Do you realize how close you may have come to winning some business – from a company you didn’t even know was looking at your business?

Every day, businesses unknowingly miss out on opportunities to engage potential prospects, primarily because of some simple things they may have overlooked on their website.

Could you be winning more customers who are looking for your products or services?

Here are 5 ways businesses lose sales and how to fix them.

1. You don’t show up well in online searches.

Studies indicate that more than 85% of people start their search online for products and services. So more than 5 out of 6 prospects use online searches to identify and qualify (or disqualify) providers they potentially want to do business with.

The fix: Improve your online visibility by optimizing your website for search engines. Understand the key words prospects will be using to look for your products. This is relatively simple when addressed by an SEO expert, and extremely valuable. There are at least three vital SEO components you should address: domain name selection, use of keywords on site tags and content.

2. Visitors to your website can’t tell what you do.

In doing business development exploring for my own company, I have come across any number of websites that say the company delivers high quality products and customer service and will exceed your expectations. But you have to dig to find out what they actually do, or what products or services they offer.

The fix: The way Google and other search engines index a website is by looking at the content and what that content says or how it is defined. At a minimum, you should have one sentence on your home page that clearly defines what your company does or offers, and make sure all page, headlines, photos, etc. all have proper tags that show up in your website code. For example, as a company description “ABC Industries makes hubcaps and bumpers for ’57 Chevys” is very specific and searchable. “DEF Industries makes high quality products for consumers and delivers outstanding customer service” is not very specific or searchable. Get this right and you’ll get more visits – and you’ll be better understood by those who do visit.

3. You don’t engage your visitors with online offers.

When prospects visit your website they are sizing you up. You may be one of 10 to 20 companies they are taking a preliminary look at to get an impression. They want to find a company they can trust, but your website makes it hard for them to determine that trust level.

The fix: Providing additional content lets visitors get to know you. For instance, offer free downloads of reports or white papers that provide useful information that don’t include sales offers. By exploring this type of information, prospects get a feel for how you might relate to them and how you might be to work with. Today, website content is king – and can be remarkably helpful to your prospects.

4. Website metrics are not being tracked.

I’m amazed at the number of companies that don’t know the metrics or statistics related to their website. They may not even have the free Google Analytics installed. Taking this one step alone can provide massive information on how to improve your website and make it look highly attractive to your prospects.

The fix: Install Google Analytics or another analytics package so you can see where your traffic is coming from, especially if you are advertising online, and what keywords visitors are using to find you – and what keywords you should add to your site. This is so important that we have added Google Analytics to some websites for free, even when we ended up not working with that prospect. Adding analytics can help put you ahead of your competitors online by providing you with vital information.

5. Not collecting visitor information.

Many websites provide a lot of information, but don’t collect information from visitors that can be used for future follow-up contact, such as email marketing or enewsletter marketing. In other words, building a database of visitors who are already interested in your company.

The fix: Email marketing remains one of the most used and best methods of reaching customers and prospects with product offers, sales information or simple and useful information. Put a prominent contact form on the right side of your website, above the fold, in order to let visitors sign up for your newsletter or email offers/notifications. Tie that form to an email software program such as Constant Contact or MailChimp that automatically captures the names and email addresses entered into the form. It also can send out an autoresponse thank you and notify you of new sign-ups via email.

By implementing these 5 tips, you can vastly improve your company visibility and the chance to snag that new business that you didn’t even know was out there.

On the heels of Apple’s iAd last year, Google announced that they are adding rich ad serving to mobile devices courtesy of HTML5. This announcement has flown under the radar for the most part so what makes this stand out from Apple’s service? The biggest difference is that these ads can be shown on regular websites whereas iAd is limited to only be used in apps. Google has added this service to DoubleClick, a company Google acquired in 2007 for $3.1 billion, under their rich media toolset called DoubleClick Studio.

Downloading the information sheet (pdf) that Google provided alongside this announcement shows that Google predicts, by 2015, mobile devices are going to be the number one screen though which people engage with advertiser’s brands. This is no small claim considering the level of adoption the personal computer has reached, but I’m not sure if television is included in that claim seeing how they are talking about interactive advertisements.

