Category: Blog

What is the first thing we do when considering buying a product, hiring a service, or doing business? We Google it.

Our lives are increasingly on the go. We are always out, working, playing, traveling – and almost always “Googling” on our phones. Your customers are, too.

As a small business – you have two challenges:

1. You must be easy to find on Google.
2. Your company’s website must be mobile responsive.

It’s time to act. A mobile responsive website will boost in your bottom line, winning more bids, and ensuring the longevity of your business.

 “Mobile responsive” – How your site looks on a phone or tablet

Mobile responsive design means that no matter which device prospective customers are looking at your website on – desktop, tablet, or smartphone – it will look good.

No more frustrating your customers with tiny screens, pinch and scrolling trying to find the info they are looking for. An easy experience online will give them confidence you are a good company to work with and buy from.

Customers spend 78% of screen time on a mobile device

People are migrating to mobile fast! Are you ready for this change?

A mobile responsive site means your customers can connect with you easier, faster, and more effectively. You can retain customers – and attract new customers.

Customers want to work with a business that takes care of their needs – on and off line. 

Mobile responsive site = more visibility online

To remain competitive and retain visibility in the marketplace, it’s imperative your website is mobile responsive – and that you rank highly in search results.

Search engines like Google are how people find companies they want to work with. Don’t you want your company at the top of search results, so more people call you, rather than your competitors?

Mobile responsive sites are the first to show up on Google search results. If you’re not mobile responsive, your site is being punished. 

Every buying decision starts on Google

We all Google businesses and companies that we are doing or considering doing business with. Customers expect a really dynamic mobile experience. If they don’t’ get it, you lose customer connections.

Reputable businesses are expected to be online. Your customers expect a website they can easily navigate. Giving site visitors an easy way to get in touch or buy directly will increase your business.

We can build you a mobile responsive website

A mobile responsive site will enhance your company’s reputation. It’ll be perceived as modern, relevant, and customer-centric – giving you long term sustainability.

Act now! Your competitors are also noticing this evolution. So are new companies considering entering your market!

Have questions? Give us a call at 303-278-7310. We love talking about beautiful websites your customers love and helps grow your business.

The Battle for Customers Can Be Won with a Successful Internet Strategy.

Customers are the lifeblood of any business, no matter what type of business you might own and operate.

Without customers, you have no business. However, you’ll find that getting those customers into your door, or to visit your website or to even remember your business’ name can be quite difficult.

Today, consumers are bombarded with marketing messages every day, all day!

So how do you make your company stand out from the crowd?

The right internet strategy is the key.

In today’s world customers start their search and research by looking at your website.

So you should too!

And unless YOU are impressed with it, the design, the words, the headlines, the things that are emphasized, it demands a redesign!

Now an important fact:  The average web visitor only stays on a website for 10 to 20 seconds.

Are you making the most of those 10 seconds? 

A site redesign, with an eye towards user experience, is the best tool you have to generate interest with a new prospect.

Website user experience can get overly complicated.  Don’t let it!

Layout, features and functionality are the foundation of your website. A few things you need to ask yourself are, how do you want to utilize the following:

Navigation – will you be using faceted navigation, a more traditional drop down navigation, or a blend of both?

Site search – how will you optimize your site search function? Where will it live on the page and what will feed into it?

Lead generation tools – what’s the goal of your website? Are you looking to capture leads? If yes, then your lead form should be short and easy to access.

Personalization – how can you create a personalized experience?

Recommendation engines – along with personalization, does it make sense for you to showcase recommend products and/or content?

What it comes down to is are you meeting the needs of your web users?

Are your web visitors finding what they need on your site?

Are they able to drill down to additional information in a quick, natural manner?

Are you connecting with your audience with the right tone and imagery?

Perhaps most importantly, are your web visitors intrigued enough to want to learn more and are they able to easily find your contact information?

When you think about it that way – creating the best experience for your audience, it makes a whole lot more sense.

After all, we all know how important first impressions are; it’s no different for your website except that you might only have those 10 seconds to really hook your audience so you can convert them to customers!

