3 Content Questions for Your Next Web Design Project

For any business owner, the company website is one of the most valuable marketing materials. It is often one of the first points of contact for prospects, and as they say, first impressions are everything. A website’s content, when managed effectively, ultimately contributes to higher conversion rates, increased revenue, and better customer service across the entire business. But before the content creation process begins, there’s a few questions to ask yourself that will save you time and aggravation.

Do I Have All The Materials I Need?

I don’t mean cutting down the amount of work you do by reusing the content of your brochures and data sheets. Instead, gathering and utilizing the context, message, or tone from these established materials can give your brand a kind of “time-honored” consistency. In addition, users and potential customers will often respond and more easily relate to content they feel is familiar. That’s the trick—making sure your content is updated and “fresh,” but reinforcing the same message / values that you’ve established your business around.

Do I Know Who I'm Writing For?

The point above, as you might expect, leads to the issue of your audience. To attract, engage, and ultimately convert customers with a website, it’s important to have a firm grasp on who makes up that audience and what they want to see. Choosing your desired segmentation, identifying their interests, needs, and expectations, and finally aligning your content with those attributes makes for a smoother process and a better, more impactful end result.

What About The Future?

When all is said and done, what happens next? Where do you take your content after your project is complete? The good part about pondering this is that there is a wealth of options for your new web content. For example, you can create an optimization plan to ensure it stays fresh and relevant. You can also use your renewed branding efforts to update your marketing materials, brochures, pamphlets, social media pages, etc. The goal here is to form a solid information architecture with a steady stream of relevant content. No matter how you end up using it, understanding the applications of new content is a big step on the path to better marketing.

Now more than ever, great content is at the heart of all marketing, and taking your efforts online doesn’t change that. Investing the time and work into new web content is something that will have a host of benefits in the long run. Overall, thinking about your company’s history, your target audience, and what lies ahead will greatly contribute to that success.

3 Common Pitfalls in Content Marketing

By now, you’ve probably heard about the benefits that come with incorporating a Content Marketing strategy. The ways content can enhance your business’s marketing mix, how it builds a sense of community with customers, the ways it shows off your expertise—the list goes on and on. Unfortunately, many businesses aren’t utilizing their content to its full potential. Below are the most common of these mistakes and tips on how you can avoid them.

1) It’s All About Me

Sometimes when a business decides it wants to jump on the content bandwagon, there is the mindset that the bulk of their content should be directly tied to their products / services, or that they should always try to sell something when they communicate with their audience. Unfortunately, this strategy often turns users away from your content rather than sharing it and coming back for more. The problem is that businesses often fail to step into their target audience’s shoes and think about what they like, care about, and expect from web content. People want to be informed, entertained, and assisted in solving a problem, not bogged down by constant self-promotion.

The Tip: Do your research & be customer-centric—think about who your audience is, use their feedback, and create content based on what’s important to them.

2) Nothing But The Facts

You may have heard the phrase “facts tell, but stories sell” before when it comes to Content Marketing. This point builds off the pitfall above in that users don’t want dry, isolated, or negative content; rather, they want stories. Stories have themes, compelling elements, room for engagement and interaction, and connections between them. The success of other marketing tactics, such as SEO and Social Media Marketing, rely on building content that users can relate to, find what they need, and pass on to others. This not only affects the way content is made, but also the way it is distributed.

The Tip: Have a theme & make connections—use stories to entertain, persuade, and engage with your audience.

3) Publish & Pray

In any new marketing endeavor, having a plan is essential. Not only can your business keep its efforts (and budget) organized, but it also projects a sense of reliability to customers. With your content, this step is even more important. Many businesses take a heavy-handed approach to their content, letting regular communications fall by the wayside. Customers don’t want to keep checking your site for new content only to find the same thing they saw the week before. In most cases like this, they’ll eventually stop returning. Applying an optimization plan (set a goal, plan, implement, measure, refine, & repeat) is a great way to look at the content creation process.

The Tip: Make a plan & stick to it—create a calendar for content to show that your business can maintain a high standard while enhancing your reputation to your audience.

What do you think of the pitfalls above? If you have any suggestions or questions about this list, leave us a comment below!

Top 5 Features of Google Analytics Content Experiments (vs. Website Optimizer)

For about 5 years now, marketing professionals have been using Google’s Website Optimizer to run A/B tests and Multivariate tests on webpages. Google recently announced that Website Optimizer will be replaced with Content Experiments. Content Experiments offers similar functionality as Website Optimizer with a few limitations; however, I’ll highlight the top features that I think Content Experiments offers. Here are my top 5 features for Content Experiments when compared to Web Site Optimizer:

1. Experiment Integration within Google Analytics

Content Experiment’s integration within Google Analytics is much improved compared to Web Site Optimizer. Web Site Optimizer did not integrate with Google Analytics, which limited a user’s ability to obtain additional information about the test variations for each experiment such as time on site, bounce rate, or the possibility of segmentation.

2. Simplified Workflow with the Set-up Wizard

The simplistic workflow to implement an experiment is streamlined as well. The process went from 5 basic steps to 4 basic steps. The set-up wizard for the experiment clearly identifies where you are within the set-up process and the next steps. In addition, there are icons to help you throughout the process to understand what you’re doing.

3. Visuals of the Experiments within the Console

The simple workflow is enhanced with visuals of the experiment variations, which was not part of Web Site Optimizer. Within the console of Google Analytics Content Experiments, you can see exactly what your original design vs. the variation(s) will look like prior to launching the experiments.

