Just because there are tools available for just about everyone to set up a blog, doesn’t mean that blogging is something every organization should just jump into. Many companies make the mistake of starting a blog without really taking the time to understand how it fits into their overall marketing strategy or plan.

Here are a few reasons why we think business blogging can be a good idea for small business:

• It helps with your SEO strategy
• Blogging helps differentiate and build your brand
• It can position you as a thought leader in your industry
• You can educate your potential customers
• It can be an excellent lead generation tool 
• Blogs can create communities and conversations

How to get started

1. Determine the reasons why you want to publish a blog. Before you get started it might be a good idea to ask yourself these questions: What is the purpose of your blog? What are the goals your blog is meant to accomplish? Do those goals relate to your overall business objectives?
2. Figure out what businesses in your niche are already doing a good job. Researching successful blogs in your space can be a great way to help you figure out where to get started with your own blog. It’s a good idea when undertaking any new business initiative to see who your competition is and how they are performing and it also helps you get an idea what you can write about once your own blog is up and running.  
3. Decide who your target audience is. Who will you be writing for? Understanding your audience can help you get a grip on their concerns, challenges and what they’re looking for from a blog in your industry. 
4. Establish what you want your readers to do once they read your blog. This relates to the goals you set for your blog earlier. For example, If you want your blog to generate more leads for your business, then you need to have clear steps on how you’re going to guide your reader to subscribe to your blog updates or convert on your website’s other content. 
5. Set aside the time to make it a reality. The fact of the matter is, blogging is a big commitment. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t undertake it, but a successful blog needs frequent content updates and this requires dedicated time and resources. It’s a good idea to establish in advance how often you want to be blogging (at least once a week is really a minimum requirement for business blogs) and then establish ownership and workflow schedules if necessary.
6. Start writing! Now that you’ve done the research; you understand your objectives and your target audience; and you’ve set aside the resources, it’s time to get down to business and start actually writing posts. Take the research you’ve done and write posts that you think your readers want to read, about information you think they need to know and remember, no blog is successful immediately. Like any business or marketing channel it takes time and effort to reach your goals.

It's Friday again and that means it's time for our weekly Web Marketing Digest post. This week's post has two great reports, an informative presentation on social media and some tips for optimizing your website's usability.

Earlier this week, we published the latest in our website redesign blog series, "Website Redesign How to Step 4: Website Usability Planning," which provided some tips on how you can improve your website's user experience. To add to that point, we wanted to point out two startups, Usertesting.com and Feedback Army  that are offering website usability testing quickly and inexpensively. These tools can be an excellent place to test your new design, or figure out what isn't working with your current one.

B2B Magazine has published its 2010 Lead Generation Guide and we definitely recommend checking it out. It is full of great information, articles and reports on Lead Generation in the B2B industry.

For the second report in this week's post, Razorfish a digital marketing agency, has released its 2010 Outlook Report. You can read the full report here, or check out the key findings in this presentation.

This insightful presentation on the true value of social media and how companies need to start embracing it rather than other, outdated or "dead end" marketing strategies.

Have a great weekend!

We just finished this week's web marketing webinar on SEO and we received some great feedback and quite a few  questions. We were unable to get to all the questions during the course of the webinar so for those of you who didn't get your question answered, we've chosen the most frequently asked to answer below:

1. How long should your meta description be? A meta description should ideally be between 155-160 characters in length.
2. How does having a blog help with SEO? Blogging is a great way to aid your SEO efforts because it is based on frequently updated content. Blogging on a regular basis encourages inbound links and the large amount of relevant or niche content created means you're able to target more keywords at once.
3. If my H1, H2 and H3 tags are in the CSS style sheet are they still being picked up by search engines? The answer to that is yes, you can style your headings however you would like as long as the still appear in your website's HTML.
4. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of enhancing website elements in order to achieve higher rankings on major search engines. SEO provides an inexpensive long term solution for increased traffic to your website which can ultimately be converted to sales. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)  on the other hand, is broader than SEO. It includes SEO and other areas to improve a site's visibility in search engines' results pages, like paid listings and paid inclusions.
5. What role does social media play in SEO? Social media is an important way to promote inbound links to your site through content syndication.
   

