Laurel Stark née Lindsay has helped thousands of businesses get better results from their online marketing since she began her career as a web marketer in 2003. As a speaker, author and CEO of The New Media Group, she’s been featured on CNN, Entrepreneur.com, CTV and ShawTV.
The downturn in the Alberta economy has widespread negative impact for many in business.
Our client, rent2ownleduc.com has a very specific niche market, and actually benefits from a more difficult economic situation.
Objective:
Tarah, the founder and owner approached me at a seminar and was asking how she could use the web to generate more clients for her business & take best advantage of the beneficial economic situation.
Solution:
After conducting keyword analysis to determine the market size, demand and relative competition for her niche, we crafted a digital marketing strategy to get her in front of her prospective customers.
The solution included creating a landing page with a very specific call to action, and driving traffic to this landing page via Google Adwords.
Results:
After only a few weeks of the page being up, Tarah is already generating leads.
What the client has to say about working with us:
I had a great experience with Laurel. She is informative and explained every step of the process and why she suggested what she did.
She was excited about my business model and responded quickly to all my emails and truly was great to work with.
Already within a few weeks of having my new website up, I am already generating leads and am very exciting to see all the new possibilities that are showing themselves now that I have a larger web presence.
Build it and they will come….Said no-one ever about your website.
The more you know about your website visitors, the better you can serve them, and keep them coming back.
The most underutilized tool to help you improve your website’s performance is Google Analytics.
It’s a free tool that you can embed in your website to get a gold mine of information you can use to make better business decisions.
And in today’s video, we are going to focus on the audience section of Google Analytics and some of the reports available there and what they can do and what kind of intelligence they can provide you with.
This post will show you what metrics to look for to increase engagement and conversions from casual website browsers to actual sales.
I’ll also cover where to find important demographic and user details that might surprise you(I have website visitors from Kazakhstan? Cool! )
How is my website doing? A Snapshot of Your Audience Behavior.
The very first thing that they can provide you with is a snapshot of how your website’s doing.
So, click on Audience Overview and here it will tell you what your bounce rate is, your pages per session, and your time per session.
These are some metrics to focus on improving:
Bounce Rate.
Ideally, you want your bounce rate to be as low as possible.
Typically, it will hover up at least around 30% depending on your industry If it gets any higher than, let’s say 70, then you’re doing something that you want to change, because people are coming to your site and then they are leaving right away.
Pages Per Visit.
Pages per visit ideally should be at least 4.
So, again, you want people to come to your website and be engaged and find what they’re looking for and look at multiple pages.
Time on Site.
The same rule of thumb applies for Time on Site. More is better.
You want your website visitors to spend a lot of time on your website.
I always compare last month’s results to this month’s, so I can see if the results are turning upwards or downwards.
Who are my website visitors? Your Audience Demographics:
And then there’s a whole bunch of other information that’s just fantastic under the Audience section.
One is demographic information.
This section is where you can see what is the approximate age and gender of the majority of people that visited your site.
You can also find out geographic information – what countries are people coming from and how engaged are they per country.
You can also find out what website browsers they’re using as well as mobile devices <—This is a great way to test your website and make sure that it’s used and performs properly in the browsers and on the devices that your customers or future customers are using.
Just because you use Internet Explorer, for example, doesn’t mean that your website visitors do. Make sure your website performs well on the browsers and devices your audience uses.
Are my website visitors engaged? New versus Returning.
Under the Audience section again, you want to take a look at Behavior.
Under behaviour you will see the percentage of new visitors vs returning visitors. You’ll also see how often people return to your site, and how long new vs returning visitors are spending on your site.
Hint- You want to have a healthy percentage of returning visitors to your website.
How could this information help you make better website marketing decisions?
Tell me in the comments below!
This post is the second in a series of 3 posts on how to master Google Analytics – complete with handy videos 🙂
For the first time ever, I am unveiling the exact tactics I use to dramatically increase my client’s sales, using this PROVEN 7 Step Digital Marketing Blueprint.
There’s limited availability, and seats are filling quickly so – Snag Your Seat Now and make 2016 your best year yet!
