Technology Marketing by Tatum MarketingJust another WordPress weblog

Every business owner or marketer I’ve talked to lately has the same question on his or her mind: How can I lower marketing costs but still generate leads?

Reducing marketing costs without screwing up your ability to grow is easier than you might think.

Here are five ways to do that.

1. Eliminate waste.

Over the years I’ve looked at hundreds of marketing programs, and I can tell you honestly that nearly all of them have some kind of hole that either drains money directly or allows leads to be lost.

Before you cut anything, take a good hard look at what you’re doing. Are there programs that aren’t delivering the results you anticipated? Fix them or get rid of them.

Is there anything that can’t be traced to increasing sales opportunities? Unless you have a pile of extra money, now is not the time to be spending money on marketing efforts that don’t generate more leads or develop the ones you have.

2. Make fewer mistakes.

Another way to say this is: turn to people who know what they’re doing.

Marketing – which has never been exactly simple – has changed a lot in the past few years. Customers and prospects are in charge now, and they’re looking for you online. If you’re not on the internet, you’re not in the game.

While I admire business owners who try to figure marketing out for themselves, it wastes a lot of time and it leads to mistakes that could be avoided with some experience.

You may not need a proven marketing pro on staff, but if you don’t have one somewhere on your team you’re probably wasting money.

3. Nurture what you’ve got.

Successful lead generation programs bring in people in different stages of the buying process. Some are ready to commit more to you than others are. Some are ready to talk to a sales person and some aren’t.

Think of any lead generation activity you’ve ever done: search marketing, email, advertising, telemarketing, networking, trade shows – it doesn’t matter. Were all of the people who responded ready to schedule a two-hour demo of your product? Of course not.

But that doesn’t make those people any less likely to buy from you in the future as long as you maintain a relationship with them.

If you’re one of those businesses that has a bunch of inactive prospects sitting in a database (or on your desk), you may be better off nurturing those people than paying to find new ones. And nurturing leads can be a lot less expensive than generating them in the first place.

4. Increase conversions – not just inbound leads or traffic.

This point is similar to the one above it, but it’s important enough to look at from a different angle.

Let’s say you have 2000 visitors a month going to your website and 60% of them leave your homepage without going anywhere else. Which do you think would be cheaper, changing your website so that an additional 20% (400 visitors) stay on your site or doubling traffic to the site? The results are the same.

(Hint: if you picked the first option, you’re right).

Complex purchases – such as technology, high ticket goods, and on-going services – are made up of many different conversion points where the buyer decides whether or not to spend any more time with you. Each of those conversion points can be tweaked to pass more prospects through and provide a better return on your investment.

5. Consider outsourcing.

To have a successful marketing program today requires skills in multiple disciplines – some of which didn’t even exist a decade or so ago. For example, you need
website strategy and development, search engine optimization, paid search marketing, prospect conversion optimization, lead nurturing and web marketing – just to name a few.

Staffing an in-house team with all of this expertise would cost more than most small to mid-sized businesses are willing or able to invest. Yet you can easily – and cost effectively – get this expertise from an outside firm or group of individuals.

It’s worth looking into.

For the past two weeks in this column we’ve been looking at website statistics. First we looked at Hits and Visitors and last week we looked at Bounce Rate. Continuing the look at statistics there is a grouping called Pageviews and Average Pageviews.

The basic concept of pageviews is fairly straight forward. This is the total number of pages on the entire website that people have looked at during the date range you are counting.

Average Pageviews is the total number of visitors during that time period divided by the total number of pageviews.

Be careful because these two measurements don’t necessarily track everything.

For example, Flash or fancy XML pages might change content while not counting as a change in pages.  A flash picture album is a good example. A visitor might go though 100 pages in a flash picture album, but the web server will only count that as a single pageview.

Also RSS feeds can mess with the pageview count. If a customer reads pages using RSS reader software some statistics-collecting software will not count them as page views. This is because RSS readers are viewed by some search engines as a computer spider and not counted as a human looking at the page. It is not clear if Google Analytics counts RSS feeds or not.

This just goes to show that one should not take any single statistic and build a profile around it.  Each set of numbers shows only a fraction of the total picture.

When I look at pageviews I also like to look at the statistic of Time on the Site.  The time setting is just what it sounds like; it tracks how long someone sticks around looking at the information on your site.

On a side note, I once told a manager about Time on the Site statistic and the manager looked at me with shock.  He responded:  They have a stopwatch that keeps track of your time?  I was able to keep a straight face and explain that they just subtracted the entry-time statistics from the exit-time statistics.  I let myself laugh later when I told my co-workers this story.

Of course the “catch” with Time on the Site statistics is that your visitors may not be actively looking at the site for the entire time they are there. They could take a phone call or just wander off for a few minutes.

Still, even without complete accuracy, these statistics provide some valuable information. Together the these two things, pageviews and the time information, can clearly tell you what people look at on your site, what is popular and what makes them stop and take notice.  Because a website should always be a work in progress this information will help you decide what can stay and what needs to be replaced or at least updated.

Both Google Analytics and web server information can generate a lot of sometimes-confusing information.  However, by careful review it is possible to gain a clear picture of how people are using your website.

