It's time for our weekly Web Marketing Digest post and we have some really interesting things to share with you this time around.

This week's post has two presentations one on the critical success factors associated with lead generation, and another on the scope of the new marketing landscape and the power customers have over marketers. We also came across an interesting article on how schools are making use of Google apps and an informative one on the emotional factors related to landing page conversions.

For all of our higher education readers, this post from Mashable discusses how schools are encouraging their teachers and students to make use of Google apps (gmail, docs etc.) to facilitate learning and communication in the classroom. This is a really neat initiative that shows how technology can be used in education.

The marketing landscape is changing and more and more customers seem to be the ones with all the power. This presentation from Tribal DDB Canada discusses the new era of marketing and how you can make the most of it for your brand.

This presentation on the critical success factors for lead generation from Intouch gives really good insight into how you can improve your lead generation tactics.

There are many factors associated with landing page optimization, but not everyone remembers the emotional motivators which are a part of this process. This presentation does a great job of explaining those factors and giving you some ideas for how you can use them for your landing page optimization strategies.

Image from Flickr

We just finished out latest webinar, "Marqui's Top 10 Email Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them" and we're glad to say that it went off without us making any of the errors we mentioned in our blog post from earlier this week:  17 Ways to Screw up a Webinar.

For those of you who couldn't join us, here's a quick glance at our top 10 list:

1. Not optimizing for blocked images and preview panes
2. Having un-inspiring email copy 
3. Not testing for email client compatibility
4. Using broken / misleading links
5. Incorporating weak calls-to-action and landing pages 
6. Sending irrelevant communications
7. Not ensuring CAN-SPAM compliance
8. Not making it to the Inbox 
9. Not using benchmark data
10. Focusing on list size vs. participation size

If you want more details about each point, or to learn how to take your email marketing to the next level, you can check out the full recording here.

Image from Flickr.

Have you ever wondered what exactly siFR is or why you should use it? Have you ever had a burning question about siFR that you just never asked? Well we took the 6 most commonly asked questions we get about siFR and we've broken down the answers here, so you never have to worry about your understanding of the technology again.

What exactly is siFR?
Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (siFR) is an open source technology that allows you to replace text elements on a screen with Flash equivalents. SiFR uses JavaScript to read in HTML text and render it in Flash instead so that text elements can be styled in whatever font the web designer chooses, without the user having that font installed on their machine.

How is it pronounced?
According to one of the key developers involved in siFR’s creation, Mike Davidson, siFR is meant to be pronounced as “siffer."

Why should I use it?
SiFR has some key benefits for web designers including:

1. SiFR is accessible, selectable and most important, cross-browser compatible.
2. It does not violate end user license agreements (EULA)  or copyright laws since the font is contained within the SWF object.
3. SiFR is SEO friendly, provided that keywords appear in the text.
4. Implementation of siFR adheres to semantic XHTML and accessibility standards. Sites which use siFR are fully accessible to screen readers and other assistive technologies.
5. SiFR is scalable which means that if a user has modified font size within their browser, it will fluctuate accordingly.
6. Last but not least, you can create beautiful typography for your web page.

What are the downsides of siFR?
SiFR is often criticized for the fact that it can cause pages to load slowly and is not supported by some mobile devices including the extremely popular iPhone. It requires both javasript and Flash to be enabled.  

Will it hurt my SEO?
SiFR can be a fine technique with regards to your SEO as long as your keywords appear in the HTML text and it is used in moderation. However, extensive use of siFR can be interpreted as a poor site quality signal by crawlers, eroding SEO.

This is an example of siFR in action:


What alternatives are there?
This section gets a little technical (we apologize in advance) but for those who want to delve a little deeper into their options, here they are:

• Facelift Image Replacement (FLIR) is similar software to siFR but instead of using flash, it embeds plain images that are generated automatically from the text on the webpage. This way, even if the user doesn’t have a Flash plugin installed, they will see the text replaced by FLIR. FlIR is also compatible with EULA and copyright laws since the font is rendered as an image. Unfortunately, FLIR requires that a website host is capable of running PHP with the GD enabled, which is even less accessible than Flash plugins and text cannot be selected.

• Cufon is also a text replacement solution that doesn’t use Flash. Cufon consists of two individual parts: a font generator which converts fonts to a proprietary format, and a rendering engine written in javascript.  Cufon is basically an improved version of the popular, Typeface.js with a focus on faster, easier implementation. Cufon works on every major browser, and there is almost zero configuration needed. Unfortunately, there are some deficiencies: not many fonts are permitted to be rendered in this method, the JavaScript files used for the font can be easily reverse engineered and “stolen” which violates EULA  and copyright laws, and you cannot highlight or copy and paste text.

• Typface.js allows you to show your site’s graphic text in the font you want without using Flash or images. Instead, you can use typeface.js and write in plain HTML and CSS, just as if your visitors had the fonts installs locally. Typeface.js is another alternative to using Flash, and is fairly simple to use. However, this option can slow down page load times significantly, it cannot be read by screen readers and it isn’t compatible with all browsers.

Anyone who has ever presented a webinar has been there: the absolute panic of knowing you have to present to a large audience of strangers who are (undoubtedly) judging you. Unfortunately, for some of us, that fear never goes away, and it isn’t helped by the knowledge that there is a long list of things that can go wrong before, during and after the webinar.

While some of these things may be out of your control, most of them aren’t. Here are some things you shouldn't do if you want to have the most successful webinar you can:

1. Book a time that works for you. Make sure you choose a time of day and presentation length that works for your target audience, and, once you've committed your webinar to this schedule, stick to it!
2. Only send out one invitation email, no reminders.  Don’t you want people to show up? Send out reminders! Make sure you reach those people that missed you the first time around and don’t let them forget that your event is happening.
3. Be too busy to practice or do a trial run. Practice makes perfect (and reduces your anxiety). You’ve heard it a million times before because it’s TRUE.
4. Forget to dial in prior to the webinar to ensure that the number is working for participants. It’s embarrassing and time consuming to deal with technical issues during your webinar and it’s disheartening to realize, once you’ve finally sorted them out, that half of your audience has lost interest and left.
5. Leave downloading the necessary software or checking your network connection to the last minute. Make sure that you have logged in, and tested all the necessary software a few days in advance of the webinar and then check again an hour or two before. You can never be too confident that the technical aspects of your presentation are working correctly.
6. Rely on a single communication channel (ie. VoIP and webinar only, instead of including a dial-in option). Tehcnology is fallible. We all know this. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
7. Forget to determine moderator's duties in advance. Your audience doesn’t want to listen to you scrambling around because nobody knows who’s doing what.
8. Decide at the last minute whether or not your webinar will be recorded. This might seem like an afterthought, but it can actually have a significant influence on the content of your slides. If your slides are abstract, or have little text, then sending them out, or posting them to a site like Slideshare, is relatively useless without a recording attached.
9. Have you partner IM you or your boss publicly berate you. You don't want any distractions or interruptions to get you even more flustered than you already are. Remember to close all other applications (email, IM, Skype etc.) to avoid interruptions when sharing your desktop.
10. Just use text and leave images out of your slides. This is just plain boring. Please—don’t be dull.
11. Use lots of distracting animation. Yes, PowerPoint does have lots of fun animations you can use, and yes, they may be fun to add, but realistically, all they are is distracting and unnecessary.
12. Lose consistency with your company's branding.
    
13. Forget to mute all attendees. Not only is this distracting for you and your attendees, but it can cause embarrassment for everyone involved. Most attendees don't want you to hear what they're doing (whatever that may be) while you present any more than you do. 
14. Leave the phone on mute at the start of the webinar. Following the point above--don't forget to un-mute yourself. It's never pleasant when you realize you've been talking to yourself for 15 minutes and that half your audience has given up and left. 
15. Get locked out of your own webinar. You should be familiar with the different technical aspects of your webinar provider well in advance of your  presentation.
16. Present slides you've never seen before. Be prepared! Nothing is more intimidating (or foolish) than trying to sound knowledgeable about something the first time you read it.
17. Choose not to send out a thank-you email with the slides included.  Be gracious, and offer them resources in exchange for their attendance. If people don’t feel appreciated, or don’t feel like they get value from your presentation, they won’t come back for the next one.

Now that we've given you our tips, hopefully we can heed our own warnings this Thursday for our upcoming webinar: Top 10 Email Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them.

This week's web marketing digest post has a great article on content development, a glimpse of how some popular websites looked when they were first launched, an earth-friendly post in honor of Earth Day and a presentation on brand strategy.