The holiday season is the perfect time to market your business. Shopping for gifts is top of mind for many consumers and you don’t want to miss out. If you’ve built up a strong social media or newsletter presence, then you’re already off to a great start! Now it’s time to leverage those existing communities and try and engage a larger audience. Before you begin to brainstorm ideas, try and determine what type of metric you want to measure or increase, for example; online sales, engagement or in-store traffic. Then tailor your campaign to impact that specific metric. To get you off to a strong start, here are five holiday marketing ideas that you can use for your business!
1. Have an Instagram Hashtag Contest
Photo and video contests not only help you engage with your audience, they also help you reach a larger audience of individuals who are friends of your fans. Over the years, we have found that Instagram requires the lowest barrier of entry for fans and is the most effective way to generate a lot of participation. When creating the contest, try and make the hashtag resonate with your audience or align with the theme of your business. Try and make it short and sweet, instead of long and complicated. Search the hashtag on Instagram in order to see whether it is already a popular hashtag. Once you’ve found a unique hashtag, create your promo materials and begin your campaign. Make sure to set an end date to the contest, in order to encourage fans to participate before it’s too late. For the winner of the contest, again try and align the prize with your business or simply give the winner a gift card to your business.
2. Create Your Own Gift Guide
Whether you’re trying to show off products or services, a holiday gift guide can provide your business with a number of opportunities. They’re perfect for brick and mortar as well as online stores to showcase specific products or departments. They can also be created with a very limited budget and you can include important information such as your store address, directions and holiday hours. The easiest way to create a gift guide is within Powerpoint, then export as a PDF. Consider creating a unique landing page for the gift guide, using Unbounce or a similar service then create a unique Adwords campaign to drive downloads.
3. Design High Quality Facebook Boosted Posts
Creating high quality, shareable Facebook boosted posts is a sure fire way to engage are large targeted audience in a short amount of time. You could be promoting products, services, wins for the year, office antics, christmas recipes, local charities or anything else that is relevant to your business. Make sure the post has a clear message so fans know exactly what you’re posting and why. Challenge your team by trying to organically reach more people than who follow your page.
4. Have a 12 Days of Giveaways Contest
Everyone loves free stuff and 12 days of giveaways is the perfect method for generating new signups for your email newsletter list. Make sure each day of prizes are unique and relevant to your audience. Consider creating local prizes, that partner with other local businesses or simply give away the products or services that your business sells. Again, using Unbounce, create a simple landing page that collects first name, and email. Make sure people are clear that they are signing up for your newsletter and that they can unsubscribe at any time. If you promote the giveaways on social media, you will likely receive a high number of entrants.
5. Create Holiday Themed Display Ads
Display advertising is an effective way to reach a targeted audience that is already engaged with similar webpages to your own. By targeting the sites that your potential customers are looking at daily, effective display ads can drive high quality leads that convert. Make sure your ads are clickable, by creating a fake button or way for users to interact with the ads and test out a number of variations on the same ad (different colors, background image, button style).
Last month, I had the opportunity to sit down with Glenn Greenwald for a private dinner in Calgary. The conversation focused on the upcoming election, Ed Snowden, and Canada’s involvement in the spying of it’s own citizens through CSEC and the Five Eyes alliance. Despite many Canadians being unaware that the government of Canada not only spies on it’s citizens but also shares all communications data with four other countries (USA, Australia, New Zealand and the UK), I am optimistic that with enough attention on the issue we can decide our own privacy fate in this country.
After the dinner, I asked friends and family whether they care that they are being spied on or are at risk of being hacked and I often heard a similar sounding response. “I have nothing to hide, I’m not a criminal or celebrity, so I don’t care”. This notion frightens me a little. If I asked you to install camera’s in your bathroom and bedroom, in order to not only watch but also record and document 24/7, would you allow anyone to do that? There is essentially no difference between that and what spying and hackers are able to achieve with your phone calls, texts, emails, browsing history and general online presence.
So it raises the question of how do you protect your privacy online? It’s not by using Google and Facebook everyday, so in order to achieve maximum privacy, you may have to forgo some of your favourite services for new ones that have protecting your personal information in mind. Before Mr. Greenwald headed back to his home in Brazil, he gave me his favourite tools to protect my privacy online:
Pidgin is free to download and offers an off-the-record (OTR) plugin, for end-to-end encryption. You can log into multiple messaging accounts and access them all from Pidgin. Chelsea Manning used Pidgin to leak documents that would later be hosted by Wikileaks.
“The Tor software protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked.”
