Newsletter: Vol. 1 No. 1 - Sept. 8, 2010

Using the Internet to Market Your Business

Bastion Internet presents "Drive It - Convert It!", bringing you valuable information to help you succeed in marketing your company via the Internet.

After years of helping other companies with their online marketing and newsletters, we decided we needed to get back into the swing ourselves. Thus, our newsletters and email updates have been reborn.

Our "Drive It – Convert It" Newsletter (and soon - associated Blog) will give you the information you need to stay current with the most powerful and effective marketing tool there is today – the Internet.

If you're getting this Newsletter it means that somewhere along the line you’ve done business with Bastion Internet, requested information from us, or just gotten to know us on a personal basis through various events and associations. If that's not the case and you don't want these updates – we apologize – and offer you an easy way to remove yourself from future emailings. Just click on the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email, or send us a direct email at unsubscribe@bastioninternet.com, and we’ll get you off of the distribution list. We do hope you stay with us, though. We’ll be passing on valuable information about online web design and Internet marketing.

Customer Spotlight - DESCO Enterprises, Inc.

DESCO Enterprises specializes in lowering their clients' energy bills by providing energy efficient lighting products. Their typical clients include warehouses, offices, retail establishments and multi-unit residential buildings.

We talked with George Hegewald of DESCO Enterprises, and asked him a number of questions:

1) What does your company do:

DESCO provides energy conservation products and services for small to mid-size businesses and their facilities. We primarily focus on energy savings through advanced lighting technology and techniques. We provide energy efficient lighting fixtures, timers and light sensors with automatic on/off capabilities, skylights and more. We can either retrofit a facility or be a part of a new construction or remodeling project.

2) How does your website fit into your overall marketing:

Our website serves two primary functions. First, it can introduce our company to potential clients that we’ve never met but who have found our site through ads, search engines, or 3rd party referrals. Alternatively, it allows prospects who we've recently met or talked with the ability to review our offerings in more detail. They can investigate our products and processes on their own time and terms versus under the pressure of a sales call.

Our service is a real winner for most businesses. Often to prospects it seems almost too good to be true. The website allows people more time to really understand how it all works and why it’s for real.

3) What online marketing strategies do you use to drive traffic to your site:

We’ve used email and pay per click advertising to help get traffic to the website.

4) How often do you Google your own personal name in any given month:

(laughs) Not often. As long as I don't turn up in the obituaries I’m okay with what's being said about me.

5) If you couldn’t be doing what you're doing now – what would you like to be doing:

I could be retired right now, but simply love what I do. I really do this because I choose to, not because I have to.

 

A big part of DESCO's customer service is to analyze current utility and government energy savings programs and incentives. Most businesses qualify for a program, but the paperwork and bureaucracy can make it difficult to know exactly how to take advantage of it. DESCO reserves program funds on behalf of their client and ensures that paperwork is completed correctly. Capital costs of the project are usually covered by energy savings. Positive cash flow is often seen from day one.

If your business could benefit by lower energy costs, we encourage you to contact DESCO Enterprises.

Bastion Internet redesigned and optimized the website.

Google's Modified Broad Match

Google has added a much needed feature into their Adwords system. In essence, it allows advertisers to include Exact matches on words within their Broad match keyword phrase.

If you are doing PPC with Google, you need to be taking advantage of this.

Anyone who has spent any time in Google’s Adwords system (i.e. pay per click), has run into the frustrations of keyword matching types. Google offers a "broad match" option which causes your ad to pop if the Searcher has entered/queried your targeted keywords (in any order and alongside other words). However, Google can get extremely loose with what they consider synonyms, leaving your ad to possibly pop for less appropriate search queries – leaving the door open to a poor quality click.

For example, if your keywords are RED LEATHER CHAIR, and the Searcher types in "buy a chair that is light red and made of leather", in all likelihood your ad will pop – and that’s probably a good thing.

However, if the Searcher types in "maroon vinyl barstool" – your ad may also pop (Google uses synonyms in its Broad Match algorithm). Now that may or may not be okay. It depends on what you sell and how close the match is. However, you as an advertiser have less control.

Finally, if the searcher types in "how to sit on a rosy cow skin", Google may also pop your ad - probably not a good thing. Now, this may seem far-fetched, but it’s actually not too far from the truth. It sometimes seems that if Google wants to make more money that day, they loosen up their synonym algorithm.

Now Google often helps us discover good synonyms through its broad match and that's a good thing. Broad match also saves us a lot of time because we don't have to worry about the order of the words in the search query (vs. phrase match). Therefore, we don't want to throw out the broad match baby with the bathwater. So what to do – previously there really weren't any ideal solutions.

Now, with modified broad match, you can require one or more words within your keyword phrase to act as a partial exact match (although Google will still match for plurals, misspellings, and a few other situations). You simply add a "+" sign before the word. So, to use our earlier example; +RED +LEATHER CHAIR - will require that "red" and "leather" be in the search query, but that chair can still trigger synonyms. So "buy a red chair made of leather" and "buy a red stool made of leather" should both pop our ad. But, "buy a crimson leather chair", won't.

