Strategy

Why You Shouldn't Replace Your Old Website

Mark Figart — Tue, 16 Jul 2019 18:02:22 +0000

Why You Shouldn't Replace Your Old Website

Mark Figart Tue, 07/16/2019 - 1:02pm

It’s mid-morning and my cell phone rings. I’m between tasks and haven’t talked to a soul all morning. I need to hear a voice, even if I don’t recognize the caller’s number. Surprisingly it’s not spam, and the lady on the other end, the owner of an MSP in Dallas, explains that she needs a new website. I try to get her to describe the problem.

“What’s wrong with the website now?”

“It’s not working for us”, she says.

So I ask, “Would you mind if I ask what specifically isn’t working?”

She replies, “I’m not getting any sales leads through the site.”

“Any idea why?”

“No”, she answers, “and I’m counting on a new website to fix this issue.”

We are trained to buy new.

Does this story strike you as a little ridiculous? It does me, but at the same time I get it. Most of us are busier than hell, so busy that sometimes buying new is easier than trying to fix what’s broken. We also live in a culture of disposables—electronics, home appliances—where repair ends up being more expensive than purchasing a new replacement. We have been trained to “buy new”.

If that’s not enough, others may try to convince us that new is better. As a marketing agency owner, I used to think convincing a client to replace a legacy website was, by default, in their best interest, knowing that what my team would build would be superior to what it was replacing. Some agencies will not consider taking on a new client if forced to work with the legacy website. It’s new or nothing. My agency now takes a contrarian view.

I’ve also seen stakeholders within a firm, if unhappy with their firm’s website for any reason, lobby for a new one. They don’t necessarily have to contribute, financially or otherwise, to the process of building it, so what do they have to lose in asking for it?

What’s so bad about a new website?

There are lots of reasons why you should not build a new website to replace a legacy site. For one, a website is not a dishwasher, and you can’t just pick out a new one on Amazon. Even the simplest websites generally combine some form of unique expression and tailored design with the complexity of an underlying content management system and hosting environment. As soon as you make a choice to rebuild your website you are likely committing yourself to double, triple, or quadruple your normal workload over the subsequent weeks and months to have any hope of a favorable outcome. You can’t effectively outsource or delegate the important decisions about your firm’s marketing, and the decisions are numerous. I’m not arguing that the effort is reason in and of itself to avoid building a new website, but I do want to make the point that buying new is anything but the easier option.

It’s not about what you’re gaining, but what you’re losing.

The reason you should think long and hard about replacing your website has more to do with what you’re giving up when you make the leap from the old website to the new one. The typical new website is birthed from hundreds, if not thousands, of assumptions based on opinion, intuition, and quite likely one or more persuasive personalities. Perhaps some new design trends are incorporated, and some new photography and video thrown in. Maybe the navigational structure is re-organized. And maybe, just maybe, the result of all these guesses is better than the existing website.

But you know what’s usually missing from that onerous process? What’s missing is evidence that any of these changes will make a difference to your audience. What’s missing is the influence of convincing data that supports each of our decisions. Red buttons instead of blue. Roboto font instead of Montserrat. Putting our philosophy on the About page. Adding all the employees to the Team page rather than just showing C-level leadership. Are you making all those changes because you have evidence they will move you toward your business goal?

Look, I have no doubt that a talented agency can create a “better” website than the one that your company published five or seven years ago. But unless you have rigorously been running marketing experiments on the site (I bet you haven’t) and unless the intelligence garnered is leveraged in the design of your new website (an awkward idea, given the way iterative experimentation works), then a wholesale replacement of your website is probably not a great idea.

Changes to your website should be made incrementally, based on the results of experiments that provide evidence that such change has a positive impact. What I have typically witnessed instead is a monumental (substitute “expensive”) effort resulting in the implementation a brand new design, a site’s underlying technical architecture, and typically some smaller portion of a website’s content. A brand new site that may, or may not, bring better results than the last one. Out with the old site, and along with it a ton of data that would have proved quite useful as a benchmark for experimentation.

To add insult to injury, these gargantuan efforts take so much in the way of time and money that many times there’s no appetite left for actually leveraging the asset in a meaningful way. “Set it and forget it” seems to be the prevailing philosophy. I’m reminded of the tortoise and the hare. The rabbit burns out, and I don’t blame him for sitting on the bench to catch his breath while the methodical tortoise inches forward, each confident step adding a new insight and creating value.

How to have the best website among your competitors without ever building a new one

The most successful marketers take a different approach. Instead of operating out of the perceived need to impress the CEO with a flashy new website or to make a big splash with a redesign, they seek to understand the connection between what happens on the website today and the buying decisions made by customers and prospects. They observe website behavior and develop goals related to how to deliver more value as measured by improved engagement, an increase in micro-conversion rates, higher page rank, or some other meaningful metric. They hypothesize and design experiments to measure the impact of small changes on those metrics. They seek to create one simple success after another, implementing change only when evidence suggests that such a change will bring about a positive result.

Continuous experimentation is not easy. But in contrast to the complexity of a major website overhaul it is infinitely more manageable. And if you want to maximize the positive impact of a website budget, you’ll most often do far better—that is, you’ll make a much greater impact toward meeting business goals—spending it incrementally through experimentation and incremental changes than you will on the typical website replacement route.