This is a great post from Mashable with some ideas for how you were able to "go green" for Earth Day. We know that Earth Day was yesterday, but this post highlights some of the great initiatives that took place, and provides some ways you can "go green" the whole year round.

A presentation from PSFK, a trends research and innovation company based out of New York, with their list of top 10 "good brands" for 2010.

A quick glance at how 20 of the worlds most popular websites today, looked when they were first launched.

This post from Copyblogger, highlights five of the best ways to create effective content, and become a copywriter extraordinaire.

We hope you all had a great week and especially a great Earth Day.

Web Forms are likely the primary way you capture leads on your website. Forms enable information entry for prospect engagement and they can help you prioritize and score leads, and get permission to continue dialogue with a visitor.

When it comes to form design, creativity is important, but it is also necessary to implement common best practices so that your forms have greater usability and functionality to help motivate your visitors to register (the goal of any form).

Here’s a list of some of our top form design best practices to help you create fool-proof forms:   

• Don’t be ambiguous. It is important that your visitors understand what information you’re asking for. Clear descriptors of what you want should be visible next to every section of your form. If your visitors are confused they most likely won't fill in your form.
• Do be consistent. Have a regular form design across all the forms present on your site, especially if you require visitors to fill out multiple forms in one visit. Ensuring that your typography, design and input controls are uniform, makes your forms easier to understand and use.
• Group related data. Organizing similar data into groups helps to give the form a cohesive feel and helps visitors fill out the form faster.

• Make sure you emphasize error location. Have you ever had the experience of filling out a form, getting to the end, submitting it and then having an unclear error message? You know you’ve made a mistake but you have no idea where it is. Are you really going to go back and refill the entire form using a trial and error method? Not likely.
• Use colors correctly. Some colors have universal meanings (for example,  red usually means error) and emphasizing them can help make forms clearer for those who have certain disabilities or other limitations like age, language and computer knowledge.

• Be concise and keep information user-friendly. Visitor-centric copy on your forms, reduces confusion that can arise when they try to fill out your forms.
• Be flexible on how data can be entered. Nothing is more frustrating than not knowing how to enter the information you are requested to give. Some sections of a form call for drop-down menus and some for text boxes etc. Test and see which formats work best for each section of your form. 
• Make required/optional fields clear. In general, it is better to only ask for required information and skip the “optional” fields altogether. Having said that, if you decide to use optional fields, make sure that the required fields are clearly labeled so hurried visitors aren't put off by long forms.
• Communicate your privacy policy. It isn't necessary to have a link to your organization's privacy policy on a form, but it can help increase your visitors' trust in your company. No one will want to give you their personal information if they don't trust you.

• Be explicit about your forms' value proposition. People want to know what they are going to get after they fill out your form. They want a reason to give you their information, make sure you provide them with one!
• Include standout buttons. Buttons should be the focal point of the form. Your buttons should be large, colorful and should clearly state an appealing call-to-action which visitors will see and choose to act on.

Forms are one of the most important factors in your demand generation strategy. Making some simple improvements to your forms, like the ones listed above, can have a huge effect on your conversion rates, and can help you get more qualified leads to your sales team.

The actual design of your website is obviously one of the most important aspects of a redesign, but it isn’t just about having an eye-catching, appealing site.

Your website’s design should capture your visitors’ attention while at the same time, supporting your web marketing and business objectives; ensuring that your site is fully compatible with different browsers; scaling so it can grow with your company; and enhancing your site’s usability. When done correctly, your website design can help improve your company’s credibility and get more visitors to convert into leads.

A large part of a designer’s job is to understand your company, and then to find a way to reflect what they’ve learned into a layout that delivers results. When designing a layout to suit your company, the designer will work hard to understand the message you’re trying to present and will translate that into the site’s overall look and feel, usability, and scalability. When designing a website, a designer will look at three major aspects of the layout:

1. Overall Look and Feel: This is the part of the website that creates the visual appeal. This aspect of the design represents your brand and should be cohesive across your entire site. The look and feel will help to give your visitors’ their first impression of your brand, and should reflect how you want them to perceive you. To help determine this, a designer will look at the examples you’ve brought them, and try to understand your company’s objectives for the site. By understanding who you are as a brand, your target audience, and what appeals to you from other sites, a designer should be able to create a template for you that represents your brand accurately.


