Author Archive

Why SEO is a core component of a modern marketing plan

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 by Esther
Search Engine Optimization: Get Found

Image Credit: Danard Vincente

As you will have read in yesterday’s blog post I am currently signed up to the HubSpot Inbound Marketing University.  Today’s lecture was given by Lee Odden from TopRank Online Marketing and was a SEO Crash Course to Get Found (GF102).  My assignment today is not to cover off SEO best practices or neat ways to increase your Google ranking – it is to explain why a marketer would want to include SEO in his/her web marketing.  So here goes……..

To sum it up in a sentence: Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a great way to help people find you online for free.

That is basically all there is to it.

If people can’t find you online they won’t visit your website and won’t purchase any products or services.  Whilst SEO is not the only way to help people find you recent studies show that it is the most cost effective method of online marketing.  A study carried out by Forbes in 2009 showed that nearly half of all their respondents confirmed that SEO has been the most effective tool for generating conversions online.  That is a statistic that can not be ignored by any responsible marketer and must be included into any rigorous marketing plan.

Should you need another reason to start implementing SEO on your website then I can give you one: It is free to do!

Now I know that there are many companies who offer a service to optimize your website and I am not going to enter into a debate on white-hat or black-hat SEO or whether they are scamming you.  I am not hear to judge and as I have never used a company like this I can’t really comment.  The point is that if you have the time you can optimize your site yourself and save yourself the money of employing an external or additional party to undertake the work.  If you haven’t got the time to carry out the work yourself then there is nothing wrong with employing a reputable firm to take on the job – just make sure that they tell you what they have done so you can continue their good work.

I would highly recommend that you watch the SEO Crash Course to Get Found (GF102) if you want to find out more about what you can do.

Finally what if you are a start up and haven’t got a website what can you do?  Well we firmly believe that if a website is built correctly then the Search Engine Optimisation is truly organic.  When you are designing the architecture of the site and the content you should be focusing it to make sure that it is optimized by:

  1. Structuring the website so that it is easy for the search engine spiders or bots to crawl easily.
  2. Use suitable URLs that make sense and are as short as possible.
  3. Have plenty of content to upload immediately and make sure that you update the content regularly post launch.
  4. All your content must be key word focused based on you initial market research findings.
  5. You have plenty of other websites that you are able to link to either as partners or clients or references.

Once you have built your website ensuring that you take into account all these factors then you should be quickly and easily found and indexed by search engines.

Finally, the most important thing, no matter what stage your company or website is at, is that you continuously track, monitor and measure how well you are performing in terms of SEO.  We personally love Google Analytics as a tool for this but there are plenty of alternative free and paid for tools you can use.  You will then be able to clearly see which techniques have made a real difference to both your search engine rankings but most importantly your bottom line making sure that all your SEO initiatives are based on real world usage of your website rather than an educated guess.

3 Best Practices for Blogging

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 by Esther

Picture by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Here at Border Crossing Media we always try something before we recommend it.  This month I have signed myself up for the HubSpot Inbound Marketing University. I hope that after my 16 hours of lectures and homework assignments I’ll get a nice shiney badge and will have picked up some useful information along the way.

My first lecture has been ‘How to Blog Effectively for Business’ and my homework is to write a blog piece about 3 best practices for blogging.  So I have watched the video, listened to the questions and even printed out and scrawled all over the slides.  Was it interesting?  Some of it was and whilst the rest of it was fairly obvious it is always good to get a gentle reminder as to what you should be doing.  I have picked out three of their recommendations that I fully agree with and that we recommend to our Clients who are going to commence blogging:

1. Be a content creator.

This seems obvious but is often missed.  You are creating content that your Customers or users will want to read IN ADDITION to the information that is already available on your site.  Your blog is a smart way to create organic SEO and interact with your Customers outside of your usual activities.   Most blog readers are very internet savvy.  They won’t be fooled by a blog post that is trying to upsell a product or service as a post of any value.  That is not to say that you can’t talk about your services or products at all in blogs, just make sure that you are giving added value to your reader and that the reason for the post is for additional information and not a marketing ploy.

2. Its a way of life

This is probably the hardest bit in many ways.  If you start a blog, you have to keep going.  There is nothing worse than coming across a blog that started in Jan 2009 and only has post upto March 2009.  Even if the company  has gone from strength to strength the blog leaves the reader with a negative perception of the company.  Therefore before you commence your company blog you have to make sure that you will commit to it in the long term.

