setting marketing goals Archives

December 2, 2014 By Jody Raines

Social Media, Robin Williams, The English Language And Holidays

Social Media has a way of making you feel sad sometimes. The posts of beautiful holidays and warm family celebrations may be more for the benefit of others than what’s true. Consider the perceptions that we have from what we read or hear, and compare that to the reality… sometimes the way things are presented are far different than what is actually happening.

For example, listening to the news can sometimes be difficult – not only due to the content, but also due to the spin that the commentators put to the stories. This summer, during a two day period, Lauren Bacall passed away. The day she died, it was also reported that Robin Williams died the day before, by suicide. The announcer who said “Robin Williams passed away” made me stop in my tracks. Not because of his death, but because of the way they utilized the English language. Robin Williams did not “pass away”, but he ended his life violently – apparently asphyxiating himself with a belt and a closet door.

I appreciate that many are and were surprised that the man we all thought of as a genius and incredible comic was anything but happy. He brought laughter to millions, yet his life was more a tragedy with depression and addiction. How sad. It’s utterly heartbreaking.

Did Robin Williams pass away

But to say he “passed away” implies a quiet passing… a traveling from this life to the next. I daresay that when someone takes their own life, it’s not a “passing”, its more a termination, an ending, a taking of the life that can never have another “act” to follow. It’s not a “passing”.

One of my pet peeves recently is the abuse of language to share information. I’m not sure whether this is because as I’ve gotten older, I am more cognizant of the power of words, or whether there is an inadequacy in our school systems with regard to teaching English? Case in point, the other day I was chatting with a friend who told me that he does not like a politician because he finds his “self defecating” humor to be offensive. Well, yes, I guess it would be. Any politician who poops himself for a joke would be offensive. But perhaps he meant “self deprecating”?

Another friend was sure that “irregardless” of something, he was going to do something. I cringed. I am sure he did not realize that the word he meant to us is “regardless”. Regardless means without regard. When you add the “ir’ in front, it negates the word, so irregardless means “not without regard”. Huh?

Ok, and then there is the person who becomes “orientated” to a new job. Really. Define that for me? I think he means he was oriented. To orientate means to turn to the East, as if in prayer… Does this then mean that every person in the new job must learn where the East is?

And just yesterday a senior staff member suggested that we “home in on our skills”. I suspect it was honing that was required, but I could be wrong. Perhaps we should get closer to them, as in homing in?

When I see or hear advertising copy that’s poorly written, I have the same response. How does copy get approved when it does not make sense?

For example, a recently launched campaign by Ryder focuses on the “ER”. What? Who put the “ER” in Ryder? Seriously… and what the heck is that supposed to mean?

Another campaign makes it seem cool to have bad manners. A young girl struts over to a lunch table at school and puts her feet up on the table wearing her brand new sneakers. And instead of telling her what a snot she is and to get her feet off the table (did she grow up in a barn?!?) the two older kids nod knowingly. Huh? If anything, that’s a great reason NOT to buy anything from this store! The store, Famous Footwear thinks their add is about confidence? Nope. It’s about bad manners!

Bad manners can also be examplified by a football team that makes a political gesture while entering the field. Just because someone can throw a football does not make that person any more of a role model or a patron of integrity than anone else. Just look at Ray Rice – the player who clocked his fiance and left her laying, unconscious in an elevator. More than likely some team will pick him up to play for them, despite the fact that the man is an abuser. Consider also the case of Michael Vic… the man who sponsored dog fights and then who winds up playing football again. Will we, as a nation, ever realize that to continue to sponsor and condone these despicable actors results in a generation that thinks this is normal… That suicide and “slipping away” may be the same act?

In any case, bad grammar, and bad marketing aside, it truly is a tragedy that a person so talented and clever as Robin Williams felt that there was no other option available to him other than to take his own life. Thankfully, this brings much needed attention to the issue of depression and mental illness. Hopefully we can help others before they take that last, final step.

Truly this was not a ‘passing’, it was a ‘taking’. Rest in the peace that you could not find while living, Robin Williams.

The holidays are difficult times for those who find themselves without family or friends. Reach out to others and invite them to spend the holidays with you, especially if you know they may be alone.

