Archive for the ‘Digital Marketing’ category

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Daily Deals: Groupon vs. Living Social vs. GoogleOffers

September 2nd, 2011

Daily deals sites have taken the small business world by storm. With Groupon and Living Social leading the way, a number of daily deals sites are capitalizing on collective earning potential. Beyond all the hype, the question remains: how can small businesses can take advantage of daily deals and minimize risk? Or are small businesses better off avoiding daily deals sites altogether?

In this series of posts we’ll examine the daily deals industry, starting with the distinctions between Groupon, LivingSocial, and GoogleOffers:

  • Groupon: The behemoth of daily deals sites, Groupon allows consumers to signup for coupon offers from local businesses. If a set number of Groupon users signup for a particular coupon, the customers are granted the coupon. Groupon charges a cut of the coupons sold, and the businesses get increased exposure and potential new customers. Of the daily deals sites, Groupon has the widest range of discount offers.
  • LivingSocial: Living Social works similarly to Groupon, with consumers able to register in a specific city or market. Living Social has a greater number of household and personal care offers than other daily deal sites and has a dedicated section for travel getaways.
  • GoogleOffers: Launched in 2011, GoogleOffers is newer than the other sites and is currently available in Portland, Oregon (but soon expanding). GoogleOffers doesn’t require a minimum number of users to signup for a coupon to activate the coupon. Google aims to ease user experience by combining GoogleOffers with mobile payment capabilities (via the “coming soon” Google Wallet). Another feature that sets GoogleOffers apart is that Google will sometimes pay businesses for unused coupons (coupons that are sold but not used).

The market is flooded with daily deals sites and businesses are becoming more savvy with understanding the benefits and risks of offering “deals” through these sites. Having a strong customer retention strategy and understanding the details of these services is critical for businesses considering using any daily deals site. Stay tuned for more details on how businesses can strategically use daily deals.

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Posted in Customer service, Digital Marketing, Social Media, Website Design

The 4 Ways That Website Visitors Make Decisions

July 21st, 2011

One of the biggest challenges and opportunities with any website is figuring out three things about your visitors:

  1. What they are looking for
  2. How they make decisions
  3. How #1 and #2 can be aligned with your business objectives to create results for your organization

One of the most effective tools to help understand if your website messaging, copy, functionality, layout and design is helping your visitors to make decisions is the Decision Making Quadrant, a tool for understanding how visitors make decisions online.

This tool, adapted from the Eisenbergs various books (such as Always Be Testing), is a quick way to look at any site and think about how you are addressing these decision making styles.  The core principle for this tool is to understand that people make decisions in two main ways: fast vs. slow, and emotional vs. logical.  These two axes combine into a quadrant for looking at four different decision making types online.

The 4 Types of Online Decision Makers

  1. Fast-Logical: The Competitive type
  2. Fast-Emotional:  The Spontaneous type
  3. Slow-Logical: The Methodical type
  4. Slow-Emotional: The Humanistic type

Another helpful way to look at each of the types is in the kind of language that they are looking for:

  1. Fast-Logical: Tell me WHAT you will do for me and what makes it better than other options
  2. Fast-Emotional: Tell me WHY I should use your product or service
  3. Slow-Logical: Tell me HOW you will deliver your product or service and give me all the details behind your approach
  4. Slow-Emotional: Tell me WHO you are and let me make a connection

How to Use This Tool in Your Marketing

The Decision Making Quadrant is a tool to help us to engage with our customers or visitors in the manner in which they wish to engage. Author and psychologist David Keirsey wrote an entire book about the importance of this concept–Please Understand Me–in which he lays out the research behind the personality types quadrant that is the basis for this tool, and discusses the human challenge of not trying to force others to behave as we do.  As with most marketing tools, the goal is to create empathy with our customers.  It is important to remember that you are only concerned with the dominant decision making mode of a specific customer segment or persona when they are interacting with your brand; people are complex and may engage in many different decision making styles in different contexts.

Every component of your website is geared towards at least one of these decision making styles.  It is easy to look at a website and think of what we would like to see or what appeals to us, but we face two huge challenges in being effective critics of our own web marketing efforts: one, we are afflicted by the curse of knowledge where we know far more about our business than any typical prospect ever will; and two, we are afflicted by the natural human tendency to think of our decision-making style as the best or only natural way to make decisions.

Once you have the Decision Making Quadrant as a part of your frame of reference for looking at a website or any interactive marketing element, you can quickly see how different components appeal to different styles.  A page geared towards a methodical personality type will have lots of details and be extremely thorough; that same approach can be extremely off-putting to the other three types.  Similarly, a page geared towards a competitive personality type will clearly show why your product or service is best and clearly quantify the results achieved; this approach may seem cold, tactical, and irrelevant to a spontaneous personality type.

In our experience, simply asking why any specific element on a website is designed or phrased in a specific way immediately creates productive discussion and improved results.  The Decision Making Quadrant is a great tool for creating a more productive and effective discussion.

I hope this tool is helpful to you in your marketing efforts as you look to maximize the number of visitors that engage with you.

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Posted in Content and copywriting, Digital Marketing, Persuasion, Web Analytics, Web Development, Website Design, Website Usability

4 Steps to Killer Email Marketing Campaigns

March 8th, 2011

Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools in the modern marketer’s toolkit today because of how trackable it is and the low cost of delivery. Your approach is primarily driven by your content strategy (similar to social media), and you will struggle if you do not have a detailed content plan to generate relevant content.

