In the famous fable, the steady tortoise wins over the flashy hare with steady, consistent effort. Too often companies approach launching a website as the finish line, when it is in fact the starting line. A website gets you in the race, but then you have to start running! Here’s some tips on how small business owners can get ahead with steady, consistent marketing efforts.

Create a Marketing Plan (Quickly)

For most small business owners, having a Chief Marketing Officer or dedicated marketing team is the stuff of dreams. That doesn’t mean you can’t be intentional about your marketing efforts!

• Do it quickly: Don’t spend more than an hour! Create a Word Google Document with:
  • An outline of your various marketing channels (website, blog, enewsletter)
  • Your objectives: what do you want to achieve? For example: increase web visitors by 5%, decrease bounce rate on home page by 10%, add 100 Twitter followers, increase ecommerce business from return customers by 15%. Be SMART with your goals!
  • Your strategies: how are you going to accomplish these objectives? For example: increase ecommerce business from return customers through sending out monthly enewsletters with 10% off coupons to previous customers who haven’t bought in the last 3 months.
• Track the Results: What’s the point of a plan if you aren’t going to see if it’s working? However, the sheer amount of data available from your marketing tools can be overwhelming. So pick some leading indicators that have a direct impact on your business. If you want to centralize all the results, just create an Excel or Google Spreadsheet with the various data points recorded for each week or month.
  • Google Analytics Conversions: learning how to use GA conversions will take a little time, but be worth every second. In summary, create “conversions” such as filling our a “Contact Sales” form that indicates an important step in your sales process has been completed.
  • Google Analytics Traffic Sources: is the traffic from organic search, pay-per-click campaigns, or social?
  • Google Analytics Visitor Data: how many visitors, how long did they stay, what was the bounce rate?
• Make adjustments: It’s a quick and dirty plan, but revisit it once a month for some mid-stream adjustments. For example, the first Monday of every month at 9am spend 30 minutes going over your plan.
• Just do it: as my business mentor Chuck Blakeman points out, quoting his Marine buddies: “Bad Plans Carried Out Violently Many Times Yield Good Results. Do something.” There is no perfect plan. Implement the plan, and perfect it as you go!

Choose Easy to Use Tools

Spend more time on marketing and less time on monkeying with your website tools by selecting the right one for the job. Choose the content management system, enewsletter, social media, and analytics tools that are easy to use and easy to integrate.

What are you Waiting For?

The spoils on the web are not for the witty or wily, but those who create a simple plan, implement it, and make corrections along the way. I’ve observed and participated in hundreds of small business marketing campaigns over the last decade, and the steady tortoise pretty much always beats the hare. You don’t need to win every race, you just need to keep showing up to the track every day.

Need help creating a marketing plan? Shoot us an email and let’s see how we can beat that hare with steady, tortoise-like marketing.

Blue Riot Labs is a Web Development Denver company providing Denver Search Engine Optimization and Denver Web Marketing services.

(Take a breath). Ok, let’s have some straight talk: the only thing that revolutionizes online marketing is when you select the right tool, integrate your efforts, and continually improve your use of the tool. Rather than an overview of all the available tools, I’ll show you here our favorites; those tools that work as intended, integrate easily, and are either free or reasonably priced.

Select the Right Tool

1. Website Content Management System: WordPress
   • WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet’s “top 1 million” websites and as of August 2011 manages 22% of all new websites. This runaway success is due to two important factors: it was built for CMS users not web developers, and it began as a publishing platform. WordPress now powers everything from Mobile Apps to Ecommerce, but its still easy to use. That means our post-project relationship with the client is “how do we make this even better,” not “how do I use the d@#$ thing!”
   • As an Open Source platform, WordPress stands on the shoulders of a massive community of developers. I’ve owned a business too, and understand the fear that a contractor will box you into a platform that will be hard to leave or become obsoleted. WordPress provides the closest thing to “future-proofing” you are going to get in business.
   • WordPress has plugins for everything from social share buttons to photo galleries, which means that we often can build on the work of others, rather than starting from scratch.
2. Enewsletter – MailChimp, Campaign Monitor
   • Many of our clients still enjoy great success and high open rates with quality enewsletters. You’ll enjoy the process of creating those newsletter much more if you use the great tools from MailChimp and Campaign Monitor! They have attractive templates, great tutorials, and excellent analytics to track your success.
3. Social Media – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest
   • Remember: sniper rifle not shotgun!
   • Facebook lends itself to consumer products, daily deals, advocacy, and any organization where affinity and loyalty are key to the purchasing process.
   • Twitter and LinkedIn have proven themselves effective for PR, promotions, observing trends around your product or service, and immediate consumer feedback.
   • Pinterest allows companies to connect with passionate niche communities (fitness freaks, moms of toddlers, nature lovers) with unique content and top-shelf photography.
4. Analytics – Google Analytics
   • Google Analytics is free, and with the recent additions of features like custom reports it has become even more useful at creating actionable data

