site bytes

With so many great social media options, like Facebook, available to small businesses, why bother with creating or maintaining your own website? A website takes a lot of thought and scarce manpower to maintain. Facebook allows you to say what you want to say, it’s free, and millions of people visit everyday. 

All true. But before you devote all of your resources to Facebook, here are some additional points to consider when creating your online marketing strategy:

Content Control

On your website, you get to say exactly what you want to say, in the way you want to say it. Your content isn’t subject to interpretation by a customer or competitor – whose comments and thoughts then become a part of your home page. You have ultimate control over content and its presentation.

Facebook limits what you can do with your layout. No matter how you add/delete or move those applications, every page looks more or less the same. Facebook does provide you with some content control. For instance, you can limit the ability of fans to post photos or items on your Wall (effectively, the Wall is your home page on FB). However, limiting the reader’s interaction with your company runs counter to what Facebook is all about. It is after all, “social” media, and one of the worst things you can do in that arena is to set up a presence, establish expectations, and then fail to fulfill them by holding back. Limited or one-way communication can make you look conservative, uptight or just a little behind the times.

Old vs. New

A website of your own, crafted with proper attention to search engine optimization and supported with marketing, can be found by new customers looking for an answer to a general question. They don’t have to be looking for General Electric. They can just search for light bulbs. Your company has a chance of showing up as an answer to their problem.

In contrast, people who are your fans on Facebook are often those who already know about you. The value of their becoming a fan of your company is that, when they sign up, all of their friends can see that they’ve done so. It’s an updated version of word of mouth marketing. If my friend becomes a fan of a Pilates instructor, it might inspire me to get healthy and call someone whom my friend respects.

Order, order!

As we all saw with the Obama campaign, Facebook is effective in mobilizing a fan base. But even Obama has a website. There, you can easily find his stand on health care, education, visual representations of his current campaigns, and much more. Have you ever tried to find an old post on Facebook? Facebook is the here and now. It’s a good way to deliver a message and to reach a large number of people. It’s not a good place to store information for easy access or reference.

Conclusion

Well, you already knew what this would be, right?  Neither a website nor Facebook provides a complete answer to your online marketing needs. You have to connect with your customers on multiple levels and through a variety of channels. Social media is about making a connection with people and Facebook can provide you with keen insights if you’re listening. Good reviews are great. Bad reviews offer you the opportunity to find new ways to improve your business. Interaction is good. You want to hear what your customers are saying, but you also want to be able to choose the words that define you.

Don’t know how your website is performing? Then how about getting started with web analytics? Try Google Analytics – it’s free – all you need is a Google email (gmail) account. Many host providers also provide their free version of analytics software. Here are few highlights to help you get started:

Referring sites: where is my traffic coming from?

This report will tell you how potential customers are getting to your site. Do they arrive via Google, Yahoo or another search engine? Through your press, an article or blog? Or were they referred from another website?  Perhaps you need to work on optimizing your content for search engines, drum up more publicity for your company or write some articles to attract business. Knowing how your customers are getting to you will help you figure out what you need to work on and which avenues are already working for you.

Keywords: how are customers finding me?

This area tells you which keywords were used and clicked upon to find your site. This helps you understand which words might be worth paying for in a paid search campaign or incorporating into your site’s content to improve your standing in search results.

Bounce Rate: who cares about me?

The bounce rate gives you the percentage of people that landed on a page and who left without clicking any further into the site.  (Let’s face it, you can’t be all things to all people.) Some users are going to arrive at your site and find that it’s not what they want. And you won’t find statistics on what’s considered a “good” bounce rate for an industry, so much of your analysis here will be subjective. But if you’re selling “web design” and 80% of the people who enter “web design” arrive at your site leave without researching you further…it’s time to reassess and make some changes.

Geographic Detail: am I getting through locally?

If you’re targeting a regional audience, check out this section to make sure that your site is optimized for that region (Google’s recent changes may also help you by automatically displaying you as a local result) and that the majority of your traffic is coming from areas to which you choose to sell.

Time on Site / Pageviews: am in interesting?

This gives you an idea of how engaging your site is. If users spend time on more than one page to read more about your company, that may be an indication that you’ve got their attention. Note that the figure for time on site may be a bit misleading because some users will leave a site up on their browser for hours.

Unique Visitors: how many are coming to my door?

