Now is the time for many Marketing Directors to develop their Marketing budgets for 2011.  Recent budgets, including 2010, have most likely been cut or perhaps flat over the past couple of years.  B2B Marketers have been hit harder than B2C Marketers but regardless many of you are ready for more investments in 2011.

You will have many options to consider for your marketing investments including PR, sponsorships, trade shows, TV, print ads, direct mail, and certainly Web Marketing.

Web Marketing encompasses many areas of support including Organic, PPC including Content Networks, Social Media, as well as the very important Conversion Optimization.  As we often discuss here on our Beacon Blog, Web Marketing is an excellent channel to consider increasing investments because of the ability to carefully and fully measure the return on the investment and effort.  Beacon’s reporting incorporates all related cost (labor, PPC, etc) in order to fully understand the return so our clients can make the very best decisions.

I often read Forrester Research’s blogs and I recently found this very helpful tool called the HERO Project Effort-Value Evaluation, http://www.forrester.com/empowered/tools.html.  It is a very simple tool that will ask you a series of 10 questions.  The tool evaluates your answers and summarizes the ‘effort’ vs ‘value’ of your particular Marketing projects.

If you are interested in learning more about Beacon Technologies please contact me at: pflanagan@beacontechnologies.com, (336) 232-5668

Patrick

http://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickflanagan1

For the past 10+ years I have been consulting and advising businesses with their Web Strategy investments.  From Corporate Websites to University/College Re-Designs to eCommerce systems to Web-based Integrated Applications…all projects demand a careful discussion regarding the investment and the possible return on the investment.

Very often with our clients, Web Marketing Services is a vital piece of the puzzle towards driving the necessary ROI for the Web Strategy.  For many years, the majority of focus in Web Marketing was driving qualified traffic (new prospects) to our client’s sites using Optimization, Paid Ads and more recently with additional attention on Social Media Strategies. I could spend the next hour writing about the detailed tasks on how we help our clients receive qualified traffic but that is not the purpose of this blog entry.

The purpose of this entry is to drive more attention to the art of Conversion Optimization.

Wiki defines Conversion Optimization as the “science and art of creating an experience for a website visitor with the goal of converting the visitor into a customer“.

While ‘converting visitors to customers’ is certainly an obvious goal, Beacon will take you much deeper and determine multiple ‘Conversions’ within your website and your processes so we can carefully track, measure, analyze and act to improve the success of your website investment.

I view Conversion Optimization at a more granular level than “converting the visitors to a customer”.  It all starts with a very thorough and possibly complex implementation of Google Analytics. Without a very sound setup of analytics, you will NOT be able to successfully invest in Conversion Optimization.   The process starts with consulting sessions with the client to understand the business so we can recommend and implement a custom Google Analytics setup for segmentations, funnels, and goals.  Afterwards, we begin to accumulate data in order to make informed decisions for modifying the site/funnels/processes in order to increase Conversions.  Certainly the process is more involved and is unique to each client but I hope this gives you a sense of how we view Conversion Optimization.

More and more of my interaction with clients/prospects is focusing on Conversion Optimization.  Beacon has an exceptional team of Marketing experts and we truly understand the value of Conversions Optimization!!

I enjoyed reading this article below and I hope you enjoy it as well.

Please comment on this blog if you have any thoughts and suggestions.

Patrick

336-232-5668 direct

336-944-4187 mobile

Patrick Flanagan at LinkedIn

ARTICLE TO READ

Conversion Optimization Is The New SEO

by Scott Brinker

Thomas Edison said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. As we begin a new decade in search, we face a parallel truism: great search marketing is 1% about getting the click and 99% about what you do next.

Starting here in 2010, conversion optimization is the new SEO.

To be sure, SEO is still important and still evolving. There are still plenty of companies that need to adopt its best practices. SEO isn’t dead. But among the giants of SEO, there is a growing restlessness for the next mountain to conquer.

That mountain rises beyond the SERP and beyond the click.

SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin recently declared that conversion optimization is the most underused and highest ROI activity in the marketing department. Predicting that 2010 is the Year of Conversion Rate Optimization, he wrote, “Online businesses can generate so much revenue from this… 2010 is the year, simply because it’s an inflection point for companies to assess their spend and where they derive value.”

SEO and conversion optimization are a lot alike

Conversion optimization and SEO both thrive at the tumultuous intersection of marketing, IT and customer operations. SEO professionals are experts at navigating this technical and political tempest. They are part engineer, part creative and part strategist—all bundled together in the role of a front-line change agent.

Those same talents, honed over the past decade, are exactly what’s needed deeper in the funnel.

Conversion optimization, like SEO, isn’t a one-shot project. It’s an integral part of the new marketing. The most valuable players will do more than optimize a landing page or run a good A/B test themselves. They will help organizations absorb conversion optimization into their culture and operational rhythm.

Good SEO practitioners know that short-cuts aren’t the answer. Sure, almost anyone can “optimize” a single page’s conversion rate by eliminating all choices and brow-beating visitors with misleading promises. You can myopically increase conversions that way—but at a terrible cost to brand, reputation and customer goodwill. Such black hat conversion optimization, like black hat SEO, isn’t worth the price for legitimate businesses.