Next Up: What do you want your website to actually do for your company?

In our previous article WHAT? Now I need a website AND a social media presence? we discussed the business benefits of a strong social media presence aligned to your business website.  Today, we will look at the key sites you should be using.

 So let’s start with LinkedIn for your business and for your most important executives and salespeople.

LinkedIn is primarily a business network. You won’t find any photos f parties, or people’s kids or pets, and no travel photos. It’s all business!

Remarkably 25% of all adult internet users in the US use the site.  And 40% of its registered users visit LinkedIn daily.

Your company can have its own profile on LinkedIn…So think about what your company’s resume might look like if it were a person.

You can describe your business history, primary skills, greatest accomplishments as well as a posting recommendations from customers. I’d also recommend you post some industry information or news, and even a case study of an experience or two you had with your clients that were particularly successful for them.

If you have a sound and comprehensive LinkedIn profile for your company, you can get some incredible traffic to your website. And as we’ve discussed, one on your website, you have lots of things you do…especially having a prominent “Contact Us” mechanism. And then suddenly, you have new leads for your company.

Prospective customers and partners will also check out your personal profile on LinkedIn to make sure you have the credentials to handle their business, and then they’ll come back to your company listing to make sure its worthwhile to reach out.

On your personal profile, you can post your opinion on issues, suggestions on business matters or even technical information. Anything you think a prospective customer might be interested in.

For example, on either your personal profile, or your company’s profile, you can post about your best clients/case studies, your hardest jobs, your largest jobs, your most complex jobs, your company history;  show me photos of your equipment, your offices, your executives. Share videos of your work on customer sites, as well as links to their websites. Link to stories from your industry association’s newsletter or conferences and events.

Treat your company’s LinkedIn profile as what you would say about your company or industry if you could have someone sit and listen to you over a cup of coffee and always link back to your company website, so you can start the cycle of getting their interest on LinkedIn, then move them to your website for more in depth or dynamic information, and ask them to “Contact Us”…Now you have someone who is “ready to buy”.

Instagram  and YouTube 

The same approach and benefits apply for Instagram and YouTube, although with a different approach on the type of content you post.

It’s interesting that Instagram is one of the fastest growing platforms and permits you to post images and videos that show off your company’s projects, new products, your new headquarters, or anything that visually represents your core values and services.   Instagram tends to appeal to a younger audience as well, which is not a bad thing (!).

Post photos of jobs in development, before and after photos (everyone loves these), videos of new installments, or new product launches.  Short and sweet is the approach on Instagram, letting the image tell the story and build your brand trust. And, as I always say, everything you post will have a share button and a link back to your website.

YouTube

Did you know that YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google?  Me neither! But now I do,and that means something.

So how big is YouTube?

YouTube processes more than 3 billion searches a month. 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute. It’s bigger than Bing, Yahoo!, Ask and AOL combined!

YouTube can feature your company and products in a very visual way, from short 30 second videos to a longer series of interviews with customers, interviews with executives, sales presentations, or whatever you think would make for interesting video content.

Feature your company’s accomplishments, any charity efforts your company is associated with, partners you work with, etc.  You can post these videos to your LinkedIn company pages and to your company website as well!  And close every video with your company name, address, email, and really big and large: your website address!

So….what are the benefits of all this work?

Feeding the insatiable appetite people have for content, combined with well developed personal profiles and company profile pages on LinkedIn, all linking back to a dynamic website equipped to handle responses by capturing all these names  of potential or existing customers, you will quickly realize that those people you see out there glued to their phones, laptops, and tablets will become your next customer!

Being ranked highly in search results feels like a complete mystery to many of us. I’m going to discuss it here without dragging you too deeply in to the details. If you want more details, there are folks here who would love to spend the day discussing them with you…but that’s not me.

I’m not a technologist, I’m a sales and marketing person. My goal is to get you more customers, and be able to charge more for your products and services. In sum, to improve results, and to become more competitive.

Relative to search results, the all-powerful Google seems to control all things related to search …and we’re so often told that the way to rank highly on search keeps changing!

