Spending the week with family and friends.
Have a great Thanksgiving and enjoy whatever gives your life meaning.
I’ll be back next week with normal posting.
Marketing
B2B Website Promotion
You have your website optimized for usability, customer-centric design and search engines. What else can you do to promote your website and get more traffic? Advertise. There are a lot of options now. What makes sense for your business?
Cheap Methods of Promotion
- One of the best ways to promote your website is just to include the link to your website in any communications you send out: emails, enewsletters, quotes, RFPs, brochures, etc.
- Trade links with association websites and partner websites. Make sure you place links on your site in a place that makes sense for your visitors. Avoid link exchanges which place non-relevant ads on your site.
- Contextual advertising such as Google Adwords can be very affordable since you can set spending limits and place several different ads to target specific segments of your audience.
Brand Awareness
Once you have some traffic coming to your site, you might like to increase your brand awareness. You want your customers to think of you when they have a need you can fulfill. Here are some types of advertising to increase your brand awareness:
- Ads in newspapers, magazines, or other print periodicals. Properly designed, this type of ad can not only make your company more top-of-mind, they can also drive traffic to your website when people remember your name during a purchasing cycle.
- Ads on industry websites: trade magazine sites, association sites, etc. These can be especially effective because professionals typically turn to the web for research and news. Many websites are also very affordable for limited runs and smaller ad sizes.
- Sponsorships. Sponsor a round of golf, a charity event, a local event, etc. These can be great publicity plus a tax write-off. Your company will be seen as generous and in-touch with issues and/or the community.
Targeted Campaigns
You may have specific products or services you want to promote or a corporate event you want your customers to know about. This type of marketing requires a bit more targeting.
- Targeted ads on industry websites. Look for sections or features which target your customers and find out about advertising or sponsorship opportunities. You’ll get more impact from bigger ad sizes (skyscraper, medium box, leaderboard).
- Contextual ads. Find out if your industry’s websites use contextual ads to target your audience.
Don’t be shy about trying out a few different advertising methods. Sometimes it takes a little trial and error to figure out what works best for your specific customers.
Technorati Tags: customer-centric sites, advertising, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting
B2B Analytics Basics
We’ve discussed some of this before, but just as a refresher:
There are three types of basic information for a website:
- Page views are the number of web pages viewed on your website.
- Visits are the number times people visit the website. They can view multiple pages (page views) each visit.
- Unique visitors are the number of people who visit the website (usually as near as possible to ascertain).
What other information should you look for in your analytics package to find out if your site is usable and designed with your customer in mind?
- pages/visit: how many pages (on average) do people look at when they come to your website. Obviously, the higher the better. Some of this will depend on if your traffic comes mostly from search engines or from direct traffic. Visitors from search engines are less likely to browse around once they’ve found their answer (or if they didn’t find their answer).
- average time on site: how long (on average) do people spend on your site. Again, the longer the better. If this is a very small number (under a minute), your visitors aren’t bothering to read much of what is on the page.
- bounce rate: is the percentage of visits where the visitor only viewed a single page and then left. This often means the page where the visitor entered was not relevant to what they were coming to the site for (although it could also mean that they found their answer and left). This stat is extremely important for eCommerce sites which don’t want visitors to leave until they’ve purchased something.
- % of new visits: how many of your visits are from new visitors. This will tell you how loyal your audience is. If your site is engaging, your visitors will come back from time-to-time for more information and updates.
Technorati Tags: analytics, web analytics, web statistics, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting