higher than on desktop and this differential is expected to rise with the widespread adoption of AMP and Facebook Instant articles.
  • Native advertising will generate 74% of all U.S. display ad revenue by 2021.

 Key Takeaways – Introduce native advertising into your digital marketing mix. Many in-feed publisher platforms exist, such as Nativo, Taboola & Outbrain. A new player on the block is Wayfare Interactive which offers native, contextual ad units for online commerce. Or try native paid ad listing options from well-known brands, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Amazon, Etsy, Yelp.

 

6. Step Up Mobile Marketing – As mobile search overtook desktop searches in 2015, digital marketers need to adapt to a mobile-first digital world. Mobile advertising is increasing its share of total advertising rapidly as marketers see improved conversions from mobile compared to desktop advertising.

US mobile ad revenue will rise by a 26.5% CAGR through 2020 while US mobile ad spend will correspondingly increase by a 25.2% CAGR. Desktop revenue and spend will decline in the same period.

Key Takeaways –

Step one: make sure your website is mobile ready. Next, enable enough SEO-specific content on your mobile site as Google recently announced that it will now use your mobile site for primary indexing.

Step two: Target your existing ad platforms for more mobile views and better mobile conversions. It could as simple as enabling the Call extension which allows users to simply click on your phone number displayed in the ad, reducing the number of clicks required for conversion.

Step three: Explore more specialized platforms, such as AdMob, Google’s Mobile ad services or TapIt for hyper local mobile targeting.

7. Invest in Data Analytics – At the end of the day, your marketing effectiveness will only be as strong as the insights you can gather from the rich data provided by your campaigns. Ensure the help of BI tools and trained analyst to sift through the data noise and produce valuable information about the market.

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The Evolving World of Enterprise Data Strategy

Posted on December 18, 2016 - 9:38 AM by

The variety, volume and velocity (the “holy trinity”) of enterprise data coupled with the rapid pace of changes in enterprise data management technologies has left many business executives stumped.  Technology choices around enterprise data management seem overwhelming and unclear – SAP Hana or Hadoop? How about SAP Sybase?  What is MapReduce? More importantly, is there a compelling business case to make changes or is status quo good enough? Where do I start?

Well, this is a great place to start. This primer will show you how the enterprise data landscape has changed and map those changes to your enterprise level requirement.

First things first, let’s get some basic definitions out of the way.

Business Intelligence is an umbrella term to describe a set of software tools used to raw data into actionable insights for business decision making. Data Warehouse is a large ‘store’ of enterprise data on supply chain, products and customers. Together, BI and DW comprise the Enterprise Data System and form the backbone of business intelligence, required to sustain competitive advantage.

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8 Easy Ad Extensions to Improve Adwords Conversions!

Posted on April 26, 2016 - 3:37 PM by

Are you looking for an easy way to improve your Adwords performance? We highly encourage you to consider ad extensions to improve your ad performance.

Ad extensions are hyperlinks you see below the main text ad. Having visible and relevant hyperlinks along with the main ad is likely to increase your click-through-rate (CTR).

In the example below, the use of locations extensions to highlight physical address of the center, sitelink extension to deep link  actionable webpages, and call extension to allow mobile users to call the health clinic can all work to improve click-through-rate of the ad.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ad extensions can be your best friends in improving conversion rates. But why do ad extensions work?

  1. They increase your real estate. Google search ads allow a measly 25 characters for the headline, an additional 35 characters for the 1st ad text line and another 35 characters for the 2nd text line. Combine this with the requirement that your ad needs to pack a punch and stand apart from competition. How do you do all of this in mere 95 characters? Ad extensions to the rescue! Ad extensions allow you to add more information to your ad and increase your real estate in the search ad block of search engines. More text, more links and more space allocated to your ad can result in higher click-through-rate and higher conversions.
  1. They highlight your unique selling points – Callout extensions, sitelink extensions and structured snippet extensions can allow you to draw attention to your unique strengths, provide hyperlinks to relevant webpages and highlight particular service, product or your business itself.
  1. They enable deep links – Sitelink extensions are an easy tool to provide deep links to your website beyond your landing page. These sitelinks can easily drive traffic directly to book and appointment page, testimonials page, locations page or any other goal-specific page.
  1. They highlight your location – If you are a local business and want to tell your prospects that help is right around the corner, what better way to do it than add a locations extension?
  1. They allow mobile users to call you – Use call extensions to allow mobile users to call you directly by tapping on your phone number. Easy reach equals faster conversions.