But there is good news. Long gone are the days of black-hat SEO trickery. Websites aren’t getting away with keyword stuffing, link buying, cloaking, etc. The search engines have finally established clear rules that sites are expected to follow. If they do not?  Google will find them and penalize the sites that don’t follow the rules.

Why so many rules?  Because search engines want to provide the best possible experience for their end users.  And since we do as well, it’s a good partnership – in theory.

Because we are businesses who want our customers to find us easily if they search anything related to our business, but we still have do at least these two simple things:

1. Build the foundation of our websites with the technical components needed to rank highly in search results.
2. Create juicy content for our customers to enjoy on our site, but do so in a data driven way. (I’ll explain that in a minute!).

To set your site up with the right technical tools is really what sets your site up for success. It works like the engine of your site, and if it isn’t performing smoothly (if you have any technical issues) your site will not rank well on Google.

BUT…Google is tight-lipped about what actually makes up the algorithm that decides how websites rank in search engine results pages – at 200+ algorithm changes per year, even if it was public knowledge, it’d be hard to keep up with the changes. It is really challenging working with the behemoth that Google is!

However, we do know what’s important for visibility. And through regular audits we measure and act on anything that could be hindering our ability to improve rankings in the engines. This is an ongoing practice – not a one time effort ( Note: More to follow on what we look for in an SEO audit to follow).

For today’s purposes our focus will be on the content on your site, and keyword research.

I mentioned juicy content above. The truth is, you can spend a ton of time on a well-written piece of content; you can do your research, create an outline, craft really thoughtful language, however, if no one is searching for your content – the topic, or the keywords that you’re using – then the content might go into a black hole and never be appreciated for the breadth and depth of what you’ve written!

Furthermore, you have to also create content that is going to support your business objectives. If your website is being used for lead generation it might make more sense to expose part of your content, get your audience wanting more, and then gate the rest of your content to capture lead information. It’s about a balance and it really depends on your objectives.

But here’s an idea on how to create compelling content that ranks highly on search:

We start not with our idea of what we want to write about, but the opposite, with what your customers and clients are searching for.

Next we look at how they’re searching for these topics (keywords, also known as queries) so when we sit down to draft the copy of the site, we know what content will show up highly in search (that’s data-driven content – see?)

Then with our keyword research in hand, we know what keywords should be weaved into the copy, in the most natural way.

From here it’s a lot of back-end stuff that we build that informs google what else is on the site. (i.e. meta titles, image tags, meta descriptions, which are back-end tags that don’t live on the site but inform Google about what’s on the page.)

Sadly, it doesn’t end there – in fact, it never ends!  Because with any of our digital marketing strategies, we always measure and respond to what we learn from measuring results to continue our performance improvement programs.

After we launch your site with some of the above mentioned techniques, we will evaluate:

– Are we seeing a large uptick in traffic?

– Are the pages that we optimized ranking higher on search engines?

– What is our rank for specific searches that are highly important to the business?

– Is organic traffic (different from traffic driven by ad campaigns) contributing a larger portion of the leads?

– Are the leads from Google more or less quality than our other channels?

We use this information to analyze trends and then we decide on our next steps.

And while you may be focused on other parts of the business, nothing excites the technology folks more than driving you more traffic, more leads and ultimately more revenue!

And that’s the goal.

WHAT? Now I need a website AND a social media presence?

It seems like two minutes ago, small businesses were wrestling with the reasons why they needed a website – now you’re being told you also need to develop your social media presence. Why is that?

Let me first say, I am not a technologist  – not a coder, or programmer, or developer or any other job title I don’t fully understand. I am a marketing and sales professional.

I focus exclusively on the results you could get from these efforts; not how the technology behind it works. (For those of you looking to understand the technology, don’t worry, our chief engineer will be chiming in future blog posts!)

I like to start with asking “What are the key business benefits you are trying to achieve?”

• Strictly increase sales?
• Increase brand recognition?
• Lower traditional marketing costs?
• Boost search engine rankings for your website?
• Generate new sources of leads/inquiries?
• Create a new channel for improved customer service?
• Establish your brand as industry thought leaders?