Mobile advertising can provide a level of usefulness that other forms of advertising haven’t been able to achieve. People bring these devices with them everywhere, and that on its own is an incredibly important aspect (ex. seeing an advertisement for a restaurant while at home might bring it to your attention to go there someday, but an ad for the same restaurant while you’re looking something up on your phone might help you choose where you’re going for lunch that day).

These devices have integrated cameras and a bunch of sensors so the level of interactivity and intuitiveness can surpass previous mediums. What has been seen on mobile devices thus far is just the tip of the iceberg, and having established distribution platforms evolve to accommodate these capabilities is a good starting point.

Direct marketing to a tightly targeted, database-driven audience has long proven its value. However, “database” has new meaning when it is attached to the 800 million names of people using Facebook. Did you know that you can target ads on Facebook directed to a geographic area, even a ZIP code? And based on sex, education level, age, gender — and even areas of interest, like “Iowa Hawkeyes” or “camping,” or from “toddler teacher” to “professor?” What if you were a local cake decorator or florist and knew you could reach a significant audience who identifies themselves as “engaged?”

I’ve heard people say of Facebook ads, “I can’t imagine people read those, though…” I beg to differ. While click-through rates are generally low, you are still getting your message out to an audience that fits. Because the ads are sold on a pay-per-click basis, you ONLY pay for them when someone sees the value in clicking on them. You don’t pay for impressions, or for people just to SEE them. Consider this – I recently ran a campaign for an event happening in my local community. Where else do you have the potential to reach 23,000 of the RIGHT people for less than a hundred bucks? And generate awareness and additional clicks to your website to boot?

Just like Google AdWords, the risk of advertising this way is minimal. People seem to be fearful of shifting media dollars to online entities because they think expenditures can really get out of hand online. They can if you aren’t careful about what you buy. However, with both Google AdWords and Facebook, there is a daily spend cap that allows the campaign to automatically shut down the ads once your spend limit has been reached. What do you have to lose from testing it?

Is Facebook advertising a fit for your product or service? HRB has developed our own Facebook Advertising Viability Analysis™ to help you decide. We’ll determine an expected reach, forecast and spend level based on the parameters you give us.

Fill out this form to find out what the NEW targeted marketing can do for you!

A site that’s online isn’t much of a site unless people go to it. The raw website visitor stats that services like Analytics and Quantcast provide sometimes aren’t enough for gauging the traffic flow to a site. A “link” is a fundamental way in which visitors reach a site, and direct links (typing in the web address) and search engines are the two other ways. Of course, there’s “good company” and “bad company” online that could be linking to you. I’m not going to discuss right & wrong in this article, but I will go over how to be more aware of one factor that affects all sites… backlinks.

Which method is best?

There’s a few different ways to find who’s linking to a site. Some are tools made available by search engines like Google while some are various services that are available online.

Google’s link: command (perfect for URL-specific stats)

Using link: as part of a Google search will list the webpages that have links to that specified webpage. For instance, link:www.google.com will list webpages that have links pointing to the Google homepage. Note there can be no space between the “link:” and the web page url. It’s also important to know that this finds the backlinks for that one URL, and doesn’t provide matches for every URL on the site. By the way, you can use the number of matches below the search box to get a rough number for assessing the online penetration of that webpage.

Google Webmaster Tools (perfect for site-wide stats)

As part of Google’s Webmaster Tools, they have “Your site on the web” => “Links to your site” in the side navigation that shows backlink stats for a site as a whole. Essentially, this provides:

• A list of sites and what pages they’re linking to
• Which page is being linked to the most
• The terms being used for the links
• and you can get fairly granular with each data set

Everything else

The above methods obviously depend on what Google has indexed, and similar tools are available using Bing and other search engines so one can diversify their data set. There’s also a great service from SEOmoz called Open Site Explorer that’s worth looking into.Unfortunately, searching for a tool that accumulates these stats resulted in finding a lot of adware/junk sites so your mileage may vary depending on the service being used.

Knowing who’s linking to a site a good way to understand what sort of company that site is involved with, and this can be helpful when working with the public relations & marketing for a website. It’s also a decent way to see what others are saying about a particular site, but do keep in mind that this is just one way that websites establish a connection with one another.

A digest of interesting marketing stories.

