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Digital Marketing For B2B Take Away From SXSW

By on March 10, 2013 in SXSW Interactive

A really powerful learning session at South by Southwest Interactive was Digital A-Z for B2B. The speakers for the event were Maura Ginty and Lauren Vaccarello who are two of the three authors of Complete B2B Online Marketing. The concept of the session was to assign 1 word relevant to the topic for each letter in the alphabet and they were really successful at getting through all of their content and leaving enough time for questions. Here are a few highlights from what we learned:

Assign a value to everything – literally everything. Maybe that value isn’t always monetary for certain businesses but assigning a value that is relatable to how your company measures success is a necessity. It is common for people to know the average spend of their product and the cost of conversion from their website. What is not so common is the value of each website impression or the value of each click-through when it doesn’t directly lead to a conversion. This is important because you can’t measure the failures without knowing what it cost you.

Set aside an innovation budget – possibly for each department if your company is large enough. The speakers recommended taking 10-20% of the existing budget but where it comes from is an executive decision. This is important because when using digital strategies there can be a lot of trial and error and campaigns will fail. If you don’t know what you can afford to lose, you will end up losing your job.

Nurture your leads and employ multi-touch marketing. Digital marketing is all about being where your customers are and saying what they want to hear. Our internet marketing director consistently tells our clients that digital marketing is not about telling people what they should buy, rather finding out what they want to buy and making it as easy as possible for them to do so. Nurture your leads by warming them up to your brand and company vision so they are educated about working with you. Using a multi-touch marketing plan will give your company the exposure it needs to give your leads that warm and fuzzy feeling before you get a chance to sell them.

Experiment with Facebook advertising. Facebook is also experimenting with their advertising options and they release new options frequently so it’s important to keep a close eye on what they are offering. Currently there isn’t a lot of competition with Facebook ads because people don’t have a lot of faith in their effectiveness. For those who are willing to give it a shot, this makes it an economical paid advertising option because there aren’t too many others competing for the same audience.

Digital marketing is social. This of course includes social media but it should be applied holistically. Being social within the digital marketing community will save you a lot of time and money. This also applies to the campaigns you are creating in the aspect of establishing the right feeling about your brand to warm up your leads and get the conversation started about doing business.

You can purchase Vaccarello and Ginty’s book on Amazon Here.

By Kristen Gerner

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Website Mistakes Programmers Make that Need to Change

By on December 5, 2011 in Ecommerce Web Design, Web Development

In today’s wide world of web design we have a hodge-podge of styles, techniques and best practices.  This is because the industry is no longer novice and has a culmination of old pros, savvy sophomores and fishies that have been coding since diapers. Although each generation of programmers have their own insider ways, there are some common website mistakes that can be found on a variety of sites and platforms. 

These are quick website mistake fixes that spawn from tunnel vision and not seeing your site from the eyes of the end user. It is always good to ask your least technical friends and coworkers to give your site a walk-through seeking website mistakes before you start promoting it all over town (or the internet). These common website mistakes are the ones that are caught by users that don’t code which is most likely your target audience.

Website Mistakes #1: Forgetting About Conventions

Users have been trained how to interact with a website. Therefore, they often get frustrated when websites don’t meet their expectations, such as hovering over an object, blue, underlined text and find out a link does not exist; click on the logo in the top left, believing it will return them to the homepage, only to find it takes them nowhere. However, developers and designers should always maintain certain rules to avoid user confusion. Here are three.

  • Clickable Elements Should Have the Pointer on Rollover
  • Style Links Appropriately
  • Make Logos Clickable to the homepage

Website Mistakes #2: Creating Slowly-Loading Websites

Users hate slow websites. Studies have shown that 40% of users will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Here’s how to avoid common speed mistakes by new programmers.

  • Resize Images Outside the Browser
  • Load JavaScript in the Footer
  • Load CSS Externally

Website Mistakes #3: Not Accounting for Potential Backend Changes

Most programmers nowadays are using a content management system like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal to build their websites. This is great because it gives website owners the ability to make changes and updates.

The problem is that a lot of developers only program for a website’s content at launch time. What if two months after the website’s launch, the communications director decides to set some text to heading 6? That decision would revert to the default styles of the browser since the developer never styled for it initially. Here is how to avoid this situation.

  • Include Styles for All the Common Tags

Click here for the full article

Make sure your website is free from these common website mistakes. If you are having these common problems and would like a redesign or a new website, contact Softway Solutions for a thorough analysis of your website.

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Top 5 ECommerce Pricing Models

By on November 21, 2011 in Ecommerce Web Design

Top 5 Ecommerce Pricing Models

1. Revolving Pricing Model
A revolving pricing model is most commonly used for subscription based services. The key sign of a subscription is: consistent content delivery. This means you deliver fresh content daily, weekly, monthly and so on. Seeing as how your product is delivered on a schedule it only makes sense to charge your customers on a schedule. Does it have to be the same schedule? Absolutely not! Plenty of subscriptions offer many revolving pricing options. These can be monthly, annually, semi-annually or anything your customers desire.