Challenges of evidence-based change

I have no expectation of seeing an end to this website replacement bias anytime soon. Even when marketers embrace the idea of pursuing data-driven, incremental change, they may face pressures that prevent its practice.

Another obstacle is the clunky and cumbersome nature of the traditional content management system (CMS) that powers most websites. Tools like Wordpress and Drupal solve a lot of problems, to be clear, but their complex intertwinement of interdependent database and file system content storage, navigation logic, visual “theme” layer, and content administration interface holds marketers hostage, and sometimes seem to force wholesale website replacement. Fortunately there are new technologies and trends emerging (e.g., the headless CMS, JAMstack) that are empowering a growing cadre of agile marketers. And again, we’re not necessarily talking about wholesale replacement of a CMS. Even the aging monolith CMS systems can be leveraged for incremental change, sometimes continuing to provide value well down the road, ceding some roles to more agile-friendly technologies.

Where we are headed

New technologies and tools, along with a growing general awareness of the weakness of traditional approaches to digital marketing as a whole, are behind a trend toward evidence-based website management. I hope to play a role in expediting the adoption, because I don’t like to see waste.

Do you have a website replacement project on your marketing roadmap? Consider, at least, an alternative, incremental approach. Ask yourself if your time, energy and budget might be better allocated toward gathering useful evidence and implementing incremental change rather than on rebuilding your site in its entirety. If you’re honest with yourself, you may conclude that the time has come to adjust your approach.

Leave Things Better Than You Find Them

Mark Figart — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:05:43 +0000

Leave Things Better Than You Find Them

Mark Figart Mon, 01/28/2019 - 1:05pm

My mom and dad weren't big campers. In fact, my mom never went along on a family camping adventure, preferring instead to let my older brother and me suffer the consequences of my dad's questionable planning. Fortunately, my dad braved the elements—and the persnickety personalities of his two young boys—on more than one occasion so that we didn’t entirely miss out on one of the great traditions of the outdoors. And despite my mother’s absences, she had quite an impact on my own experience with nature that's stuck with me ever since.

I was only four years old when my brother and I were loading our gear into the trunk of my dad's ’63 Plymouth Fury for a weekend trip to White River Reservoir where I would be introduced to my first stringer of catfish. In the kitchen, my dad was asking my mom for a couple of paper grocery bags to take along to use for discarding trash. Plastic grocery bags were not a thing yet, and we never had cause to buy plastic trash bags. "We want to leave the place just like we found it," he said to my mom.

"How 'bout you leave it better than you found it?!" Mom shot back without hesitation.

I overheard that exchange through the screen door, and for some reason was more than a little intrigued by the idea. It stuck in my head for the whole weekend, and I challenged myself repeatedly to apply it wherever I ventured. If I encountered trash, even if it wasn't mine, I would pick it up and put it in one of the paper bags my dad had set under the picnic table at our campsite. Maybe I didn't pick up all the trash, but I told myself that all I had to do was to leave things “better”, not necessarily “perfect”.

Today I apply this principle as often as my self awareness allows. If I catch myself having a bad day, it's amazing how often I can trace my mood back to something I did where I failed to apply it. Maybe I provoked a friend with a sarcastic (and unkind) remark, or allowed some frustration to manifest in an inappropriate outburst. Are these things I would allow if my goal were to leave things, including people, better than I found them?

It's in this spirit that I've always tried to approach the work we do at Digett. Take employees, for example, who seldom stick around forever. It's never fun to see a team member leave the flock, and sometimes it downright hurts, but I always appreciate knowing when a teammate has gained knowledge and experience preparing them for their next career chapter. It's good karma, too, at least the way I see it, to leave people better than we found them. Clients, also, will come and go, and that's a good thing. We may cherish the long-term relationships we share with some of them, knowing at the same time it can be healthy for clients to venture out on their own, or to seek assistance from another provider. I only hope I never hear a client tell me they were better off before we worked together.

But how many times have I heard prospects and clients recount stories of having poured thousands of dollars into marketing over the course of months or years while expressing their frustration in having little or nothing to show for it!

What is the Purpose of Marketing?

Marketing is an investment, and investments can turn out good or bad. They can help grow your assets, or deplete them. If done with care, though, with sound decisions outnumbering poor ones, time and money invested in marketing should be converted to outputs and outcomes that are worth more than the inputs. To me, "leaving it better than I found it" means, in the context of a client's marketing program, increasing the value of the marketing asset.

If the concept of the marketing asset sounds new to you, you're not alone. I've looked far and wide for literature on this topic, and it is shocking to me to come up virtually empty handed. There are countless resources that talk about marketing as an investment, but almost nobody ever talks about caring for and tracking the value of the marketing asset—the net worth of an organization’s marketing program— as they would their stock portfolio, or their real estate holdings. I can guarantee that when companies are bought and sold, there is careful consideration given to the value of the marketing asset. And failing to consider the value of your asset, my friends, is opportunity lost, because it can have a profound impact on how you view the effectiveness of your company's marketing efforts.

Placing a dollar value on each and every input, output and outcome can be challenging, if not impossible. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try, and the value that comes from shifting one’s thinking could put a business on a growth or profitability path never before imagined.

Let’s take three distinct sets of activities that comprise marketing at a high level: Planning, setup and operations. Each of these activities contributes to the overall asset. Planning produces a strategy, an asset. If you think strategy is not an asset, you probably don’t have one. Setup produces a marketing platform we can leverage to execute our strategy. And operations takes the assets produced by the other two activities to produce—in addition to certain desired outcomes—even more assets. Think about how a skillful marketing operations team can increase market reach by cultivating quality email lists. The lists themselves aren’t the desired outcome, but they’re a valuable asset in obtaining that outcome. Consider an ever-expanding library of valuable content. Blog posts and videos are not the ultimate outcomes we are after, but they can definitely contribute in our efforts to achieve those outcomes. How about the improved audience intelligence resulting from skillful A/B testing? Again, intelligence isn’t the end goal, but it’s a valuable asset in the pursuit of our goal.

All of these assets, tangible or intangible, are ideally carefully nurtured, and yet too often unacknowledged, neglected or ignored entirely. The most common failure I see is one of planning. Firms are quick to deploy tactics without having developed an overall marketing strategy, and it’s the very essence of such strategy to determine not only what tactics could be effective, but how they play a role in cultivating, growing, and measuring the value they contribute to the marketing asset as a whole.

Picking Up Trash

When, as a four-year-old, I first l latched on to the idea of leaving things better than I found them, I found a simple application that required no planning. If I saw a piece of trash as I explored the shores of White River Reservoir, I picked it up and discarded it in an appropriate place.

Marketing is a bit more complicated, and requires planning, setup and effective operations to maximize short- and long-term impact. If increasing and tracking the value of the marketing asset are incorporated as goals of each of these activities—in addition to achieving other desired outcomes—we can gain immediate clarity on how to better allocate resources, improve outcomes, and maximize return on investment. That’s what I’d call leaving things better than we found them.

Who knew such a simple principle could be so valuable?

How to Solve Your Customer's Problems and Make Money Doing It

Emma Ruehl — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 19:51:54 +0000

How to Solve Your Customer's Problems and Make Money Doing It

Emma Ruehl Mon, 07/31/2017 - 2:51pm

You’ve invested the time and effort to craft a solid sales message and marketing campaign. The offer is great, the price is right, and people should be flocking in your doors and email inboxes to purchase. You’ve even paid a company to help get your website to rank in the top five of Google’s search results page, and your site’s traffic has soared as a result. But somehow, the sales aren’t rolling in.

Turns out, ranking #1 in Google doesn’t directly get you sales. Helping people does.

Back to the Drawing Board

At the heart of every potential sale is a person with a problem. Is your business the right solution to the problem? Does your prospect feel understood, cared for, and compelled to partner with you to work towards a solution? Before you sell, it’s imperative that you understand the person and the problem. Otherwise, you’re marketing blindly. Here’s where to start.

1. Stop Trying to Think For Your Customer

Instead of developing products and messaging around inferences and feelings, ask the consumer directly. Start with a simple survey asking about their pain points (there are a ton of great chat bots and survey tools out there right now), interview people as they use your site to uncover frustrations, and read through your reviews and testimonials.

Photo via Olark.

Uncover why your prospect went looking for a solution and other approaches they’ve tried. Why have your customers chosen you? What almost stopped them from choosing you? Before you prescribe the solution, flush out the problem, and observe it from multiple angles. It’s your goal, as the Master of the Solution, to better understand the problem than your prospects and customers.

2. Build Content that Resonates with Solution-Seekers

Your prospects and customers don’t want content shoved down their throat. They want to encounter messaging that speaks to them and their problems. Have a conversation that brings them to the conclusion that you are the right fit and worth their dollars.

Screenshot via Hubspot

Much of the best content comes directly from the mouths of your customers, which is another reason why surveys and interviews are critical. There is no better way to help someone feel understood than to translate their very own thoughts and feelings into helpful messaging. Did a prospect express frustration around cost? Include messaging about value, or offer a free trial. Even better: when you know their pain points, include a list of features that directly addresses those pain points.

3. Rid Design of Disruption and Trend

So many brands are latched on the heels of the latest design trends. Heard of parallax? Ghost buttons? Hero rotator images? Perhaps you’re not familiar with the terminology, but no doubt you and your competitors have toyed with one or all of these design trends.

Look familiar? Screenshot via ABC.

It’s rare that businesses choose design elements based on actual research; typically, design is dictated by a template you purchased, or someone on your sales team saw an effect on a competitor’s site and thought it would be “cool” to implement on yours. If everyone else is doing it, you should be too, right?

The problem with trend is that it’s often broken from its original context and applied to a million different projects, despite relevance and suitability. When design dictates development and content, you end up with a pretty portfolio site that is irrelevant to your target audience. And all your money goes to making a piece of art that no one buys.

The best design adds to, and doesn’t detract from, user experience. It’s a supporting player that should be the last thing people notice. It should help logically guide users through your site architecture, keeping interest up and building trust in your brand.

Easy to digest and navigate site via Ted.

At the end of the day, your content is the star of the show. It is what resonates with your customers at their core, communicating that you can solve their problem and solidifying the connection that supports a lasting, mutually-beneficial relationship.

