Entries for month: September 2011
26 September 2011
Top 5 Things We Learned at HUGS 2011
By Bryn Adler; Internet Marketing Associate
This past Friday RainCastle attended the HubSpot User Group Summit to advance our HubSpot skills and learn more about what the future of Inbound marketing holds.
And while we did have some fun learning about their censored unicorn marketing strategies and watching the CEOs detail a report card on the company's improvements, the heart of it was a look at how Inbound marketing can greatly advance your company's marketing success. Here are our top five takeaways from the event.
1. Marketers need to utilize the MOFU (Middle of the Funnel)
The sales funnel can be a complex system of communication based on your company, resources, and preferences. The middle of the funnel is where relationships are formed, and it depends heavily on creating relationships with potential clients. At HUGS, a big theme was how to utilize the MOFU so that our content and websites are geared toward personalization; creating a personalized experience for the visitor will be more effective in gaining him or her as a customer. HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan pinpointed Amazon.com as evidence of this: the more you visit and interact with the site, the more personalized the experience becomes as Amazon directs you to things you might like.
2. Don't discount social media
Social media can generate leads in a number of ways; it's all about direction. Ex: Tweet about a blog post that leads to an eBook offer that registers the visitor as a lead. Find what channels your leads use to navigate the decision-making process and what content brings in customers. When you maximize content discovery you make conversion potential pervasive, and this allows you to optimize for leads. Social media only increases the number of chances you have to reach out to your audience.
3. Test, measure, learn
A/B testing your landing pages, calls to actions, titles, photos, etc. will only lead to more concrete findings on what works for you. If a certain title on a call to action gets more views but fewer follow-throughs, re-think the title to optimize offer completion instead of views. Similarly, find out what offers are getting the most leads from Twitter and Facebook, and use this to tweak your marketing efforts for that offer (see? more social media integration). Learn what you can stop doing to specify what you can do more of.
4. 73% of CEOs don't believe marketing drives revenue
This is a sad fact. Marketing is what fuels your website, brand messaging, and corporate identity. Advertising isn't enough anymore; your company has to have an online presence and utilize Inbound marketing to build reputation, revenue, and clientele. More importantly, the analytics you have access to today in relaying information about your marketing efforts give you the ability to build on your efforts, and tailor your campaigns to success.
5. Set goals
Every campaign you launch should have a goal. This means creating massive amounts of personalized content that is valuable. Understand the customer: who they are, where they found you, what they're looking for, and set goals around them. For example, email campaigns should be customized to different customer personas representing different goals; their goals influence yours. This is, generally, a best practice for any marketing effort, but becomes especially important considering the vast number of ways a modern potential customer can be reached and influenced.
Categories: Brand / Marketing
Posted by Paul Regensburg at 9:16 AM | 9 Comments
12 September 2011
Questioning the Future of Flash
Most designers struggle with Flash at some point during their careers. As a medium, Adobe’s Flash has been struck down by Apple as a relic of the past – making it hard for most designers to justify using it.
But Adobe won’t quit just yet. The company recently announced the arrival of their new version of Flash Media Server in an effort to provide Flash support on iOS devices. Unfortunately, all it does is allow streaming Flash video to run on these devices, and doesn’t present a sustainable solution to breathing life into a dying medium.
What it does allow, however, is for producers to easily get their Flash content onto iOS devices by switching over to an HLS format when it detects an iOS device and the device’s level of Flash capability. According to the TechCrunch article, it has to “un-Flash” the content and “wrap it” in a way suitable for support on an iOS device.
At least it’s a step in the right direction.
What do you think – is Flash a doomed medium, past its prime? Or can it make a comeback if Adobe can create a successful Flash server?
Categories: Web / Interactive
Posted by Paul Regensburg at 4:15 PM | 2 Comments
02 September 2011
Current Trends in Navigation Part 2: Deep vs. Wide
The trend in B2B Website Navigation
In two separate client meetings last week the same question arose: is it better to have deep scrolling web pages that require fewer clicks to arrive at desired content, or shorter pages requiring less scrolling but more clicks?
My first reaction has been that short pages requiring little or no scrolling are preferable to the user and longer, more content rich pages are better for search. Website user experience is a balance between the needs of humans and the demands of analytics software.
Challenging the conventional wisdom of web usability has been a consistent theme of mine this year as our clients have higher marketing goals and expectations for their websites. The huge increase in the amount of website content and multiplicity of pathways for accessing it, have made navigation a labyrinth for which we are the guides.
Inch deep and mile wide or mile deep, inch wide?
I asked a colleague to do an informal survey of B2B websites to see if we could discern a trend toward deep vs. wide, content-rich websites. While we found endless examples of deep, scrolling pages—with IBM being the quintessential example, we were hard pressed to find any sites that contain all content "above-the-fold," and relatively few requiring minimal scrolling.
IBM doesn't just provide endless copy for scrolling, but carefully
designs all graphics and layout aspects to accompany deep pages.
Salesforce.com was the best example we found of a user experience consisting of relatively shallow pages with a nice text to image ratio and clear click paths going down four levels.
In typical salesman fashion, salesforce.com keeps content short and simple on
each page to maximize reader interest and potential leads. (Click to enlarge)
The long and short of it is that the current trend is for longer pages that tell more of an entire story through text, tabbed content and images.
That isn't an endorsement, just an observation. Salesforce.com is a legitimate example of a successful company that has maintained a refreshingly simple navigation scheme and has used imagery in harmony with text to make content easy to digest and not overwhelming.
Ease-of-use is still our mantra; the site's content and a client's personal preference will be the leading factors in whether the call is deep or wide.
What's your opinion on deep vs. wide navigation?
Categories: Web / Interactive
Posted by Paul Regensburg at 1:53 PM | 2 Comments
