In a previous post this month we talked about your overall web strategy including social media and a blog to drive your target audience to your website, which is often the foundation upon which all your marketing is built. Spencer correctly pointed out that without satisfying your audience’s needs on your website, all these efforts can fall flat as visitors bounce from the site in quick time.  To prevent this, you need to think about patching the leaks on your website, both on your home page and deeper in.

Close the Deal | Image via Wikipedia

Do Your Landing Pages Close?

Remember, any page on your site is a potential landing page from a search engine query. The bulk of your visitors will arrive on your home page, so you have to get your marketing message, design and functionality right; but that doesn’t mean you should treat interior pages like the red-headed stepchild. If you’re a Realtor or a salesperson, you have to work hard all the way to closing and it’s no different for a web site. If a visitor gets past the home page, gets lost, has to hit the good ole back button, can’t find a contact or simply gets bored and frustrated, then all that hard work on design bought you an average home page bounce rate and no conversions.

The kinds of pages that you should pay most attention to are:

• Home Page – First touch point and will receive the most traffic;
• Service(s) you offer – Provide detail without overload, and offer solutions;
• About – Don’t boast but reassure your credentials with relevant stats;
• Testimonials – Add photos of your customers, include a diverse mix;
• Contact – Always have a form, and customize the response email.

Write Content That Works for You and Your Audience

Write about the strengths of your business, and focus on your core audience.  The reality is that over 80% of your revenue likely comes from a small visitor segment. In retail, certain products drive sales, which makes up for all the products in the inventory that probably don’t make a profit. The ‘long tail’ business model can work for large businesses such Amazon and Netflix to name but two, but if you are a small business the likelihood is you rely on core products or services with a particular audience.

Tune up your webpages | Image via Wikipedia

Know Your Market? Now Fine Tune It

This is the meat of the issue when it comes to fine tuning your landing pages. Each page needs to help and satisfy the visitor segment it was meant to, either with a logical next step or a quality resource. If you have worked hard to optimize the page with well researched key phrases for Meta tags and text, don’t ruin it with stale, uninspiring content that leaves the visitor with nowhere to go, or no incentive to contact you and interact with the site.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself when addressing you audience:

1. What’s the ideal demographic in terms of age, gender, interests, and how can I write to appeal to them?
2. What do they read, listen to, buy and watch? How can I provide an emotional trigger in my headings?
3. What benefits can I convey within 30 seconds of their reading this content?
4. What relevant internal links can I use to optimize the page and direct visitors deeper into the site?

Only 16% of all web visitors read every word! (Pew Research Center)

That’s not many people, so think about getting your main points across as soon as possible in the first sentence or paragraph. What’s your elevator pitch? Your target audience might be older and quite possibly have  more patience, so consider providing as much information as possible without overloading. If it’s a younger audience and your product or service does not require as much careful consideration then it’s better to be brief and cut to the chase. For example, ‘We create ‘x’ for people looking to ‘y’ by making the process simple.’ This type of active language can work well on your home page and can be modified to reflect a change in your business goals or services. By keeping the message conversational and avoiding corporate speak, you can connect much more quickly with the reader, who will feel they can relate to you and will listen to your solution.  This technique should especially be applied to headings, which we scan first for relevance, as do search engines.

What Should I avoid in my Content? My 8 Cents

1. Corporate speak – Your mission statement and marketing message are different
2. Too much jargon – Don’t make people think
3. Passive language – Use active verbs to drive your message
4. Leave your ego at the door – It’s not about you as much as what you can provide
5. Avoid using Flash – It can slow the page down and search engines don’t care
6. Vagueness – This won’t help a page close
7. Plagiarism – Obvious, but search engines know where content resides and will add no value to your site, so quote your source.
8. Hard Selling – Those days are over, welcome to Inbound Marketing

It will always be a challenge reaching your entire customer base with a silver bullet, so what I recommend is to figure out what kind of audience works best for you and feels right. This will most likely make your content more effective and help close those online leads.

Please tell me about your experiences or share tips for our audience on successful landing pages!

In the last few months, we’ve had the privilege at Union Street Media of launching several new real estate websites.  Many of these have been built on our new Enhanced and Premium platform, and we are excited to show these new and refreshed websites.

