A colleague of mine often says “Your website should be as good as your best salesperson” – which for many organizations is easier said than done.  Those of you who read this blog regularly know we always advocate looking at your overall marketing strategy, your web marketing strategy as a set of that, and your website itself as a piece of that.

In addition to looking at the big picture, sometimes it helps to slice off a few clear and actionable improvements you can take.  Some organizations have never done all 3 of the steps outlined below, while for others this is a chance to get back to basics and make sure you haven’t lost site of these 3 keys.  Here’s 3 key steps you can do to make your web presence work harder.

1). Take an Honest Look at Your Search Presence

We all know that search engines play a huge role in the web — In fact, 80% of online session start with a search  engine (via  PC Magazine).  So, even if you are doing everything you can to get the word out on your brand and website in other media, if you don’t have a significant presence in search you may be sunk.  Since search is where people go first when they go online, you need an effective search strategy — both paid and organic — to make sure that you will be found.  So take an honest look at your search presence, look with a keen eye and really re-evaluate everything.  Once you ahve done that and reformulated your strategy (or confirmed it was right all along), start working on keyword testing in paid search and SEO (learn more in a  previous post The Obvious Yet Underused Way to Build an SEO Program) and continue to monitor and adjust as you go, utilizing your analytics systems as a guide for what’s working and what isn’t.

2). Segment Your Audiences and Match Their Expectations

Too often we see campaigns where all visitors are sent to the same generic homepage, which may not speak to a segment’s particular needs.  One of the things we love about the web as marketers is it is trackable and customizable. So, for example, if you are a bank and know you have a prospect looking for CD rates, make sure you take them to a page about CDs.  If they are looking for mortgage refinancing make sure you take them to a page about refinancing, not new loans.  Utilize targeted landing pages and microsites in order to better match the prospect’s expectations and you’ll see much better results (see our previous post Microsite or Landing Page? to learn more on when to use landing pages and microsite ).  While these examples seem obvious, I’m constantly amazed by how many organizations aren’t doing them.  This feeds right back into #1, if you match your customers expectations when they come to your site, your campaigns — whether search, social media, print, or anything else — are just about guaranteed to perform better.

3). Optimize your Conversion Opportunities

So you’ve knocked down items 1 and 2 – what’s next?  Well, some people still think getting traffic to your website and getting a few leads is doing the whole job.  Getting visitors to your website is really just the first step, what we really want to do is convert those visitors by making them take your key actions.  That generally means converting them to leads by an activity such as filling out a form, converting them to customers by an activity such as an online purchase, or sometimes by an activity such as viewers of key information like using a retail locator to the nearest store.  By reviewing your analytics, you can develop a baseline for your conversion activity.  Then, begin to test different variables against this baseline, including copy approaches, offers, calls to action, imagery, landing pages, form fields and other variables.  By understanding and continually optimizing your conversion opportunities you’ll get much more value out of your marketing activities.

Whether you are new to online marketing or a seasoned veteran just circling back to make sure you are still doing the basics right, these 3 steps will make your web presence work harder.

About the Author: Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  If you liked this post, follow Will on Twitter for more commentary like this.

So you got yourself involved with a startup company.  It may have happened by circumstance or by choice.  You’re either a founder or one of the first employees.  You either envision your concept as a potential single to be flipped in 3-4 years, or a grand slam that will allow you to socialize with the likes of Brin, Bezos and Cuban.

Awesome.  We all love a good startup story.

Unless you’ve got an inherently viral concept on your hands (and by the way, keep in mind that there have only been about 5 inherently viral products introduced over the past 5-7 years), you’re going to need to put a significant emphasis on marketing.  I wrote an earlier post about the necessity of bringing marketing expertise to your internal/external team, but this post isn’t designed to belabor that point.

You’re going to need to do certain things during your first 90 days to survive and show some traction from a marketing standpoint.  Why 90 days?  It’s simple.  Business plans are great for fundraising and for attracting senior-level employees, but executing on a 5-10 year grand vision usually happens in pieces.  I happen to believe that this execution is best broken down into 90-day pieces.

One caveat before we get into the list.  All of the items below are tactics.  Tactics that do not flow from a broader strategy usually fail at some point.  Build a sound marketing strategy – identify goals, build your messaging, pinpoint target audiences – before you start getting tactical.

Here are the 10 marketing items every startup should consider executing within the first 90 days of operation:

1.  Build a clean, easy to navigate website.

I know.  Quite an “outside the box” statement.  All I can say is that people still miss on this first step, and miss in an embarrassing way.  Remember this – depending on which web genius you listen to, you have between 3-10 seconds just to convince a visitor to move further on your site.

And if you’re a startup that doesn’t think you need a web site at all, I wish you luck.  No need to read further.

2.  Create a blog, post quality content, and learn how to market it.

You’re still reading this post because you find the content interesting and the site doesn’t look half bad.  You’re here because you found the content via a search engine, another website, or perhaps a social media property like Twitter or LinkedIn.

If your website is your brochure (and hopefully it doesn’t look like one), then your blog is your platform to express your ideas and distribute some of your marketing content.

