How to accomplish software marketing in an economic downturn – your web site

The news is on fire with stories of federal bail outs to our banks, mortgage industry and major insurance underwriter… it makes the population uncertain and most businesses are tightening belts to ensure they have the cash reserves to weather any decrease in sales since most lending has dried up.

So how do we are marketers continue to do our jobs when our budgets are usually the first to be cut?  I’ve gathered a few ideas that I hope will spark some interest and thought.  Over the next several posts, I will focus on a few areas of marketing that would benefit from some extra attention and shouldn’t cost you a whole lot of money.

In my first post about software marketing in an economic downturn, I’d like to focus on our web sites.

I am a firm believer in online marketing, traditional marketing is a great compliment, but in today’s world the first thing most people will do to research your company or product is search on the web. Your web site should be under constant review. And you should always implement changes and improvements.  Your web site is a living, breathing representation of your company – don’t fall in the rut of a 6 or 12 month review and rollout process.

Some things you can do with little to no budget:

Improve your organic search rankings by conducting an SEO review – for those of you who feel adventurous enough to try this on your own, there is a lot you can do to improve your site’s rankings.  But don’t hesitate to talk with an SEO consultant if you’ve reached a plateau or don’t know where to start.  I mentioned a few free SEO resources in my last post Resources for SEO on a Shoestring Budget.

Review your site from a customer perspective.  Is it easy to navigate? Read? Could you find what you were looking for if you’d never heard of your company or product before?  There are a lot of usability tips you could implement on your site that surprisingly most people don’t

• Make sure there isn’t too much on your home page – too much clutter will overload visitors. If you have animations – make sure they don’t keep repeating.  Go through the cycle once and stop.
• Is there clear organization of different content groups? Make sure all of your headings are clickable
• Does your home page successfully serve as a navigation page? Are your most important pages listed here? Do you have clear calls-to-action.
• USE READABLE FONT – studies show that dark font on a light background is the easiest to read – don’t put white text on a black background if you can help it.  The most readable fonts are Tahoma, arial and verdana.  Don’t let your font read any smaller than .8-.9 EMS (EMS is a sizing standard that allows browsers to resize text as needed)

Analyze your site’s performance – There are a lot of web analytics packages out there, such as Web Trends, Omniture and Google Analytics.  No matter what you use to track your site’s performance, make sure you are paying attention.  Especially when you are conducting online campaigns to drive visitors to your site.  You want to see if you are positively impacting traffic to your site and if the traffic is quality traffic.

• Use tracking – tag urls to your site with campaign variables, so you know what campaigns or traffic sources are giving you the most traffic.  Place conversion codes on your lead capture forms so you can tie your leads to the path they took on your site.
• Track which pages on your site are the most popular for visitors – make these a priority when determining which pages get attention when it comes to changes and improvements.
• View more information about your visitors – is it important where your visitors are coming from?  What OS or browser they are using?  Have you optimized your web site to be viewed in a certain resolution or browser?  Most web analytics tools should give you this information and you may be surprised at the demographics you should be paying attention to.

Make use of Strong CTAs – Compel your visitors to DO SOMETHING on your web site.  Of course it’s important to present useful content for them to read about your company and products – but if all a visitor ever does is read your site – you won’t be happy with the results.  I’ve listed a few useful calls-to-action that should drive your visitors to do something – and hopefully turn them into leads!  If your CTA is strong enough, your visitors should have no trouble parting with some contact information for the privilege.

• Whitepapers – If your company has generated any 3^rd party information explaining the events of your product or products like yours – use it!  Readers will take a 3^rd party’s word over yours.  If you don’t have the money to hire a research firm, you can contact your local higher education institution and offer up the chance for students to conduct a study.
• Case Studies – Some argue that there is no better sales tool than a success story from one of your customers.  Case Studies can be very beneficial and prove your sales case.  They can be done at no cost and give you a lot of mileage.  Most prospects are going to want to see how other customers have fared with your product.
• Demos – If you sell software, chances are your visitors are going to want to experience what the software does, how it works, etc.  One of the age-old tactics is to offer some sort of demo.  Whether it’s a CD, download, flash animation or online demo – make sure you offer this clearly, prominently and make it easy to execute!
• Contact sales – if your web site’s main goal is to sell, make sure your visitors have no barriers to contacting your sales department!  Whether it’s by phone, click-to-call, chat or web form – make sure this information is easy to find on your site and on every page that your visitors may be viewing if they are in a buying pattern.  Don’t make it hard!  You don’t have to plaster your site with phone numbers and email addresses, but don’t make visitors hunt.

Reminder: Don't forget to sign up for the Paid Search Webinar tomorrow!

Don't forget to register!  Tomorrow is our free webinar: Drive More Traffic Using Google Paid Search.

If you've been thinking about including paid search in your online marketing, or want to learn more about Google AdWords.  I highly recommend this webinar.  If you can't attend the live webinar, register anyways and you will receive a link to view the recorded version.

I hope to see you there!