 

How We Used Ad Extensions to Increase Conversions for a Dental Clinic

While running an ad campaign for a dental clinic we significantly improved conversions after enabling ad extensions. For instance, ads with the location extension enabled achieved a 29.82% conversion rate. Location extensions work really well for businesses with a storefront or a local service radius because it signals to prospects that help is nearby.

The biggest impact on conversion rate was for ads with the Call extension enabled had a 38.10% conversion rate!

Sitelink extension also worked really well for our clients when we used it to promote a Valentine’s Day Teeth Whitening Special. Result? A 26.67% conversion rate for the month.

 

So what ad extensions are available for businesses to tap into?

Google Adwords allow for the following extensions:

  1. Sitelink extensions – Sitelink ad extensions are hyperlinks that are deep linked to relevant pages on your website. In the example above, “Find a Doctor,” “Find a Location,” “Request an Appointment” and “Lab Services” are all sitelinks that improve the chances of your ad being clicked.
  2. Location extensions – Adding an address of your physical “storefront” can also increase clicks for your search audience that is shopping locally. Location extension signals to your audience that help is right around the corner.
  3. Call extensions – This is a must for your on-the-go mobile audience! By enabling the call extension, you are allowing users to simply click on your phone number displayed in the ad, reducing the number of clicks required for conversion.
  4. App extension – Are you looking to increase visibility and downloads of your app? Add app extensions to drive traffic to your download page.
  5. Review Extension – What better way to increase trust in your audience than to provide a positive review from a third-party review source? Review extensions allow you to do just that!
  6. Callout Extensions – Callout extensions allow you to display additional text along with your ad that highlights what makes your business unique. Note that callouts are set up at the account level and are not clickable. In the ad example above, the callouts for the cardiovascular center incude “Personalized care,” “Multispecialty team” and “Innovative Research” – all excellent USPs for the healthcare center.
  7. Structured Snippet Extensions – Similar to callout extensions, structured snippet extensions allow you to highlight a specific product or service under predefined headers, such as Amenities, Brands, Neighborhoods, Service Catalog, Styles, Types and more.
  8. Automated Extensions Report – Originally known as “annotations” that displayed consumer ratings and seller ratings, automated extensions are set up automatically to display ratings, social extensions, dynamic structured snippets and dynamic sitelinks if your ad meets certain criteria.
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Looking for ways to improve your Ad Campaign Performance? Contact us today for a 24-hour turnaround Adwords Audit!

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Considering a New Mobile Website? Here’s What You Need to Know Before You Start

Posted on August 26, 2015 - 6:26 PM by

It’s official: Mobile searches have overtaken desktop searches in 10 countries, including the U.S. and Japan. The rapidly expanding mobile-first search world has led Google (with Bing not far behind) to tweak its algorithm to favor mobile optimized sites for search rankings – the so-called “Mobilegeddon.”  The message is clear: As users and search engines favor searches on-the-go, Google is committed to providing an optimal mobile experience and neglecting mobile could mean the inevitable – loss of search rankings and eventual loss of new business.

As a savvy business owner you probably know that having a mobile website experience is important for search rankings. But it is important to carefully craft a mobile strategy that is performance-driven and responsive to your consumers’ on-the-go search behavior.  So how should you navigate the mobile-first world? Before you decide to take a first-step to establish your mobile presence or are interested in evaluating your mobile presence, here are some useful mobility guidelines:

Mobile Configurations

If you have explored mobility solutions, you have probably heard that there are three different configuration approaches to build a mobile presence:

  1. Responsive Design
  2. Dynamic Serving
  3. Separate URL

 Responsive Design has become the holy grail of mobile site development where content from the main website is resized and repositioned to best fit all screen and devices. Responsive Design, however, may not be the best option for you especially if you expect usage patterns and conversion paths to differ between your desktop and mobile users.

