Author Archives: Jim Barry

What exactly is a bad website & how do you fix it?

Posted on by


On my way into work this morning, I passed a local computer repair shop and they have one of those messaging signs. This one said “we fix bad websites”.  Obviously that got my attention, but I am always on the lookout for such things as a marketing executive.  It did however get me to thinking, “what exactly is a ‘bad’ website?”

Is a bad website something that looks like it was built in 2001?  Is a bad website something that is so overwhelming with content that you “click off” the moment you get there because you don’t know where to start?  Is a bad website something that drives you no traffic on its own?  Is a bad website something that nobody can find unless they search for your company name?  Is a bad website something that makes you click 4 times before you get to what you want?  Is it when you go to visit examples of their work and they look old or in some cases you can’t FIND the references they give as “testimonials or case studies”?  Just what does a “bad website” mean and look like?

I would have to say all of the above.  You website is your only resource working 24/7/365 for your company.  It is also a lot of times your only chance to make that all important “first impression”.  You have 7 seconds for them to determine if they will “click off”.  You have to make sure you provide enough and the right content on your business site so they feel comfortable in one of three things – buying something (if you sell), filling out your form to talk to someone – or picking up the phone and calling you.  If you don’t give them what they need to do any of those three (refer to your sales process for what information is needed to get them to make a buying decision) – then you have a “bad website”.  PERIOD.

In a day and age where everybody says they can build your website, search optimize it, handle your social media, and drive you traffic – execution of those strategies makes all the difference.  Just because they “know more than you” doesn’t make them an expert in web strategy – talking the talk is much different than walking the walk.  Make sure you check out their site and the references they give you.  If their site does not have the work done that they are proposing to you and/or you find references to work that you don’t like – run.  If you don’t like their website (and just because it’s better than your current one, doesn’t mean you have to like it) keep looking.  When they are willing to tell you how they will do the things that will drive your website’s return-on-investment (ROI) to new levels (which is beyond just traffic) with specific steps and tasks and give you a list of people to call – follow up with references and ask how much VALUE they received – value being ROI, data, sales, leads, qualified traffic and understanding to move their entire business forward – then you have found someone worth talking to when it comes to “fixing bad websites”.

Should your business try Groupon, Living Social, & Google Offers?

Posted on by

Looks like the online promotions space is thriving. More and more special offers sites are being created. Google even went and developed their Google Offers product after they failed to buy Groupon for $6 Billion – that’s right $6 Billion. So there must be some value in these promotional tools right? Otherwise businesses would stop using them and Living Social sure has a large advertising budget for themselves.

Let’s look at Groupon.  So if you have a $50 product/service, that you sell for $25 – (it has to be a 50% discount so it is a “good deal” to get approved) and then you get 60% of the $25 and Groupon keeps 40% of the $25.  You are really selling a $50 product for $15 because of the discount and the Groupon percentage – but they are opening relationships for you – and for the most part giving you an opportunity for customer relationship.  So is a $35 acquisition cost on a $50 product/service worth it?  Only you can answer that, but you should run the numbers.  Based on that, I can tell you, it is going to perform close to what it would cost you with advertising dollars spent at that level (but you can optimize for performance over time with advertising).

You will have some instantaneous Branding and recognition, not to mention customer traffic over the 6 months the Groupon/Living Social is valid.  You will always have some existing clientele who will always buy this so it doesn’t reach only new people – unless you are just opening your doors in the market.  This is unbeatable for the new business.

However, I have yet to see a second offer from the same business so you only get to use this once – so pick your timing – if you are not a new business try to use it to boost a slower period and make sure you can handle the demand during the 6 months without losing your shirt.

There is also the FREE money aspect of this.  Like any rebate that is offered, you get a % that don’t use it. So if we use the first example again, you got $15 off each sale and that 25-30% don’t end up using it, that is FREE money for you to keep, which doesn’t hurt and softens the blow – but then you don’t get that all important “new” customer relationship either so it is kind of a double edge sword.