If you or someone you know may have thoughts of hurting themself, call a depression hotline. If you are not having suicidal thoughts, you may wonder if how you feel warrants a crisis call. It doesn’t hurt to call, and it doesn’t cost anything, so pick up the phone and make the call. No one will judge you, and you won’t feel like you are wasting anyone’s time with your problems. Many of the counselors are volunteers, so they do this because they enjoy helping others, not because they are being paid to do it.

Resources for Depression:

http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/
National hotline — 1-800-273-TALK (8255)
National Alliance on Mental Illness — (800) 950-NAMI (6264)

Suicide

Suicide Hotline 1-800-SUICIDE
National Suicide Prevention Helpline 1-800-273-TALK
National Adolescent Suicide Hotline 1-800-621-4000

Depression

Postpartum Depression 1-800-PPD-MOMS
Veterans 1-877-VET2VET

All Types of Crisis (Compiled from multiple sources)

United Way Helpline 1-800-233-HELP
Youth America Hotline 1-877-YOUTHLINE (1-877-968-8454)
Covenant House Nine-Line (Teens) 1-800-999-9999
The Trevor Helpline (For homosexuality questions or problems) 1-800-850-8078
Depression Hotline: 1-630-482-9696
Suicide Hotline: 1-800-784-8433
LifeLine: 1-800-273-8255
Trevor Project: 1-866-488-7386
Sexuality Support: 1-800-246-7743
Eating Disorders Hotline: 1-847-831-3438
Rape and Sexual Assault: 1-800-656-4673
Grief Support: 1-650-321-5272
Runaway: 1-800-843-5200, 1-800-843-5678, 1-800-621-4000
Exhale: After Abortion Hotline/Pro-Voice: 1-866-4394253
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (suicidepreventionlifeline.org) is a 24-hour, toll-free, confidential suicide prevention hotline available to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress.^[10]^[11]
The Trevor Project (thetrevorproject.org) is a nationwide organization that provide crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth.^[12
Boys Town: This is an email option for youths and their parents. Turnaround time is usually 24-48 hours.
Crisis Chat: Talk about stress and other problems anonymously and get non-judgmental support.
IMAlive: Speak with a volunteer online without having to wait for an emailed reply.

May 13, 2014 By Jody Raines 2 Comments

Redesigning The Home Page? 8 Common Website Mistakes To Avoid

Redesigning the Website Homepage can result in greatly improved conversions when done well. The first trick is finding a website designer who understands inbound marketing. The process should begin with an evaluation of your existing online marketing campaign as well as your website to ensure that all components work together in an effective and coordinated way.

What, you don’t have an online marketing strategy?

The parts of an online campaign are critical to assuring your ongoing brand development and business success. Not only is your website the foundation, it is also the most important asset because it is the one online asset that you have almost complete control over. Unlike any social networking channel online, the website content is added or changed under your own direction. Other than the search engine, such as Google, introducing new algorithms, your website is the mainstay of your online marketing program. Even with those changes, if you are following Google Best Practices, you will never be hurt by an algorithm change.

What’s wrong with the website?

If you don’t know how your website is performing, you won’t know how to fix it. Without any analytics, you are operating in the dark. Having a track record to improve gives you a benchmark. If you don’t know what is going on with your site, if you have no clue how many visits you have on a monthly, daily, weekly basis, how will you know if your site is performing? One fundamental mistake many web designers make is to look only at the aesthetics of the site without understanding whether it is effective.

If you don’t know anything about the types of visits you have, how many there are, what your bounce rate is or why your visitors are leaving, you should absolutely install tracking to assure that you have this information. Tracking can be done using Google Analytics, which is a wonderful (and free) tool, or can be accomplished by installing one of a number of software solutions including Moz (formerly SEOmoz), Hubspot, Raventools, etc.

Why Change The HOME Page Of Your Website?

The goal of a website redesign should be to improve your conversions. That is the to improve the website in such a way as to appeal more appropriately to the audience who is interested in your services. To do this, you will need to be able to be found, by the right prospects or potential customers for the right reasons.

Improving the design of your HOME page goes beyond the “look and feel” of the website. It’s making the HOME page the doorway to the information that your customers are seeking.