“Calls and texts made from one Silent Phone user to another are fully encrypted, whether they’re on iOS, Android, or Silent OS. Encryption keys are stored only on the users’ devices (not on any central server) and are destroyed at the end of each call, ensuring complete privacy, every time.
Silent Phone includes features such as video chat and conference calling capability as well as unlimited encrypted texts with burn self-destruct functionality on any Silent OS, iOS or Android device, enabling you to keep your business moving, securely.”
“Using Signal, you can communicate instantly while avoiding SMS fees, create groups so that you can chat in real time with all your friends at once, and share media or attachments all with complete privacy. The server never has access to any of your communication and never stores any of your data. Say Anything. Signal uses an advanced end to end encryption protocol that provides privacy for every message every time.”
“Tails is a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and anonymity. It helps you to use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship almost anywhere you go and on any computer but leaving no trace unless you ask it to explicitly.”
“PGP is a program that gives your electronic mail something that it otherwise doesn’t have: Privacy. It does this by encrypting your mail so that nobody but the intended person can read it. When encrypted, the message looks like a meaningless jumble of random characters. PGP has proven itself quite capable of resisting even the most sophisticated forms of analysis aimed at reading the encrypted text.”
Email marketing is still one of the top most effective digital marketing techniques, according to a recent survey of small business owners.
If you’d agree, and you have an email list you’re regularly marketing to, than please accept my pat on the back!
You’re much farther ahead than so many business owners at staying in touch with existing and future customers alike.
As us marketers are so fond of saying “the money is in your list”.
Because, if you haven’t contacted your customer in 90 days, they’re not your customer.
Here are 5 best practices to help you get the money out of your list; increasing your email open and click rates.
Use your customer’s name. Repeatedly.
Your name is your favorite word of all time.
And it’s the same with your customers. Make your emails stand out from the never ending stream of emails in your customer’s inbox.
Most email marketing software companies, like Mailchimp, have a “shortcode” that you can use in the first paragraph of your email to pull your customer’s first name from your list and display it in the email you’re sending.
Mailchimp’s shortcode is [F*NAME] – use it, and watch your open rate soar.
Refine your email subject.
Watch buzzfeed.com and the front page of Reddit for trending topics. You’ll notice a pattern among so many top stories on these sites. They pique your curiosity.
Try creating curiosity in your customer, by creating an enticing headline that promises answers and solutions…as soon as they open your email. For bonus points, use your customer’s name right in your email subject headline.
Use the Social Sharing Options.
You cannot receive what you do not ask for.
Asking for likes and shares on social media is a great way to get, you guessed it, shares and likes on social media.
Make it easy for your newsletter subscribers by taking advantage of the sharing modules provided with most email marketing providers.
Add in a little blurb explaining why someone should share that is in line with what they care about.
Recently we devised a share-line for a niche women’s boutique that was promoting an invite only event.
We crafted a line that was along the lines of “Don’t keep this secret to yourself; share with a friend. “ to appeal to the woman’s pride at having the inside scoop in a coveted industry.
Links, Links and More Links.
If your newsletter isn’t linking back to your website, it’s time to change that, like, yesterday.
With email marketing’s sophisticated tracking tools, you don’t want to miss the opportunity to see who’s engaged with your brand.
Tracking the amount of link clicks, as well as the click-ees themselves is a savvy way of determining what content appeals to who.
Create links in the text, the image as well as the headline. Make it easy for your subscribers to get to your website.
Whether it’s clicks to your website, calls to your location or social shares, you have to be explicit about what you want. Make it easy for your subscribers to do what you ask by making the call to action the most visually prominent part of your newsletter.
I really like Mailchimp’s big orange button, for an unmistakable call to action.
If you’re wondering how to measure the effectiveness of your web marketing efforts, then look no further than Google Analytics!
Google Analytics is a free tool you can use to measure your website’s traffic & web marketing efforts.
If you have Google Analytics set up on your website , but aren’t using it, keep reading; as a wise man once said:
“you can’t improve what you don’t measure”
In today’s Marketing Minute we’re going to cover how to use the reports found under the Acquisition section of Google Analytics. This is the first in a series of three articles on how to use the reports found in Google Analytics.
Are my web marketing results improving over time?
You’re likely spending a great deal of resources marketing your business online – when you add up the cost of your website and time spent on social media and email newsletters, it’s mind boggling to think that the vast majority of business owners do not measure their efforts for effectiveness.