Here is a great case study.  We had a client use Groupon in December 2010 – a single location Hot Yoga Studio as part of launching their business and they sold almost 700 at $39 a pop.  That is incredible for a small business that is just getting going.  Now, it gave them some cash in the door and created some relationships.  They considered it a huge success.

My take, if you are opening a new business or want to launch a new product or want some quick cash – put an unbelievable offer out there through one of these and you should get some traction. Also learn from one before you try to do another – Set up some tracking on your website that sees what these people do that come to your website via this campaign and track their habits.

Be prepared to use it as a loss leader to get access to new customers and get “legs” underneath your new product or location. Also make sure your ongoing marketing turns those new relationships into repeat customers so you can make some money back and it creates success for the long term. That might take a second promo for them for another visit – but you don’t have to give Groupon their 40% this time.

Let us know if you have had success with one of these services – please give location and product/service sold and if it has been successful in generating repeat business.

Analyzing your audience’s web habits to improve website performance

Posted on by

How much actionable information do you have about your web visitors? Can you predict their wants, goals, needs and behavior? Are you using analytic data to improve website performance? Do you utilize any re-targeting, ad networks, Search Engine Marketing (PPC and Display) and social media to be collecting data across multiple external sites and clickstreams? If so, the potential to deliver targeted content and offers based on their previous behavior and referring traffic source is possible.

You can construct detailed matrix that serve up content based on the family of sites they have visited and the predicted traits and interests that visitors to those sites demonstrate. However, if the first known point of contact with your visitors is their arrival at your site, then predicting their targeted area of interest is a much more tricky proposition, unless you study your own analytics and data (Sitecore, Webtrends, Quantcast, Google Analytics, etc) to come up with them and improve website performance.

Do you perform any A/B testing of two broader offers or content paths on your enterprise level site visitors and see which performs better (ie they look at more pages or end up as a conversion more often).  That is a good place to start, but more organizations have never consider split testing their own website. Doing this would ensure no audience gets excluded or misdirected–and it requires less historical data to drive the offer but allows you to profile how each “path” behaves.

Coming from purchased media like PPC or Facebook, can also shed light into keywords that have “special” needs to be effective, landing pages that get them to take desired actions and demographic profiles of who is visiting based on reporting. Again, this allows you the create a profile on each type of visitor and adjust the “path” accordingly – which will improve website performance .

You tie all of this data together to make the necessary changes to your website and content, navigation paths to drive more usability, click patterns, desired “conversions” that you have established for your website and/or campaigns.  Interpreting data is extremely important to ongoing web success – find a resource to work with that understands this to help set benchmarks and foundational strategy and it will help educate yourself and give you insights to things you could use across all mediums with your marketing and advertising.

Social Media Strategy – trigger interaction & response

Posted on by

You do not have to be consumer oriented company to be able to use social media to advance your Brand, thoughts, products, and engagement with your audience. There are plenty of people professionally that look for helpful information for their jobs and will share valuable information with their peers when they find it. It some cases, it is even “cool” to be the first to find a great deal or share relevant information for others.

In the B2B world, you can also help aggregate content for your customers, clients, and prospects, by being a filter for them. You can share relevant information with them that has already “passed” your approval or relevance rating. This becomes almost like a value added service for them. They turn to you, a trusted resource first, before they go hunting on the Internet. You want them to say – “if they haven’t said anything about it yet, then I probably don’t need to pay attention to it yet.” And any savvy Internet person can tell you that just because it comes up “first” on Google, doesn’t make it accurate or right.

If you can get your people to interact with you, you can get valuable information about their habits, wants, desires, and interests. If you can get them to follow you or be involved, you can help your message get in front of thousands with a single click or post because it will not only reach your direct followers, but also post to their network of people because they are following you.

You can choose to have different message via each social medium (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, etc), or choose to broadcast your message, which will allow your audience to follow you via the medium they like to use the most and you still get your message out to the masses without requiring them to visitor you website. That is power and potentially all from a single article or click.