Unique visitors are the number of unduplicated visitors over a certain time period. Each person/computer is only counted once, no matter how many times they return to your site. If you match this up against how many conversions or sales you received from your website, you can get an idea of your conversion rate – the % of unique visitors that are responding to your call to action (that is, doing something you want them to do on your site).

There’s much more to web analytics, but understanding these terms will help you start digging in to all those graphs and charts!

Still can’t figure out what Twitter is for? Twitter has written a help manual just for you. Go to: http://business.twitter.com/twitter101 to get the details.

You’ve seen the ads on TV, but you still don’t know what it is. In a nutshell, Bing is a revamped (it used to be Live Search) search engine that Microsoft is marketing as a “decision engine.” – …”helping customers make better decisions, focusing initially on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.”

Bing definitely has some kinks to work out in terms of being able to deliver what it’s advertising. I clicked on “tour bing” and then checked out “wondering what’s new in your neighborhood?” which is supposed to give me restaurants and services that I can walk to.  I entered “pediatrician” and got the about.com page, the wikipedia definition, info on how to become a pediatrician.  Nothing local – unless you count the local maps display at the bottom of the page. Same for “spa.”  What Bing did was send me to a page displaying “All Results,” instead of filtering out anything that wasn’t local – which is just silly considering the path I took (what’s new in your neighborhood?) to get there and that local business search is supposed to be one of Bing’s key deliverables.

From a design standpoint, Bing is a good deal prettier than Google, but at this point, it doesn’t offer anything cool enough for the average user to make the switch. Although, if you’re like me, you may find yourself checking out both engines to see the differences in their results (just in case I’m missing something) – but then again, this is what I do for a living.

Check out this article from Search Engine Land for a more comprehensive look at Bing’s features.

Facebook is known for being a social network – a place where you can spend hours and hours of precious time that you’ll never get back. If you’re looking for a way to be more productive with that time, how about using Facebook for your business?

advertising

The most obvious approach, of course, is to advertise on its pages. Facebook allows you to target your audience using its demographic and psychographic filters. You pay per click or view and set a daily budget for your advertising expense.  Also, for a fraction of the cost of traditional media, you can launch a new product or drive traffic to your Facebook page, brick and mortar store, or website. Example: Dunkin’ Donuts recently asked its fans to take a picture of themselves drinking a “Coolata” – offering prizes for the winners.  Fans had to post the picture on the Dunkin’ Donuts page and use it as their profile picture – thereby proclaiming their Coolata preference to all of their friends.

create a Facebook page for your business

If you don’t have the dollars to give away fabulous prizes, you can still use Facebook as a way to listen, through comments and discussions, to what your customers are saying. Not to mention the fact that Facebook is handy as a word-of-mouth marketing tool – try creating a page for your business and let your Facebook friends know about it. Any time one of them becomes a fan, it gets posted on their page – letting all of their friends know about you. You can also create events (perhaps a sale at your store or website?) and invite people to them. Again, any time someone accepts or puts it on their calendar, you get the chance to pique their friends’ interest.  Anyone who sells a product or offers a service that benefits from the recommendation of one of their clients can find a use for a Facebook page. Even non-profits can use this to their advantage. Check out this Facebook page done for a local private school (you’ll need to sign up or be an existing Facebook user to see this one).  This page provides basic info about the school, along with pictures and updates to its fans. If a reader is a parent looking for a school for their child, the extra (and up-to-the-minute) information the school provides may help them with their community outreach and give them a leg up in the admissions race.

take the personal approach

You can also take a more personal approach and think of Facebook as a conversation starter. Your profile is always there and people who want to know what you do can find out any time (not all of your friends know what you do, right?).  Also, as Facebook’s audience gets older you may find that you’re reconnecting with more of your college and high school friends, many of whom will be curious to know what you’re up to now. An updated professional profile and links to your company’s website will give them that info without you having to be the annoying salesman who only talks about work in their status updates: “…going to write an insurance policy today…”

At this level, the theory is that people like to do business with their friends and with friends of their friends – it’s like meeting business prospects at a barbecue.  The downside of using the personal approach (as opposed to a separate page for your business) is that these new “friends” have access to your personal life – to the extent that you’re willing to post it on facebook for all the world to see.

Have you seen the changes Google has made in its search results display lately? You’ve probably seen the top ten local results before if you’ve ever searched for something with a geographical indicator, like: “contractor Pasadena” or “dentist San Francisco.”  Google would know you were looking for a local result and place the top ten “Local Business Results” up at the top of your page.

