Examples showing what is needed for a customer-centric B2B website
In a recent post, I talked about the importance of developing a solid B2B digital marketing strategy. A critical part of this is creating an enduring website presence that meets the needs of visitors while also achieving standout, leads and favourability for the business. Making their site more effective for visitors and the business should be a primary concern, but it often hasn't got sufficient attention in the past. But this seems to be changing; 2012 RWS/US research data suggests that marketing budgets are being invested more in websites and web development than anywhere else. Yet I still see a lot of basic requirements of an effective B2B site that are missing. In this post, I'll give examples showing some of the key features.
The seven essential features
Start by defining your requirements. Even…
A 3 Phased Approach to integrating Content and SEO Audits
In every book about Content Strategy, the recommended process will have an audit as one of the first steps; this is much the same as for Search Engine Optimisation. Granted, there are some specific technical aspects of SEO – particularly regarding server-side issues – that aren't related to content, but SEO audits will also cover onpage issues that need to be forwarded to product or editorial teams. As these disciplines merge, it is useful to get these groups working together, and it saves time to do onpage SEO and content auditing in one go. Thus I suggest combining the audit process as I'll explain here.
Phase One: Gathering Through Crawling
Using Xenu & Excel
Content Strategy books seem slightly wary of using crawlers for content audits. In Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson writes (p.48):
"During the audit process… technology can…
7 key strategy considerations for expanding into new markets using the Internet
One of the many benefits the Internet has unlocked is the ability to expand into new markets. The lack of palpable borders means customers around the world shop across countries and continents without so much as noticing where their latest purchase will be shipped from.
E-commerce giants realised several years ago that accelerating growth meant increasing the focus on their international operations. They started offering tailored experiences to customers around the world, carefully studying the so-called ‘BRIC’ markets, and developing local operations where it made sense. Today, Amazon has dedicated sites in 9 countries, including Japan, and smaller players often consider international operations from the onset.
But what is a blessing can become a curse and international expansion needs to be planned and thought through carefully. Offering products or services…
It’s a perennial dilemma for email marketers, what's our best tactic to boost revenue?
For some companies, the only way they are increasing revenue is growing the size of the email list to give a corresponding rise in revenue. While an increase in subscribers will undoubtedly improve revenue, we all know that only growing your database can lead to a declining scale of effectiveness over time as open rates drop and the number of inactive subscribers grow.
So what are the alternatives?
This article will look at those key practices for improving returns from email marketing that should be on every marketers list:
Database growth
Deliverability improvements
Open Rate (OR)
Click Through Rate (CTR) & Conversion Rate (CVR) and show you where your time and budget should be spent.
So let’s start by taking a look at a fairly standard situation and see what effect on the bottom line each tactic has.
We’ll start from this baseline: a retailer makes £38,880…
Examples showing how SEO recommendations should be briefed for implementation
SEO recommendations are often highly technical and specific in nature. One common mistake businesses make when implementing changes recommended by their SEO Agency is to not clearly communicate why the changes are needed in the first place.
Recommendations often pass through two or more people before they get implemented – from the SEO Expert, to a Marketing Exec (non-techy), to their internal/external Developer for example. On some occasions, this means the reasoning behind the recommendation is lost along the way and it can have a devastating effect on your SEO.
This article gives insight into a few examples of things that could go wrong if SEO recommendations are misinterpreted during the implementation process...
Canonical tag misrepresentation
As an SEO, recommending the addition of canonicals is a matter of best practice. It can address known duplicate content issues, as well as guarding against…
A review of process and tools available for online competitor analysis
Although we know it’s important to analyse how your own website is performing in terms of visitor numbers, customer demographics and conversion rate, we should remember that it's important to look outwards too.
Competitive intelligence analysis can tell you how you are performing relative to your competitors and provide some insight into their visitor numbers, audience plus marketing and search strategies.
Effective competitor intelligence analysis can provide real actionable insights that just aren’t possible using standard web analytics tools such as Site Catalyst, Google Analytics or Webtrends. By understanding more clearly as to what your competitors are doing, you can make more insightful decisions about what to do with your online marketing activities.
Key benefits of conducting online competitive analysis
You can apply competitive intelligence analysis allows you to gain insight on:
Competitor activity -gain insight into the activities and tactics of your competitors.
Questions that…
Move to "implied consent" useful for informing other site cookie policy decisions?
Value/Importance: [rating=4] (For UK marketers)
Recommended link: ICO announcement
Through 2011 and 2012 we kept marketers informed on how they should respond to new European privacy legislation and how it relates to the UK in particular. In our last post on the topic in 2012 we summarised the action the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) is taking on enforcement now the law is in force (from May 2012). There is a clear shift on previous announcements from “mandatory opt-in” to “informed consent” (to simplify).
If you’ve been following the cookie privacy developments to inform what you do on your site or for clients, then the latest announcement is very interesting. It’s from the ICO themselves explaining how they are changing their message such that they can now gain analytics insight from users.
Here's the 'before and after' for the ICO…
