An Infographic to Help You Optimize Your Website

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.

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What Influences Your Website’s Search Visibility? An Infographic

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

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.

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.

Digital Marketing Agency in Naperville

Top 7 Principles for a Successful Website Design/Redesign

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

‘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:

[mk_image src=”https://www.webtage.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/UX_Infographic_Webtage.jpg” align=”center” crop=”false”]

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.

Web Design Services in Naperville

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

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

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:

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.
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 admin

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 admin

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

Struggling to Create A Great Content Marketing Campaign? Here are 10 Useful Tips & Tools

Posted on January 8, 2014 - 11:09 PM by admin

If you are like most businesses you need a solid content strategy to fuel your inbound marketing. However, it is a struggle for busy professionals to come up with great content ideas and turn it into a professional product. Here are tips and tools that will be helpful you in pulling together a content strategy:

Start with a goal – Have a clear view of what you want your content marketing to achieve. For instance, do you wish to build a community around your service or product, generate traffic for your website, establish thought leadership & develop your brand, create quality leads, or something else? Your content strategy will vary greatly depending on your goal. If you are looking to establish thought leadership, your content should be informative and engaging and the output should be in the form of ebooks, newsletters, infographics etc.
Listen to your customers! Successful content creators will tell you that the best content created around questions your consumers ask and the feedback they provide. Take commonly asked question and turn your answers into a blog topic.
Build an organized content repository – Next time you find an article or post that you find engaging or useful, “clip” it using tools such as Evernote Web Clipper or Pocket. Make sure that your repository is organized so that you can find and view it later. This repository will be very useful when you are brainstorming content topics.
The 40-40-20 Rule – Not all content that you use in your inbound marketing needs to be self-created. A “40-40-20 rule” is a good place to start your social strategy where about 40% of all content should be self-created, 40% is curated from third party sources, and 20% is user generated or contributed. Just make sure the content is top quality and is engaging and/or informative.
Do content mapping – For content creation activities, take into account your user persona(s) and purchase lifecycle stages to map out your content. Have a different content output in mind to target users in different purchase cycles. Include informative material and visually attractive infographics if you want to spread awareness among targeted buyers with displayed interest in your area of expertise. Once prospectives are in the “Consideration” phase, target them with specific content on your value proposition, such as, price & feature comparison infographics. If they in the “Decision” phase, lead them to a landing page with automated quote generation capabilities and follow up with customized emails.
Content Type – Be cautious in the type of content you share on social channels. Make sure it’s not all self-promotion! Another good rule of thumb in social content strategy is the one-third rule – one-third is self-promotion, one-third is informative, and one-third should be general, fun shares and posts.
Be Consistent– This one is obvious. The more consistent you are, the more results you will see. Whether it is building your brand, achieving visibility by targeting influencers, or getting quality leads, you will see best results if you are socially active.
Use Social Management Tools – There are many useful social content management, curation, marketing, and analytical tools that can make help you streamline the content creation and dissemination process. From comprehensive social marketing management and analytic tools like Sprout Social and Hootsuite to specific B2B marketing tools, such as eGrabber to content curation tools like Swayy and Compfight, there is a plethora of tools that can make social marketing effective and precise.
Develop Metrics – Assign metrics to track your goal conversions. If you are looking to build thought leadership and manage your online reputation, make sure you use social tracking and monitoring tools like SocialMention, Mention, and Radian6 to track social mentions of your brand and respond to concerns and opportunities.
Validate – Set up A/B tests for all content marketing strategies. Track and analyze your campaign and make sure you track at least these basic metrics (and do it for each social channel so that you know which channel is most effective for you):

- - Reach & Engagement – Be sure to track your audience growth rate as well as whether they are engaged with your content.
  - Channel Reports – How many visits is each channel generating? What is the return visit rate? What is the bounce rate?
  - Conversions – Set up conversion metrics and track how many conversions is each channel generating.
  - Influence – How influential are you on social media? Track it with the help of social social tracking and mention tools.
  - Response Rate – Ho many interactions are you having with your prospects and leads? How many mentions of your company are you responding to?

What are you favorite tricks and tips for content generation & marketing? Feel free to comment below or drop us a line at snigdha@webtage.com

Content Marketing Services in Naperville

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