Internet Marketing Clinic

A new report from eMarketer shows the growth and potential of social media to businesses.

A couple of the interesting statistics cited in the piece include the percentage of ad spending that is going to social media, and the popularity of social media sites as compared to search sites.

This chart shows the growth in spending and is an indication of how seriously businesses are taking the media. This is a new factor in marketing and is still being explored to determine where and how it works best, but, whatever the findings, it is a factor that businesses must take into account when developing their strategy for the Internet.

This next graph shows the popularity of sites on the Internet in New Zealand. New Zealand may not be the biggest target in your marketing strategy, but the graph is still interesting because it reflects a trend that is much broader than NZ, which is that different applications are occupying more and more time of people on the Internet.

A recent magazine article in Wired announced that “The Web is Dead”. This may be an overstatement (not uncommon in selling magazines), but the point they are making is an important one to keep in mind, which is that the pattern of usage on the web is changing quickly and dramatically.

The question, as always, is, “What does this mean to me and to my marketing strategy?”

We will continue to explore that issue, and I plan to post some comments about the Wired article later after I have had more time to review it. Watch this space!

Many times I have spoken about the dangers of hiring a web designer who is not oriented toward web optimization. Here is an article on web site design that does an excellent job of describing the problems that are created when you engage the wrong person to create your new site. Marketing firms and graphic designers might be very good at what they are familiar with, but web design is a different field, and many people try to use what they know from other fields without updating their understanding of the differences that are important in a different medium

Good web site design incorporates many features that only people with the right experience bring to the job. To be fair, some marketing firms or graphic designers have that experience, but, in my experience, they are few and far between! When you get the wrong person or team on the job, they will make choices that make sense in a different environment, but can cause serious problems on a web site. Those problems can range from costing you a lot more money to fix, up to and including making your site non-functional from a marketing perspective. To be specific, a good marketing web site is intended to attract traffic from the Internet, and if it doesn’t do that effectively, it is failing in its principal function!

I won’t go into the specifics any further, because Kristine does it so well in her piece, but keep the message in mind. I don’t know how many times I have had people tell me that everyone who sees their new web site loves it, and I look at it and see immediately that it will never produce any traffic from the web for their business! If what you really want is a site you can send people to because it is beautiful, that is all well and good, but most businesses are not really investing in a site for that purpose. most really intend that the site will produce a return on their investment for them by bringing in new business leads.

We have recently had several discussions about the advisability of using Facebook to promote your business. There are clearly some differences of opinion around, so I wanted to add a few thoughts that may be of some interest.

First, I have to say that it appears to me that if you are marketing to a particular demographic, and that demographic is heavily represented on Facebook in terms of presence, time spent on site, and ability to be influenced, Facebook is certainly a strategy that you should consider. Whether it is worth the effort required to become effective is a judgment call that different businesses might decide differently.

Several important things to keep in mind when considering your own strategy are:

• Facebook is relatively new and “unstable”, in that many features are being added constantly and changes are being made to how the whole system operates. This makes it hard to get a clear handle on how one should best utilize the application.
• Users’ familiarity with the features of the application vary widely from those heavily involved in their interactions with it, to many others who are basically just there to see what is going on, to everything in between. To be effective, you have to understand who you are targeting and where they fit on this spectrum.
• With all the changes taking place, you could easily find that on any given day, something has been done that wipes out all the effort that you have invested in establishing yourself in the community. In the near past, Google changed its policy about hosting their blog content on different servers and dramatically altered the benefits of using the free Blogger software that many of us depended upon.

As an interesting aside, I know several people who have recently complained that their involvement with Facebook has become a compulsion. Others have commented that being on Facebook is so involving that it takes away from work time. If the people that I want to reach fall into these groups that just can’t stay off of Facebook, I want to be somewhere on Facebook!

With that as perspective, I offer a couple of links that people might find helpful in getting some explanation of what Facebook might do for them. The first is a blog post describing new features that Facebook released in 2010 that are oriented toward business use. This is a good brief description that will help people who might have an interest in digging into this further. In that same post, they provide references to other sources of information, one of which is a Facebook Product Guide, which I thought was also useful and interesting. This is a PDF file that you can download to your computer (or read online, as you prefer).

I just reviewed a one hour video featuring Matt Cutts (of Google) that gives a really good short course in search engine optimization. It is posted on Matt Cutts blog. Matt and his team go over all the basics of optimization in this session. It is a great overview, and points out a few tools that can be of great value to webmasters.  Most everything he mentions in this session has been covered in our clinic, but I was not aware until he pointed it out, that Webmaster Tools will check your site for the existence of malware! Something like that can be really important to know if you think you are having a problem. This is a video that is worth an hour of your time if you want to make your web site perform better in the search engines!

This information was brought to my attention by Don Parsons, who has been associated with our clinic for many years and has taught several sessions for us. Thanks, Don!

In our last Internet marketing clinic session, a question came up about site maps.

There are two kinds of site maps, and they are both important tools to achieve better rankings for your site. One is a sitemap constructed as a page on your site. This is visible to the site users, and is a convenience for them, as well as a good tool for helping search engines to find the pages on your site. Because is is for site users, it should reflect some logical order to browsing your site.

When building it, you need to think about who is using your site and what they might be interested in seeing. You want to make it easy for them to find the information they are interested in. Because it is for readers, it may not include a link to every page on your site. That could become overwhelming for users and defeat an important purpose of the page. At the least, it should include a direct link to every major page on your site.

