Quick Contact
Newsletter: Vol. 1 No. 2 - Sept. 22, 2010
(This is an expanded version of the original newsletter sent via email. Sign up to get added to the Drive It - Convert It! email list.)
Adopt It or Drop It
Technology and marketing are continually changing - when do you drop the old and adopt the new?
New things come in and old things get pushed out. The trick is to know which wave to catch, which to let pass, and which to jump off. And speaking of waves, did you sign up for Google Wave - oh, sorry, it's gone. Do you know absolutely everything about Yahoo Search Marketing - oops - that's gone, too (well, almost).
When to adopt a new style or technology and how long to milk the old one can be somewhat company-specific. If you are in a more mature industry and/or have a more conservative audience, then being slow on the uptake can be an advantage. For a faster moving industry with a more adventurous customer base, you may need to stay very current to keep your credibility.
That said, here are some technologies and where we see them on the Adopt It or Drop It curve:
- Bing/Yahoo: Adopt (strong)
- Facebook: Adopt (strong)
- Twitter: Adopt (minor)
- Stock photography: Drop (minor)
- Smart phones: Adopt (strong)
- Social search: Adopt (minor)
- Regular search: Drop (minor)
- Cloud computing: Adopt (minor)
Did your last web design company stay old school and construct your site left-justified and 800 pixels wide (because that was the "standard")? 
If so, it now may look like a meek and insecure page on today's larger monitors.
Enjoy this extended issue of the original newsletter and follow the Drive It - Convert It! blog to learn more about which wave to catch and which boat has sailed.
Customer Spotlight - Nutrishop South Orange County
Bill Henry is the owner of two Nutrishop locations in South Orange County - Lake Forest and Laguna Niguel.
We talked with Bill and asked him a number of questions:
1)What does your company do?
We help people achieve their fitness and physique goals by taking a real interest in what they will actually be able to do and what they want to accomplish. We recommend lifestyle choices and products to help people achieve their goals.
2) How does your website fit into your overall marketing?
Our website is an integral part of our marketing efforts. We are a little unique in that we do not sell products on-line but our biggest competition is theInternet. So, we use our website to get people into the store as opposed to buying online. We do this with good content and special website deals.
3) What online marketing strategies do you use to drive traffic to your site?
Since I really do not understand web marketing, I really leave that up to the Bastion team. They get me very good results. I would say at least daily I get people in the store that found us online and printed out a coupon. Also, we get people requesting to be on our Email blast quite often from the website.
4) How often do you Google your own personal name in any given month?:
I have actually done it twice in my life. I never found me. There was a sports writer and a baseball player with the same name and they take up the first 20 pages on the search returns. Both times I gave up before I got to me. But the first time I stuck it out for 15 minutes or so.
5) If you couldn't be doing what you're doing now – what would you like to be doing?
I really do love my job helping people but I would love to be able to relax poolside daily and play golf 6 times a month.
Bill needed his Nutrishop website to match the level of quality his in-store clients were used to and drive new local traffic to his stores. Bastion Internet redesigned the website and optimized it with local traffic-driving techniques.
We encourage you to visit one of his stores, check out the products, and take advantage of these additional perks:
- Free in-store gift
- Free in-store nutrition planning
- Free trainer referrals
Yahoo and Bing - Adopt It!
On or about October 22nd, the Yahoo search page ads will be replaced by the Bing adCenter service (Microsoft). Earlier this month, the organic search listings were replaced by Bing results.
In the past, many smaller advertisers chose only to run Pay Per Click advertising on Google. They could spend their budget there and only had to invest in the time and effort in supporting one platform (Google Adwords). Now is the time to expand your PPC campaigns to serve the combined Yahoo+Bing marketplace, too. Previously for Yahoo, you needed to make a decision to invest in setup and maintenance time for less than 20% of the search market. For Bing, it was an even less attractive proposition - approximately 10% of the market. However, combined, they make up 30% of the searches being done on the Internet in the U.S. (see comScore's U.S. search market share statistics for August 2010).
If you have current Campaigns on Yahoo, you'll need to convert them to Microsoft's adCenter platform (call us or visit the Yahoo Transition Help Center). If you run adCenter, but not Yahoo's Search Marketing, you should be prepared for a lot more traffic - so adjust budgets accordingly. If you are currently running Yahoo and Bing ads, make sure to change your Bing budget when the Yahoo ads go dark.
Landing Page Testing - Adopt It!
Running focused "landing pages" instead of landing advertising clicks onto a regular web page has long been a successful tactic. Now is the time to start doing some testing. Assuming you have decent analytics in place, it's fairly straightforward to do some A/B split testing. You can test different headlines, images, offers, etc., to improve bounce rates and conversion rates.
It can get much trickier to change multiple factors at one time (multivariate testing), and to test totally different landing page alternatives. Additionally, many times the statistical validity of the tests can be in question if your traffic numbers aren't high. Regardless, if you aren't doing any testing right now there will likely be low hanging fruit where even anecdotal results will likely be valid.
Bastion Internet can help both with your Analytics and Landing Page development and testing. However, for you do-it-yourselfers, here are a few resources:
- Landing Page Optimization, a book by Tim Ash (Amazon)
- Google analytics
- HitsLink analytics
Whether we help you or you start doing it on your own, you'll be surprised at the return on investment a little testing provides.
IE 6 - Drop It!
All companies, and especially Microsoft, continue to encourage users to stop using Internet Explorer 6. Not only is it less secure than newer releases, it just doesn't perform as well. It has less functionality and websites have to hold back on features and form if they want to accommodate IE6.
The latest Google search update - Instant Search - doesn't support IE6.
Business is about selling something to someone, not everything to everybody. Our general opinion is to not accommodate IE6 when making new website design decisions. To support IE6 means sacrificing a nicer, more functional, more cost effective website, in order to accommodate a shrinking percentage of slow-to-adopt users.
Is this the case for everyone - no, of course not. There are situations where you want your website to appeal to the lowest common denominator. However, I look at websites developed in the last few years where the developer/website owner chose to accommodate those that still had screens resolutions of 800x600 pixels. Now their customers have sites (usually left justified), that appear to be overly tiny on today's bigger, higher resolution screens.
Here are just a few companies no longer supporting IE6 on at least some of their web properties:
Of course there are many, many more, though maybe not as high profile.
Design will always be partially about fashion. An old, out of date look will reflect poorly on the company that wears it.
Drive It - Convert It! Blog
The blog is launched (well, mostly). Like the cobbler's son who has no shoes, the Drive It - Convert It! blog site has no design - well, just the "out of the box" WordPress theme. Embarrassing - yes - but the content is right on.
Visit it to read the latest opinions from the Bastion Internet staff and add some of your own!
Latest post: Is Google Bloatware
internet marketing & design
design drive convert