2. Usability: This is a crucial aspect of the site’s design because it will affect the way that visitors navigate your site. A well organized layout should help customers find what they are looking for in an intuitive way. By focusing on the information architecture, a designer should be able to guide visitors to the areas of the site you want them visit, and at the same time help them to easily locate the information that they need. Complicated navigation makes it difficult for visitors to explore your site, and if they can’t find the information they are looking for easily they will most likely click away to a competitor’s site. When meeting with a designer, it is their job to help manage your expectations between look and feel, and usability. While you may want the most attractive “flashy” site you can get, a designer should help you understand how they can find a happy medium between the visual appeal of your site and its usability. 


3. Scalability: A good designer will always be designing your site for the future needs of your company. Most companies with an active web presence have realized that content management is an essential aspect of their web strategy. As a result, proactive designers should encourage you to redesign your site based on a content management system (CMS), if it isn't already. Websites, especially those that use a CMS are very organic and so the design needs to be able to scale as you add content and develop  your communication and messaging. You want your website to be designed as a platform for evolving content and ideally a designer will model your site with the capabilities of your content management system in mind so that you have ease of maintenance and your site can grow and evolve in cohesion with your content creation. 

Most organizations know that email marketing is one of the most effective mediums to build relationships with their customers and prospects. Unfortunately, many of these companies aren’t making the most of their email campaigns and don't know what to improve.

We recently came across a study by Forrester Research  which shows that while 83% of companies attempt email marketing, less than 5% are successful. This is a pretty intimidating statistic, and we wanted to share our ideas to help you get in the top 5%.

To help you understand whether or not you're using email marketing successfully, we're presenting a webinar to highlight our list of top 10 email marketing mistakes, and a how to guide on how to avoid making them in the future.

The webinar is on  Thursday April 29th at 10:30 am Pacific / 1:30 pm Eastern and you can register for it here. 

The presentation will help you recognize which email marketing mistakes you could be making, and help you optimize your email marketing tactics.

This complimentary, live webinar will cover:

• Marqui's list of top 10 email marketing mistakes
• Simple fixes to avoid these pitfalls in the future
• How to take your email marketing to the next level

Hope to see you there!
 

The first step in a website redesign, a website audit, is crucial for helping you determine the direction that you want your new website to take. It can also help you discover the problems that your site is currently experiencing and help you determine where you rank compared to your competition.  A website audit can be performed by your own marketing team (depending on its experience/size), but ideally it should be done by a web consultant, a web designer, or both.

The goal of a website audit is to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your site and to determine what changes need to be made. A comprehensive audit should look at the site’s design, content, programming, structure and SEO.

Sometimes a website assessment checklist, like the one we created for our customers can help you keep track of all of the different aspects of an audit like those listed below.

There are several things that a website audit should help you establish including:

1. How to improve your website’s information architecture, accessibility compliance, layout and navigation for an enhanced customer experience.
2. How your website’s design is affecting your SEO strategy. Discovering the mistakes your current designer/developer has made that could be affecting your rankings or possibly blocking your website from being indexed by search engines is important for the optimization of your redesigned site.
3. Whether your site is compatible with multiple browsers. Depending on how long it’s been since your last audit or redesign, your website may no longer be compatible with some newer browsers or make the most of common screen resolutions and web technologies. 
4. The effectiveness of your content. A website audit should establish, from a user’s perspective, how relevant your content is. While you may understand the message you’re trying to communicate, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your visitors will.
5. Your site’s current support of your brand. It is integral for your overall business strategy for you to know how well your brand is defined, how consistent your brand is across your site, and how clearly your brand message is communicated.
6. The strength of your conversion tactics. How successful are your calls-to-action? The audit should assess the copy for calls-to-action on your pages, the performance of your products and services and your conversion rates.
7. The quality of your participation in social media. Is your site social media friendly? The way that you approach social media can greatly affect your overall web presence and how you are perceived by your target audience.
8. How you stack up compared to your competition. Potentially the most important part of your website audit, a competitive comparison should help you establish which of your competitors has the most successful web presence and why.

We know that this may seem like a lot of work before you even get started on your redesign—but remember—without explicitly understanding your current site, it will be very difficult to create a new site that drives your business rather than just looking attractive.

Stay tuned for the next post in our website redesign how to series, "Website Design".