Integrate Your Efforts

Google Analytics is a great place to start. The content analysis shows you where visitors go, what makes them stay, and what makes them leave! Social reporting helps you build on what’s working, and fix or abandon what isn’t. As the video below shows, their multi-channel funnels show you how your marketing channels are working together to create sales and conversions.

Kaizen – Continual Improvement

The rise of Japanese manufacturing as the best in the world came from this concept of “Kaizen,” a philosophy of continuous improvement that was made in America but perfected in Japan. It’s the idea of eliminating waste by improving standardized activities and processes.

Google Analytics, MailChimp, and Campaign Monitor all provide powerful analytics…well, powerful if you use them! A simple spreadsheet or document can be used to track important information like

• What was my open rates on my newsletters, and what strategies did I try? (image vs no image; 2 articles vs 3 articles; adding testimonials, etc)
• What percentage of my conversions in Google Analytics come from search traffic, pay per click (Google Adwords), social media, or enewsletters? Do those results match the time I spend on them?
• Which blog articles got the most traction in search and social media? Can you guess why? Did that traffic result in more leads or sales?

A novel could be written about each of these, but to reiterate our original point: the only thing that revolutionizes online marketing is when you select the right tool, integrate your efforts, and continually improve your use of the tool. So get out there and get going!

Blue Riot Labs is a Denver Search Engine Optimization and Denver Web Marketing Company; SEO Denver.

What’s New?
Google has done quite a lot to the old version of Analytics. The interface has been completely redesigned and is now faster than ever. There are also multiple dashboards that allow you to create a custom dashboard for each department. You can track Event Goals and you can even configure two-minutes of play time on a video as a goal.

Google has also unveiled more powerful reports, New Term Cloud visualization, the ability to link Adwords and Adsense accounts, In-Page Analytics and users of the old platform can easily migrate custom reports to the new platform.

New Google Analytics Features
Google has also included a number of innovative features to the new platform:

• Google Analytics Real-Time: Yes, Analytics finally offers real-time reporting that shows you exactly what is happening on your website ‘right now’. The reports are constantly updated and each pageview is reported within seconds of occurring.
• Multi-Channel Funnels: Do you want to know which channels your customers are interacting with prior to converting? Now you can with multi-channel funnels. You will be able to see which channels were interacted with during the 30 days prior to converting and the conversion path data also includes interactions with many media channels. These media channels include clicks from paid and organic searches, social media networks, affiliates, etc.
• Mobile Reporting: This feature lets you know how your mobile visitors are interacting with your website. You can even determine which mobile devices your visitors are using so that you can optimize your site for those devices.
• Reports: Google Analytics now offers a report email scheduler and PDF exporter.
• Flow Visualization: This is probably the most impressive of all of the new features offered by the new Analytics platform. Flow Visualization graphically shows you how visitors are navigating through your site. According to Google, this sophisticated tool was designed by completely re-imagining and redesigning the navigation tools that were available with the old version.

Google Analytics' Powerful New Flow Visualization

Google Analytics has been ahead of its time for some time, but now the platform is heading even further into the future. With a faster interface, state-of-the-art features and plenty more, there is no better way to keep track of your web traffic, conversions and everything else web-related.

Blue Riot Labs is WordPress Web Development company at the foot of the Rockies; Denver Web Developers.