Some companies decide to “redesign due organizational change”. In the case of an aquisition or merger, redesign may be necessary to re-brand the “new” emerging entity. The HUGE mistake that is typically made is to hire a web development company to do a new website, and in the process they are blowing up both the pre-existing sites and starting from scratch. The new site has no authority, no credibility and no inbound links. The old URLs which may have been out there for years are sometimes discarded, and are then available to be picked up by a offshore scavenger who will build a site to take advantage of whatever SEO juice is left, and then re-direct those visitors, potentially to your competition! Why not salvage the domain, the goodwill, the existing “SEO juice”, to redirect to the newly branded website? Apparently there are “web designers” or “website developers” who do not have a clue what destruction they have done by creating the new, beautiful website, and as the business owner, you are relying upon their expertise.

Don’t make these mistakes. Before moving to a new website design, be sure your web developer is following these best practices by avoiding these 8 website design or website redesign mistakes. :

Indexable content. Having a beautiful website with complex graphic design may make the CEO very happy. Unfortunately, many of the beautiful website designs are not created with SEO in mind. If you see pictures that include words, this is not the same as a search engine sees it. In fact, you can read ‘content’ that is a picture. Search engines cannot. I had one client who did not understand why her website was not ranking for her most important keyword until I pointed out to her that most of the instances of her keyword were in a graphic form. Another new client came to me with a recently re-designed website that has zero authority. The company had been around for over ten years, but in creating the new design, the principals had decided to use an acronym as the new URL. Unfortunately, no one realized to redirect the old URL and no mention of the old company name was even on the page! This certainly does not help clients find the website, but also, it just threw away all of the old sites authority. The bottom line, make sure your website is indexible and that your keywords are content, not images.
Keywords. One of the most critical things that I work with for my clients are discovering the best keywords for their product or service. By keywords, it’s important to forgo the jargon and figure out what words your customers and prospects use to find you. Believe it or not, while it’s noble to assume that you can educate an audience to discovering what you mean when you have created or coined a new phrase… you probably do not have enough money in your marketing budget to make that make sense. It makes marketing so much easier and organic to use the phrases your customer’s use to refer to what you do. Also, ask your sales team what is imporatnt to your customers. If you can address what a prospect is searching, you are more likely to show up in that prospect’s search results. Ditch that jargon!
Load time. Beautiful images are nice, but if the file is too large, the site load time is longer. Not only does Google penalize long load times, your customer is unlikely to hang out and wait to see the magnificence that your web designer has created. Nope. In this day and age of instant everything, we (your audience) want to see what we want to see when we want to see it. We are not waiting. If your site takes too long to load because its too graphic heavy, we are on to your competitor’s site. Don’t expect loyalty from a web search.
Clean message. By clean message, what I mean is that your HOME page is not cluttered and confusing. It should be clean. In print advertising we used to refer to the ‘clean’ness as “white space”. There is no need to create multiple images that fight for a viewer’s attention. To the contrary, the site should have a clear idea before its created as to where the viewers eye should travel and what makes sense for that visual message. If your site is too busy and disorganized, you are not sharing a clean message.
Clear message. Now that we have discussed the visual path, let’s make sure that the message that a visitor to our website can absorb. Don’t make the message obtuse or too clever – if you do, your visitor will hop away to the next website just as quickly. I worked with one client who insisted that they wanted their website to look like a whiteboard and they spent a lot of time and money to have the visual elements designed for that theme. What was missing was the message of what they actually do. They are a printing company, and if you dig, you can find that out. Of course, that was a huge challenge to overcome by optimizing the content. The message ideally should be obvious when someone lands on your site as to what you offer and what you do. If it’s not, go back to the drawing board and rethink your concept. Don’t try to be overly cute. It just doesn’t work.
Contact info. One of the biggest mistakes I see is when contact information is buried in a website on the contact page. Sure, it’s a great place to have your contact information, but why not feature a good way to contact you on every page of your website. One of the most effective websites I have worked on has a contact us box on everypage that is coded to indicate what page the lead came from. This website has hundreds of leads on an ongoing basis. Understanding that you should not make someone work through multiple clicks to get in touch is critical to conversions.
Clear Call To Action. So now your website can be discovered, you have a remarkable design that is indexible for the righ keywords, and traffic is through the roof! You are still not done. High traffic to your website does not necessarily correlate into business in your cash register. You must build a clear, call-to-action that suggests what the next steps should be for your prospect.
Branding. Above all, keep in mind that every piece of your marketing campaign including your website should reflect appropriate branding messages. Whether your brand is identifiable by color, font, graphic identity, cutting humor, be sure to be consistent across all platforms, including and especially your website. If you have inconsistent collateral, you are wasting an opportunity to share and reinforce your branding identity. By having all the pieces of the puzzle work in unison, you are reinforcing the message and increasing the potential for your message to be identified easily. Use the same font, logo, colors and messaging across all social media platforms as well as your website, print collateral and any brochures or advertising that you do. Keep the tone of all the collateral consistent as well and your marketing dollars will work harder for you.