4. Invest In an SEO Strategy that Seeks to First Answer a Query

At the heart of SEO is simply being the best answer to a particular query; it’s inherently about solving problems. No doubt, you’ve searched yourself for product or service pricing, clicked on one of the top search results that you expected to contain pricing information, and much to your disappointment found no pricing but a barrage of CTA popups and contact forms.

Screenshot via Google

What happens when people don’t find what they’re looking for? They’ll exit your site. They’ll delete your email. They’ll go somewhere else because there will always be someone else who is actually solving their problem.

Be a smart marketer and lead your team to new thinking. If your business has been stuck in a rut of one-sided communication and has no idea what your customers and prospects actually want, be the voice for them. Seek to understand pain points and solve the problem; don’t add to a million other voices trying to tell consumers what they want. If you put in the effort to understand your prospects, they will reward you.

How to Announce Your Firm's Name Change

Mark Figart — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 22:21:10 +0000

How to Announce Your Firm's Name Change

Mark Figart Thu, 07/13/2017 - 5:21pm

You have a new company name. Congratulations. You may be thinking about how much work was involved: The brainstorming, the research, the emotional ups and downs that are inevitable in such an endeavor—whether you had exclusive control of the process or, more likely, were just one of several with an influence in the name ultimately chosen.

But guess what? You have a lot more work ahead. Introducing a new company name is not simply a matter of updating the logo on your website, a move that could lead to disastrous results. The last thing you want is to lose business or confuse your customers. At best, failure to plan will squander the positive publicity and energy you could have generated with good planning and effective execution of a well-timed announcement.

Exactly What Are You Announcing?

You're not out to just give folks a heads up that your name is changing. You need to put this in the context of how it's meaningful to them. Why was the firm's name changed in the first place? Chances are your message is somewhere in the answer to that question. But regardless of the reason, you'll want to find a positive story that connects with those who have an interest in your firm.

How does the name change reflect a shift in the firm's culture? How does the new name better align with your mission to help your clients? How will the name better reflect the firm's values. There's a bigger story here than a name change, and if you don't articulate it, you leave a wide open void to be filled with cynicism and mistrust.

Who Should Know, and When?

Your customers are just one audience to consider. Employees, partners, vendors and other organizations your firm may be involved with will also need to know, and by telling them in a thoughtful way you can best influence the outcome.

Best to start with employees. Not only do they deserve to know first, it's in the company's interest to have all team players on the same page. A name change is generally a pretty big deal, so a live gathering is best if you can swing it. There are any number of political and logistical factors here to consider, so I won't try to give you specifics on how to pull this off. But think, for example, about whether executives and managers should be informed prior to making a company-wide announcement. Consider how far in advance of the public announcement you should roll this out internally. There's no single path to success, but failure to think this through is a certain recipe for trouble.

Customers are generally your next priority. Here's an opportunity to make your best customers feel special. Call or visit them well before making the announcement more public. Tell them the story and why it was important to you that they know first. Communicating real-time, whether in person or on the phone, is one example of good account management.

By the way, breaking the news of a name change is a job to be shared by the firm's owners, partners and account execs. If you're in marketing, don't make this your job except where it makes sense because of the relationships you've forged. If your firm's leadership isn't on board with this sort of communication plan, it's your job to convince them otherwise.

While a phone call may not be in order for all your customers, some type of personalized communication may be warranted, even if it's just a personal email.

What about your partners, those firms with whom you tackle big projects together? Your vendors? The professional organization where you hold a board position? As with your customers, there's no good excuse for not sending personalized communications.

Teasing the Announcement

These are all "pre-announcements", of sorts. You're telling all the important people in your professional services firm's ecosystem of an impending change, and in doing so you're showing them how important they are by giving them advance notice.

You can, and probably should, also tease the upcoming change on your website. Think this one through, though. Unlike with those with whom you already have a relationship, visitors to your website don't necessarily need the full scoop. Part of the goal is still to avoid confusion in the eye of prospects, potential employees and partners. But you're using the upcoming "big event" as an opportunity to create interest and present your firm as a dynamic, evolving firm leveraging your most valuable digital asset. So once you've given notice to those who you deem most important to the firm, why not tease your name change with a more mysterious "Something big is happening" type of message. Once again, this is an opportunity to tell the story in a way that strengthens your brand. You're limited only by your creativity.

It's Announcement Day!

Now it's time for the announcement itself. It's time to tell the public. But how? Here are the main communication channels to consider:

Company Website

There's some chance that with a name change comes a brand new website design. That's great. But you'll undoubtedly be surprising many who came to the site expecting something entirely different. They may have even been redirected from a different URL. (You did remember to redirect traffic from the old domain, right?) So help these folks through the transition with messaging that speaks to the change. Like this, for example: "Welcome to Acme Engineering, formerly Smith and Sons."

Email

Email is a perfect way to get an announcement out quickly and proactively for firms that have an active email list. By "active" I mean that Marketing is already communicating with these recipients on at least a quarterly basis—monthly, preferably—leveraging email best practices, including a quality email or automation platform. If your firm isn't doing this, I can tell you with confidence you are missing out on one of the highest-return marketing tactics you could be employing.

