WalkerTek Blog

Originally published in Construction Digital, March 2010.

Thanks to an array of online marketing tools, you no longer have to broadcast your message and hope the right people see it. You can position your company and services based on your capabilities and have people find you—at a cost far more affordable than traditional media. Unlike advertising with newspapers, magazine, TV or radio, which “broadcast” to whomever is listening, a search marketing strategy allows people to find your product or services when they need them, making sales easier and more timely.

Using search marketing, you are targeting people who are looking for the service you have to offer–when they need it. Every month there are billions of searches conducted–people looking for contractors, masons, heavy machinery, you name it. If you could get your company in front of these people when they needed your services, what would it be worth? Enter search marketing.

The goal with search marketing is to be found. Sounds simple, but think about the power of it from the sales side. If someone finds your site when they’re looking to make a purchase, the number of leads will increase, the sales cycle will be shorter, and the likelihood of making that sale increases exponentially.

Below is a review of the two most popular search marketing tactics.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This process helps to get your site listed in the “organic” positions on the search engine results pages–the non-paid listings that the search engine has determined is the best match for the phrase someone searches on. Search engines consider several factors when ranking results. They look at the text used, the navigation, title tags and other information to help them categorize your site.

So it’s critical that your site includes terms that your customer will use to find your service, as the search engines will associate your site with those terms. Focus on specific two- to three-word phrases instead of vague one-word terms. For example, “Michigan commercial construction” will produce better results than “construction” or “commercial construction.” These phrases should be used on the site, in your title tags and, where possible, in the domain name and page names.

Still, creating key terms for your site (onsite optimization) represents only about 15% of the job. The other 85% of your Web site ranking comes from information on other sites. External information is linked from other relevant sites that point to your site as a resource for a specific term. For example, if your site has 12 links coming into it for “green building design” and one of your competitors has 45 links pointing to their site for the same term, the search engines are going to consider the other site a better resource.

Before you go out and just generate a bunch of links (through firms that offer this service) remember that the links must be relevant. Search engines look at the content and other factors of the referring site to see how relevant that site is to your site or industry. For example, a link from a site on residential construction trends will probably be far more relevant to your target audience than a link from a site on home computer parts.

Search Engine Optimization Pros

• Long-term benefits: Once your site is ranked well, it’s difficult for a competitor to out-rank you if you keep up your efforts.
• Not paying for each click: You don’t pay for people who find your site in the “organic” results, so the higher you rank, the more traffic you’ll get for free.
• Specific terms: With a niche business, you can rank high because there is typically less competition.

Search Engine Optimization Cons

• Relatively slow results: It can take several months to see results.
• Too much competition: Depending on your market, you could be competing with others nationwide or even worldwide, some of which may have an optimization campaign
• Tough with general terms: If your key messages are expressed in general terms, results can be difficult to achieve.
• Need to maintain campaign: If you stop SEO efforts, your site can quickly lose ground with the competition.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
This tool puts your ad in the sponsored section of the search engine results pages. You purchase ads on a pay-per-click basis and are charged only when someone clicks on it. You establish a monthly budget that affects how often your ads will appear. Or, if you want to generate a high volume of traffic quickly, you can utilize your budget as soon as possible. You can also establish other rules for each of your campaigns, designating precisely which days and times the ad will run or what cities or states it should appear in.

Most of our clients spend from $1,000 to $5,000 per month on their PPC campaigns, and some large corporations spend millions of dollars a year on it. While seemingly more costly than SEO, PPC is often a more practical solution. One reason is that PPC can be geo-targeted to certain geographic boundaries where your ads will show. This is important for smaller companies like a western Pennsylvania contractor who doesn’t want to waste money promoting a message to say the southwest or other distant regions.

Another advantage of a PPC campaign is that it can be launched within a few hours once the account is funded. Plus, it’s flexible, allowing you to set up a campaign with hundreds of keywords—which is impractical with SEO—and then only pay for the traffic that comes to your site from those keywords.

When setting up a PPC campaign, consider that Google (with its AdWords tool, the most popular PPC vehicle) views the content of your ad and your site to determine how relevant they are to each other. So consider setting up specific landing pages or deep-link to sub-pages on your site that are specific to the terms people are searching on.

Pros

• Quick results: Campaigns can usually be set up in several hours.
• Geo-targeting: Focuses on specific regions where you conduct business.
• Flexibility: Easily change the budget, keywords, ads and landing pages.
• Targeted: Utilize words that you wouldn’t be able to optimize for your Web site.