Peabody and Smith is a large and successful agency based in Northern NH and VT.  After years of maintaining their functional website, it was time to make sure the site was not only found in search engines, but it also represented the professionalism of the business through a refined design.  In this facelift, USM focused on clean design and images that complement the beautiful landscapes where Peabody and Smith sell real estate.  We also included a sold property search, and a new map-based property search.  We were happy with the results, but we were even more excited to get the client’s response: “We could not be happier! This is so wonderful! I was thrilled and showed the agents this morning, and guess what – not one negative comment, they LOVED it! You have done a great job, let’s keep proceeding forward. I am absolutely thrilled!”

Another longtime USM client, Debbi Burton, took advantage of our newest property detail view pages as we redesigned and widened her website to better portray her successful Burlington, VT based real estate business.

Blue Ridge Real Estate in Rutland, Vermont came to Union Street Media for a new website that would provide their customers with the most user-friendly tools while allowing them to drive the website process and update all of their content.  They chose our Enhanced package.

When searching for a web developer that could translate the success of their Development business into their real estate website, Dousevicz Real Estate found the perfect partner in Union Street Media.  Boasting a quick turnaround time and excellent content and functionality, we are happy to include Dousevicz Real Estate in our portfolio.

The ‘Resident Experts’ at Acton Real Estate recently launched their new USM Premium site after going through a thorough and collaborative process of design and development.  A large independent office in Massachusetts, Acton was looking for clean design and the best real estate tools available.

Under new ownership, Stowe Realty wanted to move in a new direction with its website.  Working with a third-party designer, we built custom fields and functionality for them to make their website stand out from the crowd in portraying the luxuries of Stowe Real Estate.

With an Enhanced site from USM, the agents at NH Recreational Properties were able to keep costs down while building a brand new website on a top of the line platform by investing their time into writing content and managing the site on their own.

One of the top five producing offices in Northern Massachusetts, Boardwalk Real Estate came to Union Street Media wanting to dominate search engines in their market while presenting a professional, easily navigable interface to clients.  By choosing our Premium package and doing aggressive Internet marketing through Report, Recommend, Revise, Boardwalk is set up to do just that.  They are already seeing improvements.

Costantino Real Estate focuses on Ossipee Lake homes for sale and wanted to make sure that their website would bring in new clients who were starting their searches online.  By partnering with Union Street Media, they were able to present their business with the best real estate web tools available and work with our Internet Marketing team to develop an overall online strategy for further website work and social media engagement.

LM Realty in Southern Vermont had a website that was just a brochure – it did not work for the office as a tool.  In choosing Union Street Media to develop their real estate website, LM Realty prioritized having a fully functional website without sacrificing design or ease of use.

To spruce up longtime client, Century 21 Farm and Forest’s, website, USM’s team widened the site, added our newest property detail view page and updated the site’s overall design to emphasize the beauty of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.  We’re so glad we had the opportunity to improve this site.

Another long-term client, Susan Martin, took advantage of the merger of NNEREN and VREIN to update her website with a new look, streamlined navigation and all of our newest real estate tools.  It’s a big step forward for her company and we were happy to launch it today.

When a business or nonprofit comes to us looking for a new or redesigned website, it’s always exciting to imagine what we’ll come up with , how the design will progress and how the site will function.  It’s even more exciting when the site launches.  That has definitely been true for the following new websites that we have launched in the last few months.  They represent a wide variety of client type and website needs, so please take a minute to check out these site profiles:

Recently started to help address conflicts around the world, the nonprofit Bridging the Divide came to Union Street to make sure that the organization’s website could act as a springboard for its innovative campaigns.  Not only were they looking for an attractive and easily navigable website, they also had a strict timeline we had to stick with.  By working with Michelle to outline every step of the process and create reachable but quick deadlines, we were able to get the website up and running faster than any site before without compromising on quality.  We are so pleased to welcome this remarkable organization to our client community.

After years of thoughtful planning, the developers of Hinesburg, Vermont’s sustainable Green Street neighborhood were ready to get started and build their community.  With Union Street Media’s expertise, they were able to develop a website that conveyed the appeal and overall principles behind the neighborhood development with a clean layout and design and an easily update-able interface.

Longtime Union Street Media client, Vermont Apartment Owners Association had a wealth of information on its former site, but the design needed a refresher and the site was due for reorganization.  In the newly launched version, we improved all calls to action, highlighted the benefits of membership in the association and streamlined the navigation to better represent the services provided by VAOA.

