The online marketing expert blog

Today’s XKCD should be required reading for everyone involved in the marketing of a University… - and not just those involved in online marketing.

XKCD on University websites

They sum up effortlessly and brilliantly the problem: the people creating the site are not the same people who will look at it: in other words you are not your own target audience.

Now: if I could just sum up my core philosophy in just such a witty and concise way, I’d also become a wildly successful webcomic author!

For some reason, most companies see the setting up of a new website as a major event: and rightly so! - this is after all the way that the vast majority of customers or potential new staff or corporate partners will find out about them after all.

There are a large number of meetings amongst senior staff, and in the more enlightened companies the view of the rank and file might also be sought.  A great deal of the most valuable and scare commodity in any company - that is management time and thought - is spent getting the site right.  The information architecture is agonised over: new photography is commissioned; copywriters labour over every paragraph; the IT department hunches over their keyboards to get the back-office technology just right.

Then with much fanfare the site is launched - and the management team goes onto their next new big project, and the running of the site is handed over to a “manager”.  Never a “Director” or a “Partner” - just a “Manager”.

This means that the site will suffer from two massive problems immediately it is launched:

• it is not run by the people who commissioned it in the first place
• the people who do run it have all of the responsibility for making it work but none of the authority.

Big companies like to run on projects with fixed delivery dates and easily measured success criteria.  “Getting the site live by date X” fulfills all of these requirements: it is a set deliverable by a set date.  The senior management can get on board, work like crazy, deliver the site and then declare success - and then move on.

Suddenly the person who is running the site on a day to day basis (if that person even exists!) is perceived as being by definition of lower status because they were not on the team that set up the site.  Inevitably, running and maintaining the site and making it achieve the businesses objectives are seen as less important and less glamorous than setting it up in the first place.  The hard work seems to have been done: now it is time to hand it over to an exec or manager for the trivial task of keeping it updated.

This person will almost definitely have none of the authority to effect any change that is needed, because they are not sufficiently senior: they will be a classic victim of the authority - responsibility mismatch I have seen so many times in online marketing teams.  They will see what needs changing but when they propose the changes be made they will be met with barriers and “well - the MD said it should be this way so we don’t want to bother him about changing it.”

This is one of the reasons that large organisations seem to go through a two year cycle of huge revamps of their sites, announced with huge fanfare, between which the site seems to languish as a backwater and does not get the resources needed to become successful or effective.

And no web design agency will ever tell you that this is a bad way of working - not when they get a regular supply of new work for doing the same job for the same customer!

What is needed is an online marketing director with the authority to make whatever changes are needed - up to and including a revamp if that is what is needed.  However, what is usually far more effective is frequent, rapid, iterative changes that are tested with the target audience of the site to gauge effectiveness, as well as frequent updates with compelling content, usability testing, successful social media implementation.

Your website is too important to only receive the attention of senior management once per revamp cycle: the person in charge of it should be at Board level because it is THAT critical to your organisations success.

And I do not think that online and offline marketing should be under the control of one person: they are so very different that true expertise can be gained in one field and not in both.

During the recession I am increasingly hearing about companies who equate online and social media marketing as being free and then cut all of their offline marketing to concentrate on the free online marketing.

There’s a number of problems and myths inherent in this that I thought I would address:

Myth 1: Online and social media marketing is free: whilst many of the tools and techniques are free, the time needed to make them into a success most definitely is not free: you still have to buy the time of a skilled practitioner.  And in most projects the single biggest cost is that of the skilled labour.  `And whilst “many” of the tools are free - there are no sign-up fees to Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn yet - there are many other costs to take account of: what about domain name registration: ongoing hosting and bandwidth costs: can you really deliver all PPC (pay-per-click) and SEO (search engine optimisation) in-house? - what about ecommerce and credit card handling? - what about secure servers and CRM?

Myth 2: Your website equals your marketing plan: now I am an online and social media marketing advocate, but even I will not ever propose that your marketing plan equates to your website.  There is always a role of effective offline marketing, even if it is not directly involved in customer acquisition.  You simply cannot ignore the whole offline marketing arena, especially if it violates one of the most basic tenets of marketing: always respond to customers in the medium in which they initiated the contact: if that’s via email or Twitter then fine - but what if they call you or write to you?