Cons

• Paying per click: You pay for each visitor to your site that comes throughout the campaign, regardless if they turn into a lead.
• Positioning: Your link appears in the “sponsored links” section, which, according to some, isn’t seen that much. (This can be proven otherwise. Just ask Google stockholders!)
• Timing: Once you stop your campaign, traffic also stops.

If you want to put together a more advanced strategy, consider targeting people at different phases of the buying cycle. Offer different content based on where they are in their decision making process and then capture them every step of the way.

Search engine marketing is a very cost-effective marketing tool—but you need a well-orchestrated strategy to make it work. Decide whether you can design and execute a strategy in-house of it you need to outsource the marketing to an outside company. Consider the time you’re willing to commit over the long term, your comfort level with the technology and other factors. Whatever you decide, be prepared to spend some time developing the all-important strategy, either in-house or working with a consultant.

A lot of people are talking about social media and how great it its, but if you have to manage social media for a company, how do you do this along with everything else you have to do?

There are several tools out there that will allow multiple people to access your social media accounts in a controlled manner. Some have approval funnels built in, while others just allow controlled access. This is a great way to allow multiple people to post to your social media outlets, while not giving up control.

Here is a quick overview of some of the sites and what we like about each one.

HootSuite.com – Hoot Suite is a nice tool. You can add multiple accounts including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ping and Wordpress (beta). When you post a message, you can select the sites you want it to post to. It also has a built in link shortener and statistics for how many times the link was clicked. When someone clicks on a link that you send through Hoot Suite, there is a small user bar placed at the top of the linked page. The bar allows the user to retweet the post, easily get back to your Twitter profile and share the link through other sites. HootSuite also has a convenient iPhone app that gives you most of the functionality of the Web site on your iPhone.

CoTweet.com – This site has a nicer overall design than HootSuite, but it is restricted to adding and maintaining twitter accounts. This can be extended by adding a Ping.fm account. You can also schedule tweets to go out, even if you’re not there to send them.

TweetFunnel.com – The nice thing about TweetFunnel.com is that it has an approval process built into it. You can have multiple people posting messages and have those messages go through a gatekeeper to help ensure that your communications stay on target and in line with company policy.

Ping.fm – This site doesn’t allow access for multiple people, but if you are the only person managing your social media efforts you should check it out. You can add Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, TypePad, WordPress, and a couple of dozen other social media/publishing tools. This allows you to post from one place to update all of them automatically.

In addition to group management of social media, there are sites that help you run more effective campaigns. Features such as allowing scheduled posts to help ensure that your social media channels are active and populated with valuable content.

Implementing some of the above tools can help to reduce the amount of time you spend on your social media campaigns and allow other people to help you build your social media presence.

WalkerTek recently launched a brand new Web site: http://www.better-bath.com. The site is a retail front-end for Better Sleep, Inc. a company that has been supplying bathroom organizational items like bath caddies, tension pole caddies, and more since 1951.

The site was designed using Magento Commerce for the back-end which allowed us to speed up the development and launch time, while still providing a robust set of e-commerce features and a full administrative interface that allows the client to manage the store themselves.

Check out the site at http://www.Better-Bath.com and enter “WalkerTek” as the discount code for 10% off until 1/31/2010.

WalkerTek recently had an article published in Utility and Transportation Contractor magazine about effectively using online marketing to help increase leads and business. The magazine is published by the Utility and Transportation Contractors Association. The UTCA of New Jersey is a national award winning, non-profit trade association headquartered in Wall, New Jersey. UTCA currently includes approximately 1,100 member firms active in all phases of heavy, highway, site, utility and environmental remediation construction, in the public and private sectors, throughout the state.

WalkerTek recently developed a new Web site for Summit Manufacturing. Summit makes POP displays for several popular consumer brands like Coca Cola, Maybelline, DirecTV, Garnier, and more.

We worked with Summit to develop the site based on a design and interactivity that they originally conceived. Other features and functionality included custom 360 degree photography, an interactive product demo, and integration of custom galleries.

You can view the site at http://www.summitmfg.net

Before you begin your next software development project, you may want to consider the following facts.

It pays to simplify your development project.  For every ten percent increase in problem complexity, there is an 100 percent increase in the software solution’s complexity.  This means that as a project grows more complex, the solution grows exponentially more complex.  This increases your costs and may affect your bottom line.  Removing the complexity from your project saves you money as long as it does not detract from the software solution.