Now all you have to do is enter a generic term like “contractor” and Google will display the local listings automatically, like this:

What does this mean for you? This means that any business that ranks well locally now has a chance of getting on the first page for general search terms, and will get more exposure/traffic. And those users who couldn’t find you because they didn’t know they had to enter geographic modifiers now no longer have to learn how. Local results will display automatically.

How do you take advantage of local search? One easy way is to go to Google’s Local Business Center and get a free business listing. Help Google find you and categorize your business correctly. You can also use geographical indicators as keywords in your code, content, titles, etc. [Click here to read more about keyword placement]. Truthfully, it will be hard to get listed in the top ten for “attorney San Francisco,” but the more specific you are in your choice of keywords (“maritime attorney San Francisco”), the better your chances are for getting relevant traffic to your website.

You’ve finally made the decision to get started with your website. Now you just have to come up with what you want to say – which often is not as easy as it sounds. A good place to start is with any existing brochures, postcards, letters or other sales material that youve already developed. If you’re starting at ground zero, here are some things you can do to pull your content together:

First, start with the facts. Who are you, where are you located, how do people contact you and what products or services do you provide? Those are the basics that must get onto your website.

Now stop and think: why you? Not in the dramatic, “woe is me” sense, but why should people want to work with you? Since small businesses usually don’t have the economies of scale to make them the lowest price seller, it’s all about what makes working with you unique. Don’t forget that good products and great customer service aren’t selling points, they’re expectations, so you need to think about what else differentiates you from the rest of the pack. Is it your craftsmanship? Your expertise? What makes you better able than the next guy to deliver a quality product or service? This is the information that should motivate your prospect into making a call or sending an email to you.

Next up: images. Images can have a powerful visual impact, but they also take time to load. Website visitors are impatient, so make sure that the photos you do have on your site are relevant and convey your business image or message. If you’re an artist or if manufacture a product, then people are going to want to see what you can do. If you sell a service, images can help break up the text and make your website more visually appealing. There are lots of places from which you can acquire inexpensive images. Here are just a few: shutterstock.com, istockphoto.com or dreamstime.com.

Still at a loss for words? Don’t try to compose it all at once – start by listing the facts and your differentiators. You can always take advantage of copy writing or editing services to help you bring it all together – and a good writer will take the time to learn a bit about you and your business before attempting to put pen to paper. Those lists will help them get started, too!

We’ve said it before – websites are more than just pretty pictures. In order for your site to be effective, major search engines like Google and Yahoo need to include you when they display results for your type of product or service.

So what exactly do Google and Yahoo want? The same thing you do when you’re looking for something on the internet. Google and Yahoo want to deliver the most relevant results to the people using their service. Serving up consistently relevant results encourages people to come back to their site because they know they’ll be able to find exactly what they want quickly.

Here’s how it works: search engines are constantly sending out automated agents, “search bots,” to crawl websites. These agents go to each page of a website to read the text – to gather the words. The search engine takes into account how many times the words are used, where they are used (high up on the page or as the last sentence) and whether the words are used as page titles, content headings, as links, or as names of images. It carries all of the information back and stores it in a giant database.

Search engines also read behind-the-scenes text – the code that users can’t see. However, because of misuse early on (webmasters entering text that had nothing to do with their product or service just to attract traffic), search engines don’t consider these items (such as keywords, descriptions) to be any more important than any other text.

Search engines also gather information on how many other websites are linking to your website – and the more “important” those websites are, the higher the priority you’ll receive when it comes time to displaying results. In other words, a link from a well-known, highly-visited website such as hp.com will give you more priority than a link from a local blog that receives only a few visitors a week.

The above, in a nutshell, is how a search engine decides what to display in its results. Each search engine uses slightly different methods (algorithms) to determine display results. Only those who work at Google or Yahoo really know the details (it is after all, the secret to their success), but knowing the above and following some simple guidelines regarding keywords and their placement can really improve your online performance.

When it comes to social media, if you’re starting to say things like: “I just don’t know what these kids are talking about these days,” you probably are not one of the millions of Americans who have a profile on Facebook or LinkedIn. Take heart, you’re still in the majority, but as a marketing professional, you may want to know that the number of adult internet users who do have a profile on an online social network site has quadrupled from 8% in 2005 to 35% in Dec 2008 [Pew Internet].

