During the course of our work week it's not uncommon for our marketing team to come across blog posts, websites and other digital assets that catch our attention that we'd like to share with our readers. To that end, today marks the beginning of Marqui's Web Marketing Digest series which will highlight the interesting things we come across each week and will be posted every Friday.

Here are some of the interesting tidbits we discovered on the web this week and wanted to share:

A fabulous article from Times Higher Education on content management and higher education. This post does a great job of emphasizing the pains that many higher education institutions face when it comes to managing their website.

A fun email marketing knowledge test. How email savvy are you? Take this test and find out (by the way our score was 100%, not that we're bragging).

For all those people who love social media and baking, there is now a twitter device to keep you updated on all the newest baked goods from your local bakery. Baker Tweet is a bakery-safe box through which busy bakers can tweet directly to their followers about their oven-fresh goods. Not only is Baker Tweet a fantastic way to connect with audiences--it's yummy as well!

An informative, and cute, video on proper e-book creation from Aptara. The video covers the steps in creating an e-book from start to finish in 2 minutes.

Do you have the characteristics of a good blogger? Check out this post on Techipedia to see if you fit the bill.

Have a great weekend!

Lately we've been getting a lot of questions from our customers about optimizing their websites in 2010. We know that planning a new website, or redesigning an old one, can be a daunting prospect and it is easy to quickly get bogged down by conflicting opinions or technical debates over the latest web development trends.

To help clarify this topic, we're hosting a web seminar to help you ensure your website succeeds in delivering results that you can measure, including:

• Using personas to develop relevant content and navigation
• Ensuring your website supports your sales process
• Making a connection with social media

The webinar is scheduled for Thursday March 4th, at 10:30 am Pacific / 1:30 pm Eastern and you can register here.

A while back I began tweeting my top 10 list of features that I would look for in any marketing automation solution. This was based on my experiences accumulated over the last 8 years, being responsible for demand generation at various technology companies. During that time I've used a mix of tools from simple web content management and email marketing solutions, to full blown marketing automation suites from various vendors.

Spreading the 10 tweets out over my time-line wasn't very helpful, and the 140 character limits made things a bit cryptic, so I'm going to split them over 2 posts with a little explanation and rationale this time.

#1. Fast landing page creation you can measure and a/b split test.

Whether your landing pages are for calls-to-action on your website, or part of your pay-per-click campaign, they represent a huge opportunity for optimization. A small improvement in conversion rate can yield staggering increases in lead capture. Any marketing automation solution must make it quick and simple for marketers (not web developers) to create landing pages because you're going need a bunch of them and they will change frequently.

Obviously you need to measure both clicks onto the landing pages as well as actual conversions. As you get more advanced you'll need to experiment with different designs, copy, images and form fields. Now you need the ability to run A/B split tests and multivariate experiments. This can either be part of the marketing automation solution, or provided as part of a tight integration with a third-party (free) solution like Google Website Optimizer.

#2: Simple form creation that integrates with your website call-to-actions. All leads into 1 funnel.

You don't just need forms on landing pages. Your website calls-to-action often require in-line forms that flow as an integral part of the web page design. Jarring redirects to landing pages hosted on sub-domains are likely to distract your visitors at the critical moment as they take the step from interest to engagement.

All inbound leads need to get routed into a single marketing database so you have visibility of all inbound lead channels.

#3: Bi-directional integration with your chosen CRM system with communication history for sales context.

Marketing Automation systems don't operate in isolation. For marketing and sales to work as parts of an integrated demand generation process, you need two-way communication between the people and the technologies.

Leads need to flow into your CRM system with as much context as possible to enable sales to have a productive initial conversation. As leads or prospects continue to interact with your business online, additional information must enrich the lead data in your CRM, without the dreaded creation of duplicate leads (see number 6 on the next post).

Inevitably not every lead passed to sales will engage with the allocated rep, let alone become an opportunity. Your chosen marketing automation platform must be able to accept leads "returned to marketing" for further nurturing. This is a huge black hole for many organizations with leads burned and lost for ever.

Finally for closed-loop marketing to work, your CRM system must be able to return pipeline / opportunity revenue and converted sales revenue for each campaign (see number 9). Only then can you invest in demand generation programs which create sales and not just clicks and conversions.

#4: Separate marketing database with dynamic segmentation based on explicit data and behaviors.

The days of email blasts to unsuspecting victims hoping that something sticks are coming to an end. Email campaigns are successful when the message is anticipated, personal and relevant (to quote Seth Godin). That means segmentation - identifying groups of customers with similar needs.

First of all you'll need to be able to segment based on explicit data such as title, company size, state etc. Next you'll want to segment on behaviors such as the lead did X, then did Y, but hasn't done Z within the next two weeks. This is a great example of a dynamic group that changes continuously as people continue to interact with your business online.

With these capabilities you can start building campaigns which comprise multiple communication touches which reflect a persons interest, level of engagement and even stage in the buying process.

#5:Lead scoring duh! But it needs to be simple to use and flexible enough to fit your business model.

This is really the feature which defined the category. It's really not marketing automation without some sort of lead scoring--but a word of caution: don't be tempted to over-engineer your approach right out of the gate. Plan to learn. You won't get it right first time, so allowing for incremental evolution of your scoring methodology will save you grief while trying to launch your marketing automation solution.

Better to tighten your criteria for passing sales-ready leads only once you have too many leads for sales to productively engage. This is especially true in the current economy. The goal here is more sales not less leads. Consider calculating a lead score and asking sales to validate the model when they start engaging the lead and verbally qualifying. You can get plenty of value from marketing automation without doing any form of lead scoring.