There are four key components to every email campaign, and they are outlined below.  We like to call them the Email Purchase Chain, because each of these steps should be part of an unbroken chain of expectations that you lead your prospect through.  We often find that small businesses only think about the middle two steps (email capture and clickthrough) when they think about email marketing, because they think of the website as outside of the scope of email marketing.

It is also important to think about the goal of each step being to get your prospects to the next step in the chain, not necessarily to make a purchase. It is easy to try and do to much, but you may find it useful to remember the adage about dating: you may think he or she is the one, but you are just trying to get a first date, not get them to marry you.

These components are very valuable in helping you to understand what to track and optimize for your email efforts, and how to make sure that you are guiding your prospects to the next step in your campaign with the appropriate messaging and tactics.  We will be going into each step in more detail in future posts.

1. Email Capture

Email capture is the process of gathering emails in the first place. While we often use old lists from a CRM or other source, the best email campaigns are from lists that people have intentionally opted in on your website and that deliver emails that match the expectations set when they opted in.

At a high level, your success at capturing emails will depend on the value that you offer your visitors in exchange for their email address versus the friction or anxiety that your signup process creates.  Focus on having a signup that is both relevant to your target customers and offers exclusive content.

The expectations that you set here should be continued throughout the rest of your email purchase chain, and are key to the success of your efforts.

» Read more: 4 Steps to Killer Email Marketing Campaigns

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Posted in Digital Marketing, Email Marketing, Website Design

5 Steps To Turn Your Website Into A Secret Weapon

February 24th, 2011
web design, secret weapon, synotac, synotac web design

The plans are in this R2 unit...Well, they were. We put them in a podcast for you, just click! Turn your website into your own secret weapon!

Below are blueprints of sorts, the beginning of how exactly to turn your website into your secret weapon. Now you probably think, hey, they will give us a little snippet of something good and then make us pay to get to the good stuff. No way, you’re getting everything. Below is a little bit from Synotac’s podcast done for E-Myth Worldwide, but it’s just the beginning!

Check out the 5 steps to turning your website from zero to hero and then click to the podcast for the details, in-depth information, free tools to help you accomplish these things, and practical advice from an industry expert.

  1. Define Success: What does it mean for your website to be successful? What is it that you want people to do once they get to your site? Is it signing up for a newsletter? Selling a product? Filling out a contact form? Whatever it is, define it clearly and be ready to measure it.
  2. Know your visitors: Do whatever it takes to get in the mind of your visitors. Think how they think, use the site as they do. Talk to your frequent visitors and find out how you can make their experience better. A website built around your visitors is a huge key to better conversions! You don’t want people leaving because they can’t find what they want or had an issue navigating it.
  3. Give them something of value: If you provide something useful to your potential clients even when they aren’t actively searching for your services, you are still building your reputation, potential for word of mouth and referrals, and keeping your site on the minds of potential customers that look to you for things they need online. What can you provide, exactly?
  4. Use many roads to get traffic: Building a site, even an awesome one isn’t enough to get people to come to it anymore. The sheer number of sites is astounding and your potential clients are bombarded with all kinds of links, offers, and ads constantly. To get to them effectively, you’ll have to explore multiple ways of capturing their attention.
  5. Track: What is working? What isn’t? Where are people coming from? Where should you focus your efforts? What kind of people are you succeeding with? Who is ignoring you? This one is all about analytics; numbers, numbers, numbers.

Remember, this is just from the first 5 minutes! Listen to the podcast for all the juicy details, it’s free right here! Included are 3 Basic Tools To Improve Website Performance, the 4 Most Common Website Mistakes and much, much more.

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Posted in Content and copywriting, Digital Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media, Web Analytics, Web Development, Website Design, Website Usability

How Influential Are You? 3 Ways To Tell

December 21st, 2010

Last week we talked about how social media influence is playing a role in the SEO value of links since Google and Bing both recently adjusted their algorithms to do so (or  at least finally admitted to it). In the SEO world, Google commands and we obey.

social media, web design, twitter, synotac, synotac portland or, symotac web design, content, seoTherefore, it is going to be increasingly important to monitor your own relative influence online and in social media sites like Facebook and Twitter so you can work to improve it and be a more valuable proponent for your links. Thankfully there are some great services out there for doing this already and we’re going to look at 3 that measure the influence of your Twitter handle. (Keep an eye out for when we look at how to measure Facebook influence)

  1. Klout: Klout is a great site that is simple to use. All you have to do is enter your Twitter handle and away it goes. It scores on a bunch of different things, but the main report includes the True Reach, Amplification, and Network Score. True Reach looks at how many of your followers are actually real and active people vs. bots or dead accounts. Amplification is the likelihood a tweet will spark a conversation and Network Score is based on how engaged your most influential followers are. (Klout also now scores Facebook as well, but is still developing that algorithm)
  2. TweetReach: This is a sweet little site that quickly looks up the last 50 tweets you posted and measures how many people they eventually reached through your network.  It also calculates a number of impressions and gives you the top people in your network that contributed to reaching people.
  3. Twittergrader: Twittergrader is made by Hubspot, the same people who made the website SEO grader. Twittergrader returns a score out of 100 that takes into account the number of followers, number you follow, and tweets and retweets. The higher your score, the more influential your Twitter account is.

Keep an eye on influence, it is only going to become more important in terms of SEO and overall success of your content, links, and ultimately, your website.

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Posted in Advice, Digital Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media