If you don’t know where to start or what you should be doing we have several tools on our website to help and we have created an great tool for measuring social media success and value of social media efforts to your organization. This will help you determine which social media efforts should be continued by your organization and give you some ways to help measure return-on-investment.

Social Media allows you to listen like never before & respond appropriately

Posted on by

Social Media has made it easier than ever for consumers and business people to get their opinions heard and get them into circulation faster than ever before. It also creates challenges – like should you listen? or what should you respond or how do you get quality responses and exposure?

You have all heard the phrase that the “squeakiest wheel gets the grease”. These are the people who will be everywhere just posting about their experience – especially if it was not a good one. Does that make them less credible? If they are an active poster and only have “complaining” on their mind, they are already less credible and you cannot be worried about everything they say. You should also look to see if they have people agreeing, “liking”, or responding to their posts. If they do, then you have to take action.

If something positive happens, respond and ask for more by more people. If something negative happens, address it and find a way to take care of it – then ask them to post (or update the previous post) after you fix the problem about how you took care of it. Actually have your customer service people ask if you can share their experience with they solve or problem or get a rave from an interaction – it will go a long way to helping you have an unlimited supply of content to use for your blog, Facebook, or social media channels.

Build your brand around building your community of followers and dialogs – the ones utilizing social media are most likely to share experiences and they will be most likely to share – giving you further reach through their network and you definitely want them on your side.

Seven Steps for Social Media Strategy Integration for your Company

Posted on by

I love this article from last summer about the 52 questions to ask when hiring a social media company. This article is spot on if you are serious about Social Media. It goes way in depth in some cases, especially for Small-to-Medium enterprises, but it does a good job in helping you determine what you should be asking a potential partner.

After talking to, working with and pitching dozens of companies and organizations on the principles of social media and why it works for more than just Business-to-Consumer Brands, I have realized that it is a much bigger commitment than just “another marketing or advertising campaign” of sorts.

Here is what you need to do to make sure your social media efforts get the Return-On-Investment (ROI) they could and also why playing around doesn’t really drive effective social media. All of these things really depend on who has what responsibilities within your organization and how it is structured but most are applicable in the larger, national and even global size companies. Even smaller organizations can take away some value as well.

First - Your various business units or divisions and partners should be all be looped in and asked if they participate in social media and how. They should all be informed somehow of what you are doing and why even potentially consulted on how they could improve their social media initiatives so you can have some Brand continuity across all of your channels.

Second - You need to look at your audience structure. Don’t be thinking that a “catch all” corporate Facebook page or blog is enough. People are smarter than that. Speak specifically to them, with content that is what they want – be specific in touching all your audience with content and experiences they can relate to. Don’t make it a “news” page. If you are updating them with content they don’t care about half of the time, they will start to ignore it ALL of the time and that is bad. If you have the resources and a large enough market share, you could consider “several” Blogs(or add filters when they follow so they can select what information they want) and multiple Facebook pages for segments that are big enough to warrant them and truly create a dialog/interaction with a specific customer base.

Third - You have to have some buy-in at the C-level. They should be involved in whats going on and even use them to help aggregate industry news, company news, white papers, blog postings, etc. It is important to help them buy into goals that established and measurement of success – in effect the ROI you want. This might also help you navigate any potential objections from “legal”. Speaking of legal, if you do use a third party source, make sure they can work with someone like Bevelwise to ensure no proverbial “lines” get crossed and they feel like you could get into any “trouble” resulting in ligitgation.

Fourth - offer out incentives of some sort to employees to touch customers (sales, customer service, customer care/support, etc) to help feed you good stories, testimonials, content, and things that make good social media posts. Anyone who touches a client could help generate content and drive the initiatives further – A customer service person that asks “are you following us on Facebook yet – we have specials we run for those fans on occasion” can go a long way to helping build your presence. These people can also get you content for posting MUCH faster and more often than most.