Don’t get freaked out by the numbers. They are there to help.

Technorati Tags: web analytics, website stats, traffic

Websites generate a large number of statistics and it can often be confusing.  Today I want to focus on one important statistic called bounce rate.

The concept of this is fairly simple. It measures how many people come to a single page of a site and then hit the back button.  No matter how someone found your website, the bounce rate tells you how many people left your site after one quick look.

Clearly every website owner wants to have the lowest bounce rate possible, but just how low can cause many arguments among people. I personally like to see fewer than 40% on the bounce and anything lower than this is very good.  Because this means that people have found want they were looking for and are willing to look at other pages of the website.

But what if your website has a 50% or higher bounce rate?  In this case you should review carefully what people expect to find when they come to your site. For example, take a look at your listings on a search engine.  Does the description text that shows up on the search engine accurately describe your website or does it give false impressions of what the visitor is going to find? If it’s the latter, you’ll probably want to change your description. In most cases, it does no good to drive traffic to your site if it’s just going to bounce.

This is also the time to look at the contents of your homepage. Analytics applications such as Google Analytics allow you to see what is being clicked on — buttons, links and so on.  If only a few buttons are being clicked on and the other links have no clicks this clearly indicates that some changes need to be made.  The changes don’t have to be drastic.

Let’s say you have a button on the home page to download a document, but no one has clicked on the link.  A change of the document description could help attract people to take a look at it.  If you change the description and people still ignore the document, you’ll want to consider removing that button and using the space for something else.  This is especially true if the document is also available on another page of the website and it is being downloaded from that link.

In the next few months bounce rate might become even more important than it has been in the past.  Rumors have been going around the past few months that Google is going to do a major modification of their filters and make the bounce rate more important.  This will have an impact on a website’s organic ranking, with a high bounce rate dropping it from the top of searches.

From Google’s point of view this makes sense. They are trying to give people relevant results. If people keep bouncing off a website this means that people are not finding what they want when they type in their keyword search.  So these failed searches might pound a website down to the bottom of the ranking.

Even if Google does not make the rumored changes, it’s still worth it to drive down your bounce rate.

Next week I will talk about pageviews.

Technorati Tags: search engine optimization, analytics, seo

One of the great things about web marketing is the ability to measure and track what people are doing. This means you don’t have to guess at what’s working and not working.

I thought I would start the new year with a back-to-basics look at website statistics. These statistics are available from analytics applications – such as Google Analytics – as well as from your website itself.

Back in the early days of the World Wide Web, people were obsessed with how many ‘hits’ their website was getting.  I’m not going to go into the technical side of what a ‘hit’ was measuring and why it was not an accurate count of how many visitors the site had.  Suffice it to say that “hits” doesn’t tell you anything valuable from a marketing perspective.

It is much more accurate and useful to look at website “visitors” for both search engine optimization and website performance.

Most statistical software can now do some form of filtering to separate the number of computer spiders which ‘ping’ websites from the number of humans coming to the site, and the software usually calls humans “Visitors”.   The first thing to look at within the data is how the visitor numbers are broken down into “Total Visitors”, “New Visitors” and “Returning Visitors”.

“Total Visitors” is a much more accurate measurement than hits.  A word of caution though. For website owners who are used to looking at “hits”, the number of “visitors” can be frightening or depressing because it is a much smaller number. It also suffers from greater fluctuation in the daily numbers.  Weekends and holidays can cause massive drops in the number of visitors to many websites but they will return Monday through Friday.  I often have to calm business clients when they look at site statistics on weekends.

Beyond “Total Visitors” the numbers breakdown into two groups usually called “New Visitors” and “Returning Visitors”. People often jump on how many new visitors a site gets, but the returning visitor statistic is important too.

“New Visitors” are not necessarily people visiting your site for the first time.  Depending on the setup of the data collection from the website some people could be counted as ‘new’ if they only return once every few weeks.  They can also be counted as new if they delete the cookies your website or Google has placed on their computer.   Still, the number of “new visitors” can provide you with valuable information, especially if the company has started a new marketing campaign or made any changes to the website designed to increase the search engine placement.

While it is important to attract new visitors to your website, the returning visitors should also be appreciated. A high number of “Returning Visitors” means that people like your site and are coming back on a regular basis.  “Returning visitors” show customer loyalties and indicate there is something on the website worth coming back for again and again.

I also like returning visitors because I think that if people keep coming back to the website the odds are good that they are telling their co-workers and friends about the website.  For some companies and websites a “refer to a friend” button can be a very powerful feature, allowing people an easy way to tell others about your site.

Next week I will continue looking at statistics by looking at “bounce rate”.

For anyone who asks me where to get started with web analytics, I recommend Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s comprehensive enough for most web owners, and it’s very intuitive. It also – I’m constantly reminded – tends to filter information in ways that don’t always allow the complete story to show through. This bothers some people.

Analytics is a hot topic, and there all kinds of places you can go to learn more, get started and move beyond Google (should you feel the need). Fortunately for me, Jim Sterne has just posted an excellent list of resources so I don’t have to develop one myself.

Instead, I can just direct you to: Web Analytics: From the Top [via Metrics Insider].

Technorati Tags: Web analytics, Google,