Your website is not a one and done deal. It requires constant improvement. A weekly, if not daily, review of your website metrics will be the way you identify areas that need work. Of course, knowing which metrics are valuable and which are just distractions is important. Where is your focus on your metrics? Do you have an eye on every angle?

Focus on Three Key Metrics:

Don’t concern yourself with metrics that track the technical performance of your website. Page load times and browser versions are irrelevant if your site is not attracting potential customers. Focus on these three metrics:

1. Visitors:

How many people are coming to your website? Is your traffic increasing? Look for correlation with blog publishing and new offers to identify topics that are attracting.

Where are they coming from? Look at trends for organic search, direct traffic and references. What keywords are bringing traffic? Can you optimize more pages or write another blog post for well performing keywords?

2. Leads:

How many visitors have converted to leads? Look at page analytics to see if people are leaving your landing pages without converting. Make the necessary improvements.

What did they convert on? If an offer is working, strengthen it with another blog post. Consider creating a similar, but slightly different offer. Instead of an eBook, offer a white paper or in-depth report.

3. Sales:

How many leads converted to sales? If sales aren’t converting, consider a strong or more segmented lead nurturing campaign.

Metrics Offer Clues:

Staring at metric data is not the goal. Rather, fine-tuning your website is. Regular analysis of visitor, leads and sales metrics will offer you clues to places on your site that still need improvement. These are areas where even small changes can make a big impact.

• Targeting: Are you using the right messaging on your homepage and throughout your website? Use A/B testing methods to test different messaging targeted at your key marketing personas.

• Calls-to-Action: Every page on your website should have a call-to-action. Test the look and feel of different CTAs on various web pages.

• Offers: Offer type is important, too. Test the performance of different offers on your pages. A middle-of-the-funnel offer like a free trial or consultation might not work well on your blog, but it might work wonders on a product page.

• Form Fields/Length: For landing pages, test all of the above as well as the length of your forms and the fields they include.

• Formatting & Layout: Test different formatting (e.g. headers, bullets, etc.) and your landing pages’ layouts overall. Perhaps your website visitors convert better on pages where the form is on the left. Or maybe on the right.

By doing small but constant adjustments, you will be able to maximize the utility of your website so it becomes a platform for generating visitors, leads, and ultimately, sales. Metrics are pivotal for pinpointing the problem areas of your website. Understanding how to use the data is important to the success of your redesign. If your company does not have internal staff with the knowledge and time to make metric review a part of their daily tasks, then hiring outside agency is critical. Turning data into action and action into results is what metrics are all about.  If sales aren’t converting, consider a stronger or more segmented lead nurturing campaign.

Well, that was quite a mouthful. Questions? Give us a call. We’d love to discuss metrics and analytics with you. Let’s start a discussion. 

image source.

Last week, San Jose graffiti artist David Choe graced Denver with his presence for the annual street art convention of the Terminal Kings.  In his time in here, he gave us several public murals that you can find in the art district, specifically off of 13th and Champa.

What brings me to talk about Choe, besides my grandiose excitement that Denver’s art culture is rapidly growing in a tasteful fashion, is the hype surrounding the rumors and anticipation of Facebook’s stock going public and Choe’s relationship with Facebook that will soon bring him to residency in America’s top 1%. 

Choe was asked to provide the art for Facebook’s first headquarters building, adorning the walls with his dirty style of infamous characterizations of gorgeously morphed creatures resembling human figures.  As a payment, Choe took what many would argue to be a risky bet, to be paid in stock options as opposed to simply cash for his art.

Choe, himself, said that he thought Facebook “was ridiculous at first,” which I think part of all of us did at some point or another in the concept of connecting with friends online; however, as a tactile artist, you can see where Choe would think so. His medium is tangible in every facet and ties into the organic world that we live in. Yet, the times are changing and trans-disciplinary connections in networking are crucial to getting your work out there in today’s digital times of the inorganic.  Even if you’re still an artisan, hands on with your craft, promotion across social networks is imperative, even for the old school, technological anarchists.

In response to his expected earnings, Choe stated on Tuesday on his blog, “[H]ave you had the dream where you ARE this guy?!? And then some kind of happy accident happens , and as you’re in the middle of this glorious car crash, you stop to realize, that there is actually no such thing as an accident, and no chance encounters, and that everything has a direct purpose? am I the only one that has this dream? You never had that dream?”

Whether directly or not, this is proof that social media can pay off.  Facebook’s literal payout to Choe is just the start of his wealth– think about the future reach of his fan base through social networking.