Google AdWords for Video Goes Beta on YouTube

YouTube has launched its beta version Google AdWords for video. The goal of this new tool is to simplify online video ad campaigns and allow advertisers to use a dynamic, auction-based platform to place and manage ads on YouTube and the Google Display Network. The platform, built on top of AdWords technology, uses the same pipeline to serve ads. Is this something you can use for your business? Take a look at the video on YouTube produced to introduce this service, or read about AdWords for video.

Want Free Publicity? Sign Up With HARO.

If you like to get free editorial coverage for your business, there is a way to monitor requests from editors and reporters. It’s called HARO, or Help A Reporter Out. This service has been around for several years. Here’s how it works once you sign up. Several times a day, five days a week, you receive an email containing 20 to 40 links to descriptions of articles reporters are planning. The reporters are looking for expert content sources. Here are some examples.

If you are a topic or content expert, or have one in your company, you can respond directly to the reporter. The topic areas include Biotech, Healthcare, Business and Finance, High Tech, Lifestyle and Fitness, Sports, Travel and more. To sign up, visit HARO and click on Become A Source. There are four participation levels, including FREE.

Twitter Ad Revenue of $135.5 Million Expected in 2011

Twitter is looking at a 210 percent increase in global ad revenue in 2011 over 2010. In its first full year of selling advertising (2010) revenues reached $45 million. According to a study by eMarketer, Twitter’s revenue projections for 2013 will reach $400 million. “Since their debut in April 2010, Twitter’s Promoted Products have proven successful in the U.S.,’ said eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson.

Corporate America is on a Hiring Binge for Social Media Workers

One billion users on Facebook and Twitter make an appealing audience for many companies. Ragan’s HR Communication reports on an article in The Los Angeles Times, which finds that experts in marketing a company’s name and wares on social network sites are in big demand. The number of social media-related jobs on Monster has surged 75 percent over the last year. About 155 positions are available each month, up from an average of 88 per month a year ago. If you need help in this area, HRB has social media experts on staff who can get you started, integrate your social media with your traditional media, or help you take it to the next level.

Call us at 800-728-2656. Request ext. 121.

As a Web design and marketing firm, HRB is receiving more requests from its clients to develop websites that generate leads and sales.

Your website is the most powerful sales and marketing tool available. It works 24 hours a day, rain or shine, and represents the face of the brand to the marketplace.

Successful websites are not just pretty online brochures. They convert traffic into leads and sales. So, if you are going to put time, effort and dollars into driving traffic to your website, why not ensure you have the tools in place to capture lead information, automate responses to inquiries and offer content visitors want to see?

Many websites are missing these critical elements.

Build a Site for Leads

If you want your website to generate leads, it must be designed and optimized for that purpose. That means offering valuable free content about your products and services (in text, video or audio), giving visitors a form to sign up for your email marketing and optimizing each Web page with your Web keywords and keyword phrases.

Build Trust with Quality Content

In order to do business with you, prospects and customers need to trust you. Trust that you are who you say you are and will do what you say you will do. During the research and buying cycle, visitors are looking for the vendor that presents the lowest risk. Ensure that your website establishes your credibility by sharing your expertise through helpful blogs, articles and white papers or ebooks.

Use Offers to Attract Visitors

Offers such as free information, a limited time sale, or “buy two and get one free” are great ways to draw attention and traffic to your website. It’s imperative that when you get good traffic to make sure you are prepared to collect lead data on your website and follow up on each lead.

Always Use Calls to Action

In order to make it easy for your visitors, let them know what you want them to do next by including a call to action. Don’t make them guess that you would like them to sign up for your enewsletter, download something, take part in a contest or to contact you for further engagement. You can number the steps, if necessary, or provide a prominent form for them to fill out on all your Web pages. And, in general, increase their response by reducing the choices they need to make.

Respond Quickly to Leads

Companies often spend substantial dollars to generate Web leads, and use lead management and CRM systems to track them. Sometimes companies overlook how slowly they respond to these leads. A Kellogg Study on Lead Response Management revealed the odds of connecting with a lead increases by 100 times if attempted within 5 minutes versus 30 minutes. And the odds of converting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes increases by 21 times.

Focus Content on Benefits

Website content should address company or product benefits, not just features. Potential customers want to know what’s in a visit to your website for them. Focus your content on how your product or service will make their lives easier, better or richer.