One piece of advice that we have recently given our clients is to trial how much blog content you can produce in a week and see how many people are interested in reading it.  The Client in question wanted a bespoke blog to be built and released before they had even tested the waters or tried to write a piece.  Now I know that the Client has time constraints as it is and so was not sure that they would have additional hours in their week to write blog content and administrate their own site.  Rather than sell them a site that they don’t need and then upsell administrating it for them we recommended that they use their Facebook Page and if it takes off after a couple of months we’ll build them a  blog. If it doesn’t they have not lost any money nor will they see a negative impact on their perception as an organization.

3. Be open about your commenting policy

One of the main advantages of writing a blog piece is that the reader is able to leave a comment to express their opinion. This is a great way to start a two-way conversation and engage with your Customers or users. However nothing will put off a reader more than leaving a comment and then it disappearing or maybe never appearing. The solution to this is to be upfront and open about your commenting policy.

We personally have all comments modified. This is because we receive a lot of spam comments on our blog.  If you leave a comment I will get an email to tell me and then I can decide whether it goes up or not.  You may think this is just censorship but please let me confirm that we only refuse comments that are blantant spam or offensive.  Any other comment would make it up.

Before you start your blog you should decide on how you want to moderate comments.   Be open on your blog and let people know so that if they leave you a comment they do not feel that either your blog doens’t work or their comment is not important enough to go up or that you are ignoring them.

So those are 3 best pratices for blogging but what would you recommend as a blogging best practice?  Leave me a comment and I promise we won’t ignore you!

Online Profiles Hubs – which do you prefer?

Monday, July 19th, 2010 by Esther

Create online business card

Vs

 OnePage

When I joined Border Crossing Media last year Frank and I discussed setting up a personal website/blogging platform. There were several reasons for creating one such as building a nice portfolio piece for the company, creating additional link juice for our site, improving my online profile and giving me an additional channel to share my views on dolphins.

However a whole website seemed a tad over the top as in addition to this blog and website I have plenty of accounts for these purposes:

Surely if people wanted to have information from me they would look here…..but then how would they find these?

This is when we came across this excellent little website from Shaun Inman and I realised that was all I wanted – a single page which simply tells people who I am and how to contact me. Seeing as we are a UX design firm specialising in researching and building beautiful websites we started looking into whether there were services like this out there and if anyone was really using them.

The answer to those questions is yes there are definitely services out there and as to whether people use them – well they are certainly catching on. When we started to look into it there were two services that caught my eye: OnePage and Card.ly

Create online business card

First I checked out Card.ly – a service that you can sign up for and create a mini profile hub that contains some personal bio, links to your websites and networks and contact routes. It seems that Card.ly was born out of a similar circumstance that I found myself in and they devised stock themes to address the problem. They offer a free service where you can get basic themes or skins and a premium service with additional themes, your own domain.com, removal of ads and Card.ly banners.

I signed up (for the free service) and found the process nice and simple to execute in terms of signing-up and creating the links to my profiles etc. Then I had to choose my skin to present the information. Now I should preface this by saying that I have just logged back into Card.ly and they have appeared to have changed the way you choose your skin.  There were quite a few available and each was represented by a tiny thumbnail which you then had to preview with your details just to see what it looked like. From a UX design point of view I got really frustrated and to be honest nearly gave up! I decided to persevere and choice the starry theme and that was that. I showed Frank what it looked like and we had a little giggle and decided to move on.

OnePage

What I moved on to was OnePage – who market themselves as providers of online business cards. To be honest they offer a very similar service to Card.ly without the paid for additions. I had some issues signing in for the service, there seemed to be a bug that kept me in an eternal loop of entering my password and going back to the home page. I decided to have a little tweet about it and got a tweet from @Joelg87, the founder of OnePage who helped me through the process and fixed the bug that was affecting me. Once I was signed in I was impressed at how easy it was to create a very professional looking online business card. There are limitations to OnePage such as a lack of choice in terms of design, custom URLs and no paid for services. However the product is in beta and so these things may be coming in the near future.

So which did I prefer? Well whilst OnePage is limited and I had a few issues signing in I much preferred the end-result. I was also incredibly impressed with the Customer Service from Joel Gascoigne and can see that OnePage could catch on. I’d like to know which you prefer so check out my card.ly and MyOnePage let me know which you prefer or if you know of an alternative product that you use.

3 Things That Made Us Better

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 by Esther
Process Map

BCM's Initial Client Contact Process Map

Here are 3 things that I have introduced at Border Crossing Media.   You would most likely see them in a large organisation but they have helped us grow as a company:

1.  Process Maps

A process map is a diagram that clearly defines each step of a process or task, who is responsible for that step and preferably the time and cost of each step.  It allows you to see a project, process or task, on a granular level and work out the most efficient, cost effective method for producing deliverables independent of who undertakes the work.