It’ll be interesting to see where he takes all of this, especially his rankings as such a powerful stockholder.  This could be the start of a shift in something really awesome in slowly transforming the demographic of that daunting 1%.  Check out the rest of Choe’s Denver street art and take a look into the artist’s mind in the recent documentary, Dirty Hands. Or, hey, in the spirit of social media, subscribe to his Facebook.

Not to geek out with techie stuff, but this is really awesome.

Yesterday at the studio, a couple of us found ourselves distracted in a conversation about Mashable’s recent blog post on 3D printing– something that actually ties into one of our clients and their work at Render Plus Systems.  This conversation eventually led to open mouths watching videos of 3D printers in action in anticipation for the year 2030.

The Pirate Bay recently opened a new category on their site– called “Physibles”– which consists of files that can be downloaded and materialized through 3D printing.  Last week, TPB finally spoke about their mission on their blog, stating, “Today most data is born digitally. It’s not about the transition from analog to digital anymore.  We don’t talk about how to rip anything without losing quality since we make perfect 1 to 1 digital copies of things.  Music, movies, books, all come from the digital sphere.  But we’re physical people and we need objects to touch sometimes as well! We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects.” How cool is this?

With the rate of evolution for current trends, we’re willing to bet that the cost of printers will lower much sooner than two decades out, and 3D printing will be available to people like you or me. Researchers are predicting that the near future will hold printing of “personal scale applications” like sneakers, home items, or even car parts.  What we were held up by, (held up in amazement and wishing we were still in middle school using these awesome programs.

The above photo is an awesome example of real-world application, where designer Pauline Van Dongen produced her own collection of high fashion footwear made of laser sintered nylon.  Art meets technology, meets time efficiency, meets outsourcing costs.  Think about where this could take us– production costs could be lowered, and hopefully, child labor could be eliminated entirely at some point.  It’s like stem cell research for consumerism.  My only question is how replications of organic objects will happen– how will leather, meat, or produce be reproduced? Just a little food for thought.

• The original point of contact—search, email, PPC ads, referrals, etc.
• The sales stage (top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel) the offer targets.

To improve the performance of these elements over time, you need to have a strategy and method for on-going testing and refinement. Website analytics will provide the data you need to judge effectiveness. But you’ll also need a system for keywording, creating and editing your emails, call-to-action graphics, landing pages and forms. Inbound marketing platforms such as HubSpot are the best choice for this, because they allow you to quickly and easily make changes without re-coding the pages. Also systems such as Hubspot integrate analytics along the whole conversion path, giving you a holistic view of a large spectrum of data.

Off-Page Strategies

If you’ve optimized your conversion paths—blog posts, call-to-action, landing pages, forms—and your offers still aren’t reaching their full potential, you can try other strategies for generating more traffic.

• Include offers in your email newsletters.
• Add links to key blog posts in your email signature.
• Create a Pay-Per-Click campaign that links right to your landing page.
• Use them as a part of lead nurturing after a trade show or event.
• Getting Outside Help from a Marketing Agency.

Getting Outside Help

Sometimes what you need is a fresh set of eyes to give you feedback on your site and help you discover new opportunities for improvement. Web-based user-testing services are a way to get impartial feedback from a broad range of people. These sites charge a small fee to put your site designs in front of 10-1000 people in their testing pool. The feedback you get is honest, actionable and usually arrives within hours. These services can be a great addition to the regular web design team. Here are four of the best that we’ve come across:

• Five Second Test
• Feedback Army
• User Testing
• Loop11

Your webpages should evolve and improve over time. This is especially important for your landing pages since they help convert your faceless website visitors into opportunities whom you have collected vital information about. If it sounds like a lot of work, you’re right. If the web developer who built your site can’t provide the support services you need, look for an Inbound Marketing Agency who can. At Hero, we specialize in marketing for small businesses. This means we’re adept to interpreting data and finding the holes in it. Give us a call if you can’t figure out your lacking ROI. We’d love to help you be the best at what you do.  After all, that’s what Heroes do.

Similar Posts:

• Why Landing Pages Are Crucial In A Website Redesign.

• Creating Original Content in Your Website Redesign.

After 5 years with Hero, our powerhouse illustrator, designer, and code-wizard Shaw Nielsen is hitting the road to pursue freelance projects.  We wish him the absolute best of luck in all of his endeavors, knowing very well he’ll come nothing short of just that, the best.  We know he’ll be doing nothing but the snazziest of things in his future work and can’t wait to see where the projects unfold.  Though we’re sad for him to leave us, we can’t be more excited for Shaw, who has acquired a mighty client base that reaches to the UK and all the way down-under, to Aussieland.

Cheers to the next chapter!