If you want to see the whole webinar, you can view it in our resource section now.

Email is still one of the most effective marketing channels available to organizations today. We’ve spoken and presented in the past on the mistakes marketers make with email, and how to avoid them and most of those mistakes involved actually getting your email into an inbox and opened. However, once your email is opened, there are still many more problems that can arise based on your emails' aesthetic aspects. Here are our top 8 tips on how you can optimize your email's design for better conversions.

1.  Keep it simple! Emails should be relatively basic to ensure that your message gets across as quickly and with as little effort on the part of your recipient as possible. The simpler the design, the easier your email is to code, test, and the less of a chance there will be problems between different email service providers.
2. Design for preview panes. When designing an email it is safe to assume that the majority of your readers will read your email in a preview pane rather than actually opening it to read it (especially in the B2B industry). As a result, it’s important to keep your email design no wider than 600px. 
3. Include a link to the web version. Your recipients will be viewing your email in a wide range of programs, and using a variety of different devices. Some of these may have outdated or poor HTML capabilities. To avoid difficulties, adding a web version link can allow this portion of your audience to read your email as it was intended. 
4. Keep copy brief. No one likes to open an email and see huge paragraphs of text. It makes reading the email seem like too much of a commitment on the part of the recipient because of the effort involved to read the whole email and scroll down the entire screen. This is especially an issue if they are reading your email in a smartphone which has a much smaller screen resolution. 
5. Stay above the fold. This is a pretty standard design best practice whether it is for webpages or email. Keeping your key content above the fold ensure that regardless of smaller monitor size or preview panes the important content in your email will still be viewed. 
6. Keep images to a minimum. Remember, not all of your readers download the images you include in your email. It is important to make sure that your email still looks professional, and still conveys your message whether your recipient downloads the images or not. 
7. Test every time you send. Designing emails can be a long process, but that doesn’t mean you can cut corners and ignore testing. You need to make sure that every time you send your email, your links are working and your email is rendering properly in different email providers. 
8. Use a consistent template. This is a design tip that can save you time and convey your emails’ credibility. Creating a template once and using it consistently afterwards ensures that you minimize the errors that can occur (although you still need to test each time) and that your company’s branding and message are communicated properly.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the best opportunities that companies have to generate high quality leads for their sales teams. Unfortunately, many organizations are committing one (or many) of these common mistakes without even realizing it.

1. Not using keywords that are relevant to your target audience. Many marketers, when choosing keywords, make the mistake of optimizing their website based on keywords they think are important, and not looking at keywords from their customers’ perspective. Your website visitors are the ones searching for your site; make sure your website is optimized for the keywords they will be using.
2. Content isn’t reachable by search engines. Sometimes websites rank poorly because their content can’t be crawled by search engines. This often happens when websites focus on design elements, rather than website usability. For instance, we often find websites that use flash for navigation elements a method that search engines can't read, which makes it difficult for search engines to index elements and pages of  your website.
3. Not keeping your content fresh. Continually adding new content, gives both search engines, and potential customers a reason to return to your website. Having a business blog is a great way to do this. A company blog can help to ensure you are generating fresh content on a regular basis and can help with your long-tail SEO strategy as well. 
4. Making search engines happy before your customers. While it is important to have your relevant keywords prominent in the body copy of each page, don’t let your overall message suffer as a result. Having overly high keyword density (often called keyword stuffing) on your pages can make your copy seem mechanical and can discourage readers who are looking for interesting, compelling content. 
5. Not optimizing your content and anchor text with keywords. Remember, the way people find your site is by search for keywords and phrases that are relevant to them. You need to be sure you’re optimizing your website with title tags, headings, paragraph titles, body copy, anchor text for links and image alt text that have your keywords in them. 
6. Not monitoring popular content. Tracking the interactions that your visitors have with your content is a crucial aspect of a SEO-friendly content strategy because it can give you insight into which content is searched and found most frequently. When you use this information it can help you to adjust your optimization methods for the best results.
7. Using generic URLs. If you’re using a web content management system (WCMS), it should give you the capability to create SEO-friendly URLs that include the keywords which you’ve determined are relevant to your web page. If your WCMS is automatically generating URLs then you are missing out on a great SEO opportunity.
8. Ignoring meta tags. While meta tags may not hold the same relevance that they once did in the SEO industry, they are still an important aspect of your strategy because they inform web crawlers about the content of your web page.