Don't overlook your corporate email system as an excellent medium to disseminate messaging about the name change. Every outbound message from the firm's employees can include transitional messaging in the email footer. For firms that don't have an IT-controlled footer, employees can be encouraged to include such messaging in their emails through a simple addition to their email signature.

Social Media

Thanks to social media channels, getting the word out to the rest of the world—beyond even the best-maintained corporate email list—is amazingly easy. While not as personal as email, the reach is unbeatable. For Announcement Day, your firm's profiles should all be updated with your new name and logo, along with any supporting imagery in the event of a brand makeover.

Unless your name change is only a slight change from the original, you may have to create a brand new LinkedIn Company Page. Check LinkedIn's guidelines, and don't wait until the last minute to do so. For firms that have to do this, you could very well need days or even weeks to complete the transition from one Company Page to another.

With profiles updated, announcements consisting of on-point messaging and supporting graphics can be scheduled appropriately.

Press Release

Press releases will have limited impact, but urban-based business-oriented newspapers still have a following, and getting your announcement printed here can reach a part of your audience—aging leadership that hasn't taken to social media—that might otherwise be missed. Such coverage will likely make it to a local paper's website, too, which might make for an interesting link to share with your email list in a future campaign.

How Long To Transition?

However you go about informing the world of your firm's name change, it's safe to say that repetition is a good thing. Starting with your activities leading up to the public announcement, and culminating in a period of transition-oriented messaging on the web and in your digital communications, you may be looking at a period of 3 to 6 months.

Do the Work

Events as significant as a name change are few and far between. Don't settle for letting it run its own course. Rather, plan ahead and do the hard work of leveraging it for all its worth. You'll get a far greater return in the long run, and mitigate the risk of unplanned headaches in the meantime. You've already done the part that takes courage. Now dig in, do the work required, and enjoy the spoils.

Real Marketing Ideas from a Fake Sport

Amy Peveto — Tue, 07 Apr 2015 16:17:51 +0000

Real Marketing Ideas from a Fake Sport

Amy Peveto Tue, 04/07/2015 - 11:17am

A few weeks ago I was snookered into watching WrestleMania, the WWE’s yearly wrestle-palooza. It’s ridiculous and clearly fake, but I couldn’t stop watching because it was packed with amazing stories. If only there was a way to bring this storytelling energy into the marketing world!

Oh wait

You’re probably not selling wrestling tickets or promoting guys in spandex singlets, but you are selling something, and you do have stories. The fun part is finding those stories and figuring out how to tell them.

The WWE has the same challenge. Just like NBC during the Olympics, WrestleMania creators must find a way to draw viewers quickly into the wrestlers’ stories.

But unlike the Olympics — where everyone really only needs to care about the athletes for a few weeks every couple of years — the WWE must tell stories interesting enough to keep people coming back week after week for decades.

How do they do this, and how can their strategies be valuable to your business?

Tell lots of stories

Some WWE characters have been around for more than 20 years. That’s a lot of stories, and a lot of effort spent evolving them to keep people interested.

Takeaway: Don’t let your stories languish. Update your case studies and post new blog articles; dive into video and other new storytelling forms. Always be on the lookout for new tales you can share with your audience.

Make them larger than life

The stories WrestleMania tells are so over the top, I can’t even describe them. For a quick example, check out this video (language/content warning):

This is crackers, right? But I bet you chose a side.

Takeaway: Go big or go home. Give your audience something to love or hate, and make them pick a side: Mac or Windows, Chevy or Ford, your product or your competitor’s.

Want to sell? Tell stories

The first WrestleMania took place in 1985 in front of 19,000 people; in 2015 there were over 76,000 — plus millions of television viewers around the globe.

All because of storytelling.

These strategies do not belong to the WWE. They are yours to leverage to grow your business. Use them well and you will tell great stories.

More marketing ideas

Why Failing Matters

Amy Peveto — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 14:35:41 +0000

Why Failing Matters

Amy Peveto Tue, 03/31/2015 - 9:35am

Failure terrifies me, especially when it means disappointing a client. These failures are brutal, and damaging to client relationships. But they are also absolutely critical to our success.

My most embarrassing failure

Awhile back I was put in charge of writing the website content for a professional services client. Our team put together market research and buyer personas, and I used this information as well as a list of competitor websites provided by the client to do my writing.

I found it challenging to write about an industry unfamiliar to me; I agonized over how much detail to include and whether or not I was copying our client’s competitors.

The client’s response to the first drafts was severe: I got it wrong, and it would all need to be re-done before we could continue. Content development was assigned to another team member.

The client lost faith in me, and in Digett. We’ve all worked together to get the relationship running smoothly again, but it makes me heartsick to think about how easily I upset the balance.

Why I’m telling you this

I’ve read so many blog posts about how it’s okay to fail, that it promotes out-of-the-box thinking and encourages people to take chances. But where are the articles explaining what to do when you fall flat on your ass?

It’s fine to “dream big and fail hard,” but you have to have a plan for recovering from that failure and avoiding a future repeat.

Learn from failure

Henry Ford once said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” Failing once is embarrassing — failing again the same way because you didn’t learn the first time can be a nightmare.

Fortunately there’s a simple process for avoiding this scenario.

