4 Simple Tips to Maximize Mobile Conversions

April 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment

mobile conversions With an abundant supply of “mobile responsive” WordPress themes now offered by third party developers, we now recommend themes from this category as a first step towards maximizing mobile conversions.

What is a Mobile Responsive Website?

A mobile responsive design adapts the layout of the site to the user’s viewing environment. The goal is to provide a user experience that is easy to read and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling for a wide range of devices including desktop, laptop, tablet and smart phone.

While a mobile responsive design will take care of displaying your site for ease of reading and navigation, you still need to consider how site visitors will consume your site from each of the various viewing environments and design accordingly to maximize mobile conversions. Of particular importance is the layout and presentation of any call-to-action efforts.

If your goal is to convert visitors through a contact form, the number of fields the visitor is required to complete will always be an influencing factor in conversion. The more of a hassle it is to complete a form, the more likely you are to lose the prospect. This is even a more critical issue for mobile device users as typing on a smart phone or even a tablet is much slower than a desktop or laptop. You don’t want your mobile visitors to abandon your site due to typing frustration. Take control of your mobile conversions by careful contact form management.

Maximizing Mobile Conversions

The slightest adjustments can go a long way towards maximizing conversions. Here are four simple things you can do to help mobile users follow through to contact you.

  1. Restrict fields on contact forms to only those required for follow-up
  2. Always use landing pages for ads and marketing campaigns. Never direct ad traffic to your home page where mobile users will be left searching in the dark for their next step
  3. Display your phone number in large font in a location that will not require scrolling from a smart phone
  4. Keep an eye on your Google Analytics mobile reports. Study how mobile user trends compare to non-mobile and attempt to address any variations.

What more have you learned about mobile conversions that you can add to the list?

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#1 Must Do for Effective Content Marketing

April 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment

effective content marketingA new SEO plugin today reminded me that in our goal to acquire new customers through effective content marketing, we need to make sure that our level of speech is a fit with the prospects we seek to convert. If it isn’t, our valuable prospect will move on in search of another site that feels more comfortable. I always thought that readability level was more of a subjective call, yet today I learned that there is a formula called the Flesch Reading Ease test that measures the difficulty of the content.

What Does Flesch Reading Ease Measure?

Key factors in the Flesch Reading Ease formula are average length of sentence and average number of syllables per word. Here is the measurement scale:

100 – Very easy to read with an average sentence length of 12 words or fewer. No words contain more than two syllables.

 65 – Considered plain English. The average sentence is 15 to 20 words long and the average word has two syllables.

 30 – A little hard to read. Sentences will have mostly 25 words with two syllables usually.

What Level is Best for Effective Content Marketing?

For most marketers, simple, easy to read writing produces the most effective content. Reader’s Digest is said to have a readability score of 65, Time magazine indexes around 52, and the Harvard Law Review somewhere in the low 30’s. These are all good examples of publishers who write to the level of their audience.

The challenge to produce effective content is highest when the product or service you are marketing is very complex or technical and your target prospects are not educated at that level. I discovered the importance of the Flesch Reading Ease test while publishing a blog article for a client and the SEO plugin led me to discover that the difficulty of the reading was much higher than the educational level of their average client. Recognizing how this could hinder web conversions, we are now taking a close look at the content on the entire site.

How to Measure the Readability of Your Content

Microsoft Word provides an easy way to determine your readability statistics. Here’s how:

  • Click the File tab, and then click Options.
  • Click Proofing.
  • Under When correcting spelling and grammar in Word, make sure the Check grammar with spelling check box is selected.
  • Select Show readability statistics.

After you enable this feature, check the spelling of any document you want to measure. When Word finishes checking the spelling and grammar, it displays information about the reading level of the content.

Have you discovered other tools for measuring readability?

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6 Surefire Ways to Build a Targeted List of Twitter Followers

April 23, 2013 by Leave a Comment

targeted prospectsMost consumer brands understand the value of acquiring a targeted list to generate sales and build and retain customers. For brands that sell products and services directly to consumers, acquiring email or postal lists of targeted prospects is often an expensive proposition that comes with one-time-only use limitations. Not so with Twitter.