You do have to invest time to map out each individual task or process, I had to sit with my partner for a day and draw out each process for each of our service areas, but the benefits of having a good set of process maps mean that you get numerous benefits.

The best thing we have found is to map them out initially and then test them over time and improve them. Your maps are a working document, not the fixed solution, that you can adapt over time as your business changes and grows.

The benefits of investing in process maps are:

  • Consistency: By having a clearly defined process map for people to follow they will be able to deliver the same quality of result every time, independent of who undertakes the task.
  • Efficiency: Mapping out each step you undertake for a process means that you can assess whether you are taking extra, unnecessary steps that are not adding value to the outcome.
  • Understanding: If your standard processes are mapped then anyone can quickly review them and understand how and why your business works.  It helps with training new staff as they can understand your method from start to finish without necessarily undergoing them and they are great for Clients who are querying why tasks take the length of time or cost of a process.
  • Faster, accurate quotes: We quickly assess the length of time a project will take and therefore cost it quickly by taking our standard process map, adding any additional elements that are required and any external costs that will be occurred.  It takes us a lot less time to quote for Clients and it gives us an accurate, realistic quote.

2. Action Plans

It is very easy not to be able to see the woods from the trees sometimes and so even though you may have your finger on the pulse of the business do you take the time out to review where you are in terms of your goals, objectives and performance.

When I joined Border Crossing Media there were clear objectives that we wanted to achieve.  Most of the time we knew how we going to do it and went about getting them done.

We wanted to be able to measure our companies performance, and therefore our success, and make sure that the actions and decisions that we took would be of value to us.  So we took some time out at the end of Q1 to review our company objectives.  I asked everyone to come up with at least 5 objectives for 2010 and we all got together and compiled a list of objectives that we agreed as a team we wanted to achieve.  We then split them into high and low level objectives and built them into an action plan.  We give each action a RAG (Red = Not on schedule, Amber = On schedule, Green = On target) Status to show where we are with each one.

We now update each other weekly as to the progress on the actions that we have assigned to ourselves which means that we are all kept in the loop and there is more accountability within the company.  I am also happy to report that to date there are no red actions on the plan!

3. Board Reports

Even if you know everything that goes on in your company it is a good idea to make sure you write quarterly a Board Report.  It is a snapshot of the performance of your company for the last quarter and will highlight anything that is planned for the next quarter.

I produce a lengthy report on a quarterly basis that covers:

1. Company Objectives and progress

2. Finance

3. Marketing

4. Technical

5. Project Progress

6. Client Update

7. HR

8. Any Other Business (AOB)

It is amazing how you can know how your company is performing but when you put it in black and white it gives you focus.  Plus it is a great document to have to hand if you need any financing or other external support and makes a good addition to your business plan.

So those are three things that I have implemented at Border Crossing Media that have made a tangible difference to both the Company’s bottom-line but also to how we all work together.  Why don’t you give some a try if you are not already.  They may not work for your particular organisation but if you don’t give things a go how will you know if they could have helped?

Good luck and let me know what works and what doesn’t work for you.

Determine your online strategy

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 by Esther

Chesspieces

I am going to start this post with a simple assumption – that you have  a business plan.

As part of your business plan you have noted that you need an online presence.  In essence you need a website – you may not be sure why but everyone else has one so its likely you do too.  You might also need to have a social media strategy but I’ll pick up on this in a later post (if you can’t wait then check out Hubspot for some easily accessible information and pointers).

There is so much information out there and your competitors are everywhere online so what do you do and where do you start?

Well the first thing to do is to think about what you want to get out of your online business presence.  What is your main objective for having a website?

It seems like a simple question but there are huge implications depending on the route that you choose to take.

When the World Wide Web (sometimes referred to as Web 1.0) was created by Sir Tim Berbers-Lee the intention was for people to be able to share and link information documents easily. It wasn’t long before everywhere you looked online there were business brochure websites popping up. It made sense and started to attract people to their companies but just like their paper counterparts these static websites had no real way to increase the conversion rate of ‘browsers’ to ‘consumers’.

Enter Web 2.0 in 2004.

You may be asking: ‘What is Web 2.0 exactly?  Was there an update on everyone’s computer that I missed?’.

Don’t panic there wasn’t!