If you want to learn more about how you can improve your current SEO strategies, attend our upcoming webinar, "The Marketer's Guide to SEO Success," on Thursday May 27th at 10:30 am Pacific. You can register for the webinar here.

Often one of the most overlooked aspects of a redesign, usability planning is actually one of the most significant ways you can get visitors to return to your site. If your visitors can’t easily navigate your site, chances are they won’t return a second time, they'll just move onto a site that can give them what they want quickly and easily.  You need to make sure when you’re redesigning your website that it is accessible to the majority of people, it is easy to use, and that it delivers on its promises.

First things first, what exactly is website usability?

Usability is an attribute that is used to describe how easy a website's interface is to interact with. It is often used to indicate the ease-of-use for a website visitor and should be tested during the design phase of a website's creation.

Why is usability important?

In an extremely competitive market like the internet, usability is a necessity for your website’s survival. If a website is difficult to navigate, people will click away to a site that is more user friendly.

What can you do to help ensure that your website is easy for your visitors to use?
 
Here are a few tips that we feel are essential to planning the usability of your site:

1. Test your old site and get familiar with your competition. This is one of the best ways to ensure that your new design is easy to navigate. By testing your old design, and even your competitors' sites, you can get a good idea of what interfaces work best from a customers’ viewpoint.
2. Compare your site to what works. By comparing your design to relative established usability guidelines you can get a good idea if your website's design is on the right track.
3. Understand who your customers are. You want to make sure that you are communicating effectively with your target audience. This increases the usability for them, and after all, they’re the reason why the site exists!
4. Keep your layout simple. Everyone wants to have an appealing, eye-catching website, but be careful not to let this take away from the way users interact with your site.The busier your design is the more difficult it is for your visitors to use it quickly and easily. When in doubt, a simple layout is a better choice from a usability standpoint.
5. Cut it down to size. If you have done your research, and really understand your audience, then you’ll know what kind of content your audience is looking for. By trimming the content on your website down so that you only have the content they need, you can make it easier for them to get to what they’re looking for efficiently. 
6. Let them search! Search functionality is one of the first features that a visitor will look for if they begin to get lost, can’t find what they are looking for, or are just in too much of a hurry to explore your site in detail. If you have this feature, it means they are less likely to leave your site to find the information they need, and more likely to return in the future because you’ve made it simple for them to find what they’re looking for. 
7. Make navigation a no-brainer. Finding information on your products and services is essential for a visitor to know whether what  your company offers is a good fit for them or not. The entire purpose of your navigation is to make it as simple as possible for your visitors to get the information they require about your company. Having a clear navigational structure that is consistent throughout your website makes it easy for people to get to where you want them to go.
8. Be like Hansel and Gretel. Leaving breadcrumbs for your visitors to follow is a great way to increase the usability of your site. This way, users can keep track of where they’ve been, where they are, and how they can return to previous pages of interest. 
9. Let them come to you. Having your company’s contact information, and “contact us” forms in an obvious place, makes it more likely that users will take the time to get a hold of you and turn themselves into conversions.
10. Watch page loading time. Your visitors hate to wait. Having pages that load slowly, reduces the likelihood that a visitor can navigate your site in a reasonable amount of time.
11. Keep animated graphics to a minimum. Lots of animation can be distracting, and confuse visitors making your site difficult to navigate.
12. More is better—when it comes to webpages that is. It is usually a good idea to have less information per page, and have more webpages on your site, than trying to cram all of your information into a few over-filled pages. Having a clean, basic design and keeping the content on each page to a minimum, stops your visitors from getting overwhelmed.