One of the richest features about Twitter is its open architecture which enables brands to get on the radar of any consumer who may likely be interested in their products or services. Here are some tips for getting on the prospect’s radar and ultimately, getting the prospect to follow your brand.

  1. Follow back, but be judicious about who you follow. Relationship building on Twitter is done through engagement and it’s difficult to engage when you’re not following your customers and prospects. You should strive to maintain a following to followers ratio that is at least 1:1. If you are following more accounts than are following you back, you deliver the perception that your content is not valued. In order to prevent this situation, you need to follow sparingly until you have room in the ratio to initiate new connections by following targeted users first.
  2. Use a Twitter tool to manage your following. Because your following number is a vital component to your ability to reach out and follow first, you need to regularly eliminate accounts that are not seeing your content. Accounts become inactive and some users play the game of following just to get your follow and then immediately unfollow you once they do. By utilizing tools like ManagerFlitter, you can quickly and easily get rid of your dead weight.
  3. Mine your competition’s following. Follow users who are active and demonstrate engagement. Being proactive by following others first is one of the fastest ways to gain followers.
  4. Curate value-added content. Be found by users who are looking for information that is relevant to your brand and develop a reputation as a go-to source.
  5. Leverage Twitter’s service that recommends accounts to follow. Let Twitter help you hone into accounts you may want to follow. Go into your Twitter settings and check the box to receive emails with suggestions based on your recent follows.
  6. Use Twitter search. Find conversations that identify users who are tweeting about your market niche. Quickly browse their location, bio and timeline to ensure they meet your geographic and demographic profile and are active users. Determine whether you want to engage or follow or both.

Related posts:

Step 1 to Use Twitter as a Prospecting and Sales Channel

ReTweet Thank You’s: Increase Clicks and Viral Sharing of Your Content on Twitter

8 Profitable Reasons to Build Twitter Lists

 

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How to Build a Website or Blog Cheap and Easy

April 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment

website developmentWhen I stepped out on my first entrepreneurial venture a dozen years ago, I hired a web design professional to build my website. I was at his mercy whenever I wanted to add or change something. A few years later when I started another new gig, I wanted to have the flexibility for it to be an ongoing work in process that didn’t come at a cost so I learned the art of html programming and built my own.

Today, thanks to the wonderful, open source content management system (CMS) called WordPress, virtually anyone can build their own website free and easy. There are two ways you can work with WordPress:

  1. Wordpress.com – where your site is hosted by WordPress. Their free package requires that your domain name follow the structure of www.domainname.wordpress.com. Custom domains such as www.domainname.com can also be obtained for a modest annual fee.
  2. Wordpress.org – you self-host your site by registering your domain name with a domain name registration provider such as Network Solutions or GoDaddy and establishing an account with a hosting service such as Bluehost or Hostgator.

Which hosting environment is right for you?

Unless you are looking to generate revenue through advertising on your site or want to provide visitors with content they can download, there are lots of good reasons why it makes sense to launch your website or blog in the WordPress.com environment:

  • There are no hosting fees for a basic WordPress.com site
  • No technology expertise is required to establish and maintain your site
  • Your WordPress platform is automatically updated with each new version of the software
  • You can transfer your domain name to another environment if you decide that you need more flexibility down the road

Site Design

The visual look of a WordPress site is generated by themes, WordPress’ terminology for templates that have been designed by third party developers to give a site a professional or visually engaging look. There are many free themes available, as well as premium themes that come with a license fee. Premium themes generally come with support, so if you are going to be hands on with the customization of your site, you will probably find the extra cost will be worth it.

WordPress content structure

Run on a MySQL database and PHP programming, there are essentially two components that WordPress provides to publish content on your site. Pages are static pages whose organization makes up the navigation of your website such as “About”, “Services”, and “Contact”. Posts are blog entries that display in reverse chronological order and often have comments areas for reader engagement.

Websites can be built through a combination of pages and posts, or if you choose not to maintain a blog, through pages only. If your site is to be primarily a blog, you can add one or more pages to complement your posts to provide readers with a place to learn more about you.

It doesn’t get much easier

Regardless of what hosting environment or theme you choose, the WordPress software is pretty user friendly.  If you can make your way around today’s word processing or presentation software, you should find WordPress easy to maneuver.