3.  Spend the time to do the basic SEO work, or have someone do it for you.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), generally speaking, rarely will impact your business in the short-term.  That being said, if anyone tells you that SEO is dead and you shouldn’t worry about it, toss them out the window like the guy in the Bud Light commercial.  Even the most basic SEO work, if done appropriately, will pay significant dividends eventually.

4.  Do some public relations, or at a bare minimum issue a press release surrounding your launch.

Not every startup can afford to spend thousands of dollars a month on retaining a public relations agency, but that’s not an excuse to ignore public relations.  You can get a high quality press release written, distributed and pitched for as little as $1,500 – $2,000, even less if you do some of it yourself.

Is there a good reason NOT to announce your business?  Afraid of a poor first impression on the media and consumers of your product?  If so, you may be facing a product problem or a problem with other elements in your marketing mix.

5.  Get involved in social media.

Notice that I didn’t say to rush out, join all 10,000 social media properties and start posting.  As always, with social media, my advice is to join, listen, learn, then post.  Most startups join and post.  They don’t even acknowledge the listen and learn part.  Startups are typically in a rush to show some traction, and unfortunately some investors judge traction based on Twitter followers, Facebook friends, and LinkedIn connections.  That’s just silly, almost as silly as the valuations those investors placed on the revenue-less companies of dot-com boom times.

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One of the biggest changes over the last few years on the web has been how easy, affordable and powerful analytics packages are now compared to just a few years ago.  Regardless of whether you are using Google Analytics, Omniture, Webtrends or one of a host of other analytics packages one thing is universally clear – Analytics can not succeed with a “set it and forget it” model.

Here’s a situation I commonly run into.  Usually, there is a tremendous amount of excitement right out of the gates about monitoring the launch of a new website, blog or campaign.  Great!  But, too often that quickly starts to flicker out.  The once daily logins to view unique visitors, top content, referring URLs etc. start to become less regular, less talked about, and greeted with less enthusiasm, until nobody is looking at all.  The goal of understanding and tracking your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) regularly falls by the wayside because “other things came up.”

With all the various marketing channels out there, now it’s more important than ever to review and evaluate your analytics regularly.  Understand up front which metrics are meaningful to your goals.  Just as importantly, if you don’t know the difference between visits, visitors, page views and hits (and which ones are impactful) make sure you ask.  Don’t be afraid to bring in the right help on a one-time or ongoing basis to help you with your analytics if you need to because understanding this is really important.  Make sure you track campaign results and optimize as you go where you can.  Understand what the traffic coming from Twitter, Google, your PR efforts, etc. is doing so you can make more informed decisions moving forward.  Are visitors doing what you want them to do on your website?  If not, what do you change to make that happen?

One of the reasons marketers say they love the web is because of the tracking – make sure you are doing it right.  Don’t just set it and forget it.

About the Author: Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  Follow Will on Twitter for more commentary like this.

While the headline of this recent B to B Magazine article didn’t surprise me, the candidness behind the underlying metrics did:

Study: Small companies can’t track campaign ROI, fail to qualify leads

While I won’t reprint the full article, here two key pieces struck me:

Nearly 63% of small-business marketers say they can’t track the return on investment of their marketing programs and point to poor feedback from sales regarding the status of leads as a prime culprit, according to a new study by the Sales Lead Management Association.

The study was based on an online survey that polled 140 marketers primarily from small companies—77% of the companies had 24 or fewer employees, and none had more than 250. It concluded that too many of these types of organizations operate within isolated silos, and have not found a way to align the objectives of sales and marketing.

So, it’s certainly not news that sales and marketing could be better aligned in many companies.  And even the numbers didn’t shock me when I thought about it.  What really surprised me was how candid the respondents were in acknowledging their failures.

The part I really want to know about is the next step – how many of these respondents, having acknowledged the problem, are going to find a way to change this?

In my experience, many of these same folks will run out, implement a tool and expect it to serve as a magic bullet to solve these problems.  Don’t get me wrong — I am a huge advocate of tools and having tracking and analytics in place are critical to most everything we do.  However, in this case the problem usually isn’t just about implementing a tool, it’s also about ensuring that sales and marketing are on the same page and have the strategies right – the people, policies, procedures and accountability in place to make these tools work.  Otherwise, you just have another tool you aren’t using right.

If your company isn’t doing this right, what is it costing you?  I wonder how many of those 63% will change?  I wonder how many of those 63% will be around in 3 years?

Had a discussion with a professional services firm today regarding a problem they’re experiencing.  The problem revolves around a very simple yet often overlooked page on the typical company website – the contact form.  This company recently redesigned their website, and while site traffic has been rising, their lead volume from these site contact forms has been declining.  As a matter of fact, the numbers from their web analytics package were pretty staggering – in the last month alone, 476 page views of the contact page, and only 3 form submissions.

While we looked under a bunch of rocks to rule out other problems, one look at the contact page told me everything I needed to know.  Here are the problems, and the prescribed medication:

Problem #1: The page is waaaay too crowded.  Lots of links, lots of imagery, lots of reasons to leave.

Solution #1: Treat someone sitting on your contact page like someone sitting at your cash register ready to make a purchase, except in this case remove the Snickers bars, the US Weekly and the Chapstick display.  Remove all clutter other than the essentials.

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