Website usability planning might seem  like a complicated process, with lots of different aspects, but it doesn't need to be an overwhelming task. It really just comes down to keeping things simple and intuitive.

If you liked this post, make sure to check out the other posts in this series:

Start Fresh in 2010: A How to Guide on Redesigning Your Website for the New Year
Website Redesign How to Step 1: The Website Audit
Website Redesign How to Step 2: Website Design
Website Redesign How to Step 3: Content Creation Strategies

Every Friday we publish a post as part of our Web Marketing Digest series, which highlights posts from other blogs, videos, presentations and generally anything we find interesting that relates to web marketing.

Today we have a great infographic on the state of the internet today, a presentation on social media and business, a graphic describing the modern consumer and a study showing that the internet actually makes the world a happier place.

Okay, on with the links!

This infographic from Onlineeducation.net shows some great statistics and facts about the state of the internet on a day to day basis.

There are lots of resources on the web on how you can use social media for business and this presentation from Adam Schoenfeld is no exception. Full of useful statistics and anecdotes, this presentation gives a great overview not only of how you can use social media, but how it is already being used in businesses today.

Do you have a good understanding of who the modern consumer is? This infographic from Penn-Olsen can help you understand that characteristics of most consumers today.

For all of you internet fanatics out there,this study from BCS, a research firm in the UK, has actually proven that the web makes the world a happier place.

We hope you found these links useful, and as always, have a great weekend!

Every business that has a website should be doing something to market or promote it and they should be monitoring the success of those efforts with web analytics. Unfortunately for some companies, especially those that are new to web marketing, the idea of all of the different metrics available for tracking can be daunting. To help you get started off on the right foot this post shares our views on the most important web metrics you should be tracking.

There are many different web analytics services that marketers can use, but we suggest starting out with a tool like Google Analytics because it’s free, feature-rich and not too complicated for beginners.

The best way to get started is to look at the items below:

1. Unique Visitors – This is the number of different people who visited your website in a time period (specified by you). For example, if this number is 300, that means that 300 different people visited your site at least once in the time period you’ve chosen. If this number is low then it probably means that your website isn’t ranking high in search engines, and you should take a look at improving your current search engine optimization strategy.
2. Traffic Sources – This tells you where the traffic to your website is coming from (ex. Search engines, social media). This metric can help you decide where you should be focusing the majority of your website promotion efforts. 
3. Referring Keywords – These are the phrases that your visitors searched to arrive at your website. Hopefully, these keywords are related to your company, and if not it probably means that your website isn’t optimized for the best keywords or phrases for your business. 
4. Top Content – This tells you which pages are getting the most traffic once visitors get to your site. Once you know which content is the most popular then you can create more of it and work to drive more traffic to your site. 
5. Bounce Rate – This metric is the percentage of visits where a visitor enters and exits the site on the same page without viewing any other pages. Monitoring this can help you figure out if your web pages are working effectively to engage your visitors. 
6. Conversion Rate – This measures the ratio of visitors to your site who convert website visits into desired actions like membership registration or newsletter sign-up. If your conversion rate is low then you might need to take a look at your website’s calls–to-action to help you get more visitors to convert.

Once you feel comfortable measuring these metrics then you can start looking into other actionable data that is available within your chosen analytics tool.

Marketing Automation is often thought of as a solution for marketers, but many organizations don’t realize that a successful marketing automation system requires effective collaboration of sales and marketing teams. 

Getting sales teams on-board with marketing automation, is more difficult then getting marketing engaged, so we’ve compiled a list of 4 reasons why sales should be excited about marketing automation.

1. Less cold calling – With a marketing automation system, marketing teams are able to implement more efficient campaigns. This means more leads are generated for sales so they can focus less on cold calling, an more on having meaningful conversations with prospective customers.
2. More qualified leads– Marketing automation systems should have lead scoring functionality. With this feature, marketing can prioritize the greater quantity of leads coming in so that the hottest leads are passed immediately to sales.
3. Lead history tracking– Once a lead has been qualified, sales should begin gathering information about them. With marketing automation systems you should be able to track a lead's activities on your website (what campaigns they converted on, what content they downloaded etc.) to give sales insight into a lead to help improve their sales conversations.
4. Automated lead nurturing– Even once marketing has done their job, sometimes leads just aren’t ready to buy when they talk to sales. Rather than keeping their own list of leads to stay in contact with, sales can return leads to marketing for automated nurturing.