Acknowledge your failure - Confess your failure to yourself (and others).
Write it down - Create a plan for avoiding future similar mistakes. Revisit these notes often.
Move on - Stop beating yourself up. Your next project needs your full attention.

The lesson I learned from my most embarrassing failure was to speak up. I was tentative, afraid to dive deep, ask questions, and be assertive. I didn’t have what I needed to succeed, and lacked the nerve to demand it. So I failed.

Failure sucks

The occasional mistake or failure is inevitable, and painful. But without those failures humanity would never have taken to the skies, visited the darkest depths, or mapped our globe.

Try new things. Fail. Learn. Try again.

Submitted by Julia on Wed, 04/22/2015 - 1:00pm

Thank you for sharing, Amy! I think your point about having a plan for when you fail is so true, and I like the suggestion to write it down and revisit your notes.

Submitted by Amy Peveto on Wed, 04/22/2015 - 1:06pm

Thanks, Julia! Writing something down makes it easier to remember. Hope you're having a great day.

Case Study: The Secret to 175% More Conversions

Amy Peveto — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 17:08:41 +0000

Case Study: The Secret to 175% More Conversions

Amy Peveto Fri, 03/13/2015 - 12:08pm

Content marketing is not easy. It’s not fast, either. But as Van Delden Wastewater Systems learned, it can be one of the most effective ways to increase your company’s online presence and lead generation — provided you begin with a solid strategy and a willingness to adapt it as you go.

Meet Van Delden

Van Delden Wastewater Systems is a family-owned and operated company specializing in the design, installation, maintenance, and inspection of all types of septic systems in South Texas. The company is currently owned and run by the third and fourth generations of Van Deldens.

Background

Van Delden originally approached Digett seeking assistance with driving more traffic to their website. After a brief assessment, we knew there was greater opportunity. The company had existed for more than 70 years, but their digital presence was minimal.

Their legacy website was not designed to encourage inquiries. Driving more traffic to the website was a worthwhile goal, but we believed few of those visitors would be persuaded to pick up the phone and call.

At the same time, Van Delden was right; they did need more traffic. After deployment of a website designed to entice visitors to take a desirable action, we would still need to help people find that website.

Our strategy

Through conversations with Van Delden we knew what we had to pull off to deliver a positive return on investment. We began by developing a holistic content marketing strategy incorporating email, paid advertising, blogging, and social media outreach, as well as an editorial calendar to guide our execution and a new website that operates as the hub of Van Delden’s marketing efforts.

Challenges and readjustments

While we experienced some great results quickly — the new website received more than 50% more visitors the month after launch than the month before, and the number of conversions doubled — it has demanded an ever-watchful eye for opportunities to drive consistent growth over time. Here are some of the efforts we’ve executed and lessons we’ve learned in the last two years.

Challenge 1: Few conversion opportunities

Van Delden’s legacy website offered no opportunity for prospects to convert online. If they wanted to contact Van Delden, they had to pick up and dial a phone. We knew we would need to develop multiple conversion opportunities on the website at all levels of the sales funnel if we were going to help Van Delden generate more online business. We came up with this plan of attack:

Add a contact form - We added a page to the website where visitors can fill out an online form, asking Van Delden for assistance with their septic needs. Prospects have more ways to reach out for assistance, which reduces conversion friction.
Make it even easier to contact Van Delden - We embedded more contact forms in the sidebars of the website’s most-visited pages and blog articles so that visitors could contact Van Delden without having to navigate to the main Contact page.
Capitalize on existing conversion opportunities - Van Delden has always offered free phone consultations, so we promoted that offer with messaging throughout the website and an optimized landing page.
Offer downloadable content - We created landing pages that offer educational whitepapers to different segments of Van Delden’s audiences, and promoted that content through the blog, social media, and paid advertising.
Build an email marketing list - At the bottom of every conversion form we promoted an opportunity for visitors to sign up to receive Van Delden’s quarterly newsletter.

Results: 175% conversion increase

Between its launch in December 2012 and December 2013, the Van Delden website saw a 175% increase in conversions — from phone calls alone. By 2014, Van Delden was receiving an average of 80 conversions per month from forms and phone calls.

Their next-biggest converter is the audience-specific whitepapers, which are downloaded dozens of times per month and are responsible for most of the newsletter subscriptions. Van Delden’s quarterly newsletter goes out to thousands of people and has an average 35.5% open rate and 24% click-through-rate — in an industry where the averages are 20.16% and 7.36%, respectively.

One area we still see room for improvement is in our promotion of Van Delden’s free phone consultations. The landing page hasn’t generated as many leads as we’d like, and we are re-evaluating our promotional efforts.

Challenge 2: Small local reach

Blogging was slowly improving Van Delden’s presence in search engine results, but local consumer awareness of the company remained low. We needed a way to rapidly build their brand’s visibility in the Hill Country while we continued the gradual organic search growth through blog content. Our plan was three-fold:

Send special offers to local prospects - We mailed postcards with special offers to residents in Van Delden’s service area.
Target local Facebook advertising - We developed a branding campaign and ads designed to reach local prospects while they browsed on Facebook.
Develop educational videos - We worked with Van Delden to script, shoot, and edit eight educational videos that we’ve incorporated into existing marketing campaigns, both on-website and across social media channels.