View the full size:

2012-02-27 Example Rankings Report

New Fully Customizable Header
The new Twitter brand pages feature an expanded header image area that allows you to display your logo and tagline much more prominently. The current layout causes the logo to look cramped and sometimes it’s hard to make out words or designs. With the new layout, there’s no mistaking what company the brand page belongs to.

Featured Tweets
If you want to highlight a specific tweet, you can cause it to stick at the top. Usually, a tweet is buried within minutes. But now, you can extend the shelf life of your individual tweets. What’s more, featured tweets will auto-expand, which allows you to embed a video or a photo from YouTube or Flickr.

Streamlined Responses
The new brand pages allow you to separate @replies from @mentions, which makes all the ‘Twitter noise’ much more manageable.

The new Twitter brand pages aren’t available for everyone yet. They’re still being rolled out, but if you want to see them in action you can look at several big name brand names that are using them. The Coca-Cola Twitter page is a good example, or you can check out the Nike and Disney Twitter pages, just to name a few.

New Layout For Easier Navigation
Besides brand pages, Twitter is also unveiling a new layout for regular users and businesses alike. This new layout is designed to help beginners who may not be familiar with Twitter lingo navigate the platform more easily.

So will Twitter’s new brand pages be used heavily by online marketers who may already have Facebook and Google+ brand pages? That remains to be seen. Twitter seems a little late to the party and the platform is still way behind Facebook in the numbers. But these are exciting features. For one, multimedia is taking a much more front-and-center approach, which means that Twitter is paying attention to the content that is being shared heavily on its platform. And for marketers this is especially important. With sticky videos and photos on your brand page, your promotions, campaigns and multimedia will be seen by more people than ever.

What do you think about the new Twitter brand pages? Do you plan to use the new brand page layout in your marketing campaigns when the feature becomes available to you, or do you have so much going on already that social marketing fatigue starting to set in? Let us hear from you in the comments section below.

Educate and Inform
To help you attract more leads, try offering your audience information related to your products and services. Maybe teach your customers how to use your products effectively or you can provide tips and tricks to make your products or services more efficient. The use of e-books and e-reports work well and your potential customers should be able to download the material easily from your site, after entering their contact information of course.

Make It Easy
To increase your conversion rates, make it easy for your leads to become subscribers. Don’t ask fifty questions, as most people don’t have that kind of time or patience. Instead, just ask for their email address or at most their name a phone number.

Track Your Leads
You should be tracking the conversion of your leads, whether it took one day or it took three months. This usually requires the use of software, such as provided by Blue Riot Labs partner Net Results. By tracking your leads from initial contact to conversion, you will have a better idea of what’s working and what’s not.

Have Solid Goals
Before you put any time, money or energy into your lead generation campaign, make sure you have clear objectives set with realistic expectations.

Nurture Your Leads
As you know, there are many stages to the buying cycle. A new lead may not be interested in buying now, but that person may want to buy from you three months from now after they’ve conducted the proper research on your company and products. Nurture your leads over time and you’ll be more likely to generate loyal customers and repeat buyers.

Multiple Opportunities
Don’t think of each lead as a single sale. Each lead you generate can convert into multiple opportunities with the use of techniques like cross and up-selling. Instead of turning a lead into just one income stream, it’s always better to generate multiple revenue opportunities for every lead you generate.

Follow Up
Internet users want information right now, not later. As soon as you generate a lead, follow up with that person right away. It is best to contact a person within the first five minutes of initial contact if you want to qualify and convert that lead into a buying customer.

Online lead generation is critical if you want to corner more of the online market share from your competitors. But as we head into 2012, these tips become more important than ever. The online world is changing drastically and quicker than ever and these tips will help to keep you ahead of the fold.

And remember, you can automate your marketing so that you always know exactly what your leads are up to no matter where they’re at in the buying process.
Do you have lead generation tips you’d like to add as we head into 2012? Let us know in the comments section below.

FirstBank QR Codes Help Unprepared Travelers
Around October of last year, FirstBank ran with a marketing campaign at Denver International Airport that used QR codes in a rather innovative way. During the campaign, several FirstBank posters were placed throughout the airport with various QR codes printed on them along with instructions on how to scan them. When these posters were scanned, unprepared travelers with smartphones and other devices with readers were able to download free content in the form of free Sudoku puzzles, books and crosswords. As you can imagine, the campaign was a resounding success.