“Today’s all-access mediascape has flattened out many areas of expertise, casting shadows of doubt upon the future of journalism, graphic design, book publishing, and other specialized practices.” -Ellen Lupton

In Richard Poynor’s article, “Read All That? You Must Be Kidding Me”, recently published on The Design Observer, he analyzes Cooper-Hewitt curator Ellen Lupton and her articulated essay on today’s design culture, entitled “Reading and Writing,” a featured text in Graphic Design: Now in Production (a current survey on American design culture) that questions the role of written work in relation to visual or graphic design. After much analysis, Poynor arrives at the conclusive statement that though not always read by everyone, long-form writing does still possess a great value in curating visual projects, and it’s absence would be an absolute “impoverishment.”

This article made me curious, as a writer in a sea of designers and a primarily visual, digital culture, and makes me question, again, how much our culture is actually reading, or at that, actually wants to read. We’re given so much awesome, innovative, and interesting content to look at online each day, and our RSS feeders are exploding with new posts each day.  As creatives, with our eyes and minds on creative work 100% of the time, how much time will we devote to reading the entirety of a text when there’s something else we want to read? We’re busy hustling to get our work out there, to be seen and heard for our creative visions. Further, from the perspective of the writer, how do we find readers– advocates– who will dedicate their time to reading something we scribe in long-form text? Is the essay, as Lupton states, a lost cause?

In studying Lupton’s essay, Poynor (after admitting to only skimming the text at first) relays to us her accusation: “If you are reading this text now (and you started perusing it from the beginning, some three thousand words ago), you are a stalwart slogger indeed. The super sad truth is, this essay is a last-ditch effort at so-called ‘long-form writing.”‘; he goes on to call her bold statement, “an amazing amount of trouble to go to as a curator, editor and writer if you doubt that many people will make the effort to read [your text in its entirety].” Yet, by the end of the article, Poyner calls himself a “slogger”, which I stand to argue that we all are, genre-depending.

Digital design is a field that is beyond cross-disciplinary, and requires an impeccable eye for analysis, as well as a well-studied and well-read mind. To arrive at our our finished projects, we each read an extensive amount about those who inspire us,  their design process, and the about the methods and tools that we need to create our own.

As Lupton comments, the writing surrounding our work– or even our written comments and opinions towards the work of others– may just be a means of deriving pleasure from our experience of a piece of work, or, as she says, a means of “disseminating the self.” However, without language, there wouldn’t be any purpose behind design, as, really, the design industry is one in which we each create work that is expressive of some form of opinion, and how else do we thoroughly finalize and give detail to that opinion other than through written text? Though we often think in images, we still form thoughts and conceptualize those images with what we were built upon– the written word.

“Seach Engines, blogging & other Internet trends have fundamentally transformed the way people & businesses purchase products, but most small businesses still use outdated & inefficient marketing methods—like print advertising, telemarketing & trade shows—that people increasingly find intrusive & screen out.”
-Brian Halligan, Co-Founder & CEO Hubspot

With the increasingly and overwhelming amount of marketing messages that we’re bombarded with each day, we’ve trained ourselves to ignore the messages, even from our favorite companies. The impact of digital technology, social media and always on, real-time access means the power in the marketplace has shifted from the advertiser to the audience. That said, your marketing can no longer just be something that talks about you. It must be something searchable, useful and sharable. It must serve the needs of real people with real problems to solve. Or, it will be nothing but noise to be blocked out.

If your marketing is based on the old metrics of impressions, click-through and open-rates, if it relies on interruption to gain your audience’s attention, it is a losing strategy. Today, traditional outbound marketing is more expensive and less effective than ever. To succeed today, you must re-align your marketing to strategies that pull customers to you, instead of pushing messages out. With this in mind, we’ve created a new Ebook, “Get Found With Inbound Marketing” that lays out the six most prominent facets in structuring your inbound marketing campaign. The six steps include:

1. Know Your Customer: Building buyer personas.
2. Optimize Your Website: Applying SEO best practices.
3. Create Value Content: Connect with value-driven content.
4. Be Social: Use social media for business.
5. Measure Your Results: The power of analytics.
6. Feel Your Way: Use empathy to find what works.

It’s clear that marketing is changing on a fundamental level as the Internet continues to revolutionize how we find, buy, sell and interact with brands and products. The days of annoying people with intrusive advertising and marketing tactics are fading and the shift from Outbound to Inbound Marketing methods is underway. The new age of Inbound Marketing is about providing added value and earning customer loyalty instead of simple pounding a message into consumers heads and hoping it will stick. You can read more about the Inbound Strategy in our full-length Ebook that breaks down the above steps. Click the link below to get your copy. Did we mention that it’s free?