Results: Expanded brand awareness

The first direct mail campaign was a success, and still brings in new customers more than a year later. The educational videos have been collectively viewed more than 15,000 times, and targeted Facebook ads are responsible for hundreds of visitors and dozens of conversions every month.

Looking ahead

It’s been amazing working with Van Delden these past two years, and we’re excited to implement more improvements and tackle more tough questions.

How can we better promote the company’s free consultations offer? Is it even a good use of our marketing budget, or is there another, better opportunity?
What can we do to better track our efforts’ results? Measuring marketing results is a challenge for everyone, including us.
How can we continue optimizing, maintaining, and growing our existing positive momentum?

“We came to Digett looking for help with SEO — we never expected to get almost three times as many leads through our website by the end of the first year. Digett has made the complex seem simple; they show us every month exactly what results we're getting for our money.” — Courtney Van Delden

Build your brand in 2015

Content marketing is a never-ending challenge, one we love tackling head-on with our clients. If you’re interesting in building your brand and generating more online business in 2015, we’d love to hear from you.

Time to Deck Your Marketing Strategy This Holiday Season

Jennifer Edwards — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 18:23:14 +0000

Time to Deck Your Marketing Strategy This Holiday Season

Jennifer Edwards Wed, 12/10/2014 - 12:23pm

Although Black Friday has come and gone, we are still just getting into the holiday shopping season. Don’t wait any longer to pump up your marketing strategy — now is the time to give your customers some holiday cheer. Here are three ways you can improve your marketing this holiday season.

Oh what a sight

Winter is one of the most beautiful times of the year, so take advantage of it by wowing your customers with gorgeous visuals of the season. Whether you prefer an elegant Christmas tree or a snow covered forest, make sure to use high-quality photos that will catch people’s attention.

If you are ready to take it a step further, try asking your customers to send in photos. What is better than using great visuals made by real customers? Not only will they love being recognized on social media, but incorporating user-generated images can even allow you to run promotions centered around your fans’ content.

Send some cheer

You would be surprised how many companies actually take the time to send out holiday greetings this time of year. Stand out from your competition by getting a little creative this year with your cards or e-cards.

Want to stand out even more? Send your holiday card on non-traditional card-sending holidays, like New Year’s Eve. You’ll be sure to be the company on your customers’ minds as they go into the new year.

Give a little back

Since it is the season of giving, why not make a donation to a charitable foundation or volunteer some time for a special cause in place of sending gift baskets to your clients. This is the time to give back to the community, so choose a cause that hits the heart and gets your entire team excited.

And let your clients know about it, too! Include in your next newsletter or holiday card that your company is donating — whether it’s money or time — to a great cause this holiday season. You’d be amazed how far a little “warm and fuzzy” can go.

Are you ready for the season?

Preparing your marketing strategy for the holiday season doesn’t have to be daunting. Instead, make it a fun and creative time the whole office can get in on.

Are you using an outdated strategy? Download our Digital Marketing Guide to Growth to get started on developing your content marketing strategy that will truly wow your customers this season.

[Image credit: wlodi- license]

Thinking Mobile: How to Write Killer Content for All Devices

Jennifer Edwards — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 16:19:47 +0000

Thinking Mobile: How to Write Killer Content for All Devices

Jennifer Edwards Tue, 11/11/2014 - 10:19am

At the 2014 Content Strategy Summit, Ginny Redish discussed the do’s and don’t of content writing. Her most important tip: think mobile. But what does this mean for our content? Let’s go over how to create killer content that is easy to read and adaptable across multiple devices.

First, let’s plan

Before you can get started on writing, you must first create a plan. Whether this is an umbrella plan for your entire company or you are planning for each piece of content, it is important to consider three things when writing content:

Purpose: What do you want to achieve? Ask yourself, “If my content is successful, these people will do [this].”
Personas: Who are we writing the content for? What devices will they use? What should we keep in mind about them?
Conversations: What is the message? Is your content answering the questions the site visitor came with?

By keeping these three points in mind, you will have a better idea of how to form your content and provide a clear message that not only engages the site visitor, but more importantly, answers their questions.

How to think mobile

With over 50% of American adults using smartphones, it’s pretty likely you will have just as many mobile visitors to your site as desktop ones. With so many electronic devices available these days, how can you possibly write content for each one? Even responsive websites don’t always make your content look great across all devices.

Redish’s rule of thumb for avoiding this issue is simple: write all your content as you would for your mobile site — if it looks great on your mobile, then it will look great on all other devices.

Write less for more impact

Writing less for a mobile site doesn’t mean you are “dumbing down the content.” Instead, you are simply respecting your busy site visitor’s time. You can save page space and provide a clear, concise message by shortening phrases. For example, instead of “at this point in time” try using “now.”

Another key component to keep in mind is the order of your information. Visitors will only read until they have satisfied their need for visiting your site. So make sure to put your key messages and/or warnings before your marketing hype.

For example, Redish talks about how two women visited a mobile site for a stain remover to learn how to use the product on a silk blouse. After going through the directions, the women would most likely stop reading because they received the information they were looking for.

However, farther down on the page there is a warning that the product cannot be used on silk. That kind of information should be first.

Ready to write?

