Web Marketing 101

by MJ Petroni, Causeit, Inc. Principal, with contributions

by Jeremy Wilkins of Tinderbox Creative

The importance of web marketing

Increasingly, consumers are ditching their yellow pages in favor of the easy-to-use, rich content of the web. With four clicks and a few keystrokes, a user can find a business’ contact information—as well as reviews, praise, complaints, and media coverage. With a few more clicks, they can read about your competitors and compare pricing. But before they ever dive into this information, they probably made an emotional judgement about your company.

Planned vs. unplanned web presence

1. •How much ‘mindshare’ or awareness do I want to raise? How many customers do I intend to gain or retain through my web presence? And how much revenue will be generated out of my web marketing efforts?
   

2. •How will I know if my website is successful? Consider analytics (tracking sources of incoming visitors), the number of leads generated and/or the amount of sales occurring through the web or referred by the web.
   

Yes. You need a website.

Your web presence should:

1. •Be simple: thin out your content. Most pages only get read for a few seconds. Make them load as quickly as you can, and avoid unnecessary complexity, Flash content and motion graphics whenever you can—it generally annoys people.
   

2. •Be appropriate to its audience: Who will be reading your site? Is it designed for incoming customers, current customers, prospective customers, vendors? Is it for a specific community or does it need to be generic enough to be received by everyone? Causeit is strongly committed to LGBTQ people, and we’re willing to have content on our site either directly or indirectly letting our visitors know that. We have to balance our desire to attract certain demographics, or population segments, with the risk of alienating others.
   

3. •Provide value: what can you offer people—from referrals to educational content—which will increase their trust of your brand? Carefully select content to put on your site, provided by you and those you trust. Consider making your site interactive, if it makes sense for your business and you can afford it. One of our clients, a chiropractor, has an interactive model of the spine on her website. We included it to assist in pre- and post-visit education of her customers. (Google ‘Web 2.0’ for more information on interactivity.)
   

4. •Be consistent: maintain a simple color palette and type choice when designing your page. Use photos which represent your brand; consider buying stock photos from iStockphoto.com or a similar service.
   

5. •Be beautiful and accessible: use at least a well-designed template or a pre-fab site from someone who knows your industry, know web programming and knows core graphic design principles. Bad design will turn off potential customers before they ever talk to you and will scare away potential customers. Check their sample work and insist on interviewing a client or two. If you can, hire a web designer for a custom site if you are in a particularly competitive industry.
   
   Make sure your site is legible, composed of high-contrast, easy-to-read type and fast-loading pages, with logical divisions of content.
   

6. •Be only part of your marketing effort: your website should complement all of the other ways you market, or few people will go to it. Be wary of relying on your website to get you customers, especially if you have in-depth contact with your clients. While an electronics store or amazon.com may be able to sell a product with no personal customer interaction, most small businesses aren’t selling products as much as services or experiences.
   

7. •Be a time-saver: if your business has intake forms or needs to educate its clients, use your website to distribute that information: it’s a great way to provide a consistent customer experience while saving you time and breakdowns in communication. Include maps to your workspace, a bio and history, professional associations, your contact information (but mask your email with to avoid a deluge of spam; eg. jerry [at] mary [dot] com).
   

8. •Be measurable: make sure you can measure the impact the site is having on your business. Tools like Webalyzer and Google Analytics can let you know how people got to your site, what they read, for how long, and how often they visited—it’s incredibly important information to check up on to ensure that you are getting return on your investment and that your content is worthwhile to your visitors.
   

9. •Be kept up-to-date: keep relevant information (events, contact information, and product/services offerings) up-to-date at all times. Make sure that lists of employees and the like are refreshed frequently. When selecting photos or content, make sure you can afford to keep your site matched to who your business is; for example, if you have a staff photo on the site, make sure you can afford to take another one if one of your key employees moves on. As a rule of thumb, if you cannot promise to keep it up, don’t put it up. Also, avoid ‘coming soon’ placeholders—they are only slightly less unprofessional on the web as they would be if you put them in a brochure. Make sure you can edit your own site’s content (if not design) easily, especially if you have the site produced by someone else.
   