In the first article in this series, let’s get back to the matter at hand.  Why does your business need an outstanding website plus a robust social media presence?

What do we mean by social media for a business?  Well here are two of the larger platforms that we will not be exploring in this series.

Does this mean Facebook?  Yup. We pass. While it may have value for some larger B2C businesses, Facebook is not currently the primary platform for businesses that sell to other businesses (B2B).  I’d say the same thing about Google+, especially after the removal of many business oriented services over the last two years. I’ll discuss Twitter and other niche social platforms later in the series, although these tend to be overwhelming and time consuming for beginners.  So I say pass here too (!).

What are the social media platforms that DO work for small businesses?

LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram, if used effectively, will drive inquiries (leads) back to your website, enhance your company’s image, and help you reach new and existing clients. We will examine these in detail in the next installment.

And I’ll say this a lot of times throughout this series: Every time you post anything to your social media ecosystem, (yea, that is what you’re building! – An ecosystem) always include a link to your website. With every social media post, you’re creating new points of entry for viewers to get to your company’s products and services.  (Plus your business cards, your stationary, your receipts, your invoices, …literally everywhere!)

And if the people who see your post or video or photo like it, they will share it. Then all of THEIR connections see your post or video and then those people share it and on and on and on.

And some people will follow you, so they’ll see some of the posts you share in the future organically, with links directly to their in-box.  These people are interested in your product or services, and are becoming loyal to your company (brand).

Achieving your business objective

The objective is clear: drive people interested in you and your company back to your website.  Once you are driving people interested in your company back to your website offer them something to retain their interest and start building their relationship with you: a newsletter, a white paper, a business token such as a free tee shirt anything to get them to “reveal” themselves.

Now you’ve captured their contact information. You can track where this lead came from when they sign up for your offer.  Did they get here through LinkedIn? YouTube? Instagram photos of your last project?

Next reach out to them with your sales effort and sell them something!

The reality for small businesses is that social media isn’t a trend or a fad; it has to be a part of your daily routine. Your customers are online and looking for places to share opinions, find information and establish a stronger relationship with your company – So, let them in.

Come back for the next installment where we will discuss ideas on using the key social media sites.

The most important reason you need a powerful web presence…

If there is only one reason…this is it:

Everyone has a list of reasons why they need an updated, improved or even a new website.

The real reason though is pretty simple and the list is short:

To make more money! 

I know that’s a bit blunt for some, but rather than share all of the soft benefits of one of the most powerful digital marketing tools there is, let’s focus on the bottom line: you can do more business with more clients, often at a higher price point, if your online presence is robust and dynamic. Rarely does any organization hire a company without checking out their website: examining case studies, looking at success credentials, exploring service/product offerings, checking out the profile of the principals of the company and even examining online profiles such as LinkedIn.

If all that passes muster, they will consider contacting your company, either through email, through a “Contact Us” page or even by telephone.

But it always starts with that first impression you make, and that impression is made by your website.

There are many other reasons to have a dynamic professional website (no …) like added credibility among potential clients, (and even potential employees!), to conduct business (ecommerce), and to share your core values as a company in a thoughtful (and hopefully entertaining or interesting) way.

However, maybe more importantly, you can track your visitors…you know who is checking your website, how they found it, how long they stayed on the site and which pages had the most interest.

In addition to prospective customers or clients, potential investors in your business such as banks, credit unions, and industry investors will view your website. If you look like a tiny business, you get a tiny credit line…but if you look like a big, well organized and professionally run business, you get a big credit line.

Plus…developing a professionally designed website, with a modest level of functionality is NOT expensive…you can build one for as little as $5,000!

Compare that to other communications investments you might consider such as signage outside your business, listing in directories, salespersons’ commission, lead generation services or any of the other ways you try to get business.

A professional, dynamic website pays for itself many times over. Small businesses have to compete with much larger companies that are getting larger each day… making it harder and harder to compete.

A powerful digital presence permits even a small company to compete against ANY sized company… but only modern and brave small companies will step into that breach

Take the plunge…be one of those companies!