The second kind of sitemap is specifically for search engines, and the rules for it are different. It will definitely include a link to every page on your site, no matter how big your site is. For sites over 50,000 pages, this map has to be handled differently, but most sites for small businesses need not be concerned with this issue. A definition of sitemaps and good discussion of them is available on Wikipedia.

My class notes for the evening provide more information and a link to some software for creating a sitemap for your site.

This protocol for creating and using sitemaps goes back to 2006 and has been adopted by the top major search engines, so it provides excellent coverage and should not be overlooked by any webmaster! One important point to keep in mind is that you should set up a pointer to your sitemap in your “robots.txt” file, which all search engines look at. The sitemap won’t help you if the search engines don’t find it!

I have often commented in our clinic that big brands on big sites that have big budgets don’t really rank well in search engines. I just came across a long post that takes apart several sites to illustrate the point in considerable detail.

This post analyzes several big corporate sites and demonstrates pretty clearly that they just don’t do SEO very well! From my point of view, this is great news! What this means is that people who understand how to do their SEO properly, and who are willing to put the effort into doing it, can achieve great performance on search engines without having to spend a lot of money.

Since my clinic is oriented toward small businesses, and small businesses typically don’t have a lot of money (otherwise, they would be “big businesses”, yes?), this is really good news!

As I said, the article is a little long, and may seem, to some readers, technical, but it is worth reading to get a better understanding of what you are up against when working on your web site.

We talk a lot in our clinic about the importance of linking your site properly in order to improve your search engine rankings. When you set up your links, there are some details that can be important.

For example, create your links as “absolute” links, not relative links. What that means is that your link in your code should contain the complete address to the linked page, like “http://www.your-domain-name.com/page-name.html”, not something like “…/page-name.html”.

This makes your reference clear, and will get you link credit if someone “scrapes” your page. Little things like this do make a difference if you apply the rules persistently. You get a cumulative effect from doing things the right way that can really make a difference in how your site performs!

Also, always refer to pages on your site in the same way, that is, if you use “www” as part of your domain name, always use it. Don’t refer to your site sometimes with it and sometimes without. Those would count as different links and will not give you the same benefit.

I received a newsletter from Hubspot with a short list of reasons to use social media in your business. The list was very concise and to the point, so I found it hard to summarize. Here it is in its entirety:

“Why Social Media and Blogs Can Help Your Business

1. Start Fast. You could launch a page on Facebook today and get a blog going in a couple days.

2. Low Cost. You can get started in social media and blogging for very little or no money.  They are among the most cost-effective methods of reaching your audience.

3. Instant Interactivity. Both blogs and social media can give you nearly instant market feedback – good or bad.  We get all kinds of feedback through the comments on our blog, and people also leave reviews and other comments for us on Facebook and other social media venues.

4. It’s the Search Engines, Silly. Surveys indicate that 90% or more of people begin their purchasing process in search engines.  Blogs and social media make it more likely that your prospects will find you online when they search.

5. Inbound Marketing. If you read our blog, you know that we’re all big fans of inbound marketing at HubSpot.  Outbound marketing is telemarketing, direct mail, email blasts (not lovely nurturing emails like this one to you), TV and print ads – all the things that buyers tend to block out more and more.  Social media and blogs are essential inbound marketing tools.

6. First Mover Advantage. For blogs and social media, there is an advantage to moving first.  If you don’t jump into the conversation, your competitors, competitor’s customers or your customers will (if they have not already) and then you’re fighting an uphill battle to become influential in these online conversations.  Start now, and claim the virtual conversation-ground to your advantage.”

Hubspot is the same group that published the Facebook Guide that I referred to in a prior blog. They seem to have some good information and might be a good place to check in from time to time.

Facebook can be a powerful tool for marketing your business, but, like anything else, you have to understand how to use it and you have to put some effort into it. Many small business owners are just taking the first step in getting acquainted with Facebook as a tool.

I have just come across an eBook on the web that provides a great introduction to setting up Facebook. I recommend it to anyone who is looking for a short course to get them started with this powerful tool.

The book is a free download and it contains links to other materials provided by the people who offer this guide.

Google just called me to sign me up for a new feature of their local advertising. I talked to the rep for a while to see what the features are to see whether they might be of interest to businesses that I work with, particularly those with a local connection.

Google’s Local Business Center is a free service that Google provides that will place a marker on a map when a keyword search returns your site and other businesses in the results. I recommend signing up and creating a listing for every one of my business clients, since it is all free, and provides more opportunity to be seen and found. Creating your listing requires a Google account, which is also free, and you should be able to create your account at their local business center. From there, you can enter lots of information about your business, including a description where you can feature keyword phrases that you should be found with.

This listing will also give you statistical reports on how often your listing is presented in searches, and how often it is clicked on. This reporting is similar to their AdWords reporting, but doesn’t cost anything.

Their new feature, for which they charge $25/month, is the ability to create “tags” that will show up with your listing to make it stand out from other businesses that you are competing directly against. If you search in Google for “houston auto glass“, you should see several examples of how this can work. In this example (and, as of this date!), there are 3 listings with tags, and, each listing reflects a different option on the tag. You can see from the tags, and from the listings that accompany the tags, that one business linked its tag to it’s web site, one to a coupon offer, and one to a video. There are other options available as well. The New York Times has an article describing how one business in Houston used this tool to its advantage.

I always say that paying for any advertising on the web is strictly a judgment call and must be tested against what it produces for you in your business, but this little feature sounded interesting to me as an option to consider.