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Chat Session
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Web Specialists
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Positioning as Only One Part of Online
Marketing
December 16, 2002
Conducted by Sally Kavanagh
Academy of Web Specialists
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Sally Kavanagh - Before we start - can you let me know a) are you
currently doing one of the academy courses, and if so which one and b) do you
look after one site or lots of clients sites?
Ed Dechristopher - One
site, attended conference in November.
Sally Kavanagh - Anyone else?
Bradt48 - Finished the course, and look after several sites.
Nachtman - a) I am not currently doing a course - I attended the Workshop in
July. b) Several client sites.
Shermanhu - Certified at Orlando's
search engine workshops, and with one major client (30 sites).
Sally
Kavanagh - OK, is there a topic anyone particularly wanted to talk about or
shall I start things off?
Ed Dechristopher - Guess I should have
written certified too.
Sally Kavanagh - thanks - it just helps if I
have some idea what people are doing
Sally Kavanagh - I think the most
important part of any marketing is to define the aim. Is it to generate sales,
enquiries, or just traffic?
Ed Dechristopher - Mine is to generate
sales.
Sally Kavanagh - Lets assume its sales, but the same will apply
to enquiries. The level of sales will be the product of the traffic and the
conversion rate. The ideal will be to get both high, but in reality that might
not be possible.
Sally Kavanagh - If you are trying to generate
enquiries for high value industrial plant, then you are never going to get huge
traffic levels, but you might get a good conversion rate. Equally, if you are
selling a low cost product with lots of competitors, you can traffic high but
conversion rates will be lower.
Sally Kavanagh - So you need to look
at both, and get both as high as you can for the particular site. Perhaps
that's all self-evident but it doesn't hurt to go back and think of the basics
every so often.
Sally Kavanagh - would each of you say you have more
of a need to increase traffic or increase conversion?
Nachtman -
Increase traffic.
Ed Dechristopher - Increase conversion.
Bradt48 - Increase conversion.
Shermanhu - At this present time, still
developing sites, so it will be traffic, but keeping conversion strategies in
mind.
Sally Kavanagh - Great - we can talk about both.
Sally
Kavanagh - Obviously optimization is vitally important but off line advertising
and promotion should not be overlooked.
Sally Kavanagh - For some
types of business this is going to be at least as important as optimization. I
am working on a site that sells binding machines for office use and people just
do not seem to be looking for binding machines but office supplies is to
general. I am plugging away at increasing the traffic using optimization but it
doesn't look as though it is ever going to be great.
Ed Dechristopher
- Should the advertising and promotion (off line) be website specific?
Sally Kavanagh - Should it be web specific? Depends on whether the company
trades off line to a major extent, also it depends on the cost of the
advertising. In expensive media it might be possible to take a small ad just
giving the web address, but in the less costly medium, a bigger ad with more
info.
Shermanhu - Sally, are you coming from the perspective that the
client's strategy should include email marketing, affiliate marketing, ezine
marketing, and ads, and on top of that, offline promo, including media releases
etc?
Sally Kavanagh - Yes - My view is that positioning should be an
integral part of the overall marketing strategy (how that for marketing
speak1).
Sally Kavanagh - if you attend an exhibition, you would
announce it in your ads - basically you would make each different medium work
for all the others - just the same for positioning.
Shermanhu - Are
there specific strategies you've employed that have tremendous response aside
from SEO or are they company or industry specific?
Sally Kavanagh -
tailor you campaign to the industry/company etc.
Sally Kavanagh - I
think email shots are still underused. Almost all sites can benefit from asking
visitors to sign up to a newsletter or similar. I find that many clients are
unwilling to take this on board - particularly companies in more traditional
markets. It must be marketers dream to have a captive audience to announce new
products, price changes etc to free of charge.
Sally Kavanagh - Let
very quickly list a few strategies for increasing traffic then look at
conversion...
Sally Kavanagh - Number 1 must be optimization.
Sally Kavanagh - Number 2, increasing links so increasing the number of
channels to find the site through.
Sally Kavanagh - Off line
advertising as we have discussed.
Sally Kavanagh - Keeping the site
fresh will keep people coming back, i.e. increase repeat traffic.
Sally Kavanagh - Anyone like to add any others?
Shermanhu - Email
marketing and affiliate marketing.
Sally Kavanagh - Yes, sure.
Shermanhu - Reciprocal links.