This is just one great idea on how you can use QR codes in your own marketing campaigns. As long as you provide quality content that your customers want, your campaigns will surely succeed. And to help you get even more out of your QR code campaigns, here are a few top tips you may find helpful.

Stick To Offline Marketing
QR codes are best used on business cards, posters, menus and other objects that people can physically touch with their hands. The QR code shouldn’t just rehash your offline content. Instead, it should provide extra, hidden content that is only for QR code users. Make your audience feel special, like they’re part of the club.

Make Them Readable
Smartphone users must be able to scan your QR codes with their phones. This means they must be large enough and clear enough for devices to read. Furthermore, you should give a thought as to where smartphone users will be scanning the QR code. For instance, if you place a poster in an elevator, are your users going to be able to have the service to scan the QR code with their smartphones?

Let Users Know Where The QR Code Leads
Let your users know what they’re getting into. This will not only entice them into scanning the code, but it will decrease the bounce rate that always comes when you try to take your audience by surprise.
Test Them Thoroughly Before Sending Them Out
Before you publish your QR codes, test them thoroughly with various devices and using several different browsers. There are many different types of smartphones out there. Don’t alienate your audience that uses a specific type or browser.

Mobile Friendly Experience
When a smartphone user scans your QR code, the landing page that user is taken to must be mobile-friendly. Don’t take your audience to your regular site. Instead, have a mobile site prepared with all unique content. This may be extra information that wouldn’t fit on your business card, it could be ‘exclusive items’ for sale or it may be a video that teaches a trick, tip or technique. But that information must be optimized for the small screen and smartphone capabilities if you hope for your audience to stick around.

QR Code Awareness Is Spreading
QR codes aren’t used by all smartphone users just yet. But the technology is growing and awareness is spreading, which means your business should get in on the ground floor now. Before you know it, QR codes will be mainstream. Don’t let your business get left behind.

Are you using QR codes in your marketing campaigns? Have you found a unique and exciting way to use them? Leave a comment and let us know.

The Wrong Landing Page
Even if you have the best ads in the world, if you send your visitors to a crappy landing page, you’ll experience a higher than normal bounce rate. Your website should have professional design and the information should be easy to find. Furthermore, make sure the ad sends your traffic to the appropriate page. Sending your ad traffic to your home page will only force them to search for what they came to see, and few people, if any, are going to take the time to do that.

Setting Too Low of an Advertising Budget
It is wise to try and save money when you are just starting out with PPC marketing, but starving your PPC budget will only cause your ads to show up intermittently. Your customers may need to see your ads a few times before they choose to click-through and buy. Make sure your ads are showing up when your searchers do, and you can do this by setting an appropriate budget that always shows your ads at the appropriate times.

Bidding Too High Or Too Low
When bidding on keywords, if you go too high you may end up getting into a bidding war with other PPC advertisers. And if you go too low, your ads may not show up on the first page of the search results. Experts recommend bidding enough to achieve positions four through seven. Then, you can optimize to try and reach the top spots. This will help you keep your cost-per-clicks down while improving your conversion rates at the same time.

Trying to Predict Search Behavior
Some PPC advertisers think they know when and how their searchers operate. Instead of trying to predict this behavior, consult your PPC account reports. By analyzing this data, you will get a better idea of when and how your ads should be displayed. It is always best to have your ads running as much as possible so that you can get an accurate assessment of when traffic peaks and when people are ready to buy.

Pay-per-click marketing puts your ads in front of the people who are looking for those ads. But it is easy to become overwhelmed. By keeping away from the above mistakes, you will experience better click-through rates and higher conversions for your advertising dollar.
Do you have any PPC tips you’d like to share, or mistakes you think advertisers should stay away from? Let us know in the comments below.

• Designed a site that tied together products, applications and resources for an intuitive and informative user experience
• Google Adwords Pay-Per-Click: Cost Per Click down 23% while simultaneously raising Click Through Rate 1900% (nope, not a typo)
• Content management system that allows them to efficiently maintain their sizable product catalog and resources database
• 31 keywords in the top 30 of Google and rising
• Creating custom post types specific for their needs, along with “post-to-post” capabilities