Analytics are Key to Success

Every website should have analytics software installed in order to see what’s happening on the site. If you never establish a baseline measurement for key performance indicators such as visits, unique visits, bounce rate and downloads you will have a hard time determining if you are achieving your website goals. Analytics are vital to determining site performance and can help you with testing to improve online results.

Great Websites Generate Great Leads

If your website is not generating any leads for you, it may be that one or more of the key items listed here is missing from your site. Contact us for an assessment of your site. We offer Web design and development services, as well as optimization for conversion of leads to sales. Let us know if you would like to take the first step to turning your website into a lead and sales generator for your business.

Check out the last paragraph for a free keyword analysis.

Having a great website is one thing, but driving traffic to it is another art in itself. Since so much Internet traffic is driven by search engines, it is very important to ensure that your site is not only attractive and user friendly, it must also be search engine optimized. Most search queries on Google yield millions of results. Yet most users don’t look past the first page of about 10 of those search results. Ninety percent of users don’t look past page three of the search results. So your goal should be to land on the first page — better yet, within the top three listings.

SEO is the process which Web developers undertake to ensure a site is found by the search engines. Search engine algorithms are very complex, and they change readily, so it is important to follow general best practices rather than chase every revision to the algorithm. Some of the factors that play into this are the domain name of your site, the time it has been in existence, the title tag of the site, the words within the headers, subheads, and photo tags of the site; and the words within the site content itself. These critical elements need to be clearly and accurately defined to give your site the best chance to be found for its content when crawled by Google and the other search engines. This is referred to as organic optimization.

The frequency of words within a given page is called “word weight” and the goal word weight on a particular keyword phrase you want to optimize needs to be at least 4%. That means for every 100 words of searchable content on the page, the phrase should appear at least four times within it. This is also why, in order for a site to be legible and easily understood, it is difficult to organically optimize for too many terms. Therefore, we often recommend sponsored search on Google in addition to SEO efforts. (For clarity’s sake I won’t go into sponsored search here, so stay tuned for it in another post.)

What is Relevant Traffic?

You need to know how your site is found – or how you want your site to be found. To do that, you must think like a searcher. Determine which keywords or keyword phrases will send you the most relevant traffic. Then implement them within your site in a way that influences search results.

At HRB, we do this by using what we know about searchers and the actual data that comes from Google in regard to search terms and volumes. We learn what the goals of your site are, what product or service you offer, and to whom. We take all of that information and provide you with a keyword list that is prioritized with the most viable terms. Then we (or you) use the keywords within SEO efforts, site content, sponsored search, and public relations releases and application stories in order to drive traffic to your site.

Since we are adamant about the value of keyword analysis as the first step to gain more website traffic, we’re offering a FREE keyword analysis to the first ten people who respond to our offer here. Whether you take us up on that or not, good luck making your Web words work.

More on sponsored search next time!

You might understand traditional media like the back of your hand.  But when it comes to new or “newer” media channels, you probably have a difficult time discerning where your time and money is best spent.  In fact, the Web 2.0 terms and its growing number of channels will just keep coming before you can figure out what they are, let alone how to use them.

Integrating those new channels with traditional media into a cohesive campaign that reaches the right people at the right time – with the message you want to tell – that’s difficult.

And that’s where we come in.

The goal of using social media is to build a dialog and relationship with an interested audience.  However, the added benefit is that, because of the elements of search engine optimization, using social media can also drive more traffic to your web site – relevant traffic.

Think of each person that clicks from a search term onto your page as a “prospect”.  What do you want that prospect to do?  If you want them to purchase something, you place the item for sale directly on the landing page.  Ca-ching!

If you want to develop a prospect contact list, you might have them sign up for more information, a newsletter or a contact from a sales agent.  Regardless, once you have a name of someone tied to the click, you can make them a part of your customer relationship management (CRM) strategies.

In other words, you can – and should – use Web 2.0 elements in order to gain traffic and ultimately acquire leads that you can then address with BOTH traditional and non-traditional marketing channels.

Examples of Channel Integration

Simple:  A direct mail piece that directs the reader to a landing page of its web site.

More complex:  A postcard printed with a QR (Quick Response) code that the reader can scan with their smartphone in order to go directly to the web landing page through the app on their phone.  The web landing page contains more information and a link to sign up or buy.   This method capitalizes on the technology to take the user directly to the end result they want – quickly – before they can change their mind or be distracted with other things.

