marketing - Quaker Ranter

My panel discussion on Quaker leadership at @esrquaker

Martin Kelley — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 22:59:39 +0000

“Minding the Message” was the second speakers panel at the Quaker leadership conference hosted by Earlham School of Religion this weekend.

Four of us were asked to talk about our work in marketing our Quaker organizations. We represented a mix of organizations. In addition to myself representing Friends Journal, there was: Chris Hardie, founder of a Summersault LLC, a technology and web hosting business; Margaret Stark, director of marketing and admissions at Kendal at Oberlin, a continuing care retirement community “in the Quaker tradition”; and Tom Farquhar, head of of Washington, D.C.

Other recorded talks include plenary talks from Ian Joyce and Thom Jeavons, and the first speakers panel that included Norval Reece, Barry Crossno, Betty Tonsing, and Christina Repoley.

Five Tips for Building a Self-Marketing Website

Martin Kelley — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:09:37 +0000

A potential client recently came to me with an existing site. It certainly was slick: the homepage featured a Flash animation of telegenic young professionals culled from a stock photo service, psuedo-jazz techno music, and words sweeping in from all sides selling you the company’s service. Unfortunately the page had no useful content, no call-to-action and no Google PageRank. It was an expensive design, but I didn’t need to look at the tracking stats to know no one came this page.

So you’re ready to ditch a non-performing site for one more dynamic, something that will attract customers and interact with them. Here’s five tips for building a self-marketing website!

One: Useful Content for your Target Audience
Give visitors a reason to come to the site. Text-rich, changing content is essential. In practicality, this means installing a blog and writing posts every few weeks. You’ll see measures like “keyword relevancy” increase instantly as excerpted text shows up on the homepage. Add videos and photos if your company or team has that expertise, but remember: when it comes to search, text is king.

Two: Give away something valuable or useful
Many smart marketing sites feature some free giveaway right on the homepage: a useful quiz, professional analysis, a PDF how-to guidebook. A builder I worked with went to the trouble of posting dozens of floor plans & pictures to their website and compiling them into a PDF book, which they gave away for free. The catch in all this? You have to give your contact information to get it. Once the free material has been compiled, the site runs itself as a sales lead generator!

Three: Ask yourself the Three User Questions!
It’s amazing how focused the mind gets when you actually sit down to define goals. Just about every website can benefit from this three-step exercise:

Who is the target audience?
What would draw them to the site?
What do we want to get from them?

Get a group together to through your website page by page these questions. Brainstorm a list of changes you could make. You’ll want to end up with Defined Goals: what quantifiable actions do you want visitors to take? It might well just be the successful completion of a contact form.

Four: Test Test and Test Again
Many small businesses now get a lot of their customers from their websites. Your website is an essential piece of your marketing and publicity and you need to be smart about it. Compile together your favorite site-improvement ideas and make up alternate designs incorporating the changes. Then use a tool such as Google Website Optimizer to put the alternatives through their paces. Which one “converts” better, i.e., which design gets you higher percentages in the Defined Goals you’ve set? Once you’ve finished a test, move on to the next brainstorming idea and implement it. Always be testing!

An extensive series of tests of one site I worked on doubled it’s conversion rate: imagine your company doubling its internet sales? It is completely worth spending the time and effort to go through this process.

Five: Don’t Be Afraid to Get Professional Help
If you need to hire a professional to help you through this process you’ll almost certainly get your money’s worth! A recent projects cost the customer $6000 but I was able to document savings of $100,000 per year in his publicity costs! See my piece “What to Look For in SEO Consultants” for my insider-advice to how to pick a honest and competent professional web publicity consultant.

Marketing and Publicizing Your Site

Martin Kelley — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 17:08:31 +0000

“Build it and they will come” is not a very good web strategy.
Instead, think “if I spent $3000 on a website but no visitors came, did
I spend $3000?” There are no guarantees that anyone will ever visit a
site. But there are ways to make sure they do.

Much of web marketing follows the rules of any other mode of
publicity: identify an audience, build a brand, appeal to a lifestyle
and keep in touch with your customers and their needs. A sucessful web
campaign utilizes print mailings, manufactured buzz, genuine word of
mouth and email. Finances can limit the options available but everyone
can do something.

One of the most exciting aspects of the internet is that the most
popular sites are usually those that have something interesting to
offer visitors. The cost of entry to the web is so low that the little
guys can compete with giant corporations. A good strategy involves
finding a niche and building a community around it. Personality and idiosyncracy are actually competitive advantages!

It would be cruel of me to just drop off a completed website at the
end of two months and wash my hands of the project. Many web designers
do that, but I’m more interested in building sites that are used. I can
work with you on all aspects of publicity, from design to launch and
beyond to analyzing visitor patterns to learn how we can serve them better.

Making sites sticky

We don’t want someone to visit your site once, click on a few links
and then disappear forever. We want to give your visitors reasons to
come back frequently, a quality we call “sticky” in web parlance. Is
your site a useful reference site? Can we get visitors to sign up for
email updates? Is there a community of users around your site?

Making sites search engine friendly

Google. We all want Google to visit our sites. One of the biggest
scams out there are the companies that will register your site for only
$300 or $500 or $700. The search engines get their
competitive advantage by including the whole web and there’s no reason
you need to pay anyone to get the attention of the big search engines.

The most important way to bring Google to your site is to build it
with your audience in mind. What are the keywords you want people to
find you with? Your town name? Your business? Some specific quality of
your work? I can build the site from the ground up to highlight those
phrases. Here too, being a niche player is an advantage.

I know lots of Google tricks. One site of mine started attracting four times the visits after its programmer and I redesigned it for Google. My sites are so well indexed that if I often get visitors searching for
the oddest things. We can actually tell when visitors come from search
engines and we can even tell what they’re searching for! Google
apparently thinks I know “how to flatten used sod” and am the guy to
ask if you wonder “do amish women wear bras.” I can make sure your important search terms also get noticed by Google and the rest!