Myth 3: All online marketing can be done by relatively cheap, inexperienced staff: in many organisations online marketing is the upstart new kid on the block - and social media marketing is not even on the radar of the senior decision makers.  So social media marketing gets delivered by the youngest, most inexperienced staff in the marketing team - and therefore the cheapest.  This is just wrong on so many levels: the people that are engaging with your customers and potential customers should be more senior than that - but most importantly they should be empowered to talk on behalf of the company and they should have more seniority within the company.  Of course, the opposite is also true - social media marketing that is originated by someone senior but which then needs to go through 5 layers of sign-off before going live, so missing out on that crucial component of the social media marketing mix - timeliness.

So you can save some money by focusing on online marketing, but you should really be looking at it’s true strengths: the fact that everything online is measurable to a degree simply not possible offline.  This way you can get a true idea of the cost of acquiring a new customer and most significantly put a true figure on your return on investment.

Knowing - and being able to prove - that every pound spent on online marketing delivers a return of (say) £3 should give you the best job security possible in these troubled times!

I am now offering online marketing and social media marketing training and consultancy in Birmingham.  I am also available to talk to groups on how to make your site more effective.  These talks can be very enlightening indeed because everyone is a user of the web and therefore has their own opinions about website design - but not everyone takes the time to get hard empirical data as a result of primary research and from that make informed decisions about what their customers actually want, instead of what they the site owners themselves want.

I have been told that I have an ability to articulate the thoughts that go through people’s minds when they visit a site - often without them being consciously aware of those thoughts.  I can make people think about their site and come away with a list of things they can do to make their site better.

When I act as a trainer or as a consultant I do all of this but in a more structured fashion, ensuring that the client understands every single stage we go through.  One of the secrets of the social media marketing industry is that it is not hard to do: it is very easy - it just takes time.

I can train most people in what they need to do to run a social media marketing campaign in a day or so: it is the running of the campaign that will eat up your time, not acquiring the knowledge necessary to run it.

This is what the agencies do not want you to know: they want to be able to bill you by the hour for campaigns that once set up are comparatively easy to run.  I can deliver these campaigns for you too… - except that the hourly rate for an honest freelancer is between one tenth and one fifth of what the average agency will charge you.

I have delivered a lot of training and mentoring - look at my Linked In profile for recommendations and talk to previous clients there: also follow me on Twitter to see how I practice what I preach.

I will guide you through all of the stages of implementing effective online and social media marketing, and there will be no barriers to you taking the work in-house or giving it to another agency.  In fact I think that this kind of work should be delivered in-house: it is becoming a core-competency of any marketing department and should be delivered from within the organisation.  I will help you set that up and I can train both the people delivering it and their managers.

I can also act as your outsourced online marketing and social media marketing department in times of excessive workload.

In short if you think that your online marketing could be better - or if you think your ecommerce site is not converting enough visitors into customers - or you want to enter the world of social media marketing but don’t want to get it wrong then give me a call!

James Robertson  BSc MSc
Online marketing expert
07970 678 133
james@onlinemarketingexpert.co.uk

So when you designed your site, exactly how much research did you perform to find out whether your information architecture actually supported your target audience’s user journey?

What’s that you say? - your design agency never broached the subject of “information architecture” with you? - no one has ever defined the concept of a user journey? - you’ve never defined your target audience because you are compelled to design and update your site due to the dictates of internal senior managers?

You’ve never done any research on your site and as a result you have no idea what your target audience actually wants - not what you think they might want?

This is why you need an online marketing expert and not just a designer!  You need someone to define what your site will deliver and then actually talk to your target audience and find out what they want!

I find it amazing that people still perform no research on their site: still do not establish what will result in a sale; still have no idea who it is actually looks at their site.  Every time I have talked to the target audience of a site I have more than made the cost back in a better targetted site.

When did you last talk - in person, face to face - to a user of your site?

So with very little surprise the iPhone 4 is launched.  Why is this phone - together with it’s iPhone predecessors and the iPad - so lusted after by the technorati?

The answer is simple.  It Just Works.

No crashes: no manual; no hassle: no faffing: no learning curve.  It works immediately: it works perfectly, first time every time.

People want smartphone functions yes - but they do not want them in the hideous mess of an operating system that was all that was available before Apple got into the game.

Now: think about your organisations website.  Does it just work? - can your customers find what they want when they want it?

Or is it designed for the vanity and egos of your internal senior decision makers?

And do you even know how well your site works with it’s target market? - have you even asked them? - have you even paused to define your target market and then establish exactly what it is that they want from your site?