E-mail marketing

E-mail is a valuable tool for marketers when used properly. It can be next to free, convey highly-customized and somewhat-interactive messages, and may have a much higher ‘open and read rate’ than traditional direct mail marketing—depending on the implementation.

Before sending a message to your entire address book, though, consider carefully planning an e-mail campaign.

1. •When will it be most likely to be opened?
   

2. •Will your message get stuck in spam filters?
   

3. •Have you gotten permission to e-mail solicitations to your recipients?
   

4. •Will recipients be more annoyed than interested? Will your spam be ‘bacon’—or solicited mail—that recipients sometimes resent receiving, even though they signed up for it?
   

5. •Do you have a way to manage unsubscriptions from your list?
   

Investigate e-mail marketing tools designed to manage subscriber lists, regulatory compliance and the sending of your newsletter for you (often for a negligible fee of a few pennies per message). Some of the top companies include StreamSend, My Emma, and Campaign Monitor.

What are blogs good for?

Blogs (an amalgamation of ‘web and log’) are websites (sometimes as part of a larger site) where users publish a narrative set of information. Much like a journal, they are designed to be accessed chronologically, and are, as such, well-suited for publishing events and information which is time-sensitive, or for providing commentary on local or world events.

Instead of using a blog as just as dumping-place for announcements—something many businesses have been guilty of—realize that a blog is a place where you can expose and build up the personality of your brand. It is appropriate to have (somewhat) more casual tone in your blog entries, and they are usually signed by an individual. Like any content on your site, make sure you will have the time to keep your blog updated.

Users now often ‘subscribe’ to a blog, skimming the content from multiple blogs in what is called a ‘feed reader,’ a tool which goes and collects the newest articles from URLs known as RSS feeds. Make sure that your blog is compatible with RSS so that the media, web-savvy customers and search engines can easily check it on a regular basis without having to navigate directly to your site. Note, also, that your formatting may be simplified within an RSS feed.

Blogs can also serve as a community-building vehicle, since you can allow comments on your posts. This way you can engage your visitors beyond simply sending articles their way, and cultivate readership and customer feedback through genuine conversation. As part of this conversation, be aware that although you may not have updated your main website in many months, but your blog is up-to-date, your visitors may see all of them at the same time. Make sure your message is consistent.

On e-mail

When attending to brand identity and public relations, it is critical to note that all of your contact with other people will influence their relationship to you. Pay attention to the way that you communicate with others via e-mail, chat, and other technologies: do you adopt a more casual tone because of the immediacy with which you can write back and forth? Do you relax your grammar and spelling standards due to time constraints?

Avoid inadvertently telling the world that you are unprofessional and/or don’t respect them—research e-mail etiquette and make sure you hold yourself to the highest practical standard you can. A few quick points:

1. •Don’t SHOUT in e-mail by writing in all caps.
   

2. •Do not use Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL or other free/generic email services for professional interactions if you want to be taken seriously—they often append ads to your messages and scream ‘cheap and unprofessional.’ Your email address itself is a marketing opportunity—register a domain name of your own. (Ask us how to do this if you need help).
   

3. •Be conscious of revealing client names or addresses if you send out a bulk message to, say, all of your clients, or all of your vendors. Use the BCC: field in such situations.
   

4. •Avoid the temptation to send out bulk e-mails just because you can. If you aren’t absolutely sure that people want to hear from you about your business, politics, or other broad messages, don’t click Send. If you are sending out marketing e-mails, make sure they comply with the CAN-SPAM act—which requires that people have ‘opted-in’ to your mailing list.
   

5. •If you send out e-mails, include a professional signature at the end with your relevant contact information and pertinent disclaimers about confidentiality (if applicable.)
   

6. •Do not disclose anything in e-mail that you aren’t willing to see on a billboard: e-mail has neither the physical, cultural nor legal privacy protections of regular mail or even telephone usage.
   