Simple:  Start a blog and repurpose your blog content into a periodic newsletter.  Email your newsletter to your email database and post it on your web site.

More complex: Create an event, set up an event page on Facebook, link it to your corporate Facebook page, post it on your web site.  Use Twitter to tweet about your event; embed another tweet with a tiny URL link to a signup page.  Send postcard invitations with a QR code to the signup page.

Your company’s social media activity can also help build your brand credibility, retain website visitors and help with search engine rankings by providing engaging content that can be indexed regularly. Both Facebook and Twitter should be used to routinely communicate new information, products and offers, and to connect with people who are commenting about your company, positively or negatively.  The beauty of social media is also that you can respond – quickly.

Social media must be seen and used as a fully-integrated partner to your traditional marketing efforts.  As a result, there needs to be cooperation and coordination to be certain your brand “voice” is consistent, campaign efforts are properly timed and clear metrics are determined.

Start now!

I suggest you start incorporating Web 2.0 elements into your plan right now.  After all, social media isn’t going away.  According to the Nielsen Co. (2010), Americans spent 23% more time on social networking sites and blogs in 2010 than they did in 2009.  The category has seen — and continues to see — exponential growth.

But that can be intimidating.  What is most important is to have a plan that is manageable to maintain.  Don’t promise a daily blog if that seems daunting; rather, a weekly blog and a tweet or two a day might be reasonable.

To learn more details about social media, download our free whitepaper or email me swest@hrb-ideas.com.

We’ve all grown accustomed to the idea that search engines take a word or phrase that you write, and then retrieve a list of results the search engines have determined is the most relevant to your search. One thing international businesses should take into consideration is these words and phrases change when they’re in different languages. Searching for something in english shouldn’t return results in a different language since the user won’t be able to get anything out of them. Not even the introduction of image-based searching changes this since the user still chooses a language preference for their results. This is important when working with international companies considering search engines return results based on the user’s primary language.

Many sites are utilizing automated translation that takes a single version of the site content and translates it into whatever language the user wants. The accuracy of these translators is always improving, but there’s always the potential of having errors that make the lack of attention to detail stand out like a sore thumb. The more important issue caused by using an on-demand translator is that the numerous translations people might use won’t actually be indexed (included in) by search engines whereas the source material is.

The way to get a multilingual website indexed in each language is to make copies of the source material for each language. This is especially true because search engines aren’t currently able to derive automated translations from the automated tools. By making copies of the source materials in the different languages, the search engines have raw and unique content to crawl for the different languages, and it communicates a level of commitment the site owners had to undergo to make the translated versions. This has the additional benefits of allowing the site to cater to a more specific audience and being able to avoid the mistakes an automated translator might make. The different languages need to be separated some way, and there are different methods that web developers can choose from where each have their advantages and disadvantages.

Separating the languages via a top-level folder (ie. http://www.example.com/en/ & http://www.example.com/es/) allows for a single domain to contain the whole site and every language. This makes it so that each language helps to contribute to a single site’s search engine rankings rather than being dispersed across country specific domain names (ie. http://www.example.co.uk). The centralized location allows for a single address to be shared that then gives the user a choice of the region and/or language they prefer. International website designers can also integrate a language selector to guide users to the corresponding page in the desired language, and Google has tools to ensure each different language section of the site is indexed properly.

In light current client developments this is something we have been researching heavily. We welcome all on-comers who might be interested in more information.

Whether you’re a social media novice or expert, it’s important to remember that the Internet never sleeps. While we may need eight hours of rest before returning to work in pursuit of our blog, Internet marketing and public relations goals, there are millions of Internet users who continue to post content when we hit the hay.

With recent changes in search engines and today’s short attention spans, people are now expected to post and promote new content regularly. While automation tools are helping companies and brands share information around the clock, many employees still feel worn out at the end of the day. It’s a lot of work to consistently post and track content on top of our everyday responsibilities, yet it’s more crucial than ever that we monitor what people are saying about us.

Throughout my internship at HRB, I’ve worked on accounts that have needed immediate attention because someone wasn’t listening. A news release wasn’t posted on time, a complaint from a dissatisfied customer slipped past a Community Manager or a competitor beat a client to the punch. I’ve learned these problems can be prevented if we take the time to monitor the Internet and our social media accounts.