Dynamic Serving allows you to serve different user experience on the same URL, based on the type of device that’s requesting the page, thus creating a mobile UX relevant to your on-the-go customers. Use the Vary: User Agent HTTP header for pages that serve dynamic content based on device or that redirect to device-specific URLs to signal to search engines that website content will change based on user agent (device) that requests it.

Separate Mobile site is a great option to create a completely different mobile site and host it on different URL to deliver a highly specific mobile user experience and optimize for mobile search intent. The mobile URL can be a subdomain (m.domain.com), a subfolder (www.domain.com/mobile) or an entirely different domain (www.mobile.com).

So which configuration is best for you?  (Click The Thumbnail Below to View Full Size)

Best Mobile Configuration Method - A Flowchart
Best Mobile Configuration Method – A Flowchart

 

Task-Centric Site – Before you decide which approach is best for you, understand your target audience and their mobile behavior patterns. Consider tasks they are most likely to perform on your mobile website and design the site to ease smartphone task performance.

Understanding their behavior will not only help you create relevant UX, design and content but will also affect the method you use to build a mobile site. If there are significantly different use patterns on a mobile and desktop site, consider a Dynamic Serving website that can render a completely different UX under the same URL. Having the same URL also means you save on SEO costs, although you can tailor the mobile page content for some mobile search intent. A separate mobile site will also work well to serve different use patterns of customers, but entails significantly more technical and marketing resources.

Website content – Is your website content heavy? Will your customers be served well by serving the same content to mobile users or do you want to restructure your site architecture to break a long, single page content into several pages? If it’s the latter consider developing a separate mobile site. Alternatively, if you choose the responsive approach, analyze whether the bandwidth-heavy content can be turned off for responsive mobile sites.

Technology – Mobile specific web pages provide the ability to integrate specific properties of mobile devices that can be used to improve user experience. For instance, the ability to tap in geo-location, cameras and phone can vastly improve user experience. Think Chase mobile site and app that facilitates online deposits by taking pictures of checks, or the ease with which Shutterstock’s customers can click and upload pictures to create personalized cards and stationary, or Google mobile site that uses geolocation to find the best Mexican restaurant near you, if that’s your search intent! Whichever method you use to create a mobile experience, make sure you use the best of mobile technology mapped out against your user needs.

Search Intent – Are your mobile users looking you up with an intent to perform tasks that are different from your desktop visitors’ tasks? If yes, responsive design may not be the best option for you. While a Dynamic Serving site will allow you to optimize the on-page content and layout to target specific keywords, a separate mobile site is the best way to go to aggressively target search intent through building quality backlinks for mobile-specific search words.

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Ready to start creating optimal mobile experiences for your on-the-go audience? 

Click to download our Friction-free mobile experience design checklist.

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Contact us at info@webtage.com to schedule a FREE consultation on your mobile strategy.

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Webtage - Digital Marketing Specialists

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About the Author

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A believer in hype-free and performance driven digital strategies, Snigdha’s endeavor is to get your brand established and your business grow. She is passionate about research, design and analytics and works non-stop and meticulously to make sure that your brand stands out from the rest.

Snigdha’s background is in research design, industry research, content creation, and qualitative and quantitative research (including web-based and phone survey methods and focus group discussions). She is a highly qualified professional in the areas of digital marketing strategy design, SEO, content creation, and social media marketing. Most recently she has grown a client’s online presence from zero to 25% online leads within 3-6 months; moved client website to the #1 & #2 spots on Google, Bing, and Yahoo for all major keywords; and generated online leads accounting for 25% – 30% of all leads for that client.

Contact her at snigdha@webtage.com

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What Influences Your Website’s Search Visibility? An Infographic

Posted on March 30, 2015 - 3:25 PM by

What Influences Your Website’s Search Visibility? An Infographic

Starting April 21, Google will be expanding “mobile-friendliness” or optimal mobile experience as a search ranking factor.

While it is important to stay on top of search algorithm changes, it is never a good idea to outsmart them! Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should not be about tricking Google with keyword stuffing or about building paid or “spammy” links or making it more complicated than it is.

It is about making a great website that provides relevant and useful imformation to users, is trustworthy and provides excellent user experience (UX) – if users and influencers find your website relevant and useful they will keep coming back and search engines will notice!