In fact it was merely a change in attitude to the way in which the Internet was to be used. Instead of a collection of information that was static and difficult to find there were new programs and platforms coming out that were designed around the way we use the Internet. Andrew McAfee defined Web 2.0 with an acronym:

Search:   Find information through keyword searches using Google, Yahoo, Bing etc
Links:   Connect information together through hyperlinks
Authoring: Everyone has the ability to create and update content on the Internet
Tags: Categorise information by assigning tags or keywords
Extensions: Using software to make the Internet become an application platform as well as a document server
Signals: Using syndication technology – allowing you to get feeds of updated work such as blogs etc. e.g. RSS

This was not a new World Wide Web, as Sir Tim Berbers-Lee pointed out, it was simply the way it was always supposed to work!  People began to adopt this attitude and created new, exciting products and websites online allowing us to see the real power that the Internet gives a business to interact with it’s Consumers.

So now lets go back to your online strategy. If you really are investing in an online presence and want a good return on your investment (ROI) then take the ‘Web 2.0′ approach to your website:

Search: Make sure that your website is easy for Search Engines to read.  A search engine works by sending out ’spiders’ or ‘bots’ to crawl your website for keywords on your web pages and hyperlinks. Once every page on your website has been crawled it then indexes it to a massive database that collates all the information online and uses an algorithm to determine the most relevant results to any query.  The more relevant your information is to the subject, the higher your ranking will be.

Links: Are really important to any website.  Firstly from the point of view of the user it is easier to find the information by clicking on a link to the next page or another website then typing in the full address or URL.  People will spend more time online and will ’surf’ through more pages simply because it is easy.  Links are also good because if you can link your website to other popular, established, trusted websites then search engine spiders will read these and think that your website is popular and trusted too.  This is referred to as building ‘link juice’. Be careful though, you should only ever link your company to websites you trust. Search engine spiders are clever enough to know when they are being gamed and this can seriously effect your ranking.  Also if you have more than 100 unique links on a web page then the spiders stop reading them, I like to think they get tired or a bit bored, and therefore only offer value to your Consumers not search engines.

Authoring: The more interesting the information is on your website the more people will read it. If you update it regularly then people will come back to see what you have changed.  It is also good to get your Customers or Consumers involved in creating this information. This is why blogs, wikis and social networking are becoming so popular – people like to be part of the content creation process and therefore ‘buy in’ to the overall business concept.

Tags: If you assign tags to the content that you create both your Consumers and search engines will find it easier to find exactly what they are looking for by category.  It makes your website work in a similar fashion as a human brain by putting each bit into a special compartment with a relevant label on it.

Extensions: Think about how you can enhance your business online through different applications and software. Instead of just showing them what your business can offer, let them buy things or try them online.  I recently came across hairdressers who are now allowing you to not only book your appointment online but also upload your photo to try out different hairstyles by superimposing them on your picture.  A simple but effective enhancement to the traditional hairdresser’s brochure/booking website.

Signals: Why wait for people to check your website for your new blog piece or product update?  Make it easier for your consumers to access the latest information by telling them about it.  Syndication tools allows you to do this easily and in a way in which the consumer wants.  Your consumers may want a daily update as to what is happening in your business or they may only want it monthly.  Syndication technology allows you to share this information with them in the way that they want making them more likely to actually consume and react to it.

So whilst you are determining your online strategy you need to bare these pointed in mind. Before you go and build your new website think about why you want it, who is going to use it, and how. I’d also suggest using the SLATES approach to consider how you can enhance what you are offering your Consumers.

Photo credit: CogDog Blog

What the VoC?

Monday, March 1st, 2010 by Esther

Ears‘VoC’ or ‘Voice of the Customer’ reports are becoming an increasingly popular topic. But what is a VoC report and do you really need one?

What is a Voice of the Customer Report?

Voice of the Customer reports are simply a synopsis of what your Customer’s are saying. A good Voice of the Customer report allows you to ascertain the opinions of your Customers about your business, the service you provide or the products you sell. It should give you:

  • Quantitative information to use as a metric of tracking your Customer Satisfaction.
  • Qualitative information to convert into tangible business improvements that matter to your Customers.

So do you really need this information?

YES!!!! If you have a business that has Customers (I have tried to think of a business model that does not and can’t so this means YOU) then you need to know what they think and say about you for two main reasons:

  1. Customer Loyalty – your customers will be loyal if you listen to them and amend your product/service to their wants and needs.
  2. Your Company Reputation – the way that people communicate has changed.  If a Customer had a bad experience in the past they would probably moan to you and a few of their friends, causing limited damage to your company profile. The introduction of the Internet means people can moan to the whole world about you, with immediate impact.

A VoC report will not stop this from happening. What it does do is allow you to deal with issues directly and rectify them for the future. Everyone makes mistakes  - it is how you deal with them that has the final impact on your Customer.

Where should I get this VoC data from?