Until you do your site will be like a Windows smartphone… - technically capable of everything that the best in class can do… - it’s just that no one can be bothered to wade through five levels of unnecessary screens to get to what they want.

One of the things I am most insanely proud of doing is combining two of my biggest passions for the environment and the web and launching Birmingham Freegle. (Freegle started life as Freecycle of course, but we changed the name in the UK when we split away from the US)

I am currently evangelizing Birmingham Freegle and drumming up support and in a meeting the other day someone asked me if I knew of any online community in Birmingham that had more than 25,000 members - which is where Birmingham Freegle is at the moment.  I replied that I didn’t think so - but then this is not exactly empirical research - so I thought I would throw the question out there.

So: over to you all: can anyone tell me if there is a Birmingham online community that has more members than us?  If you know of any, contact me via Twitter at www.twitter.com/brumguvnor or james@onlinemarketingexpert.co.uk

I have to admit it - I am a huge bibliophile: for the past 20 years or so I have read on average a book per week. I cannot drift off to sleep without a book in my hand and it’s my default relaxation mode. I just love to read and must always have a book on the go.
Along the way I have noticed that there are two categories of authors whose books I read:

• Those whose books I will pick up, think about, evaluate and then perhaps buy
• Those authors whose books I will automatically buy without even looking at the name of the book: the authors name is sufficient.

________________________________________________________________

The Freegle logo

Way back in 2004 I heard about an idea called Freecycle which was stunning in it’s simplicity: instead of throwing an item you no longer needed into the tip, where it would only end up in landfill, why not offer it to someone else instead?

If they wanted it then they would have to come get it… - and that’s it: I said it was brilliant in it’s simplicity, didn’t I?

I loved this idea - partly because it could only be made to work on the web.  Trying to imagine how this idea could be implemented in an offline model only makes my head hurt: it absolutely has to be accomplished online.  Imagine maintaining a printed list of 25,000 people, with 500 or more messages between them every month, offering items, posting adverts for items wanted and also notifying the group when an offered item had been taken.  It makes me shudder to think the amount of time, effort and paper that would be needed to do this in the real world.

So: I looked on their website, fully expecting there to be a Birmingham group already created, but to my surprise there was none - so I created it.  After a few years the UK groups fell out with the parent US ones and parted ways and changed names to Freegle.

So - how did such a group using the most primitive social media tool around - Yahoo groups - get 25,000 people to sign up and consciously avoid sending stuff to landfill?

• Moderation, moderation, moderation: we have a full time group of volunteers who moderate the site and provide guidance on the rules and etiquette to new members, and even more importantly stop the scammers and spammers taking over.
• A truly excellent core idea.. - in other words, compelling content
• A way to accomplish a worthy goal that was simply not possible in any other way but online.

Another hat I wear is that of the official Bryan Talbot fanpage webmaster.  This is a site I run voluntarily and have done so for over 14 years.  It is a labour of love for me: Bryan’s work had a huge impact on me and I wanted to help publicise it better.

Over the years I have learned almost everything I know from running this site because it is a site I care about and one that I make sure is updated every 2 weeks come hell or high water.  In fact, one irony is that I have yet to work on any professional site that has more pages than this fanpage!

Bryan recently asked me to upload a few scans of his artwork onto the site and sell them through PayPal.  He said I could have a commission on each one sold which is our usual arrangement, and so I launched the online sale.

In the 2 weeks since the launch of the artwork sale, he has sold four pieces of art at a total revenue of £1,090 and a total cost of £20 monthly hosting and £40 for my commission.  That means that in 2 weeks the site has made 18 times its monthly costs - for hosting - of £20 and has in effect paid for it’s whole year’s worth of hosting.

Why has the artwork sale been so succesful? -

• site longevity and ease of finding: I started the site so long ago it has come to dominate the field - there is no one running a competitive site, it is number one in Google for the search term “Bryan Talbot” and it is the only place people tend to go to for information on Bryan and his work.
• correct and appropriate use of social media: the Bryan Talbot Facebook fan group has over 250 members and the Bryan Talbot twitter presence has 93 followers: the sale was announced on there and was soon retweeted by other comics fans on Twitter,
• an exceptional product: Bryan has a huge reputation in the comics world and his artwork has to be seen to be believed: there is a massive fanbase interested in the collectors items that are his original artwork.