Sensible Marketing for Small Business

Now that the calendar has rolled over, many people are reviewing their approved budgets, evaluating their project lists and setting their B2B marketing and communications priorities based on last year’s results. Management has handed down its business goals and objectives for the year and it is now the job of marketing to support those objectives. If social media is part of supporting those objectives, remember that all online engagement drives customers and prospects back to your website. This is the perfect time to review your website and make sure that it is in line with those business objectives as well.

As many websites have been around a while, they may not reflect your marketing initiatives and business strategies for this year. We offer the following suggestions to help guide your review of your site. Some of these may be small fixes to your site that can be easily accomplished. Others, however, may require you to shift your priorities and make a site redesign part of this year’s tasks.

1. Home Page Clarity and Functionality

When prospects arrive at your home page, it is clear what products or services your company offers? Objectively review your home page and view it as a first time visitor, whether your primary offerings have changed or not this year. You may have optimized your search results to drive great traffic, but if people can’t tell what you do at a glance, they are not sticking around. And by the way, if you have an animated flash landing page or auto playing music or video, remove it today. These outdated and slow-loading bits of media only slow down your site visitors and make it more likely that they will leave your site without taking action. Check your analytics to see what sites people came from or what keywords they searched to understand who stays on your site and who leaves.

2. Clear Path to Information

Prospects and customers arrive at your home page and they know they are in the right place, but can they find what they are looking for? As web sites have gotten fancier and technology more advanced, gadgets, widgets and sliding navigation have made it harder to find what your site visitors are looking for. Make sure your site has a clear path to get people to the information they need, whether it is product specs, customer service or finding a distributor. Again, your analytics tell you what pages people go to after your home page.

3. Call to Action

Is your site generating leads for your sales force? Are you trying to get new subscribers to content via RSS or to an email newsletter? Are you selling products directly from the web or passing all these prospects to a distributor? Whatever your call to action on your site is, make sure it is on every relevant page and customers and prospects know what to do. And make sure this is all trackable so you can match this up to your objectives. Review these numbers on a regular basis so you are not surprised by either success or failure. Your website is a living entity that should be easy to change to make it more effective. If you are constantly fighting with your IT department or a web vendor to make changes, you need to reevaluate that relationship. Your company’s success cannot be held back by technical limitations or the whims of your internal or external partners.

4. Social Media Profiles

Last year you started a blog, joined Twitter and created a Facebook fan page. Now is the time to get those social presences to the home page of your site. You want to grow these social communities and burying their existence on your about page, contact page or some random page that no one can find is not the way to do it.

If you are considering building a mobile application or mobile website over the next year, there are a few best practices which you can work into your website re-design process which will make moving to mobile much easier. Below, I’ve put together four key elements which will prepare you for the mobile transition.

Be prepared for RSS Feeds
When you are creating a mobile website or app, we always suggest setting it up in such a way that once you post a new article to your website, it automatically appears on the mobile side as well. Such a setup ensures that adding a mobile presence won’t double the amount of work for your marketing team. The main method for creating these type of automatic updates is by using RSS feeds.

When re-designing your site, map out any section which has frequently changing content (i.e. publications, recent news, press releases, ect.) and make sure you have an easy method for creating RSS feeds for each of these sections. You could even take this a step further and create RSS feeds for this content right from the outset.

RSS feeds are quite common for major media websites and there will be visitors to your website who will appreciate receiving your latest updates in the RSS format. The only point to remember here is make sure your feeds contain the full article and not just a summary of the content with a link to the article. Summary RSS feeds will not work for mobile as they do not give the mobile app enough information to re-create the full article in the app.

Limit PDF Based Content
Many professional service firms are stuck with using PDFs as there is a certain segment of their audience who like having print formatted content. However, the demands of readers are quickly changing and the challenge with having too much PDF content on your website is that it does not translate well to the mobile web. On most older Blackberry devices, the phone of choice for many professionals, PDFs simply will not open. For newer Blackberries, iPhone and Android users PDFs will open but it will be difficult to read the information. Reading PDFs on these small screens require a lot of zooming and scrolling left to right which will frustrate users.

The best solution is to accommodate both sets of users. When you’re planning how to display PDF content, make sure to include a brief extract of the document in HTML format and then link to the PDF. Following this hybrid approach will satisfy both groups of users.

Put Video Content on Youtube
The benefit of putting all of your video content on Youtube is that it is the most common online video platform on the planet and is thus supported by almost every modern mobile device. Distributing video to mobile devices can be quite difficult but Youtube has done the hard work to make video work on most devices.

I’ve found that Youtube is most helpful when it comes to distributing content to Blackberry devices. These devices require a specific technology called an RTSP stream to playback video. These streams are normally quite costly and difficult to maintain, so taking advantage of Youtube saves time and expense.

Start Tracking Mobile Usage…TODAY!
Even if you are not going to be launching your mobile initiative until later this year, you should still be measuring how many people are visiting your site from mobile devices. Measuring mobile visits can be done using free tools like Google Analytics. If your current analytics program does not measure mobile visits, you may want to have your IT staff also add Google Analytics tracking to your site. It’s free and is widely regarded as one of the best Analytics programs in the industry. Finding mobile information is different for every analytics program but you should be able to find a mobile tab which will help you identify which mobile devices your visitors are using. In Google Analytics, this information can be found by going to Mobile and Mobile Devices under the Visitors section. Having this information will help you to determine which platforms you should target with mobile apps and websites once you start into your mobile initiative.