Know of any other great plug and play web development software out there?

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Step 1 to Use Twitter as a Prospecting and Sales Channel

April 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

social media marketingDuring the dozen years I spent as a list broker prior to launching Inner Architect, my job was to identify new sources of prospects for clients. In those days my sources were postal and email lists. I would find targeted prospects by typing keywords into one of the various databases that serviced the direct marketing industry, searching for matches to words the list managers would use to describe the makeup of the list.

Last year we launched a Twitter prospecting service at Inner Architect that was based upon my experience looking for postal and email prospects. Yet now, instead of utilizing a licensed database of lists from which to conduct a search, we drill down into conversations on the open platform that is Twitter.

Those who haven’t spent much time on Twitter probably cannot fathom how rich a prospecting channel it is, particularly for niche lifestyle product and service offers. For every lifestyle activity–golf, tennis, bicycling, yoga, wine tasting, equestrian, skiing, paddle boarding to name a few—are thousands of tweets every day by consumers expressing their passion for the activity. These tweets identify the Twitter user as a potential buyer of apparel, accessories and equipment, classes, magazines, DVDs, and other products and services consumed by enthusiasts of the particular activity.

Back in my day as a broker, one of our greatest challenges was identifying prospects for lifestyle events that had not yet happened such as weddings, buying a house, or having a baby. These days there are ways to identify those prospects through their tweets that share their status about the upcoming lifestyle change.

What is the Size of Your Twitter Prospect Universe?

The first step in determining whether a market exists is to quantify the size of its universe potential. For a limited time, Inner Architect is offering a free custom report that will provide you with an estimate of your qualified Twitter prospect universe. By “qualified” I mean that we will bring a quality control process into our evaluation to weed out those users whose tweets or bios would disqualify them as a potential serious buyer.

To request your free custom report, simply fill out our form and submit.

Let me know if I can answer any questions.

 

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3 Essential Google Analytics for Successful Law Firm Marketing

February 27, 2013 by Leave a Comment

law firm marketingHaving worked with a number of law firms over the past three years, I know that most firm principals and partners understand the importance of Google for business development. Yet that perception seems to be mostly, and often exclusively, focused on ranking high on page one of Google search results. I’m not saying that isn’t a good goal—I want to see you there, too. Additionally what I am saying is that there are so many other factors you should be looking at to determine how successful your website is performing. Here are three of the most important:

Conversions – Are visitors to your site taking your desired call to action by submitting a contact form? This is a very important statistic to track for all law firms, yet particularly for those who are investing in paid search or pay-per-click programs to ensure that marketing dollars aren’t being wasted by under-performing landing pages and conversion techniques.

Conversions by Source – Evaluate the conversion rates for all of your sources with an eye towards understanding which types are most productive for you. It’s likely that you will find a pattern. Once you determine which sources are best, explore other opportunities in like sources.

For example, you may find that listings in online lawyer directories are among your best conversion sources. Examine what is working and explore how you can leverage that with other lawyer directories. Ask yourself how you might improve results with existing directories where you have listings. Are your firm’s profile and practice areas updated and complete? Do your attorneys’ profiles contain photos that will enable them to stand out from the pack and make a human connection with a potential client?

Conversions In-Page Analytics – Study where your conversions click through once they arrive on your website. These are the pages that are effectively doing the job of selling your firm. You may find there is only a handful. Use this intelligence to expand upon the kind of content that is working and cut back on content that may only be distracting visitors.

If you are a law firm or lawyer who places a lot of value on the role your website plays in business development–or one that it could potentially play–I encourage you to evaluate these and other Google analytics for your law firm’s website on a quarterly basis minimally. It’s the only way that you will learn if something is broken and how to fix it. It will also show you the road map to other sources that can bring you business.

Got questions? We’re here to help.

 

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Do Press Releases Drive Traffic to Your Website?

February 13, 2013 by Leave a Comment

My background is in marketing, not PR, so I have to admit that I don’t have a ton of experience in analyzing the performance of a press release. Yet as I am now in the midst of performing web analytics for a client, the time is ripe to learn how a single press release—an uncommon effort for this particular client—influenced traffic to their website.