Writing killer content doesn’t mean long, complex sentences. Instead, focus on creating simple sentences and a clear message that provide the answers your visitors are looking for. The best way to achieve this is by thinking mobile — write your content for your mobile site and it will continue to look great across all other devices.

Not sure where to get started or using an outdated marketing plan? Download our Marketing Plan for Growth to get started developing your content marketing strategy.

[Image credit: Mike Licht - license]

Perception vs Reality: What Do You Value?

Jennifer Edwards — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 17:40:23 +0000

Perception vs Reality: What Do You Value?

Jennifer Edwards Wed, 10/15/2014 - 12:40pm

The advertising world is full of tricks and ploys for adjusting consumers’ views on products and services, but what do these tricks actually do? In a TED Talk from 2009 Rory Sutherland presented the idea of how changing perceived value can be just as satisfying as changing the real value. His findings reveal some interesting things for both advertisers and consumers.

Perceived value vs real value

When it comes to evaluating the value of a product, there are two way to measure it.

Real value is related to the actual manufacturing cost and the price the product is sold at for profit. In layman's terms, the real (or actual) value is what the product is actually worth, without any outside expectations from the consumer or seller.

Perceived (or intangible) value is what consumers think the product is actually worth. As marketers, we create intangible value to make up for real value. According to Sutherland, perceived value can be used to “make new things familiar and familiar things new.”

Creating perceived value

In his presentation, Sutherland discusses how advertisers can build perceived value in multiple ways—from creating symbolic value to adding contextual information—thus increasing the overall value of the product to consumers. However, like Sutherland said, you should remember that all value is subjective. But how do we create perceived value?

Sutherland asked a compelling question: can we tinker with perception rather than trying to change reality? Well, we can. In fact, Frederick the Great of Prussia tested this idea back in 1774, when he rebranded the potato.

Frederick used a little reverse psychology when his subjects rejected the idea of growing potatoes to protect against famine. After the public rejected the potato, Frederick declared it a royal vegetable and had it planted in the royal garden with guards protecting it night and day. However, the guards had secret orders to not guard the potato very well.

As Sutherland put it, peasants tend to know if something is worth guarding, it’s worth stealing. Thus began a massive underground potato growing operation and the potato was rebranded.

Although no actual modifications were done to the potato itself, Frederick the Great was able to tinker with the public’s perception of the vegetable. When declaring the potato strictly a royal vegetable, it sparked the public’s interest into why it was off-limits. The king made a familiar thing new.

Putting it to work

Creating intangible value provides fundamental opportunities to change consumer behavior without having to adjust the real value of your product/service—Sutherland discusses multiple examples of companies building intangible value as a substitute for using up labor or limited resources.

Although the way the intangible value was created varied throughout the companies, they all did one thing: increased the value of a product without doing anything to the actual product.

Strategy is key

Adjusting your product or service’s intangible value within your marketing strategy can provide efficient and cost saving methods to increase the overall value.

Are you using an outdated or ineffective marketing strategy? Download our Digital Marketing Guide to Growth to get started developing your content marketing strategy and showing your true value.

[Image credit: Quinn Dombrowski - license]

Strategy

Why You Shouldn't Replace Your Old Website

We are trained to buy new.

What’s so bad about a new website?

It’s not about what you’re gaining, but what you’re losing.

How to have the best website among your competitors without ever building a new one

Challenges of evidence-based change

Where we are headed

LEAVE A COMMENT

Leave Things Better Than You Find Them

What is the Purpose of Marketing?

Picking Up Trash

LEAVE A COMMENT

How to Solve Your Customer's Problems and Make Money Doing It

Back to the Drawing Board

1. Stop Trying to Think For Your Customer

2. Build Content that Resonates with Solution-Seekers

3. Rid Design of Disruption and Trend

4. Invest In an SEO Strategy that Seeks to First Answer a Query

LEAVE A COMMENT

How to Announce Your Firm's Name Change

Exactly What Are You Announcing?

Who Should Know, and When?

Teasing the Announcement

It's Announcement Day!

Company Website

Email

Social Media

Press Release

How Long To Transition?

Do the Work

LEAVE A COMMENT

Real Marketing Ideas from a Fake Sport

Oh wait

Tell lots of stories

Make them larger than life

Want to sell? Tell stories

More marketing ideas

LEAVE A COMMENT

Why Failing Matters

My most embarrassing failure

Why I’m telling you this

Learn from failure

Failure sucks

LEAVE A COMMENT

Case Study: The Secret to 175% More Conversions

Meet Van Delden

Background

Our strategy

Challenges and readjustments

Challenge 1: Few conversion opportunities

Results: 175% conversion increase

Challenge 2: Small local reach

Results: Expanded brand awareness

Looking ahead

Build your brand in 2015

LEAVE A COMMENT

Time to Deck Your Marketing Strategy This Holiday Season

Oh what a sight

Send some cheer

Give a little back

Are you ready for the season?

LEAVE A COMMENT

Thinking Mobile: How to Write Killer Content for All Devices

First, let’s plan

How to think mobile

Write less for more impact

Ready to write?

LEAVE A COMMENT

Perception vs Reality: What Do You Value?

Perceived value vs real value

Creating perceived value

Putting it to work

Strategy is key

LEAVE A COMMENT