Here are 10 reasons why you should proactively and consistently monitor the brands of your company or client:

1) The Point of Need — Information and research is always changing. People are always talking about the latest news and they expect to be kept in the know. It’s important to satisfy these needs and you can do this by following RSS feeds and writing blogs about client events and industry changes. We’ve done this and we’ve heard good reviews from clients and interns who turn to our site for updates and information and can easily find what they’re looking for. (Just be sure to set up blog categories so your website visitors can easily find what they’re looking for!)

2) The Influencer — In today’s business markets the competition is more fierce than ever. Consumers are overwhelmed by the variety of choices they’re given and they’re willing and ready to remain loyalty with one brand, service or product.

Establishing and actively maintaining a presence on Facebook® and Twitter® may seem trivial, but it’s absolutely necessary because your competitors are all doing it. After a prospective client “Googles®” your company, they will immediately turn to social networking websites to see if you’ve built a presence there to listen and engage with others. If you want to be viewed as an influencer, it only makes sense that you engage in networks or outlets that are influential. And right now, that’s Facebook and Twitter.

3) The Crowd — Bloggers, fans and Internet marketing gurus can all be influencers if they have a strong following. Target them when planning your social media campaign or invite them to guest blog for your company or your client’s company. Be sure to respond to their comments promptly. Check out my Friday blog posts—in particular, this post mentioning my Top PR Reads—to see which crowds I follow online.

4) The Competitor — It’s wise to follow, acknowledge and learn from your competitors. They can be huge motivators when it comes to learning about the needs of your mutual target audience.

The goal in using social media isn’t to blab about your own brand, but to create social capital, or a representation of your brand’s “social currency” via online and offline conversations, reciprocity and relationships. We use metrics to determine who’s influential, who we should be following and how we can be unique in our own campaigns.

5) The Crisis — Reading social media updates around the clock helps HRB anticipate, manage and be transparent about PR crises experienced by our own clients and others in our industry. Bottom line: Ignoring crises shows that your agency is disconnected from your audience and may be incapable of dealing with problems head-on.

6) The Campaign Impact — Be sure to measure your ROI and determine if your campaigns are working. Many social media platforms have built-in analytics tools, so educate your team members and your clients about how they work and what they can show you about your clients’ growth and sales progress.

Also, if you’re getting a lot of comments, responses or “Likes” on your blogs or social media pages, this is a great opportunity to showcase your brand’s expertise. Respond quickly and engage with your audience. After all, you can never really be sure who your audience is, and a prospective client may be listening!

7) The Question/Inquiry — As stated above, make sure that your client or your client’s account manager(s) respond quickly and completely to questions and inquiries. These may be posted directly in your news feeds or profile pages, or as direct messages via e-mail or a “Contact Us” form. This can be easy if you designate one person, such as a Public Relations Director or company spokesperson, to respond to such issues.

For the last six months, I’ve been responsible for responding to all questions, comments and concerns about HRB that are posted daily on the company’s social media sites. Sometimes it’s hard to respond to everyone in a timely manner, but it’s been really interesting to see which posts generate the most traffic to our website and which “fans” end up becoming clients.
The Problem — Problems are easier to solve when you know: a) that they exist and b) why they’re occurring. Do a little research if you’re getting negative comments or your followers aren’t responding to your social media engagement tactics.

9) The Compliments — Everyone loves to be complimented. Link to your competitors’ social media pages, blog articles and websites on your company’s own social networks to show you’re not full of yourself. Your company may think you’re a leader in your industry, but so do all of your competitors. Show them a little SEO love. Create Twitter lists, as I’ve done for HRB, to follow, acknowledge and compliment them by re-tweeting their tweets.

10) The Complaints — As I’ve stated in previous blogs, listening is the new marketing. Create e-mail alerts that can be sent to you each time someone posts a comment on your social media pages, and if it’s a complaint, quell that individual’s anger by opening up an honest dialogue. Focus on the positives, not the negatives, and take the conversation offline if it requires further attention or a response from a manager. If you truly listen to outside complaints, you have a unique opportunity to learn and change, showing that your company or client is attentive and understanding.

These are just the ways I proactively manage brands. What tactics do you use on behalf of your company or clients?