What mistakes have you seen in website or homepage redesign? Are you considering a refresh and would like some advise? Give us a call or share your experience…

September 11, 2013 By Jody Raines Leave a Comment

What Is A Smart Marketing Goal? And How Do You Set Them?

Internet marketing without goals, or traditional marketing without goals is a crapshoot. It’s throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it sticks, without a guide or way to measure whether you are effective or not. One of my favorite expressions is the definition of insanity – you know doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result? Well if that describes your marketing efforts, you should stop, take a deep breath and resolve that today is the day you are going to do something different to move the bar farward.

We used to refer to our marketing goals as Key Performance Metrics or KPI’s. If you were rating your employees, you would put together a list of the metrics of what would constitute success in that role. Why would business marketing be any different? If you don’t set goals, then you have no idea whether you’ve made progress or not.

Ironically, many of the marketing agencies that spring into existance offer to help you with your social media profile or build you a website, without starting with the reasons you need marketing in the first place – and that is – to generate business. If you take it a step farther and start to evaluate your online business, you will see that it becomes even more important for your marketing to be held accountable to the metrics that you establish. So, how does it happen that so many companies practice buckshot marketing and roll the dice instead of being laser focused on their goals?

I was recently consulting for a company that had a marketing crisis. They had an internal goal that a specific email campaign would be launched by a date certain. They contacted me, and asked whether we could meet their goal. Eager to help them, I assured them we could. This was a mistake. We got stuck in the tactics of getting an email campaign out the door and doing buckshot marketing, instead of defining what we hoped to achieve and then plotting the best course of action to achieve that goal. The email went out, the results were OK, but to tell you t he truth, we got lucky.

Inbound marketing should be goal driven and a great way to remember how to define those goals is to use the Smart Marketing method. S.M.A.R.T. is actually an acronym for remembering how to craft a goal that makes sense. We want to be sure that our goals are:

Specific – The more specific the goal, the better we can define the process needed to achieve it. Having a vague goal does not give you a target to shoot for. The goal can target specific behaviors, such as visits, leads or customers, but there should be a target for the action.
Measurable – The number or percentage of improvement should be stated in the goal as well. If the goal does not have a way to measure it, you won’t know how close you came or whether you achieved the goal or not. It’s permissible to have a goal of 1 if you are doing something you’ve never done before. You may not know how many to anticipate, but when you have a history and benchmark to work from, you can set quantifiable results to be targeted.
Attainable – Just stating a number or a percentage increase is not helpful if that goal is not realistically achievable.
Relevent – If your goal is to increase traffic and the traffic does not lead to conversions, the question that raises is whether the goal of improving traffic was even relevent to the overall goal of driving conversions and sales. If the goal cannot be correlated to something that is relevent for your business model, then it’s not a smart marketing goal.
Timely – for a goal to be a metric, you need to set a time frame. Establishing a reasonable time frame based upon historical information will determine whether your goal is attainable. Just having a goal without a deadline is not setting a standard for achievement.

The types of goals that would fit into the “smart marketing” metrics would include things like:

Improve site visits by 25% for the next quarter.
Increase leads by 10% over the next six months by adding 4 new call-to-action devices and improving landing pages.
Generate 3 new customers in the next thirty days for the new platform just released.

If you need help creating and defining goals, it’s sometimes helpful to evaluate your current metrics. Often I have tremendous inspiration when working with clients and evaluating how their site is currently performing. If we see that there are more visits than usual for certain keywords, or higher visits than normal, we then evaluate why that could be and that may lead to a new opportunity or goal. Conversely, if we see the bounce rate on specific pages of the site is very high, we can then work to identify the cause of that bounce rate, and create new content that is better aligned with our customer’s expectations.

How do you create marketing goals? How do you measure your progress towards achieving these goals. Do you find goals to be helpful and motivational or demotivational?

Resources for Depression:

Suicide

Depression

All Types of Crisis (Compiled from multiple sources)

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