Fifth - all of your web resources, teams, should know what is going on and why. They don’t have to “agree” with it always, but aligning what is happening with the website (SEO/Content) resources, all of your marketing/advertising campaigns (email, online, offline, direct mail, etc) and initiatives and your PR team will help feed you more content and help the “big picture” work together. After all, if you are putting effort in, you want to maximize each effort.

Sixth - If you are big enough, try to find a champion from each internal department, especially those that touch customers, so they can farm for content, feedback and other things you can share through your social media channels. They can work with your social media agency or potentially be trained on making posts – You want to make sure you are feeding the content to touch all of your vertical markets, products, services, audiences etc-especially if you have the resources or need for content specific social media. Internal folks live and breathe your strategy 24/7 – they can be VERY beneficial to an outside resource because of that.

Finally - if you are choosing a partner to help, choose a partner that has understanding across all marketing mediums, but with a specialty in the online channels like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), website usability, online marketing – (banners/PPC, e-mail marketing, and especially analytics. That should mean they know how to set up goals and measure results across the many different channels and mediums that are being used for your overall advertising strategy.

We welcome your social media strategy questions.

What are your company’s value propositions and differentiators?

Posted on by

Just re-reading a great article from Jeffrey Gitomer in the local business journal. It resonated with me because we preach this to all of our clients when talking strategy for their marketing and sales efforts. Everyone needs to know their value propositions & differentiators because if you don’t then you are just another product or service that you will market as a “commodity”. A better question is do you know what your value proposition is?

Everybody has their set of products and/or services. Most have spent some time coming up with “differentiators” so they can tell why they are different. But true value combines what the client or prospect perceives to be in favor of them combined with what you perceive is in favor of them – hence the value proposition.

Are your Brand and marketing strategy reaching beyond the product or service itself to a relationship with your clients? Where are the areas where the most value you provide is perceived by your clients? Whether you consult Fortune 500 clients or sell shoes, you need to craft, create, and control the perception of value your product or service. Social media is exploding because it helps create this value and gives businesses more access to each customer relationship and therefore the ability add more value and integrate themselves with a client. In the case of services, your presence out in the web channels can add to building trust, in the case of shoes – how many people they can see are talking about them will add “perceived value” to your shoe or Brand of shoes.

Perceived value can also far outweigh the actual price paid. That value can actually help justify the price in a client’s mind. Everything you do needs to drive the prospect/customer to perceive value and the value you give provide to them. Price objections are typically more about them not perceiving enough value – it also you just need to change their perception and your content, messaging, and social media strategy can all help you change that perception.

Work on developing these propositions and you will see your revenue grow. Here are some helpful marketing toolsto help you craft your marketing and web strategies.

Top Search Terms and Visited sites for 2010

Posted on by

Experian does an annual study on the top search terms for each year and the top ten visited URLs for each year. Below you will find a graphic for 2010 versus 2009. Facebook found itself at the top of both lists – showing you the power that brand and property has become. There is a reason why Mark Zuckerberg was Time Magazine’s Person of the Year and there was a movie made about the Facebook story. As you will see, FOUR of the top ten search terms were all facebook.

Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.18 percent of the top 50 searches so you social media doubters needs to stop doubting.

New terms that entered into the top 50 search terms for 2010 included – netflix, verizon wireless, espn, chase, pogo, tagged, wells fargo, yellow pages, poptropica, games and hulu.

The combination of Google properties accounted for 9.85 percent of all U.S. site visits. Facebook properties accounted for 8.93 percent, and Yahoo! properties accounted for 8.12 percent. The top 10 Websites accounted for 33 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November 2010, an increase of 12 percent versus 2009.

One of the next questions becomes, will Facebook be able to be knocked off it’s perch from either list? You would think at some point there would be something else that needs to get searched for more than Facebook just because “everyone” will already be a user right? But when does that happen? 2011? 2012? When the next great social media invention comes along? It will be interesting to watch this over the next couple of years.