So how do you go about building a great website that meets the criteria of relevance, trust, and usefulness? Here’s an infographic to help you! Click to view full screen image.

 

Search Ranking Influencers - An Infographic

 

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Top 7 Principles for a Successful Website Design/Redesign

Posted on February 23, 2015 - 9:10 PM by

‘Give me 6 hours to chop down the tree and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the axe’ – Abe Lincoln

Nothing frustrates me more than a client who has recently spent tens of thousands of dollars in getting an expensive website design overhaul without putting a great deal of thought into understanding buyer personas, user experience (UX) principles, and digital marketing basics.

[mk_padding_divider size=”75″][mk_blockquote font_family=”none”]81% of your prospects go to your website to “check you out” before they even think of contacting you. What’s more important is that 51.3% of your prospects will rule out a firm before even talking to them. (Hinge Marketing, 2015).[/mk_blockquote][mk_padding_divider]

What does this mean for you? It simply means that your website is the foundation for all your marketing campaigns and therefore it should be sticky and enable visitor conversions. Sounds simple, right?  Not always so!

 

The problem arises because a lot of websites are built for the company and not for the user. Brands want to put their best foot forward. They want to tell users what makes them special, showcase their products and services, and expect users to convert. Instead, a successful website should resonate with the user and nurture them to convert.

Key Website Design Drivers – User Goals & Expectations

Visitors come to your website to with certain expectations and goals. It is paramount to craft your website around those user goals (and associated tasks) and user expectations. The infographic synthesizes how user goals and user expectation affect the effectiveness of your website:

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So where should you start?

  • Develop User personas and user stories – This is the most important step you could take for successful website redesign. Create user profiles of your typical customers, including their problems, challenges, and goals. Develop user stories, which are desired site functions as seen from a user perspective.  Get as detailed as you can. Create personas of individuals, not groups of targets or business types. Good design should always cater to the needs of your user. If you do not understand your user(s) well enough, the website will not work to fulfill your goals even if it shines aesthetically.
  • Design for Self-Segmentation – Good website design should allow each visitor to be able to self-segment easily. Once you have developed user personas and user stories, you know what their goals and expectations are. Tailor your website to speak to those goals and expectations through smart layouts and visuals, optimized navigation, explicit messages, and clear calls to action.
    Map out the logical paths of each persona to guide them to convert. Each page should have a specific goal and should smartly fit into the logical path you have created for each user.
  • Target the Primitive Brain – We all have a primitive brain, called the Amygdala that controls our gut reaction. Even before our rational mind spurs into action, we form a gut reaction in 3 seconds or less. Design for the Gut Reaction! The minute we land on a site, we form an opinion – professional, trustworthy, relatable vs. amateurish, cluttered, not worth the time! Design perspective, colors, typography, images, and layouts – all work together to create the crucial first impression. A professional designer will be able to guide you in the best design direction to create a desirable first and lasting impression.
  • Tell a Story and Make an Emotional Connection– There are more than 1.2 billion websites today. To capture the hearts and minds of the user, it is important to pique the emotional interest of a user.  You want people to interact with your brand and hopefully convert into repeat users or customers. How do you tell an effective story that makes an emotional connection?
    1. Start by thinking about the concepts and values that define your brand.
    2. Filter out the fluff. Dissect what you do best and tell it like it is- from the heart.
    3. Keep it personal. Add custom content that creates a personal touch. Stock images of people shaking hands has been overdone!
    4. Think about turning your brand values into informative, helpful, or entertaining stories.
    5. Then use layouts, evocative visuals, typography, web copy, and interactive features to amplify those stories.

    A great example of storytelling and making an emotional connect is Cyclemon’s website (www.cyclemon.com) which makes the point that ‘you are what you ride.’ By associating bicycle caricatures of stereotypical users, they have used many brilliant design features to connect with their user personas.