If you want some quick tips for optimizing your current website, check out the slides from our most recent web marketing workshop our "Live Website Optimization Webinar".

It's a beautiful sunny Friday in Vancouver, so it's once again time for our Web Marketing Digest post!

This presentation on the tipping points of social media offers an informative look at how companies can go from good to great with their social media strategy.

For anyone who uses PPC advertising as a part of their marketing strategy this blog, apply named, "yourppcsucks.com", will probably make your day. It focuses on the plethora of bloopers out there in the PPC universe and is definitely good for opening your eyes to common mistakes, and a good laugh at other (not so wide-eyed companies') expenses.

A lot of truly obsessed err...successful digital marketers take their marketing information gathering beyond the digital world. If you fit into this category then here is a great list of essential reading material for the digital marketer from the Six Pixels of Separation Blog.

An infograhic about Twitter, created in the wake of some facts stated by one of Twitter's Co-Founders at Chirp: The Twitter Developer Conference.

Last but not least, an insightful post with 10 tips for community managers about online reputation and creating and managing authentic brand communities online.

Image from flickr

Today's webinar was a little different from the other segments in our web marketing webinar series. Today's presentation was a live website assessment, where our VP of Marketing, Richard Sharp, and our Lead Marketing Consultant, Jeff Hall, analyzed several sites that the webinar's registrants submitted.

We're happy to say that the webinar went great and we got some fabulous feedback from our audience.

Some of you may have noticed that we like to give a recap for everyone who wasn't able to attend the webinar, so here are a few takeaways which we think you might find useful:

• Proper Title and Meta Tags are a key element for getting found by search engines
• Both soft AND hard calls-to-action are important for lead generation and should be located on each page
• Dynamic, Keyword-rich content is essential to get both search engines and visitors to return to your site
• Navigation Usability and Information Architecture are essential for an optimized user experience 
• Form testing is an important way to optimize your website conversions
• Remember your visitors use multiple channels to consume information. Are you utilizing all the available channels to engage with your customers?

You can view the full recording here.

It's Friday again and that means it's Web Marketing Digest time. We've found a couple of things this week we think you'll find interesting, including a little bit of bad fortune telling.

Did you ever wonder which areas of the world use different social networks the most?  Check out  this world map of social networks from Vincos Blog which illustrates the popularity  of some of the biggest social networks by location.

We get a lot of customers asking us how they can implement social media into their business strategy successfully. With the popularity of social media this is a hot topic, and this infographic from Oneupweb gives a nice depiction of how you can manage social media effectively in your business.

Everyone needs help sometimes deciphering Google Website Optimizer best practices. Well here's a great post from Google with 25 tips for how you can use Google Website Optimizer for better product pages.

We all know that trying to predict the future when it comes to computing technology is just asking for trouble. For your enjoyment, here are 7 examples of technology predictions that were way off the mark.

Have a great weekend!

Do you want to learn how to get more leads from your website?

We'd like to show you how.

On Wednesday April 14th at 10:30 am Pacific / 1:30 pm Eastern, we'll be hosting a different kind of webinar than we've done in the past. The webinar will be held in a workshop style to help you get a  practical idea of  how  you can increase your website conversion rates.

Registrants who submit their website's URL will get a chance to have their website reviewed live by our lead marketing consultant, Jeff Hall. Jeff will choose 3 websites and review them, offering helpful tips for how they can get more leads using Marqui's approach to website optimization.

Everyone who registers will receive a complimentary website assessment checklist so that they can take what they've learned and apply it to their websites after the web seminar.

We look forward to seeing you there! You can register for the event here.

Yes, I know it's not actually Friday, but since this is a short week for us, we're doing our Friday Web Marketing Digest post on Thursday. Here are the things we found interesting this week:

1.  A recent study shows definitive evidence that social media works as part of a business strategy. Some great stats including “ 60% of Facebook Fans and 79% of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend brands that they follow” and that “51% of Facebook fans and 67% of twitter followers are more likely to buy brands they are a follower or fan of”
2.  An entertaining post from Search Engine Land about the  “Things Facebook causes”
3.  This article gives some great thought-leadership information about the expanding marketing technology universe.
4.   A new social network for teachers has emerged, which is dedicated to encouraging effective teaching. This is a great example of some of the industry specific social networks that are growing in popularity.