Resources for SEO on a shoestring budget

If you are like many marketers these days, budgets are tight - if not shrinking and you are being asked to do more with less.  One tactic could be going through your current client and prospect pool and trying to re-sell, cross-sell or up-sell.  Another tactic would be to increase your prospect pool - and it doesn't always have to cost a lot of money.

What I'd like to discuss in this post is SEO - otherwise known as search engine optimization.  Most of us in the online world have at least seen this term before, even if we don't understand it completely.  The definition of SEO on Wikipedia is: the process of editing and organizing the content on a webpage or across a website to increase its potential relevance to specific keywords on specific search engines.

Basically - the goal is to optimize your web site and its content so that when people conduct online searches for terms that relate to your business, such as accounting software, productivity software, etc - you show up at the top of the list.  This is otherwise known as an organic ranking.

You can also participate in paid search - or PPC, but that topic is covered in other posts.  You want to focus on SEO as a long-term strategy for attracting and promoting your web site.  And it doesn't have to cost you a dime.  Some companies choose to hire SEO firms to come in and conduct audits of your site and provide recommendations - but if you don't have time for that you can do it yourself - but be prepared to spend a decent amount of time and effort.

Remember this one lesson - Everything on your site can affect and add to your SEO efforts.  Look at each piece of your site individually and evaluate how it can help you rank better.  You don't have to do everything at once.

Now I could go on for pages and pages about how I think you should do SEO, but there are many sites, blogs, etc that can give you instruction.  Where I will start is by giving you some valuable FREE resources that you can use to learn about, track and implement your SEO strategy.

SEO Resources
BusinessOL SEO Blog - I refer to this blog for SEO tips - very valuable ones.  Led by Catfish Comstock, who I had the pleasure to meet at OMS, who has been involved with SEO since its infancy.
WebProWorld - This is a forum for SEO - most of the people on here are SEO professionals, so it can be intimidating, but the forums hold a wealth of knowledge and if you can't find what you need you can venture a question...  If you are really a beginner, you can check out the SEO 101 forum.


SEO Tools
www.webconfs.com - all sorts of tools from spider analysis, back links, keywords, etc
Keyword Discovery - one of the best keyword search tools on the net.  A free suggestion tool.  This site will tell you how many searches are conducted for any keyword.
Google webmaster tools - You can submit a sitemap and track how Google sees your web site.  Great insight into how Google indexes your site, external links, internal links and potential SEO issues with your site.
HubSpot Website Grader - I found this to be an amazing tool that tells you a lot about your site's SEO structure.  A FREE tool where you enter your site's url and it will spit out all sorts of SEO statistics such as page titles, meta tags, headlines, your Google page rank, site rank, conversion forms, RSS feeds, etc.  100 is the top score, it's not the end-all be-all of SEO but gives you a good starting point.  Our site ranks a 98!
Alexa.com - a great place to check your traffic, rankings, back links, etc -  a good benchmarking tool for your site.

Web Analytics
Google Analytics - I am pretty biased, but Google Analytics is one of the most robust and FREE web analytics tools you can find.  Easy to implement, this is the basis for how I analyze our site's success. Google Analytics will give you everything from your traffic volume, visitor demographics, traffic sources, keywords used, etc.  If you use their free url builder, you can also place tags on your links in campaigns to track where your traffic is coming from.

I've also found a few interesting SEO articles on specific problems I faced.  Conducting SEO on html is great and easy - web crawlers are designed for this.  But what about flash? PDFs?  I found and article on how you can get your web developers to integrate flash and make it SEO-friendly.  I also found an article that gives you a few tips on making PDFs more SEO-friendly.

Runaware Launches Blog

Welcome,

Today Runaware Officially launches our Marketing/Tech Blog, after our success with our monthly newsletter and demands from our readers, we have decided to evolve to a blog format to keep a continuous flow of information and encourage participation from our readers.

The Runaware Software Marketing Blog has been created to keep our readers updated on the latest trends, tactics and best practices in software marketing. This would include such topics as online demo (TestDrive), promotional campaigns, customer profiling, lead capture, SEM and technologies that support it all. We have assembled a staff of 6 authors that are always up to date with the latest information pertaining to their field, and they will be passing along their knowledge or thoughts on a regular basis in this blog.

Although Online Demos and Software Marketing is our core business, we are not going to use the blog as a sales pitch but more as a information guide to what we are seeing and reading about in this industry. This forum will be a place for people to comment on our articles openly and we will not police responses, unless they are outright offensive.

I strongly suggest that if you are interested in Software Marketing or the technology that is behind it that you add this blog to your RSS feed or subscribe via email. I am sure you will enjoy staying up to date, getting involved in the discussion and using this blog as a helpful resource.

Webinar: Driving Traffic Using Google Paid Search - September 23 1PM ET

Do you want to learn how to better use Google to drive traffic to your site or your software demos?  If you want to include or improve the use of paid search in your software marketing, I think you should attend this webinar.

Runaware is hosting a 3 part educational webinar series entitled Drive, Profile & Sell: 3 Steps to including demos that sell more software.

The first webinar in the series is entitled Driving More Traffic Using Google Paid Search.