It pays to hire great developers.  Great developers can be up to 30 times more effective than mediocre programmers.  Since a great developer is only paid slightly more than a mediocre one, good developers provide a huge advantage.  I will post some thoughts on distinguishing mediocre developers from great developers in another post.

Maintenance is a large part of software development, it consumes 40 to 80 percent of software costs. Programming software and software maintenance are pretty much the same, except maintenance requires the additional task of understanding the product, which consumes about 30 percent of the maintenance time.

Many estimates are made at the beginning of a project.  The problem with this is it occurs prior to the requirements phase and thus before the problem is completely understood.  This is a big advantage of Agile development.  In many companies it is also done by upper management who only vaguely understands the details of the project.  This leads to poor estimates, missing deadlines and frustration on both sides.

I hope you’ll keep these facts in mind the next time you embark on a development project, I think they will be valuable to you.

There are many businesses out there that have a single point of contact for leads that come in through their Web site. This is fine for smaller companies where that one person is also responsible for responding to Web leads, but in larger organizations, it isn’t practical.

What happens when that person goes on vacation? When they’re out sick? If they have computer problems?

We recommend using technology to help solve this problem.

If you have a CRM system (such as Salesforce.com) you can setup various assignment rules that will automatically assign the lead from the Web site to the proper sales rep based on various criteria. You can setup rules based on products, territories, budgets, or just about any other criteria.

If you’re not using a Web-based CRM product, that doesn’t mean you can’t have similar functionality. Many of our clients have us send form submissions to different people based on a simple drop-down field. Each item in the drop-down field will be associated with a different rep and will get the information as soon as it is submitted.

With ever increasing customer demands and the instant gratification expected online, reducing the number of steps to connect a sales rep and a potential customer is critical.

A recent survey by InsideSales and MIT discusses various criteria for contacting leads, such as day of the week, time of day, and most importantly, response time. They examined 3 years of data across six companies that generate and response to Web leads, from over fifteen thousand leads and over one hundred thousand call attempts.

The chart below shows how the odds of contacting a lead drop over 10 times after the first hour.

What does this mean for your business? It means that it needs to be connected. When a lead comes in, it should be sent to someone who can handle it as quickly as possible. Whether it’s a sales rep on the road, calling from their mobile phone, or a service that contacts leads to qualify them, getting back to people quickly will help you increase sales.

Having the technology in place to handle these response times will provide your customers with a better experience through your Web site and will help you maximize your opportunity to grow your business.

I attended a networking meeting today and the guest speaker was a fascinating individual.  His name was Ziad K. Abdelnour, he is the president and CEO of Blackhawk Partners.  He presented valuable information about what he looks for when doing a venture deal.  His no bullshit, results oriented approach seemed refreshing in a world of unrealistic valuations and venture deals that don’t seem to make any sense. I believe this information can be adapted to help decision making at any level.

His approach is a five step process.  The first requirement is that he only invests in companies with operators that perform.  They must have a proven track record and be able to execute.  He would prefer people that have built successful companies (or even unsuccessful companies) to people that have never been there and don’t know what it is like at those levels.

Next he requires them to have intelligence, preferably intelligence he doesn’t already have, which is tough because he is very well informed.  He expects them to have done their research and due diligence.  Too many people are lazy when it comes to doing the necessary research to ensure their venture will work.

Third they must have a laser like focus.  They can’t be distracted by every new thing that comes their way.  If they are they will go off track and lose their way.

Next they must have speed of execution.  He likes his companies to be profitable within six months.  There must be a clear path to profitability.  Any company that does not have this is not scalable and thus doesn’t have the five to 10 times growth prospects that he is looking for.

And finally they must have some skin in the game.  It must be in their interest to run the company and run it well.  Without this they will not have the incentive to put everything they have into the venture.  The entrepreneur should be the one that can’t sleep at night, not the venture capitalist.

He looks to buy companies at no more than five times EBITA, and at least with one deal he outlined, the goal was to be able to sell the company after adequate growth at 10 times EBITA within three to four years.  He does not like to over leverage a company he invests in.  He believes that business is war and that you must do what it takes to make money and never lose focus that making money is the ultimate goal.

He also mentioned that too many business owners think that if you’re in business you don’t have to concern yourself with politics and vice versa.  He feels this is a big mistake and that there is an opportunity for people involved with both sides.

Overall I thought it was a wonderful meeting and his insight was very valuable.  If you have the chance to hear him speak you will not be disappointed.