(That is one of the reasons I prefer the phrase post-click marketing—it suggests a broader regard for user experiences and long-term relationships.)

Like SEO, conversion optimization is data-driven. Web analytics remain your greatest ally, but you must roll up your sleeves and dig deeper into user behavior. Segmentation analysis becomes even more crucial. How do different segments interact with you, and how can you optimize their particular experiences? Carry that through to revenue (or at least quality-scored leads).

Ultimately, in both SEO and conversion optimization, content is king. Don’t let technicalities overshadow what really matters: compelling value propositions and meaningful brand experiences. In SEO, this wins you links; in conversion optimization, it wins you customers.

But SEO and conversion optimization are different too

SEO often prides itself on minimizing the need for PPC search advertising. While that’s a noble achievement in traffic generation, conversion optimization actually flourishes with paid search, for reasons we’ll examine below. So the first step is to clear away any paid media prejudices.

Combined with PPC, conversion optimization enables highly controlled experimentation. Turn on traffic for a specific keyword, with a particular ad, to a matching landing page, and run well-defined tests with a minimum of confounding variables—and do it in a matter of hours. Iterate quickly. If a problem arises, or you strike gold, react instantly. Test, test, test.

Of course, SEO traffic can be optimized too. But take full advantage of the control PPC offers you.

In SEO, the atomic unit of experimentation is the blog post. In conversion optimization, it’s a matched PPC ad and landing page. While most organizations can now blog nimbly, producing coordinated landing pages may still be a slog. It doesn’t have to be: optimize the process, not just the pages.

Conversion optimization extends beyond a single page. SEO usually avoids breaking up content into multiple steps. However, you may find that multi-step landing pages convert better, because they engage respondents in a mutually productive dialogue and facilitate segmentation (they’re also called “conversion paths” for a reason).

While SEO encourages open publication of everything—that great new report you produced makes excellent link bait—conversion optimization often benefits from dangling valuable content as an incentive to convert. A landing page offering your report, in exchange for a name and email address, can still be link bait, but there’s clearly some trade-off.

Furthermore, some conversion-oriented landing pages shouldn’t be indexed by search engines at all. If you’re experimenting with special offers, or running campaigns with short expirations, you want the prerogative to change them or turn them off without leaving residual expectations out in the wild. For limited promotions, the meta robot tags you probably want are “follow, noindex.”

Dream building instead of link building

The driving goal of SEO is link building. At the risk of sounding schmaltzy, the driving goal of conversion optimization is dream building.

You want to get in the mind of individual prospects, starting from their very first search query to learn something new, solve a problem, or satisfy a desire—a need that you can fulfill. That is the stirring of a dream in their consciousness. Everything you do from that point forward—every touchpoint, every landing page, every follow-up email—should help make that dream real.

Success in conversion optimization is when a prospect rejoices, “Wow, this is exactly what I was looking for!” A dream come true.

It’s harder than link building. But it’s a worthy mountain to climb.

…SPEED.  Super Fast Speed!!!

I want to change your life today.  Read this article and take my advice and enjoy your future days browsing the wonderful world wide web…fast.

* If you already use Google’s Chrome browser then please stop reading and go back to work…with your speedy browser.

** If you are a Web Marketing guru then please stop reading because you already know everything about everything.

I am constantly online reviewing websites.  I spend several hours a day analyzing sites and reading the latest & greatest on web marketing, hosting trends, design ideas, etc.

Until this past June, I used Firefox primarily.  I transitioned from IE to Firefox roughly 3 years ago because of all the Firefox toolbar features.   Firefox is still an important tool for me when I want to study a website’s SEO attributes but for the general public simply browsing the web…Firefox is overkill.

If you simply browse the web, give Google Chrome a demo.

You will quickly get used to the startup time and page loading speed.   I don’t know all the technical reasons for the speed and efficiency of Chrome but I know this….IT IS CONSIDERABLY FASTER than other commonly used browsers.

* Reply to this blog post if you try Chrome and like the results!!

Enjoy your new life,

Patrick

336-232-5668

pflanagan@beacontec.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickflanagan1

For Information Purposes:

Browser usage statistics show that Chrome is experience steady growth and now is owns ~17% of the market.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Browser Statistics Month by Month

You need a new website and you need Top 10 rankings in Google. Your most fierce competitor ranks #4 in Google for your industries most important phrase! Plenty of web development companies are offering their expertise. How do you know which web development company to hire?

I have a simple solution that will help you decide!!

Go to Google and submit searches and see which web companies have Top 10 Organic Rankings for the following phrases:

• web development – Google Search
• website development – Google Search
• ecommerce development – Google Search
• custom website development – Google Search
• ecommerce software development – Google Search
• google analytics consulting – Google Search

As you can see, Beacon has Top 3 rankings for many of it’s most important phrases. The value of these rankings is very significant.

We know how to do it.

Call Beacon today if you are serious about online marketing!!
Patrick Flanagan, 336-232-5668

…or are they just another vendor trying to get as much of your IT and Marketing budget as possible?

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