When: September 23rd, 1PM ET
Register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/774091562

In this educational webinar, we will go over how you can drive more leads to your sales department using paid search campaigns with a focus on Google.

Our presenter, Ryan Walker, Runaware’s Search Division Director, will show some of the ins and outs you need to know if you are going to use Google in your marketing. Ryan is an SEO and SEM expert having gained extensive experience at Urchin, Google and Microsoft and is Google-Certified. He has managed search campaigns for companies large and small and has access to the elite Google Beta programs that give his clients an edge over their competitors.


If you want to learn more about using Google in your Search Marketing, join us for a short presentation followed by Q&A.


Click here if you want to learn more about SEM services offered by Runaware.

UPDATE: tags added

How Google Chrome is going to change your online marketing

In case you haven't heard - Google just launched a new web browser called Chrome.  Other than the fact that this is interesting from the perspective that Google is taking direct aim at Microsoft IE - what I'm most interested in is how is this going to affect my marketing efforts?

There are a few things I can think of

1. Testing web design on yet another browser
2. Effectiveness of online advertising with the introduction of "Private Browsing"
3. How this will affect interactive web parts that need flash, java, etc

Testing on yet another web browser
As most marketers know - when your designers create anything on the web, they have to test it against the major browsers since each browser renders html in slightly different ways.  Currently, I know we test our web properties in IE6, IE 7, FireFox 2 and FireFox 3.  Last week the public beta for IE8 came out - which we downloaded - only to find out our website doesn't render properly!  Now with the new Chrome browser comes yet another browser to test against. (Fortunately it seems Chrome shows our site as it is supposed to be viewed)

Assuming that Chrome will see a decent uptaking by the public, since it was created by Google, it seems that it should be part of our testing regimen. So now, every time we create something for ourselves or a client, we will be testing on IE 6, IE 7, IE 8, FF2, FF3 and Chrome...  How do you make sure your designers have access to all of these browsers to test against since installing a newer version is going to get rid of your old version?  Our solution is to create virtual PCs that have these different browser versions installed - keeping our actual computers clean - but not everyone has that option.

How much time and complexity do you think having all these browser types and versions out on the public domain is going to cost you?  How are you going to handle being able to test against them?

You can download and try Google Chrome for yourself here.

Effectiveness of online advertising with the introduction of "Private Browsing"
If you haven't heard of this feature yet, you will soon want to pay attention.  With the introduction of Chrome and IE8 (and through plug-ins for FireFox) there is a new way to use the browsers.  Basically this is a private mode that doesn't store your web history or any cookies.  That means that if your ads or your system uses cookies to track users and their behavior - it won't work.  Some believe that's one reason why Google came out with their own browser - so they weren't at Microsoft's mercy (75% of web users are on IE) to serve their ads.  This private mode will also block certain ads that need these cookies in order to be shown.


If any percentage of your audience starts taking advantage of these new features, then you could be losing out on valuable ad serving - of if you have a behavioral targeting platform - this could affect your ability to track user behavior.  I recommend keeping an eye on this to see how it could potentially affect your software marketing efforts.


You can read more about IE8's In Private feature here.

How this will affect interactive web parts that need flash, java, etc
 Not all browsers work the same.  This is well known.  IE uses ActiveX, FireFox uses Java, etc.  What most people don't know, however, is that each browser handles things like Flash and javascript differently.  And based on the browser a user is on, your site could work flawlessly or it could cause the browser, or worse - the whole computer to crash.  It's been shown that viewing flash in FireFox can eat up all your system resources - even if you have several tabs open and aren't actually viewing the pages.  Some initial tests of Chrome have shown that it doesn't handle Flash or javascript so well.
  
So another thing to watch out for when integrating these interactive pieces into  your web site or your online marketing - make sure it's designed to work with the different web browsers.  Test the performance.  It could save you a headache in the long run.  You may want to offer different experiences for users on different browsers.

So what do you think? Will Chrome help you or cause you headaches?

Does advertising and the internet work for software marketing?

I read an interesting blog post this morning on a new blog that focuses on online marketing - Online Marketing for Marketers.  Aaron Kahlow actually states:

"With the new release of Chrome (Google’s New Browser) yesterday and Microsoft’s recent “In” Ad-blocking option for IE8, it’s reasonable to say that the two most influential companies in Online Marketing have reenforced what most of us in the industry (and our ad agencies are realizing) already know… Advertising in its traditional sense and the Internet do not work."

Now at first this seems like a bold statement - I mean how can online advertising NOT work?  We've all done banner ads and most of us have tried search marketing.  We KNOW that you can attract traffic through online advertising.

But Aaron goes on to say that there are online advertising methods that work better than others - paid search will convert more people than banner ads,  contextual ads work better than generic paid ads.  He also gives a few tips on how you can squeeze money out of your current ad budget to put towards your top-performing search terms and to optimize your landing pages.


You can check out the full text of Aaron's post here.

I think that as we compete more every day for the same audience in our respective markets, it becomes increasingly important to find ways to improve the programs you have for the same investment.  And while you're at it - shake up conventional thinking - don't just ASSUME advertising and the internet are a good mix for you - prove it and improve it.