This past October, I had the privilege of attending “An Event Apart”, one of the leading conferences for web developers in the United States. Organized by A List Apart, a premiere web development blog, the topics of the event ranged from content strategy, to web design, to development practices, as well as future technologies that the web is moving toward.

The conference tours across the United States, with a different collection of lecturers at each. I attended the Chicago conferences and I could not have been happier with the panel of speakers. If anyone ever has the opportunity to go to An Event Apart, make sure you go: there are great speakers, great attendees, and overall a great learning environment for a web developer or designer at any stage of the game.

Summary of the Lectures:

• Jeffery Zeldman, founder of Happy Cog, spoke about how to better ensure that we are addressing our clients problems, as well as looking for clues to problems they don’t realize they have.
• Jason Santa Maria, staff member of the School of Visual Arts, as well as Creative Director for A List Apart, talked about addressing the small details of the design and interactions of your website to achieve the big-picture goal of user experience.
• Kristina Halvorson, founder of Brain Traffic, gave an awesome presentation about the placement of content strategy in the life-cycle of website development, as well as easy-to-swallow techniques to get a grasp of the content on pre-existing sites and use that to re-architecture more pertinent data for your site redesigns.
• Dan Brown, a brilliant mind in the field of Information Architecture (IA), spoke about “concept models”, a system he devised to help insure total coverage of client requirements and how they relate internally to their site. Dan’s talk followed up Halvorson’s perfectly and was a real eye-opener as to how companies such as his (Eight Shapes) work with content-abundant sites such as CNN.com.
• Whitney Hess spoke about user experience, and the simple, grass-root steps anyone can take to begin to improve the UX in their site. Citing past examples from her freelance career, she demonstrated what techniques other companies used to improve their site experience for their target audiences.
• Andy Clarke, the amazingly talented man behind Stuff and Nonsense, lectured about designing site mock-ups inside of the browser, instead of in graphic design software. While not for everyone, his technique pointed out how web mock-ups offer user interaction and faster changes to type and layouts – a technique he used when designing The New Internationalist (note: as of 11/09/2009, his design hasn’t been implemented yet).
• Eric Meyer, noted HTML and CSS expert, spoke about how we can use JavaScript to handle many design issues we have, as browsers are now powerful enough to handle the work. Like Clarke, his view isn’t for everyone, but he did take the audience through a list of noted examples of how we have been relying on JavaScript to ease design issues.
• Aaron Gustafson, following Meyer’s lead, talked about eCSStender, which is a JavaScript library to level the playing field of browser capabilities as well as create your own CSS toolkits.
• Simon Willison spoke about development technique to help you design and build sites faster by prototyping with features native to your language of chose, such as libraries and frameworks, as well as tandem and team development approaches.
• Luke Wroblewski gave a phenomenal talk on web form strategies: why we don’t like using them, which layouts work better for which situations, and what you can do to make the form experience more pleasant.
• Dan Rubin’s talk, entitled “Designing Virtual Realism”, showcased examples of software trying to bridge the gap from non-tangible mediums to actual entities in nature. He also spoke about techniques you can use to make your websites or applications seem more “real”.
• Lastly, Dan Cederholm became the authoritative leader of progressive CSS enrichment with his talk, as well as his website Do Websites Need To Be Experienced Exactly The Same In Every Browser?. His summary was that we should not be striving to provide the same experience in every browser, but instead to build the best experience for every browser.

How do you measure your email broadcasts?
Are you measuring value, ROI, cost?

Here is the down and dirty:

Design + Distribution = Cost
New Work – Cost = ROI

This formula works great if you can attribute a direct sale to a specific email broadcast, but many of our B2B clients can’t do that.

You need to measure email as an overall part of your marketing and treat it like traditional print or billboard advertising. That’s why we strive for Top Of Mind Awareness (TOMA) — so when people have a need, they know we offer the solutions they’re looking for.

Our goal when sending out emails is to build a loyal following by providing value to the recipients. Value can vary for different clients. We may offer industry information, conduct research and engage our loyal following by asking them to support us when the time is right.

We look at email broadcasting as building a relationship with customers. We want them to be interested in the content they receive. If they aren’t, they won’t read it–which doesn’t help anyone.

In short, we don’t usually measure email effectiveness in terms of sales, but rather by terms of engagement. If you send a broadcast with valuable content that gets a consistent open rate, over time, the awareness you’re creating will turn into sales.