Ray Philip - Sponsoring
newsletter related to your business.
Shermanhu - Published articles in
industry related ezines or sites.
Sally Kavanagh - Sure, anywhere you
can get your site address in front of potential traffic's view, must be worth
it. I think what Sherman is saying is make your site and your company well
respected in their field. Be prepared to give information etc free of charge in
order to raise the profile and credibility of the site.
Sally Kavanagh
- The first rule must be for the site owner to know what response he wants and
then make it as easy as possible for the site visitor to comply and do it.
Sally Kavanagh - So, I am talking about navigation: Ease of finding
the right information such as the cost of p and p. How long delivery will take.
Making sure the customer feels secure, both in terms of web security and also
that he is dealing with a reliable company.
Sally Kavanagh - If the
customer finds the site confusing, he is less likely to entrust his order to
the site - will the dispatch be confused in sending the order out just as he
was on the site.
Sally Kavanagh - Again I am probably stating the
obvious, but I do try and look at clients sites every so often as though I had
never seen them before and decide whether I would know exactly what to do.
Shermanhu - Sally, two sites I've found to be tremendously effective
in understanding conversions, and reading stats effectively and perform
conversion effectively is at Jim Novo's site (www.jimnovo.com) and the
Eisenberg Brothers sites (www.futurenowinc.com).
Shermanhu - Jim Novo
has a power piece called "The Marketer's Common Sense Guide To E-Metrics". 22
Benchmarks to Understand the Major Trends, Key Opportunities, and Hidden
hazards your Web Logs Uncover.
Sally Kavanagh - I have heard of Jim
Novo - He has done several chats for the academy and I am certainly impressed
with what he has to say. I haven't seen his common sense guide but I'll look
into it.
Sally Kavanagh - One thing we have just touched on and
perhaps ought to say more is stats. All this talk about increasing traffic
levels and conversion rates is meaningless if you don't know where you are at
to begin with. Do you all monitor your stats?
Shermanhu - I have
Webtrends, but just a junior regarding reading them effectively learning more
from the two sites I gave earlier. Its like taking math classes again to work
the numbers - but its effective.
Sally Kavanagh - I use Hitslink -
mainly because I started with that and haven't changed. It is also very low
cost for clients and very easy to use. I think Webtrends is more comprehensive
though.
Cindy - One of my clients has an ASP file/log that shows
visitor stats in raw data format. I look at it to see where visitors are coming
from and when the robots are indexing them, but other than that I don't do
much. Is there an "easier" way to monitor stats on a regular basis with
multiple clients?
Sally Kavanagh - You paste a bit of JavaScript onto
each page of the site you want to monitor and then the package give info such
as traffic levels, where traffic is coming from, what search terms were used to
send traffic via the search engines, time of day traffic is heaviest etc.
Cindy - What is Hitslink?
Sally Kavanagh - www.hitslink.com.
Only one problem I have found with it. The info belongs to Hitslink, so when
their machine had a major crash in September, I lost all the past history for
half a dozen clients and there was nothing I could do.
Cindy - How
does it get the information to you?
Sally Kavanagh - You log onto
their site, using an id and password.
Sally Kavanagh - It is very easy
to set up sub accounts for different clients. They can then access their own
stats if they want to, but the payment is kept central.
Sally Kavanagh
- Sherman, can you say a bit about Webtrends as you use it.
Shermanhu
- I will. To be honest, its a monster, I have not used it much yet, but there's
so much info that I'm just learning what to read and not to bother, the only
items to read is what metrics you can turn into action on the site.
Shermanhu - Not give it justice - it would be wise to read it on
www.jimnovo.com and www.futurenowinc.com has conversion calculators for free
and I know that Macromedia has a Webtrends plugin for easy install of Webtrends
scripts. Sorry if I can't provide more info here - but I thought leading you to
the experts would be wiser.
Sally Kavanagh - Fine Sherman - The bottom
line is use something so that you know what is happening and how your site is
being used. Marketers have never had access to the sort of info that web stats
provide. It's a gold mine. One Company I work for has almost completely changed
the markets it's going for as a result of info from the web stats.
Shermanhu - That's powerful.
Sally Kavanagh - It's been quite a
general chat but I hope it has been useful. I find just having to think about
what I am doing - and why - is helpful in itself. Hope you all agree. A good
Christmas break everyone and may your sites be working hard for you while
you're not!
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