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).

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!