Being an education communicator is never easy—especially when faced with trying to engage today’s breed of technically savvy students. Many communicators are having a difficult time reaching out to constituents, students and alumni alike as larger portions of these groups turn to social media instead of the traditional media, still used by many institutions as their main form of communication. In this difficult environment innovative communicators are taking advantage of social media to reach their audience on a whole new level and are having measureable success.

So how do they do it? Take a look at how social media can be used in education to supplement your current communication strategies:

Twitter – A free micro-blogging site which allows users to enter 140 word or less posts known as “tweets” which are then published to the user’s profile page and are visible to their followers. Twitter is hugely popular and appears to only be growing.  A recent study done of students found that over 20% of students use Twitter, and of those, over 71% stated that they expect to increase twittering during the upcoming school year.

So how can you use twitter in education? Twitter is a great place to post pointers to online resources; school and class updates; and student reminders, and it also offers a way to get instant feedback about lectures, school related issues and news. Schools that have experimented with Twitter , have found that is has been an excellent way for students, faculty and staff to communicate with each other.

YouTube —The number one free video sharing site on the web with over 40% share of the online video market. Millions of videos are watched daily on the site which contains mostly user-generated and uploaded content.

The implications of YouTube in education are huge. YouTube can be used to enhance distance learning, to upload supplementary lectures and information like news reports; to contextualize an issue with video examples; to provide screen capture videos for demonstrations and can be easily embedded into lectures and presentations to provide interest.  YouTube now even has a separate site specially targeted for education videos.

Slideshare —A social site which allows users to upload PowerPoint presentations that are freely available online and easily embeddable for others to make use of. The site has many community features like tags, comments, communities and related slidecasts. I think the benefits of this one are pretty obvious: lecture material can be easily disseminated, students can locate other presentation s on the same or similar topics and teachers are able to build up a library of online resources.

Facebook Fan pages —A social networking site where users can add friends and send them messages; view their photos and updates; comment on updates; join networks of other users and send out notifications about themselves. Facebook Fan pages can be used as an open communication forum for students and faculty at an institution. The page can contain photos and videos from and about the institution and information about events, news, and important issues that are relevant for those who are members. Many schools have excellent Facebook Fanpages and are certainly taking advantage of what those sites can offer to their students.

Image by funkandjazz

A landing page is the page where your customer will arrive after clicking on a banner ad, a search engine result link or any other internet marketing offer or effort
and, if all goes well,  you’ll be able to garner contact information—one of the first steps towards a possible sale in the future. Landing pages should be targeted towards specific offers and can be easily measured, tested and optimized--so why are so many marketers still in their same old landing page rut?

Despite their obvious importance, too many marketers aren’t using landing pages to their best advantage. According to a MarketingSherpa study, 50% of web visitors will click away from your landing page in the first 8 seconds after arriving because the offers don’t appeal to them. With statistics like that, it’s clear that your landing pages need to be the best that they can be—are yours up to snuff? If not, here are 6 quick tips on how you can optimize your landing pages and capture more leads:

1. First impressions are everything! In order to capture your visitors’ attention, it is best to have a simple offer that is attention-grabbing and relevant. Keep the most important information above the fold so that your customers can see it quickly and easily and make sure that your call to action and offer are easily distinguishable.
   
   
2. Communicate the value of your offer. It is crucial to make sure that your offer is clear and specifically targeted to your campaign’s main audience and that your landing page quickly explains how the offer will benefit the visitor; this means that your offer needs to be attractive and easy to take advantage of. 
   
   
3. Keep it simple. Your visitors, no matter how interested they are in your offer, don’t want to be bogged down with complicated navigation, hidden calls to action, or long registration forms. Navigation should be clean and simple to minimize confusion; calls to action should be clearly stated and easy to accept; forms should be simple and only request relevant contact information.
   
   
4. Make your conversion button as obvious as possible. This point relates to the point above—not only should your call to action to simple and easy to accept, you should make your “submit” or conversion button the most prominent thing on the landing page. Make it painfully easy for your visitors to turn themselves into conversions.
   
   
5. Build trust by communicating your privacy policy. No one is going to give you their contact information if they don’t trust you. Make sure that your visitors know what they are filling out, where the information is going and how it will be used.
   
   
6. Measure, hone, repeat. So your landing page is capturing leads—but is it capturing all the leads that it can? You should always test multiple versions of landing pages so that you can learn what works best and refine your page.  Always measure the results of your landing pages, hone the page to perfection and then repeat.

While these are by no means all the ways that you can optimize your landing page, they are some of the simplest steps that usually have the largest results in terms of lead capture. Try some of these steps out and let us know how well they work for you!

Welcome to our new website which now includes a brand new web marketing blog. Marqui has a long and colorful history of blogging, but we wanted to start fresh with with a new look and a renewed focus on all things web marketing.

Our web marketing blog is brought to you by our marketing, product and consulting team to share ideas, best practices and trends from the world of web marketing.

We aim to cover a broad array of topics relating to web marketing including:

•  Content management
• Content creation strategies
• Conversion optimization
• Search Engine Optimization
• Email marketing
• Lead nurturing and management
• Lead scoring
• Anything else that seems interesting and relevant

You might be interested to know that here at Marqui we eat our own dog food. Every thing you see on our website and the web marketing blog have been been created and managed by our team using Marqui's Web Marketing Complete product.

We hope you like what you see and find our content useful. We'd love to hear from you about what you like, what you disagree with, and what else you'd like to get us thinking (and blogging) about.

Richard
VP Marketing, Marqui