  • Build Trust – You need users to not only need to be interested in your business, they need to be able to trust it too. By integrating trust-building elements, your website will become a powerful tool for conversions. So what are these trust-building elements?
    Utilize the site real estate to clearly state your unique value proposition and other trust building elements, such as social proof, client logos, testimonials, badges, case studies, website security details (especially if you are an ecommerce site) and a strong About Us page.
    Lastly, show your face. Adding a personal touch by putting a face(s) to your organization can go a long way in building trust. Remember, people like to do business with people and not with a faceless entity.
  • Make it Interactive – Whether your website is informational, entertaining, or one that requires enabling transactions, make sure you offer interactions with your users.  The simplest form of interaction is the website navigation that allows users to find explore your website further. More interactive features can work to encourage users to explore your brand further. Use of sliders, videos, galleries, case studies are an excellent way to make your website sticky.

By making design responsive to scrolling or hovering is an excellent way to wow your users and subtly guide them to convert.

  • Optimize for Search Visibility – No amount of conversion optimization or effective design principles will bring visitors to your website. Make sure you integrate best practices for search engine visibility, include meeting guidelines, content optimization, indexing, navigation and cross-channel marketing to improve your site’s visibility.

Planning a website overhaul? Contact me at snigdha@webtage.com for step-by-step guidance in developing and launching a successful site.

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Building an App? Be Sure You Start on the Right Foot!

Posted on June 2, 2014 - 8:09 PM by

If you are reading this, you have already figured out that mobile is fast becoming a primary channel to drive content and services to consumers.  And if you are planning to create an app to reach out to the growing audience on-the-go, it would serve you best to follow these key strategic steps to avoid costly mistakes later. We are assuming you have spent time validating your idea through market research and have a monetization plan in place.

 

Think Detailed & Ahead – A great app starts with a great concept. Start by noting down just what you expect the app to do. This could be a simple bullet point document on high level function that you expect the app to perform. The next step involves creating detailed product specifications and full-featured product description. To do this best, think ahead and plan before.

For instance, if you are developing an app to book local cab service, think about how you would want subscribers to register for the app – via phone or email? This would be guided by the national geography you are targeting, general industry trends, but also by how you plan to notify users about appointment confirmations and changes. If notifications and communication is planned via SMS, then phone number should be the primary registration, identification, and verification field. If email is the way you would want to communicate with end users, require an email field for registration purposes.

Many other similar decisions will be critical for the viability of your app.  Consider hiring app consultants for this crucial phase who can provide the foresight and experience to guide you in the right direction during the design phase, so that you do not waste resources reinventing the wheel.

 

Brand it!  The look and feel of your app has an overwhelming impact on app downloads and consequently, monetization. Usually relegated to the backbench by many app development firms, we cannot overemphasize the importance of branding in connecting with the consumer and building trust. Quoting Tom Leclerc of Wooga.com (the creator of the hugely popular Jelly Splash): 

“What a lot of app developers and publishers may not know is that retaining users starts before a download happens.”

Branding done right is instrumental in building trust and relationship with clients, plays a critical role in app store and Google Play Optimization, and guides effectiveness of marketing and advertising campaigns.

 

Great UI is Crucial – Put your customers first. Listen, read, and understand the pain points of your consumers. The functions and features of your app should be driven primarily by what consumers are looking for or even exploring latent needs of your target audience and not the latest hot technological tools and competitor feature set. Spend time developing user case scenarios and flows in the user interface design phase. Good user interface design does not simply mean designing attractive data objects and layouts – it means developing effective user personas, creating user case scenarios and user flows, and integrating those into the user interface design.

Your feature set and UI should be guided by these two basic principles:

  1. One, your app simply exists to resolve your consumer key pain points. Do not be tempted to integrate “cool” features just because you’ve discovered hot, new technological tools that could bring the coolness factor in.
  2. Two, you app should be so easy to use that it takes minimal effort on part of the consumer to figure it out. If a consumer needs to be walked through an app, you’ve lost the battle!

 

Phase it Out – A wholesome app with all desired features in version 1.0 may sound like a great idea. The opposite is actually true in most cases.  App creation works best from a long-term viability perspective if done in an iterative fashion rather than in a linear fashion. The main advantage of the iterative application development (IAD) is that it assigns equal importance to users and developers and user feedback is incorporated into each and every iterative phase. This results in better understanding of real user needs, quick identification of problem spots and bottlenecks, and fast resolutions thereby creating a better product. Complex app systems are also clearer and easy to implement if done in an iterative fashion.