To get a basic foundation from which to grasp some benchmarks, my research led me to a Hubspot article which said “According to our own Dan Zarrella’s research, press releases are viewed on average about 275 times during the week.” While I expect that Dan’s research was based on a much higher sample than my single case study, our client experienced a significantly higher number of views during its first week.

As far as being a source for driving traffic to the website, our client has seen 1.3% of views convert to traffic—not very meaningful in pure numbers—yet like anything else, surely the content of the press release influenced engagement. This particular press release was announcing the expansion of a law firm, clearly interesting news, yet not truly helpful, useful, or unique enough to drive eyeballs to the site to learn more.

While at one time, search engines indexed press releases and this helped build links to companies’ websites, those days appear to be over with Google’s Panda and Penguin updates in an effort to clean up all the “noise” that over-exploited SEO strategies like press releases create.

Matt Cutts of Google said in a Google Webmaster Help forum on December 25, 2012 that links from press releases shouldn’t have a positive impact on your rankings.

Matt wrote:

“Note: I wouldn’t expect links from press release web sites to benefit your rankings, however.”

Some SEO consultants, however, are challenging Matt’s note.

What do you think?

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Content Curation: Your Brand’s Lifeblood

February 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

“Content Curation is the act of discovering, gathering, and presenting digital content that surrounds specific subject matter.” –EContentmag.com

1 RoadCan you define content curation? Does your definition differ from the one above?  With the advent of new algorithmic changes in Google indexing, businesses must consider the significance of content curation in connecting with their audience. Although the act of “discovering, gathering, and presenting digital content” is vital to your brand’s content curation efforts, it is not the most important piece to the puzzle. The most important piece is the willingness and ability for businesses to create their own content that tells their unique story, gives consumers an inside view of the organization, and provides a channel for consumer communication. Despite the fact that none of this is news to businesses, many brands still fail to execute a valuable content curation plan.

Content Goal: your company becomes the go-to source of information for your customers and potential customers who are searching for information. You want to be perceived as a must stop shop for information in your niche, geographic area, or industry

Signal to Noise Ratio: plan your content mix by choosing the most relevant outside sources that would provide the best information for your consumer. Then write articles for your blog specific to the interests and needs of your customers and potential customers. From this pool of content provide a mix of 60% outside source and 40% your own content. Note: keep your sales messages between 30-40% of your message mix. The remaining 60-70% should be non-sales messages

Content Development: when writing your own content, focus on providing your audience

  • Your Brand’s Story
  • Company History
  • Product-Service Evolution
  • New Discoveries
  • How-to Tutorials
  • Top 10 Lists
  • Testimonials that highlight the differentiating factor for your brand

Platform: still the most powerful tool available to businesses to create content is a well placed blog. Although there are many choices available for blogging software, we prefer WordPress as the choice that provides the most design flexibility, search engine optimization, and ease of use.

Content Search Engine: hundreds of breaking news websites and blogs exist to deliver time relevant stories. National and global magazines, newspapers, and Q & A sites distribute their articles often on an hourly basis. Although Google has extensive filtered searches which can produce content for curation, our choice for content search engine remains Twitter. Every massive news source down to minute hyper local papers distribute content on Twitter. The best steps to tapping into this source:

  • Search: utilize Twitter’s search engine to find the relevant news sources you wish to curate content
  • Lists: create multiple Twitter lists. Example: my lists News Media and Media Curation that includes over 100 U.S. newspapers and magazines
  • Monitor-Mine: review the tweet stream for your Twitter lists to find real time articles just tweeted
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Inner Architect Expands Digital Marketing Services

January 31, 2013 by Leave a Comment

glasses next to computer keyboardAt the end of last year when Inner Architect started planning for our long-overdue website redesign, it became apparent that there were a number of services we have been  performing for our clients that we had not been promoting on our website. We had not been publicly keeping up with our own evolution. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that as a small boutique consultancy, we can be found guilty of being like the cobbler whose children have no shoes.

I am very happy today to announce the unveiling of our updated website and the expansion of our digital marketing services:

  • Content development
  • Email marketing
  • Social media marketing
  • Tracking and analytics
  • Website design

We’d love to have the opportunity to talk to you about any of these needs you might have.

 

 

 

 

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