While these are the reasons that sales should want a marketing automation system in place, it’s important to remember that to be successful with marketing automation, an organization needs to have proper sales and marketing alignment before implementation. If your sales and marketing teams aren't working together well, then a marketing automation system can't magically solve those issues. Marketing automation is a way to improve the effectiveness of an already successful marketing and sales relationship, not create one where none exists.

We got some great feedback from our last search engine optimization (SEO) webinar, "Live Website Assessment" so we decided to present another webinar on SEO basics and bring Jeff Hall, one of our marketing consultants back to present again.

The webinar, "The Marketer's Guide to SEO Success" will be held on May 27th at 10:30 am Pacific / 1:30 pm Eastern and will cover:

• How to target the right keywords for your website
• What on-page SEO essentials will increase your search engine visibility
• Marqui's approach to quality link building
• How to measure the success of your SEO

Hopefully we'll see everyone who enjoyed our last webinar on this topic there, and anyone else who wants to hear us share our thoughts on the essentials of SEO.

You can register for the webinar here.

There are many different reasons why a subscriber might start disengaging with your emails: your emails are getting caught in spam folders, recipients can change their emails or have dormant email accounts etc. For the most part, in those cases, there isn’t much you can do to re-engage readers.

Instead, it's important to focus on the subscribers that have stopped opening your emails because they just become disinterested with your content. These subscribers haven’t officially unsubscribed and they don't want to end their relationship with you, but their interest has faded. When this happens it is often called “list fatigue” and it means that your list has become less responsive to your communications over time.

While it  is unlikely that you will be able to stop list fatigue altogether,  there are some things you can do to decrease its effect.

1. Provide fresh, engaging content – the single most important thing you can do is to provide quality content in every email. Something new, fresh, educational and relevant will help to engage your readers.
2. Don't over promote – Promotions aren’t bad, but they need to be accompanied by enough relevant content to keep your list interested.
3. Regulate email frequency – if you’re sending your emails too frequently it’s easy to overwhelm readers. Only email them when you have something worth saying. 
4. Focus on subject lines – Your subject lines are the deciding factor on whether your emails will get read or not. Take the time to ensure that your subject lines give your readers a reason to open your emails.
5. Make unsubscribing easy – Making it simple for a person to unsubscribe from your list is extremely important. Of course you don’t want to lose a subscriber, but if they’re not engaged, it’s better to let them go and focus on subscribers who actually read your emails. 
6. Continue to grow your list – Demographics and interests change. There is nothing you can do to prevent this. The only way to keep a high percentage of active readers is to constantly sign up new subscribers who are interested in your topic.

If you want to learn more about common email issues, check out our recent webinar, “Top 10 Email Mistakes and How to Avoid Them.”

This week's web marketing digest post is all about social media. We have a video, a great presentation from Chris Brogan on how you can implement social media as part of your marketing strategy, a graph showing the role that a CMO should have in social media and an infographic with some Facebook statistics that might surprise you.

This video on the social media revolution from Socialnomics discusses how social media may in fact be the biggest shift since the industrial revolution.

This presentation from Chris Brogan, demonstrates the ways that you can incorporate social media into your marketing strategy, and offers some good insight into social media as an effective marketing channel.

We think that infographics are a great way to share information and as a result, we often have graphics on many different aspects of web marketing in this weekly series. Today's infographic from Mashable is based on Facebook statistics. Take a look, you might see some statistics that surprise you.

Have you ever wondered what the role of your CMO should be in your social media initiatives? Or are you a CMO and you're not sure where you fit in? You might find this blog post and graphic from Forrester Research helpful.

Have a great weekend!