Developer Finance Corporation came to Union Street for a new design that would bring their website up to date for their clients and potential clients.  They especially wanted a website that would attract attention outside of their personal networks, so we are proud to unveil the new look and organization that has started accomplishing just that.

For many businesses, launching a website feels like the finish line.  You’ve worked hard to have a final product and you’re excited to move on to other things. Unfortunately, there is no simple finish line for web success.  It’s important to celebrate a website launch, but the true test of your website is how well it works for you in the long run (how many new customers, donors, or volunteers it brings in, how much you grow your email list, how many new leads you’ve gotten).  Having a site that works for you and makes you money doesn’t just happen on its own.  What was true for Smith Barney in 1986 in the above video (go to the 20 second mark) is true for keeping your website up to date now.  Old fashioned hard work pays off, even if the tools and strategies you must learn to use in the cutting edge of the web are far from old-fashioned.

If you’ve followed this blog at all, you know that our motto is often “if you just build it, they won’t come”.  It’s the same principle as “making money the old fashioned way.”  By continuing to invest time and energy into your website, you will continue to see dividends.  If you stand back and let the rest of your competition innovate around you, you’ll very likely be stung, instead of getting a taste of the honey.

The three main areas in which you will want to invest your time wisely into your site and EARN good traffic are:

1. Design: website years go by quicker than dog years.  Keeping your design fresh and engaging will let your customers know that you are proactive and will prove to new customers that you are looking forward.

2. Functionality: do you have calls to action on your site?  Is it easy for your users to find what you want to direct them to?  Give your site visitors options and clear pathways to communicate with you, but don’t clutter it with unnecessary widgets.  Can they search the site well?  If your client base is on the road, do you have a mobile-friendly version of your website?  On the whole, make sure that you continue to analyze your business goals and how you are supporting them with the functions of your website.

3. Last but definitely not least – Optimization.  Design and Functionality are important once you’ve gotten visitors to your site, but you also need to build your site to attract traffic.  We can do a lot for you to tune up your site for the keywords that matter to your business, but the best, most effective, and most profitable websites have staffs behind them that prioritize having abundant, fresh and relevant content on their site’s main pages and blogs.  For tips on how to do this, see our posts on being yourself online, blogging your way past writer’s block, finding the best use of social media for your business and how to manage your reputation online.  It’s all about finding the outlets that will showcase your business and abilities in the most effective ways and then being consistent and innovative (granted, it;s not always easy to do both at the same time).

While relying on web-based sales and lead generation is far from doing business the old fashioned way, it is now an essential aspect of long-term success.  Although web traffic and website conversions may seem unfamiliar and foreign to you, finding success in this arena is the same as any other.  It must be earned, and once you start putting in effort, it can easily become a part of your routine.  In short, we urge you to EARN your success by:

1. Blogging on an integrated blog.  If you can only do one thing, do this.
2. Feeding your blog to facebook and twitter and updating those sites as needed.
3. Spending 20 minutes every few months analyzing how well your site is working for you.
4. Refreshing the content on your main website pages every few months.  Google doesn’t care about a stagnant website.
5. Researching the most active and influential blogs about your industry to keep tabs and make comments.
6. Checking out your competitors and leaders in the field to see what strategies they use.
7. Monitoring your website data through google analytics and getting advice from a qualified SEO consultant.
8. Blogging.

When you truly engage with your site on a regular basis using up to date tools and methods, you will not only build your website – you will build your business.  For even more ideas, just give us a call.

Last month I wrote an article on our blog about how to measure the ROI from social media efforts. Now I’d like to take a step back, because  before you focus on your ROI, you need to make sure that you have an effective online structure that sets you up for success. This is what we will explore in this post.

Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, ETC… Everyone continues to talk about these social media utilities as THE answer for businesses looking to attract new clients online. This is highlighted when I speak with clients who only want to discuss building a social marketing strategy and have no interest in talking about their website. This approach is problematic for two reasons:

1) People don’t want to interact socially with people who have a strategy for interacting with them; it feels weird. If you are going to use social media tools, you need to use them for their own sake.  It’s when you really invest in them and incorporate them into your day that you can you get the best personal and professional value out of them. For a deeper look at how to avoid this have a look at my Breaking Down the Barriers Post.