Some other fun facts and top searched items :
Athlete: Still Tiger Woods – Dallas Cowboys were the team
Destination: Disney World and Disneyland was #2
Movie Title: Star Wars
Company: Bevelwise (just making sure you are paying attention, lol)
Music Artist/Band: Justin Bieber mania was BEAT by Lady Gaga
TV Show: Dancing with the Stars beat Amercian Idol…
Personality: Kim Kardashian has passed Oprah and Rush was third…

We just thought it was very interesting how powerful Facebook as become. Let us know if you think any of these numbers/spots will change for 2011 and why. We’d love to hear your opinion.

As we begin 2011, thanks to everyone…

Posted on by

There are several things when you run a small services company that come into play. Good staff, good clients, and always a little luck. As a marketing firm, with heavy emphasis in the web marketing, search optimization, and online media fields that are highly competitive, you have to always be on the top of your game. For example, there is typically more than change per day (550+ in 2009) to how Google ranks sites, not to mention Bing and other factors. This “whole Internet thing” takes a lot more attention by the qualified people to do it and it will help maximize results because web is open 24/7. You also need to make sure you are not taking short cuts and you are building for long term as much as short term because long term will get you further for the money over time.

You also need to be able to create and implement marketing and web strategy you can measure and helps people establish and get to their goals. If you are not doing these and marketing effectively, then you are not maximizing your budget and return on investment. It isn’t about showing some results and saying “look at what we’ve done”. We find it extremely easy (with about 80% of our prospects) to have the ability to increase their marketing response by 10% or web hits by 33% just through implementing best practices and optimization of all media, but you have to look deeper than that. It’s more about using what we learned making those initial improvements and what we are going to do to get you to the next level of results. At some point, you will reach diminishing returns, but knowing when you shouldn’t spend the money to try for it is crucial to maximizing each and every piece of your marketing matrix and that is where we shine.

If you look at all the pieces of marketing as illustrated by these two graphics, one will see that the interactive or digital marketing picture alone has the same amount of moving parts as an entire strategy used to just 12-15 years ago. That in itself makes once have to pay attention to it to keep your business moving forward.

What we do is help get and keep businesses moving forward through building communities with their audiences and making sure their interactions with their customers and prospects gives them the best chance for success. I wanted to take a moment as we begin a new year to thank my wonderful staff for all their hard work and dedication, all of our great clients for believing in what we were telling them and trusting in our execution (even when they didn’t fully understand it) and just say that Bevelwise is nothing without both of you. Here’s to a great 2010 and hopefully an even better 2011.

Is it Social Media or should it really be Public Media

Posted on by

The term Social Media is not really accurate any more. Why? Because we have moved well beyond “social” into doing business. You want information to get into the marketplace, just turn to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, etc – and you can get it out to the masses more quickly than ever. Another reason, all of the a four mentioned have more value that being social if you use them right.

Also, one does not really have any control over what can be said/posted about them or your company or organization. It is really “public” media. Word can spread at warp speed to the public, especially if people deem it to be interesting. Several companies, public figures, and celebrities have “social media” site about them that they don’t have anything to do with – but all go into controlling public opinion of them. Some have to spend significant time to control their brand out there. The bigger your “Brand”, the more time you have to spend in this space to control your Brand.

I could also see the term “community media” being a potential moniker as well. All of these tools we mentioned above really go into creating a “community” of people who are interested in similar topics, products, information – and they feed off each other. That is an effective strategy to utilize all of these mediums. Add value to your clients and prospects, filter information for them, be a resource and partner to them as much as a supplier or vendor.

Creating an effective social media strategy is all about the execution of it and understanding how each piece plugs into the overall picture. You should hire someone to guide your strategy, but the information and content really has to come from someone internal while the expert will tweak that content for maximum effectiveness through “public” media channels. That guide for most companies that would mean outsourcing as would not be near a full time position – the right partner should have some understanding of your business and industry in order to be most helpful.