Image from Flickr

Improving lead generation is one of the most important goals for any marketer and is often one of the key metrics through which marketers and sales measure a marketing team’s success.

So you know that getting more leads is important—but how exactly can you do that?

There are lots of ways you can increase the number of leads you get online and one of the best of these tactics is to use a business blog.  Unfortunately, we often find that many corporate bloggers aren’t taking advantage of this opportunity. We hate to see hard work not paying off, so to help you out, here some things you can do to help your blog start generating more leads.

• Create great content. This seems like a no-brainer, but it is the key aspect of your blog that will attract new visitors to your site and encourage them to return. By creating content that is educational and useful you can build an audience for your blog which will generate more leads.
• Answer your visitors’ questions in your posts. Many B2B organizations receive the same questions, at the same point in the buying process, from most of their prospects. Instead of waiting around until your visitors have questions, why not answer them in advance so that the information is already available to them? Providing the answers to common questions can increase a visitor’s trust in your company’s expertise and help them become a lead. 
• Track what your prospects comment on and how often they come back. Many marketing automation and blogging tools allow you to track your commenters and what they have said in response to your posts. This not only shows which topics in your blog are the most popular (allowing you to create more of the content your readers want) but also allows you to hone in on the subscribers that are most engaged for future conversations.
• Establish it as a “go-to” resource. On our blog we don’t just write posts with information we think our subscribers need to read. We also provide links to valuable resources from other sites that we think they should know about. Don’t be afraid that providing your subscribers with additional information from other locations will cause them to click away from your site. Establishing yourself as a resource for critical information, whether it is your own or not, keeps you front of mind as the place to go for your subscribers to educate themselves. 
• Promote your posts through social media. A lot of the leads we get through our blog have actually arrived at our site through social media. When we write posts, they are simultaneously posted on our social media accounts so that the content we provide can be found quickly and easily by a wider audience.
• Use it to increase your organic search rankings. Blogging is a great way to enhance your search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines love new content and giving this to them can help you rank higher in their search results. Getting found organically more easily is an important way to drive new leads to your website. 

Social media is becoming a mainstream marketing tactic, but just because it’s a popular initiative (and a successful one for some companies) doesn’t mean it’s necessarily right for your small business.

If you're new to social media, or are in the process of trying to decide if it's right for your organization, hopefully this  list of our top 3 pros and cons will help give you an idea what some of the main benefits and challenges of this marketing channel can be.

Pro 1: Social Media is Free!

• Social media can be an extremely cost effective marketing channel
• With the exception of Facebook and Twitter advertisements you can get most of your social media marketing done with no cost at all

Con 1: It takes a lot of work, and that ain’t cheap!

• Social media takes continual time and effort to create a positive, relevant presence
• This can take time away from initiatives that might suit your business better
• If you can’t set aside the time and resources to maintain your social media accounts then it isn’t a worthwhile initiative

Pro 2: Social media can help create buzz around your company

• News travels quickly in the social media sphere and this can work to create an engaged audience for your brand
• Social media offers a platform for free publicity for your new products, resources etc.

Con 2: All news isn’t necessarily good news

• News sometimes travels too fast for you to keep up with the reactions (good or bad) from your followers
• Anyone can have a voice and they can use that voice to offer their opinions about your company, with or without your consent

Pro 3: Social media can help you improve relationships with existing customers

• Social media can help increase purchase frequency of existing customers and cement relationships
• Your customer retention levels can increase based on relationships nurtured through social media

Con 3: Social media isn’t ideal for customer acquisition

• If your main goal is immediate and quantifiable results for customer acquisitions you may not get the results you’d like

These are just a few of the many pros and cons of social media and these are simply the ones we think are most relevant for small businesses who are considering moving into the social media space. Remember: every business is different and while social media maybe an effective marketing channel for some, it doesn’t mean that every business should just jump right in! Social media takes time and commitment just like every other marketing strategy you currently use.

Image from Flickr

Hopefully, most of you have come to the realization by now that compelling content is an essential aspect to any effective website. It can help bring traffic to your site, it can help maximize the conversions you get from that traffic, and better yet, it can turn those leads into repeat, loyal visitors.