2) The main problem I want to address here, is the issue of focusing on social media while neglecting your main website.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that you are a social media for business wunderkind. You Tweet about relevant and interesting things that people in your area want more information about. Your Facebook fan page is engaging and enjoys lots of attention from an interested and engaged following. You constantly link between Twitter, Facebook, your blog and website. Everything is going swimmingly, except you have been spending so much time on social media that your website is out of date and clunky. This is a problem.

The way that you get noticed and attract business online is by offering good information, in increasing quantity, through a number of media.  Let’s look at an example of how this might look in practice: A potential customer sees you on Twitter over a period of time because you both use the same area specific #tags.  Eventually they start to follow you because they like what you have to say. As they read your Tweets, they get increasingly invested in you. You Tweet, they respond, and you develop a Twitter relationship of sorts.

Figure 1

This continues and one day you tweet about a blog post that you wrote, and they follow the link and read the post. After they have read it, they like your take on the subject and make a habit of reading your blog. Through this online relationship they learn about you and what you do.  Eventually they find themselves needing your services, whatever they may be, they go to your blog (which hopefully is integrated with your website) and dive a little deeper, looking for more information on how they can work with you. Read the rest of this entry »

‘Shoot to Score’  [Image via Wikipedia]

Since it’s World Cup fever for the next few weeks, I thought it might be appropriate to talk about Goals. In sports goals are how we measure success, websites are no different. Earlier in the month we talked about Measuring Social Media’s Success, in that post we began to explore how to measure the quality of visitors from social media sites through engagement statistics. What we did not talk about is the punch line of engagement statistics, mainly goals. What can be murky is deciding what goals are, defining them and tracking them.

How does a site visitor complete a goal? Ideally, you want to direct visitors through the most important areas of your site to a desired outcome, which can be anything from reading a particular piece of information, calling you or filling out a contact form. The easiest way to measure a positive interaction with your website,  is by creating a goal, which can then be tracked through Google Analytics.

How do I track a Goal in Google Analytics?

Read the rest of this entry »

Ready for our close-up: the team behind this and every other USM website

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably noticed the change already.  Things have been spruced up around here.  We have taken our own advice and you are now looking at a revamped and redesigned Union Street Media website.  Why?  As we advise all of our clients to do, we took a good hard look at our business goals and used that as a starting point to make sure that our website conveyed the overall strategy behind what we do for our clients’ websites – generate traffic, engage site visitors and convert visitors into customers - through fresh, engaging content, navigation and visual aids.

Some of the main changes you will notice include:

• A homepage for our Real Estate web design process and a homepage for our “Interactive,” or business, nonprofit and education web design process (so you can quickly find what you are looking for based on your industry)
• Graphics and descriptions of our newest Real Estate web design packages depending on budget and features (to make it easy to find the best package for your office)
• Clearly laid out reasons to work with USM (if our nice new site wasn’t enough – we have case studies and portfolio sites galore)
• A portfolio by industry and website package type (to give you an idea of similar sites we have developed)
• A compelling outline of how we can build your online business through Internet Marketing and SEO (since, as we always say, if you just build it, they won’t come)
• Descriptions of our Real Estate web tools that will keep you ahead of the curve
• An emphasis on video testimonials (that let our clients tell you why you should work with us)
• Access to our active social networking accounts (so you can “like” or RT the new site)
• A cleaned up blog to provide advice, market analysis and USM updates (but you know that already)

In all, we knew we needed to provide our clients and potential clients with a more easily navigable site that highlighted our specific areas of web development expertise, our proven process, and outlined clear paths of action.  We hope you find the new site to fulfill those goals and more.  We would love to hear what you think.  Is it easy to use?  Can you find what you are looking for?  Does it clarify our web design process?  If you are a client, does it shine the right light on your site? Most importantly, does it make you want to learn more?  Tell us today!