So make sure you break up your complex app system into phases by prioritizing functions and features. That way, you will not create a behemoth of a software only to discover that key user needs have been left out, or worse still that users find the interface difficult to understand or that the app requires too much effort to use that leads users to drop out or uninstall the app.

Integrate Marketing Into Design – We all like to think, as entrepreneurs and visionaries, that we have discovered the next big thing and consumers will queue up to try out our app. In reality, our brilliant app concepts will need a liberal dose of help from outstanding marketing initiatives. A good place to initiate your app marketing is – you guessed it – right into the app design. Most effective marketing happens when users generate content, in the form of social shares, reviews, feedback, and general intera­ctions. Make sure you have features within the app that allows users to communicate with their social communities and with your team! The kind of features you offer should also be guided by your strategic marketing plans.

 

Contact us for an initial consultation to help you build a successful app development and monetization strategy.

Website Development Company in Naperville

The Power of Social Media for B2B Firms

Posted on March 22, 2014 - 12:26 PM by

The Power of Social for B2B firms.

Many B2B/professional services firms are lukewarm at best about the power of social marketing. Instead they consider referrals and professional networking as the top drivers of business growth. Well, some B2B firms have figured out that social marketing is not very different from networking in the physical world. Done right, social marketing enables networking with influencers, peers, and prospectives. It also is an excellent avenue to establish thought leadership and support in-bound lead generation. According to Content Market Institute’s 2014 Benchmark Study, 87% of B2B companies employ social marketing (not including blogging) as a part of their overall content marketing strategy. Done strategically, social marketing can provide a boost to your website traffic, improve the quality and quantity of leads, and SEO ranking.

So how should you set up your Social Marketing to be Effective?

1. First and foremost, have a documented social strategy documented social strategy that addresses each of the following:

  • Goal Analysis – This should be your starting point and addresses issues such as: Who is the target audience? What is the key message that needs to be communicated? What is desired action and output?
  • Situation Analysis – figure out industry trends, authorities and patterns, popular sources of info etc.
  • Strategic Posture – This is where you nail down your value proposition – your “sweet spot” and figure out how to differentiate yourself from competition.
  • Client Positioning – How do you increase your influence by targeting key influencers and authorities in your field. This includes identifying groups, pages, and circles that you should increase your participation in.
  • Platform Strategy – This where you decide on the most relevant platforms and how you tactically plan to target that platform. Top four social channels favored most by B2B companies (in order of preference) are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

For a complete social media strategy template, drop us a line at info@webtage.com and we will email it right to your inbox.

2.  Develop a formal social media policy. Social media policy governs the publication and commentary on social media sites by your dedicated social media staff. Hopefully, you have a dedicated staff – there is ample and consistent evidence that companies that have a documented content strategy and have a dedicated social marketing staff are most effective at social marketing compared to companies that don’t.

Social media sites are a reflection of your organization that any and every person with access to the Internet can potentially see. What you post on social sites and the tone of your voice should be no less carefully weighed than your in-person interactions with your professional community and prospects.  Make sure employees of agencies that represent you should have a very clear picture of how you want to be represented.

3.  Content Creation & Curation – Once you have a clear understanding of the “what, where, and how” of your social marketing plan, it’s time to do content creation. Too busy to create value content on a consistent basis? Content curation offers an opportunity to sift through the vast content that already exists on the web and share it on your social channels.  There are some rules here: Make sure the content you share is truly high quality and is engaging and/or informative. Also, include your own perspective on content you are sharing, bring in a level of personalization that is key in any effective social networking – digital or not! Find more details on the 40-60 rule that we advocate for your content strategy and how to do content mapping.

 

4. Social Management & Tools – There are terrific tools out there that allow for streamlined social marketing process. I will not go into a comprehensive list of social marketing tools, but will talk about some that are used by Marketing Pros for integrated social channel management & analytic. The top favorites are Hoot Suite& Sprout Social. A good social management tool especially for B2B marketers is Oktopost, which allows you to integrate your social media marketing, and customize your posts across channels, while allowing you to access your groups, company pages, and pofiles. This is very helpful for B2B marketers who need to adopt a different content style for different social channels and easily reach influencers and authorities by posting to groups to facilitate intellectual conversations and establish thought leadership. Other favorites are social monitoring and reputation management tools such as Radian6 for mid-level enterprises (an overkill for small businesses) and SocialMention & Mention for smaller enterprises that allow you to track social conversations around your brand and topics of interest and respond to concerns and opportunities.