The ideas behind why you should create compelling content are well recognized, but how to do it? That’s where content strategy gets a little trickier.
 
There are hundreds of tips we could give you on how you can create content that draws customers to your site and then entices them to return, but rather than run through the entire list, we’ve picked the ones that we think are the most important aspects of a sustainable, content marketing strategy.

1. Understand what your customers want to read and then give it to them. If you give your readers something they want to read and educate them at the same time,  then it encourages them to return because it is in their best interests to do so.
2. Be committed to keeping your content fresh. It’s not just about having current content that draws a customer in once. You need to create content consistently so that they will keep coming back to see what else you have in store for them. 
3. Establish yourself as an expert, but don't self-promote. Does that sound like a paradox? It doesn’t have to be. Offer your visitors educational content that demonstrates your expertise but doesn’t blatantly self promote your products or services. 
4. Keep it short and sweet! Most of your visitors probably don’t have time to read your 10 page research paper. What they are looking for is concise, easy-to-read, tidbit style content that can give them the information they need at a glance, and without too much of a commitment on their part. This isn’t to say that those papers don’t have their uses, but the majority of your visitors are probably looking for content they can access and consume quickly and easily.
5. Put ownership in the right place. Content creation has become a collaborative effort (especially if your company uses a web content management system). This cooperative structure means that you can have the content writing spread among different owners, and put it in the hands of the people who are most qualified to write about specific subjects. For example, if you want to create a piece of content demonstrating how your customer service team deals with customer inquiries, why not have one of your customer service representatives write it, rather than a member of your marketing team?  When people write about topics that interest them, or that they have experience with,  they usually write content that is inherently more compelling to their audience. 
6. Plan ahead—way ahead. Remember, you’re not creating content because you want to land a sale in the first conversation like a used car salesman. You’re building a community of visitors, based around your content, who come to you because they trust you to inform them, educate them and answer their questions and in the long run, this will lead to relationships that drive sales.

Hopefully you found this post helpful. Make sure to check out the other posts in this series:

Start Fresh in 2010: A How to Guide on Redesigning Your Website for the New Year
Website Redesign How to Step 1: The Website Audit
Website Redesign How to Step 2: Website Design

It's Friday again, and that means it's time for our weekly Web Marketing Digest post. This week's post includes some tips for web design, some good insight on the meaningful numbers associated with B2B blogging an interactive presentation on social media safety and some innovative ideas from a University  in the U.S. on how you can encourage your students to be more aware of their personal online brand.

This post from Copyblogger, discusses the "myth of beautiful web design" and really highlights the ideals that Marqui believes in when it comes to redesigning a website, namely, that web design can't work marketing miracles and that without a strong marketing plan in place, a beautiful website won't help as much as you may think.

Social media safety, and protecting your privacy online are big issues on the web right now. To help you understand how you can better protect yourself, here is an interactive presentation from Sophos which provides their top 8 tips for keeping your social media accounts safe.

Syracuse University in the U.S. is now offering free online accounts with Brand-Yourself.com for their soon-to-be graduates to help them manage their online presence (brand) during the job search process. This is a great initiative that shows how universities can help their students be more aware of their activities online, and how their web interaction can affect their eligibility for certain jobs.

Have you ever wondered which metrics are most important for your B2B blog? This post can help you figure out which metrics you should be tracking, and how these numbers can be misleading if you don't understand them properly.

Hope you found this post helpful. Have a great weekend!

According to Forrester Research there are four main components to your customers’ engagement with your brand:

1. Involvement – The measurable aspects of an individuals’ relationship with your company or brand
2. Interaction – The depth of those individuals’ relationship (ie. If involvement is touches, then interaction is actions)
3. Intimacy – The sentiments or feelings of individuals towards your company or brand
4. Influence – The likelihood that an individual will encourage a fellow customer to consider or buy your brand

Within these four main components there are several key metrics that you can track. Understanding these numbers can help you gauge your customers’ engagement on several different levels and help you improve your relationship with them.