If you’re using twitter you won’t get very far without seeing someone put a ‘#’ in front of a word or phrase.  So what is this all about?  Hashtags were created to be able to monitor trends and create a simple way to search for a specific event, area, service etc.  Creating a hashtag is simple, but getting people to continue to use it is the tricky part.  With the use of hashtags comes the ability to monitor that tag with ease.  You can monitor hashtags in several ways using a program like Tweetdeck or by using Twitter’s powerful search engine.  A useful way to monitor what’s going in town is to find the hashtag that corresponds with your area, in Burlington’s case, it’s #BTV.  I find that monitoring that hashtag is the best way to keep an eye on all that’s around me in Burlington.  If there’s something going on, someone will tweet about it.  For instance, Grace Potter announced the morning of her CD release day that she would be putting on a free show on Church St. in Burlington.  About two hours after she announced that on Twitter, the non-tweeps around me (a tweep is someone who uses twitter) found out.  My point here is that news travels fast on Twitter, something like we’ve never seen before.

Social Trending Experiment

We began trending locally next to Burlington's hash tag #BTV

Last week I came up with the idea to play a little Twitter experiment.  I wanted to try and get a hashtag that created a trend.  By trending I mean that people continue to talk about that certain subject and use the given hashtag over and over again. Not only did I want to see people talking about something that was created here at Union Street Media, but I wanted it to be a fun, and be a great way to interact with the people and companies around us.  The idea focused on taking a picture of your workspace whether it be of your own desk or a picture of your office.  I grabbed an image I had previously taken and posted it with the hashtag #btvworkspace and also #btv to target the area around us.  It caught on fast because people not only want to share what they have around them, but they are curious to see other people’s workspaces as well.

It wasn’t long before we were trending locally.  We were completely satisfied and were extremely happy everyone was enjoying sharing pictures and talking about their offices.  The key thing was to interact with our followers and also pick some up along the way. We were able to increase our followers by 8% and establish a better connection with our followers.  The moral of the story here is:   if you want to be successful on Twitter, you need to follow trends and even try to start one of your own.

Follow Union Street Media on Twitter

Before we talk about how to track success with social media we quickly need to touch on how to succeed in the first place. First, social media is… you guessed it, social! You can’t treat it as a new way to push the same old message. Much of what there is to be said on this can be found in my Breaking Down the Barriers blog post, but in a nutshell, social media is a chance to give your customers a more integrated online experience.

Using social media, you are able to add information and value that your customer would otherwise not have access to. I like to think of it this way: Traditionally, if a prospective client was not in your personal network, all you had to attract them was word of mouth, your head shot and your pitch. But now you have all of these different channels to connect with people, and to show them what you have to offer–not only as a business owner, but as a father, a mother, a community member….  When you combine active social media use with a solid web platform you will be able to  attract people to your website through all of your online and offline channels and track your progress as you do it.

Measuring Social Media’s Success

Now down to business. The simple answer to the question, “How do I know if social media is working,” is to look at how many Friends, Fans, and Followers you have on Facebook and Twitter.  These numbers, however, are not very nuanced pieces of data. If we look at it through the lens of the online sales funnel (on left) these metrics would fall into the acquisition section of the funnel. You have captured their attention and they are listening, but do you know how many of them are really engaging with you and your web presence and ultimately converting?  This is really the information that is most valuable from a marketing perspective.

To dive a little deeper into how much engagement and conversion you are getting out of your efforts with social media you need to spend some time in Google Analytics (GA). By looking at GA you can see how many people are coming to your blog and website from Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. From there you can look deeper and find out how much time they spend on your website and whether or not they convert. 

GA views social media channels as referring sites. To find this data from your GA dashboard you click on Traffic Sources -> Referring Sites (see the figure on the right). From that view you can look at the all of the different websites that send traffic to your site.  Once you are on the Referring Sites page you can look at the number of people who have arrived at your website from your social media channels, as well as their level of engagement with your website. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently participated as a judge in a video contest for students at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. The rules for the contest, sponsored by the Admissions office, were straightforward: Create a 2-4 minute video that includes three or more reasons why you love St. Mike’s (at least one had to relate to academics), and post it on YouTube. You can imagine the array of reasons that resulted!

Participating in this panel was a great reminder for me of how powerful video is as a marketing medium. As an Internet marketer, I have two main areas of focus: how businesses present themselves on their website, and how said website can achieve a high level of visibility. Video is an excellent vehicle for addressing both. Well-optimized videos can be very attractive to Google, and they are a great way to invite customers (existing and potential) to engage in your site and learn about you in a more interactive way than text and images allow.

So, let’s circle back to St. Mike’s. The panel was asked to judge seven student-created videos, all extolling the virtues of their cherished college home. Interestingly, a few very different approaches to the same challenge emerged.

Read the rest of this entry »