It depends on what sort of Company you are and who your target audience is. Online businesses are different from offline ones and you need to tailor your approach to your Company.

The first step in gaining information for a VoC report is to identify your Key Customers. These people may be the ones who bring in the most business either directly or through association. They could be high revenue Customers, hubs of networks or the people who shout the loudest when things go wrong.

The point is to identify who adds the most benefit to your business or could introduce risk to your business.

The next step is gaining the information. There are many ways to gauge your Customers opinion and a good VoC report should be both qualitative and quantitative. You will need one or two different techniques to get a full insight into their opinions.

Here are the three I think are a ‘must-have’ for any good report:

  • Talk to them directly: call your key Customers and arrange a suitable time for a feedback session, either face to face or via Skype. By having a conversation with them you can get to the nitty gritty of what matters to them as people and how you can help make their lives easier. Ask open questions and let them lead the conversation so you can truly get an insight into what makes them tick. Sounds simple, and it’s a great relationship building opportunity, but it’s actually quite difficult. The hardest thing is to sit and take feedback directly, especially if it is negative. Think carefully about how you would react to someone telling you that you’re rubbish before you pick up the phone – if it’s badly then don’t! This method only gives you a qualitative response so you need to consider some of the other options to gain quantitative information.
  • Feedback Surveys: conducting feedback surveys means you can ask both quantitative questions and for verbatim feedback. Ideally the questions would be based around the reaction from your direct contact with Customers or to ask about changes to your company/service/business. This will give you a high level overview of what Customers think. The minimum number of responses that you need to make statistical inferences from your data is normally 50. Your survey should contain a mixture of open and closed questions. Warning: you have to be careful of the wording of the questions so the questions do not directly influence the answer. The closed questions should normally request your customer to give a quantitative response and the open ones are to drill into the meaning behind the scores.

Example of a closed question:

Please would you rate your overall experience of Border Crossing Media where 5 = excellent; 4 = good; 3 = average; 2= quite poor; 1= very poor.’

Example of an open question:

‘Now can you please tell me why you rated your experience at that level?’

Or

‘What could we have done to make your experience a 5?’

  • Listen to what they are saying about you: there are so many ways for people to share what’s on their mind it has become hard to track what is out there about your company. Gone are the days where you could buy a set of papers and quickly flick through looking for your company’s name. Now there are so many social networking sites not to mention blogs how can you stay on top of it all without employing someone full time? Well there are some good listening tools that will do most of the hard work for you. Finding the right tool depends on your company and how much time you have to dedicate to it. Google have some great free tools that you can use to track keywords, such as your company name, products or even individuals. You can also utilise the various social media listening tools. Many of these are free and quite new. I personally use TweetDeck as it allows me to monitor our company on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. We are currently testing a load of other listening tools and will give our opinions of those in the coming future. My advice is give it a bash for a week and if it isn’t working there will be another tool out there that will.

The information from all these sources, plus any additional ones should then be pulled together into a comprehensive report that will give you a greater insight into your Customer Satisfaction and how to make your business better.

Do I need my own Voice of the Customer or should I use an external company?

The honest answer to this is it depends on the size of your Company, your focus on Customer Service and how confidential you want this information to be.

If you are a large multinational company that relies on the confidence of your consumers I would suggest that you employ a VoC to collate this information and track it on a monthly/quarterly period to gain an insight into the Customers’ opinion over time. Your VoC has to be an intermediary who has excellent listening and analytical skills. They also have to have a hard skin and take negative feedback in the appropriate fashion. You will need someone who will understand that your Customers’ perception is the most important thing – a good VoC will drill down into why that Customer has that perception rather than telling the Customer that they are wrong. A good VoC should be able to see what is important to your Customers and share that information with you accurately and concisely, allowing you to then implement the changes that matter.

There are however several scenarios where it may be better to employ an external party to undertake these reports for you:

  1. They will have no emotional connection to your company and therefore will be able to listen to your Customers’ opinions logically. They will not get involved with the issues or dragged into an argument.
  2. They are the experts so they will know which tools to use to gain the information that is important to your type of business, saving you the time and hassle of conducting surveys and listening to social media.
  3. They are not aware of what initiatives you are planning over the next year and so will give you an unbiased, true opinion of what people say, rather than trying to find the information that fits into your plans.
  4. If you are a small company with limited resources it can be more cost effective to outsource this 4 times a year rather than employing someone on a full time salary.

So which ever route you decide to take, to employ someone full time or to outsource, I hope that you can now understand that listening to the Voice of Your Customer is imperative to build a successful, sustainable business in the 21st Century.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ky_olsen/3133347219/