Download Get Found With Inbound Marketing.

By now you’re probably sick of us talking about the benefits of inbound marketing, but really, inbound marketing is where you should be focusing your 2012 ad and marketing budget. Why? Statistics have proven that the ROI on inbound has well surpassed that of outbound, and more and more companies are finally taking hold of the digital space.

The benefits of inbound have proven to be so great that statistics are predicting online advertising to grow 23.3% in 2012 alone, and, according to one report, “this year, US online ad spending will exceed the total spent on print magazines and newspapers for the first time, at $39.5 billion vs. $33.8 billion. And as online shoots up, the print total will continue to inch downward.” Mitch Joel of Twist Image, who quotes Emarketer,  furthers this statistic by stating that in 2016, the total US online marketing budget is expected to reach $62 billion.

Bottom line? We suggest looking at your marketing budget focus and taking a crack at how you can work more of it into an online presence. Need help? Give us a call at Hero. We’re all about working digital marketing into every possible corner of the Internet that your business can fit.  We’d be happy to help you out.

image source: planmysite.com

What is a Landing Page?

A landing page is a website page that allows you to capture a visitor’s information through a lead capture form. A good landing page will be targeted to a particular source of traffic—say from an email campaign advertising a particular whitepaper. People who click through from the email are sent to this specific landing page, where they learn more about the whitepaper offer. Because the page is targeted and because it has an interesting offer behind a lead capture form, you are able to convert those people from website visitors into leads with whom you can then follow up.

Why are Landing Pages so Critical?

Too many companies send their advertising, email or social media traffic to their homepage. This is a missed opportunity. When you know a stream of targeted traffic will be coming to your website, you can essentially filter where they go based on their demographic.  Landing pages present a different offer than simply showing them your website’s homepage.

What Makes a Landing Page Most Effective?

When you’re considering a website redesign or improvements to your current site, you must include both a strategy and design for effective landing pages.

5 Important Landing Page Elements:

• Limit Navigation.
  Any navigation on the page that is not a part of the lead capture form is a potential distraction and may prevent visitors from completing the form. So, hide most of your Tier 1 and all of your Tier 2 and 3 navigation elements. Limit the number of exits from your landing page so that visitors stay focused.

• Deliver Value.
  If you have a valuable offer, it’s reasonable to expect that your visitors will give up their contact information in exchange for it. Ask yourself if your offer is compelling enough for your audience. If not, improve the quality of the content. You should constantly ask yourself, “How can I make this even better?” Make sure your landing pages demonstrate that value.

• Enable Sharing.
  Add share links to your landing page to encourage your website visitors to share your content with their audiences. People like original content and sharing increases your social reach.

• Keep it Short.
  For the same reason that you limit navigation, keep your landing pages short and the form above the fold. Doing so will increase your conversion rate.

• Test, Test, Test.
  Read all you want, but your landing page will never be perfect and will always benefit from testing and improvement. Use a landing page creation tool that allows you to create and edit landing page quickly, to see what works best for your business. Eventually, you’ll begin to understand exactly what your visitors are seeking out.

Landing pages are where the magic happens; they are where you convert targeted visitors into engaged and interested leads. Make sure your website redesign plan includes the creation of a landing page template and tool for easy creation and improvement. Make sure, too, that while you’re blogging you create original content to be used as a value-driven offer that will grab the attention of potential customers. At Hero, we’re all about landing pages and the value they can offer our customers.  It’s important to remember that when creating these pages, you’re addressing your customer interests. Is your ROI not where you where you want it to be? Give us a call, maybe we can help.

The age-old question of “How can I attract more clients?” never seems to tire. Everyone is curious– no matter what their business size–and everyone wants to find an answer for their specific industry. Next month, Hero’s principal, Jeff Mason, will join our friend and Denver business coach Bob Marro of The Alternative Board (TAB)  and Joanne Underhill of Underhill & Underhill P.C. for a private workshop surrounding this question as well as the importance of not only the what and how, but the why that drives your business plan. 

In today’s world of inbound marketing, it can feel like quite a feat to figure out how to creatively compete for the attention of customers in your industry. However, once you center your business focus and look to not only what you’re doing, but, more so, why you’re doing it, things begin to fall into place. From there, your ideal clients will follow.

During the workshop, Jeff and Bob will cover the ways in which you can review your business– how to figure out what’s working and, well, what might not be. You’ll discuss the ways in which you can better structure your business for the year to come and set goals accordingly.

To learn more about the workshop schedule, or to register, click here.

Or, give us a call at Hero. We’d be happy to answer your questions.