While the use of these sites is still primarily social rather than professional, Facebook and the like provide opportunities for brand marketers to get feedback from and have direct conversations with their users. Take a look at some of the basics on the most popular sites:

facebook

What it is: social networking site
Features: status updates, photo sharing, Facebook Connect allows users to use their facebook login on sites (e.g. CNET, citysearch.com, Netflix) to create accounts with one click or to post comments or reviews.

What’s it good for? According to Inside Facebook, Facebook has over 200 million users and from January to March 2009, people ages 26 to 44 made up the fastest-growing segment of the US Facebook population. Using Facebook’s fan and group pages can help build brand awareness and loyalty. (Barack Obama’s page has over 6 million fans). It may not be the best way to promote your law practice, but if you’re a personal trainer and one of your clients signs up to be your fan, it will show up on their page and pop up on their friends’ newsfeeds – giving word of mouth marketing a new avenue to explore.

twitter

What it is: social networking and micro-blogging
Features: you blog and people “follow” you; it’s “micro” because blogging updates are limited to 140 characters.

What’s it good for? Currently, Twitter is a favorite of celebrities, big companies and technorati, but if you sell a product, be sure to check into Twitter. At the very least, you can use the search feature to learn what’s being said about your product or service. You can use the information to improve your product, service or image. Example: Comcast used Twitter to battle its negative image (which was painfully chronicled on www.comcastmustdie.com) – see how in this NY Times article.

LinkedIn

What it is: professional networking site
Features: posting an online professional resume; maintaining business “connections” with other individuals.

What’s it good for: LinkedIn dominates the professional networking sphere with over 30 million users. It operates on the theory that you’re more likely to hire (or be hired by) someone you or another colleague knows than a complete stranger. If you’re a service provider, LinkedIn offers ways to demonstrate your expertise by allowing you to post answers to questions other users ask. So, if you’re an IT consultant with the perfect answer to this week’s networking question, you may get some expertise or job inquiries out of your effort!

YouTube

What it is: the leading brand in online video sharing
Features: easy upload of video clips

What’s it good for? Creating brand awareness; connecting with and providing service to your customers. Example: if you’re a product manufacturer, You Tube is a great way to share a how to video on your products. Interesting posts, too, will get you views - check out this one which got nearly 4.5 million views. It’s a video rendition of an a cappella performance of the Star Wars theme, but lots of viewers wanted to buy the tee shirts being worn in the clip!

in sum…

Like anything on the web, these avenues are only as good as your ability to keep them fresh and to keep your customer engaged. People like to buy from people they know and trust. You can look at these sites as another way for your customers to get to know you and your product/brand and, in turn, for you to listen to them and find out what problems they’re looking to solve.

Ever been to a website that took forever to load? Or one that made you search through page after page just to find a phone number or an email address? How about a site that started playing music without giving you a choice – and while you were in your office or cubicle?!

Experiences like this can drive your traffic and potential customers away. Making your website user-friendly is well worth the thought and effort as you go about developing your site. Here are some quick tips to get the thought process going.

Users like websites that (are):

quick to load: You have about 5 to 7 seconds before your readers decide whether or not they want to stay on your site to find out more about you. Graphics and images add visual interest and appeal, but they take more time than text does to load, so make sure your images are optimized for your customers. If your target customer base lives in remote areas where only dial-up is available, keep your images to the absolute minimum and stick to well-designed type (text and fonts) to get your message across.

accommodate their style: Different customers have different styles of shopping or doing business. Many want to do everything online and if your business lends itself to that, enable your customers to serve themselves by providing enough information. Others prefer to speak to a live person. Make it easy for those buyers to contact you – put your phone number or email up on every page and where it can be found most easily.

easy to understand: You might be an expert on your industry, but chances are your customers aren’t. Make it easy for them to understand what you do or sell by using common terms rather than industry jargon.

easy to navigate: Give your site a consistent look and feel – put your navigation in the same place on every page and don’t get too cute with it. Those fly-out and drop down menus are slick, but if they require too much hand-eye coordination to select the right page or if they cover up other important information when they are opened up, you’ll risk sending away a potential customer.

understands their lack of time: As brilliant and on point as your writing is, don’t expect your customers to read every word of it to get your message. State your point in the first sentence. Use headings to direct customers to content they might find interesting.

to sum it up …

Look at your website from your customer’s viewpoint and you’ll stand a better chance at turning that prospect into a sale!