What we learned (or what you missed) at our March 13 meeting.
Online Marketing Lessons
Presenter: Ryan Morgan, ERC, March 13, 2013
Your inbound marketing program should be a mix of:
- Content
- Social media
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be boring because it’s a lot of numbers…
Content is now more important than SEO for Google rankings.
“Content marketing is about creating interesting information
your customers are passionate about…”
~ Joe Pulizzi
Attention span
- Marketers are fighting for short attention spans because so much is being pushed out.
- Users have time to read 28% of words during an average visit… more likely 20% or even less (source: Nielsen Norman)
Three techniques to improve attention span on your site:
1. Progressive Disclosure: Amazon is great at this!
- Give a little information at a time, a couple of choices on each page. Customers can click on a choice, which leads to more informational choices.
2. Chunking and grouping
- Chunk and group like information together so it’s easy to find and helpful
- Examples: bulleted lists, images, photos
- Easy legible ways to read
3. Stories
- Engage people through stories that show: Problem – Action – Result
- The “Action” is your service. The result is the success from using your service.
- Good example: “Zero” uses video testimonials
Developing a social media strategy
- What’s the plan?
- If you don’t have a plan you risk not finding success and not being able to measure results.
- Define your goal: What do you want to accomplish with your website? Sell services, generate leads, branding, inform?
- Listen to your audience…what do they want?
Ask them: what social media are you using? What do you use it for? - Choose your social media channels wisely based on your goals and where your audience is.
- Create a content plan. Have one person be in charge of all content; create a content calendar.
- Monitor, refine and be patient.
Some helpful tools
“Add This”
Allows you to add social media logos so people can share. (F for Facebook, the Twitter logo, etc.) Please only put this on pages with meaningful content, not your “about” page.
Hootsuite
Allows you to manage all social media from one platform
Topsy
The “Google” of social media; you can search social media sites
Google Analytics
Will help you track traffic coming back to your site.
Remember the importance of social validation
- When people are making a decision, they are often unsure; so they’ll look to see what other people are doing (or did) and base their decisions on what they find.
- Examples: Ratings, customer reviews. If other people “like” it or give it a good review, then that must be proof that the service or product is worth buying.
Improve user experience on your site
Playing with the box – is sometimes more fun than the actual product!
“Creating an experience that is just functional
is like a chef creating food that is just edible.”
~ Aaron Walters
Don’t just make a website – make it useful, make it have:
Personalization
- Use their name
- Notice how Amazon personalizes its site
- Offer an opt-in form: ask people how often they want to receive e-mails, what type of information they want, etc.
Speed
- People will wait three seconds for your page to load; then they’ll go to another site
- Google this: “page speed insights” to see how fast your site loads
- Google Developers will give you free speed statistics
- Google will bump your site down in rankings if it’s too slow
About the presenter
Ryan Morgan oversees the overall online marketing strategy for ERC, a human resources organization in Northeast Ohio. He is experienced in online marketing, graphic design and social media, as well as his extensive experience with web design, email marketing, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), content strategy, usability and user experience. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing and Studio Art from Baldwin Wallace University. He is a board member for the Cleveland Web Association. Ryan has an Inbound Marketing Certification from HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing University, is a recipient of Graphic Design USA’s InHouse Design Award and is a contributing writer for MarketingProfs.com.