7. •Especially when communicating to people you don’t know well or with clients, save your messages as drafts before sending them: avoid the ‘quick trigger finger’ of e-mail convenience.
   

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization, or SEO, a current net business buzzword, is the process of carefully designing your site to ‘rank’ higher in the internet search engine. Search engine optimization is inexact science at best, and can be a huge money pit if not carefully applied.

Consider your site’s usage when planning for search engine optimization. If you are a realtor, don’t bother—there are far too many competitors. In contrast, specialists (such as certain types of doctors, lawyers, etc.) can profit hugely from minor shifts in wording on their site. Again, is your site for existing customers? If it is, they’ll probably go directly to the site rather than search for it—negating the value of SEO.

Some do-it-yourself SEO:

1. •Link to other, relevant sites, and see if you can get them to link back to you: this lets search engines know your content is read and respected by others
   

2. •Vary your word usage so keywords match users’ search queries; use synonyms (when practical)
   

3. •Make sure your text is not in the form of an image file—the search engines can’t catalog its contents (and mobile or sight-impaired users can’t read it)
   

4. •Consider implementing and updating a blog—search engines, especially Google, may rank blog sites highly
   

As with web designers, shop around for a SEO specialist if you choose to hire someone, and be very wary of anyone who promises to put you higher up than your large corporate counterpart or claims privileged relationships with key search engines (like Google—who does not have any SEO partners). Hesitate to spend money on SEO for anything other than MSN, Yahoo! and Google, the top three engines—some bogus SEO sites will get you listed very highly on search engines which are ignored by the average web browser. Also, even the most professional and well-intended SEO specialists may go overboard in editing your site’s content or structure—taking it to the top of the search engine rankings but losing the value of its content or creating awkward grammar or design challenges. Causeit has access to a SEO professionals with integrity and practical approaches to your needs—ask us for a referral.

Other ways of ‘getting found’

Paid Advertising

Pay-per-click
Google AdWords is the dominant pay-per-click platform online. When you see advertisements next to the results of your Google search, you’re seeing AdWords at work. For many (but not all) industries, pay-per-click advertising has demonstrated itself to be an effective driver of web traffic.

Pay-per-impression
Many on-site advertising vehicles use pay-per-impression ad sales. Pay per impression means that your account is debited whenever a page containing your ad is loaded (typically you pre-pay for a given number of impressions).

Local Search

Various local web searches, including Google Local, YellowPages.com, Yelp, CitySearch, and others provide information about local businesses. Internet browsers using local search have skyrocketed over the past few years, as they search for increasingly relevant local information (often with detailed user reviews). Owning your profile on local search websites is a great way to increase foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar establishment.

Craigslist.org and other classified sites
Some businesses, such as small service businesses (contractors, computer technicians, and real estate, to name a few) find free or low-cost online classified sites to be incredibly important. When using such sites, be sure to observe their community guidelines for acceptable material, and use impeccable grammar and mechanics in your writing to set yourself apart. Make sure you repost your ad often, but not so much as to offend regular users of the site, who may ‘flag’ your entry out of frustration.

You might also benefit from embedding graphics and formatting your content for more polished, professional presentation—but this may take a while to learn. Instead, consider using a low-cost service like vFlyer or Postlets, both of which allow you to design a polished ad using templates and then automatically, simultaneously post it to multiple sites.  

Questions before investing in web marketing:

1. 1.What are some of the concrete ways your business could benefit from expanding its online presence?
   
   
   
   
   

2. 2.What are you willing to invest in your online marketing, in terms of time and money?
   
   
   
   
   
   

3. 3.How will you measure your web efforts?
   

©2008 MJ Petroni and Causeit, Inc, with contribution by Jeremy Wilkins of Tinderbox Creative. All rights reserved. We are open to re-posting and publication; inquire here.

Posted 27 July 2008.

Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/jetalone/473033267/sizes/o/ under a creative commons license.