Involvement (these metrics can be tracked through tools like Google Analytics):

• Site visits – How many people are visiting your site?
• Time spent – How long did they spend on your site before they clicked away?
• Pages Viewed – How many pages did a visitor view before they left your site?
• Keywords searched – What words did a visitor search to find your site?
• Navigation paths – Where did a visitor navigate to after landing on your site?

Interaction (these can be tracked through social media):

• Number of comments contributed to your blog
• Number of unique commenters on your blog
• Quantity/frequency of written reviews, blog comments, forum discussions

Intimacy (these can be tracked  through customer service calls, surveys and social media):

•  Sentiment tracking through social media
• Sentiment tracking of internal customer contributions
• Opinions expressed in customer service calls

Influence (these can be tracked through customer service calls, surveys and social media):

• Product/service satisfaction ratings
• Brand affinity
• Content forwarded to friends (email, retweets, facebook postings etc.
• Posts on high profile blogs

Are you tracking all these metrics? If you’re not, you should really get started today. Not only can all of the above metrics be measured with free or cost-effective tools, but also because if you’re not already looking at these numbers then there are most likely some serious gaps in your understanding of your customers’ engagement with your brand.

One of the most important benefits of using a web content management system like Marqui, is the ability for marketers to take control of their web content, shifting the power from IT departments to marketing teams.

To help you understand how you can effectively leverage your website as a critical channel to drive business results, we're offering a free 45 minute webinar on Thursday May 13th, at 10:30 am Pacific / 1:30 pm Eastern which will discuss:

• The challenges and opportunities offered by the web as a channel to drive growth
• The needs of web content management for marketing success verses IT control
• Steps to take to harness the potential of the web to build demand
• What skills really matter for marketers to win with web marketing

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

Have you ever wondered why, despite your best efforts, you’re not getting the number of conversions you want from your website? Maybe it’s time to put yourself in your visitors’ shoes and look at your landing pages from their point of view.

Would you buy your products? Would you follow your calls-to-action? If not, it means that your landing pages need some serious help, and the number one way to improve your landing page conversions is thorough, proper testing.

So what are the top 5 tests?

1. PPC Search Dynamic Change Tests.  People like to feel unique and your landing pages should achieve that. By creating a landing page with content that dynamically changes based on the visitors’ search topics you can make them feel engaged, which encourages them to fill in your form.
2. Registration Form Tests. Your forms are as important as the landing page itself and the way you treat your forms can help reduce landing page abandonment. When it comes to forms, you really need to test them against the goals of your landing page and decide what works for your company.
3. Creative Element Tests. Don’t forget to test the graphics, copy, layout and design for your landing page including: typography; color, shape and size of buttons; and number of columns. All of these elements can have an effect on the success of your landing page, from both an aesthetic and functional perspective.
4. Organic Search Landing Tests. This is focused more for niche visitors. Creating a landing page for a specific niche, and ensuring that your page is the best source of information on that area is important for directing a targeted call-to-action for search engine visitors.
5. Mobile Email tests. Research from MarketingSherpa shows that 3 years ago over 64% of decision makers were already accessing their email and the internet via mobile devices. Imagine how much that has grown since then? With mobile market share estimated to hit over 50% by 2011 it’s absolutely crucial to ensure that your landing page renders properly for mobile devices.

If you want to learn more about landing page tests, and how you can implement them effectively, check out the webinar we presented on Top 5 Tests To Raise Your Landing Page Conversions with MarketingSherpa in our resource section.

Here at Marqui we have a major pet peeve.

We hate seeing this on forms:




Using a plain, grey submit button isn't a best practice on web forms. We firmly believe that your form buttons shouldn't be seen as an afterthought but as another method to help you convert your visitors into leads. No matter what the end-result of your form is, you're working to get your visitors to give you their information and your buttons can be an effective way to convince them to do this.

We don't want to see any more buttons like the one above, so, to give you some inspiration for what you could be doing instead, we've searched through hundreds of B2B websites and located 80 of the best form buttons we could find.

We hope you find these examples helpful, and that they inspire you to go an make your buttons more effective!