Once you’re logged in, set the date range up on the top right hand side to compare your results to last month. This way you can get a good idea if your results are improving over time.
Where is my website traffic coming from?
Once you’re signed in, on the left hand side click on Acquisition and then, Overview.
From there you’ll see a pie graph, which will show you the different sources of your website’s traffic: Ideally, this is going to be diversified, showing traffic from:
‘search’, which is search engines like Google,
‘direct’ – people typing in your website name directly,
‘referral’ – websites that are sending traffic to you,
‘social’ – your social media sites, and
‘e-mail’ – from your e-mail newsletter.
What websites are sending traffic to my website?
From Overview, then click on Referrals.
This is particularly useful if you have a domain name set-up for a particular campaign that is forwarded to your website or if you’re paying for any directory sites like bigyellowbookcompany.ca.
Here’s where you can see if you’re getting enough traffic to justify paying for any additional marketing efforts. You can see by how much traffic you’re getting as well as how engaged those people are that are coming from those particular websites.
Session Durationshows the time that people are spending on your website when they come from that particular site
Pages/Sessionshows the number pages that they’re looking at.
Bounce Rate is also something to keep an eye on as well. That’s the amount of people that come to your website and leave right away. Ideally, this will be as low as possible.
How effective is my social media at sending traffic to my website?
Once you’ve taken a look at that report, the next thing I want you to do is go to Socialand then Landing pages. This is fantastic.
This report will show you what pages and how they’re performing as it relates to traffic from social media websites.
So if you’re writing a blog post a week, (like I recommend that you do), you can see what blog posts are performing well and which ones aren’t.
Again, you can look at
how much time people are spending on your website on each of these specific pages
and how many pages are they looking at after they land on that particular page.
Again, if you’re promoting a particular page, say, using Google Adwords, or promoting a specific page by posting your blog posts to social networks, you can see what pages are working and which ones aren’t.
Fresh off the press, complete with all the bells and whistles, we’re so excited to present Dunlop Western Star’s new website!
Dunlop Western Star is the second largest Western Star Dealer in Canada. They have over 50 employees in 2 locations and are absolutely dedicated to supporting professionals in the transportation industry.
And – they needed a website design that was an accurate reflection of the quality and professionalism their customers can expect from them.
Their old website, worked ok and looked ok, but it wasn’t keeping up with their competitors or for that matter, their customers.
So – what’s different with Dunlop Western Star’s new website?
Their new site had to be mobile responsive in order to stay competitive. So we built this new website design to be size responsive, so no matter the device – iphone or samsung tablet – this site looks good on all modern internet connected devices.
Click to call / click to email . Another way we made this website design easy for their customers to use is to ensure the phone numbers and email addresses were “clickable” – or responsive on mobile devices.
Their new site features a wicked video – a drone video to be exact – of their impressive facilities. Sites that contain video tend to offer better conversion rates.
A simpler, less text heavy layout. Adapting to the short attention span of today’s internet user – this site focuses on multimedia rather than text – making it easy for the user to find what they’re looking for.
Never search for the menu again – this website design has a menu which follows the user down the page – so they never have to search for a phone number, or make an effort to navigate between pages.
Subtle animations – this website responds to user interaction by ushering in the design elements, using understated animation throughout. This only serves to reinforce the commitment to cutting edge service Dunlop Western Star is known for.
Building trust is the key to successful relationships, and this site gets a jump on relationship building by providing photos of each and every team member in each department. You’ll see the same faces in store as online.
What’s the same about Dunlop Western Star’s new website design?
We kept the internally updatable inventory – the wordpress back end of this website was working for the client – so we simply updated it to offer more flexibility to help them keep their online inventory current.
We kept our coding streamlined making sure this site loads fast for success with both their customers and Google.
Coded using best practices, this website is search optimized, to maximize the chances of this web design showing up high on the search engines.
We hope you like this new website as much as we do! Remember – sharing is caring!
Why not share Dunlop Western Star’s successful new website with your network?
We've helped hundreds of businesses leverage the power of the web to boost their sales.
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Ideally, this is going to be diversified, showing traffic from:
Again, if you’re promoting a particular page, say, using Google Adwords, or promoting a specific page by posting your blog posts to social networks, you can see what pages are working and which ones aren’t.