5. Validate – Social marketing is an art and a science. You need to employ creativity and analytics to execute it well. The basic tenets of science, such as having a testable hypothesis, collecting and managing data, and analyzing the data to confirm or toss aside the hypothesis should be done on a regular basis with social marketing. If you are running LinkedIn ad campaigns to increase leads and conversions, make sure you are running A/B versions and running multiple campaigns so that you can find your sweet spot, bring down your cost-per-click, increase your opt-in and conversion rates and replicate the success all over again. If your goal is to increase traffic to the website, make sure you are racking your web analytics that provides traffic numbers from social channels. Look for bounce rates, entry and exit pages, time spent, demographics etc. Validate, validate, validate before moving ahead.

 

Let us know what has or hasn’t worked for your business in the social marketing arena! We look forward to your comments or drop us a line at snigdha@webtage.com

B2B Marketing Services in Naperville

Online Marketing is not Rocket Science

Posted on February 12, 2014 - 9:23 AM by

Online Marketing is not Rocket Science

 

I love SEO expert, Jill Whalen (she’s even got a Wikipedia page devoted to her!). Though she’s retired from her SEO life, she’s brought in a common-sense approach to the SEO and online marketing world that is like a whiff of fresh air in the make-it-more-complicated-than-it is digital marketing world. (Note: If you’d like to sample her views on SEO, read her archived High Rankings Newsletter).

 

This brings me to the question that I often field from business owners who are just beginning to debate whether they need a digital marketing agency for their marketing needs. “Why can’t we do online marketing ourselves? How complicated can it be?” My answer to them is that online marketing is not rocket science, but it requires specialized skills (some more than others), lots of dedicated time, and perseverance. “If you have all three, go for it,” is my honest answer.

 

Good online marketing, as I see it, requires a combination of outstanding research capabilities, creativity, technology know-how, and data management skills. Obviously, you also need good project and product management skills. Most importantly, you need to have the perseverance to do it consistently over a period of time. And test, test, test!

 

Digital Marketing Skill Sets

Research is the foundation of a good digital campaign. This involves researching not just the competitive landscape, industry trends, and gleaning out the most profitable keyword (which itself can be a massive undertaking if you start to get into big data), you also need to keep up with adapting strategies to business needs, changing algorithms, and technological resources.

 

Creativity­­ – In the online world, where people are overwhelmed with information, you have about 5 seconds to make an impression before your consumers will move on. If you do not strike a chord with them with the right words and the right visuals, you have failed to connect with them. Creativity and ability to connect with your consumers is critical in the online world!

 

Technological Tools – This is digital marketing after all! There is a plethora of IT, design, tracking, data analysis and other tools that you would need to run an effective marketing campaign. You may not need each one of them for your internal campaign, but make sure you have internal expertise to assess and the know-how to use the best ones available.

 

Data Management – An effective digital campaign should step beyond touchy-feely and should have in-built assessment tools to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. Create user personas, purchase cycle stages, run A/B strategy testing, pour over your web analytics, set up conversion goals. And test it again.

One very specialized area which deserves a special mention here is analytics which taps into big data to achieve highly-effective market segmentation, targeting, and conversions. For example, assume you are an online shop that sells in-house gym equipment and you set up a social ad campaign to reach your target audience. You could stretch your ad budget very thin if you do segmentation and targeting using traditional methods. Instead, you could tap into big social data to identify extremely targeted “low-funnel” consumers who are close to making an actual purchase and run a highly effective campaign.

 

Usability is Key in Effective Digital Campaigns

For all the complexities involved in digital campaign, the goal of any online marketing campaign is very simple – design and deliver your campaign to be useful and relevant for your end users. If users find your online sites useful, they will come back, they will engage, and they will convert. And search engines will notice!

So next time you think you need a digital agency for your marketing needs, make sure they don’t overwhelm you with jargon and make sure that they are clear on the end goal, which is to understand and serve your consumers. And do it well!

Feel free to drop me a line at snigdha@webtage.com!

Digital Marketing Services in Naperville