4. Better, More Simplified Reporting

In my opinion, the reporting in Content Experiments is much better than before. Content Experiments provides high-level experiment detail at a glance (visits, days of data, status of the experiment, and percentage of included visitors). The conversion data is also much improved by providing separate columns for visits, conversions, conversion rates, and basic green & red arrows to compare the variation(s) to the original page. Finally, the look of the reports is now more consistent with the newer Google Analytics interface.

5. Rewrite the Variation URLs to the Original within GA Content Reports

By selecting to rewrite the URL variations, you can consolidate all of the traffic to your original and variation pages. These URLs will appear under the original page within your Content Reports. This ability makes the Content Reports easier to read and streamlines the analysis of the experiment’s impact on page metrics in addition to its data. This provides increased functionality with custom reporting and experiment segmentation.

What’s the BIG Deal with Content Experiments?

The simplified shift from Web Optimizer to Content Experiments will save companies and marketers’ time, money, and allow them to easily create testing experiments. Ideally, Content Experiments will reduce the amount of time to create experiments and simplify their data, making them easier to understand as well as more actionable. With more actionable information, companies and marketers should be able to improve their users’ online experience and generate higher conversions.

Get off the excuse bandwagon! Start experimenting for better lead generation and online sales, what are you waiting for? Leave your feedback on Content Experiments in the Comments section below!

Picture This—An Infographic’s Role in Content Marketing

What are Infographics?

In short, an infographic is any visual representation of information. These large, creative images (see below for an example) can be found in a variety of places around the web, like on blogs, through some social networks like Pinterest, and on bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon. For the purposes of Internet Marketing, an infographic is normally used to present a large amount or complicated data in an appealing and engaging way. And that’s the key to your business getting the most out of this kind of content—engagement with your target audience. The assumption always seems to be that web users are impatient—they won’t bother with a site if it doesn’t load after a few seconds, and they won’t take the time to read every word on a text-rich web page. To market in this environment, where users want information in (faster than) an instant, visual content like infographics just might be a way to slow people down and get your message across effectively.

How can I use Infographics for Marketing?

Just like any other visual-based piece of content, the marketing value of infographics lies in their portability, opportunities for sharing via social networks, and linking back to your business’s web site.

Portability: Once designed and completed, an infographic can be easily uploaded to an aggregator, repurposed in a presentation, highlighted in an email promotion, or discussed in an article, blog post, press release, or social media post.

Sharing: Your business’s online presence, reach, and credibility can all receive a substantial boost when users share your visual content. Because of their relatively small size and wide range of applications, infographics make for an inexpensive chance for your business’s content to “go viral.”

Backlinking: Just because any text content within an infographic can’t be crawled or indexed by a search engine doesn’t mean that these images don’t have distinct SEO advantages. Anyone that shares and/or publishes an infographic somewhere else typically links back to your business’s website; this link bait results in greater traffic and a higher search ranking.

Conclusion

It’s easy to see the benefits that can come not only from infographics, but from the integration of any visual content into your business’s digital marketing plan. The key is that the content has to be well designed. The best images are appealing and easy to understand, as well as informative and engaging. They can show your business’s expertise on a particular subject as well as increase your reach and web traffic. Finally, infographics are easily repurposed, shared by users, and serve as effective link bait for SEO purposes. For a business owner, it seems a picture can be worth much more than a thousand words.

Google's Value of Content over Optimization

Recently, a debate has emerged regarding Google’s potential forthcoming decision to place greater restrictions on its algorithm for websites that utilize less-compelling content coupled with so-called “over-optimization.” While the details aren’t exactly clear as of yet, at this year’s SXSW Conference in Austin, Google’s Webspam Team manager Matt Cutts made mention of “something that they’ve been working on in the last few months” that will make the search playing field “a little bit more level.” And even though multiple sources have taken this brief mention of change as something that won’t solve a much greater problem, or are criticizing Google for trying to level a playing field that inherently cannot be so, a single point remains—impactful and meaningful content has increased value for a website over SEO alone.

SEO Provides the Means to a Content End

The benefits of SEO for businesses and digital marketing teams have often been proven in the past. While the importance of SEO is beyond question, the real value of a website for searching users lies in the content they find once they arrive there. And while it’s one thing to fault Google for fighting a losing battle or “jumping the shark,” as many bloggers have touted, Google’s intention was made clear in that same conference—certain SEO techniques or “tricks” that can increase a site’s traffic in lieu of engaging, relevant content should not have a strangle hold over their (or any) search index. As it stands, whatever Google is working on, there is simply not enough information available yet to make any sweeping claims about their next update or improvement.

Marketable Sites have Meaningful Content

For any web developer or digital marketing team, a page’s content in relation to its search engine ranking is a powerful combination in terms of visibility and reach. These factors also provide a basic, yet effective foundation for additional, future internet marketing campaigns. Rather than bashing Google for over-regulating the over-optimizers and creating an unjustified fear of SEO, businesses should allocate time and resources toward the creation of content that is accessible, impactful, and informative in addition to approved, “white hat” optimization efforts. Many are anticipating further clarification on this issue when Cutts speaks again at the Search Marketing Expo Advanced in Seattle this June. Then we’ll see whether all the hype was warranted and who really “jumped the shark” on this issue.