Modified Broad Match – a very good thing. You should review and update your Adgroups today.

Get more information on Google’s site, here:

• FAQ on Google’s Broad Match Modifier.
• General Info on Googles Match Types.

Analyze This!

The purpose of your online marketing should be to "convert" a casual visitor into a bonafide prospect or customer. Analytics offers a window into the world of how visitors came to be on your site and what action they ultimately took.

How do you know if you’re cost effectively doing that? The answer – analytics.

Analytics software will track where a visitor comes from and what path they take through your website. If it's tied in with your paid ads program, all the better to determine how much it cost you to have that visitor do what they did.

Some of the things that Analytics tell us:

• The origination of your visitors (Google, Bing, direct URL type in, etc.)
• The percentage of visitors from various ad campaigns that purchased products online (or downloaded a paper, signed up for a service – whatever your conversion marker is)
• Bounce rates. How many visitors just looked at a single page and then left your site
• Time on site
• Page views per visit
• Path of the User (e.g. from the Home page, how many visitors then navigated to the Products page)
• and more.

Now the best baseball players in the world get on base far less often than they get put out. There's even a lower chance that they'll make it all the way around to home plate and score a run. Likewise, we don't expect to convert every visitor to our website. The time and money you spend to help them along the conversion path is well invested. However, the time and money spent on either the wrong visitor or having your website encourage them down the wrong path, is wasted.

To help us figure out where the good money is being spent and where it's not, we use website analytics software/services. There are lots to choose from and they vary in cost and complexity. The bottom line, though, is to have at least something in place.

Analytics can be tricky to set up. Additionally, the results are sometimes even trickier to properly interpret. That said, you should get started. Check out Google's free analytics software – it's called Google Analytics (imagine that). Google purchased a company called Urchin Software and incorporated its analytics software into your Google account. It had reasonably good capabilities to begin with (especially for the price - free), and has steadily improved over the past few years.

If you don’t like the idea of the company that's charging you for your ads being the same company that tells you how effective those ads are (i.e. the Google fox watching the Google henhouse), then an inexpensive yet comprehensive alternative would be the HitsLink service from Net Applications.

Both these services are javascript based and use tracking cookies on your website. The data is not strictly private (the companies use the compiled data for marketing intelligence purposes), but depending on your level of paranoia and your desire to watch your budget – they are good, cost-effective solutions. More sophisticated analytics software will work off of your hosting log files. Depending on what you need and what you’re willing to spend, there is a lot of variety. Most hosting companies offer some level of web traffic statistics as a standard option but usually lack conversion tracking sophistication. Check out other analytics solutions by searching on your engine of choice.

 

Flash in the Pan

Many people are panning Flash these days. Is this still a useful technology or is it outdated?

The short answer - outdated for website menus, minor motion/animation, and image transitions; still useful for illustrated demos, serving video (for now), and - surprisingly - for upcomers like Facebook business pages.

Now the longer answer ...

At Bastion, although we've rarely developed pure Flash sites, we've often included at least some Flash elements. Flash gave a feel of elegance and quality to a site. However, over the last few years, we've come to use less and less Flash. More and more often we choose to replace it with a combination of Javascript and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

You may also hear the term AJAX when refering to these techniques. AJAX is a related grouping of technologies and is sometimes used interchangeably (though not quite correctly), with this new style of site design. Javascript (and especially when used in conjunction with CSS), enables a website to give the visitor a feel of movement and animation while maintaining a much tighter integration to the HTML code that surrounds it.

The benefits:

• Elegance
• Motion
• Searchable Content (e.g. by Google)
• Easily edited and updated
• Shows and operates correctly without 3rd party plugins on your browser (although javascript must be enabled). This is especially useful for Apple iPhones, iPads, etc., and other "smart" devices that don't support Flash.
• Printable (though it can add cost to set up properly printing pages where the CSS has been heavily manipulated)

Here are some examples of javascript on Bastion developed websites. Hover over the menus, click on arrows, etc. You’ll see what we mean:

• http://www.descolighting.com/services/redesigns.php
• http://horizonsecuritygroup.com/services/
• http://www.nutrishopsouthoc.com/
• http://www.moldtoxindoc.com/mold-toxin-and-illness/symptoms.php

Here's a site that shows off a variety of effects based on the popular jQuery library:

• http://jqueryui.com/

So does this spell the end of Flash? We don't know. It's the most popular video playing format out there right now and for constructing animated demonstrations it's not been replaced yet. However, I think it's the end of some of the common design elements it once was used for.

Finally, many businesses are finding Flash a useful tool to pack a lot of content and/or fun into their FaceBook page. Stay tuned for more on that.

Drive It - Convert It! Blog

The blog is ramping up and will soon to be available at our sister site - www.DriveItConvertIt.com.