 

2. One-Time Charge Pricing Model
The one-time charge model can be a slippery slope. If you are considering it, make sure you run a lot of numbers before you commit to it. Meaning, the ROI must be there or else you will not be in business long. One-time charge models work for mobile apps, audio downloads and Egreeting-cards. Let’s think about the mobile apps specifically. Here at Softway we build a lot of mobile apps so we have a good understanding how much money goes into making each one. If you are going to release them on IPhone and Android you need to have a strong marketing plan to ensure the ROI because this won’t be cheap.

 

3. Usage-Based Pricing Model
The usage-based pricing model is exactly what it sounds like. This is becoming very popular for energy companies and internet companies and has always been a favorite of cell-phone providers. For ecommerce, let’s say your product is one like GoToMeeting. They don’t offer use a usage-based pricing model but they very easily could, and in my opinion they should. It is an option they could offer to smaller businesses that only need their services ever so often. They could keep your billing information on-hand and charge you a set price for each session used in that billing period. Or, charge you for ten sessions up front and then you use them whenever you need to.

 

4. Freemium Pricing Model
This is mostly seen in social sites like Linkedin and Spotify. Both of these offer a free account and premium accounts (free-mium). The idea here is that once your customers immerse themselves in your free services, they will want to pay more to get all of the services. Both Linkedin and Spotify’s premium services charge a monthly revolving price and Linkedin actually has a few premium services that are tailored to different audiences. Spotify gets you on the commercials; you pay more and there are no commercials.

 

5. Tiered Pricing Model

Now here’s where things get a little tricky. Let’s say you are selling a tangible product that has to be packaged and shipped. This product is one that you buy in bulk from a manufacturer and re-distribute. Because you buy in bulk, you get price breaks. With a tiered pricing model you are basically passing along those price breaks. Meaning, the price for one product is not going to be the same cost per item if the consumer wants to purchase 10.  A lot of subscription based services offer tiered pricing as well; if you pay for a year up-front it is cheaper than paying month-to-month. Tunecore is an ecommerce service that distributes music and video content to all of the go-to digital marketplaces for anyone and everyone. Sign-up, choose your product (or bundled product package at a discount), upload your content and select which stores you want it to be sold in.  Within 48 hours your content is being sold on your selected markets and then 60 days later you can start cashing in the checks.

These ecommerce pricing models are not new and innovative models; they are simply recycled from the tried and true and formatted for the ecommerce business model. After you decide exactly how you want to charge for you service or product it is up to you to implement this pricing model. If you are building the ecommerce site yourself then you need to do a lot of research on building a paywall because inside that paywall will be your pricing model. If you feel you are already over your head, contact Softway Solutions and our expert team will build, implement and even maintain your ecommerce portal for you.

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Crowdbooster – The Smarter Social Media Monitoring Dashboard

By on November 14, 2011 in Social Media

Social Media Monitoring Tool - Corwdbooster

I’ve seen dashboards that allow managing multiple accounts to be super easy (@TweetDeck Fan!) and I’ve seen a few betas that supply useful analytics. Thanks to @Crowdbooster I have now seen the two combined. Doing my due diligence, I have discovered that Crowdbooster is the self-proclaimed first “Social Media Optimization” solution. If you are the type that likes to read the fine print, I highly recommend sniffing out their press kit because it is full of information that inspired me to write about it.

Roughly a year ago Crowdbooster launched its private beta and then one month ago launched its public beta. There are 3 types of accounts: Personal (Free), Business ($20/month) and Agency which has unlimited accounts and users and the price will be given after you call their 800 number and work out a deal. I chose the Personal which will allow for 3 accounts and 1 user and the Business allows for 10 accounts and 1 user. After signing up it took 3 days before I had access to my dashboard and that time included the weekend.

All of the standard social media monitoring dashboard features are present. You can schedule your posts and manage multiple accounts. The only thing I haven’t spotted is a live feed of the account so that you can see what others are tweeting. Being naturally a private person, I enjoy interacting with people based on their messages and not being able to see that is what would keep me from accessing Crowdbooster all day.

On to the cool stuff; what makes me super happy. The analytics rock my socks off. At the center of the dashboard is a nice bubble graph (scatter plot) that is titled “How Are My Tweets Doing?”. The y-coordinate tracks the number of impressions and the x-coordinate tracks retweets and replies. This graph is defaulted to the last week but you can change the date range to whatever you want. When you hover over each bubble, a pop-up will tell you which tweet made the graph and how many replies, retweets and impressions it received. The impressions on tweets that were retweeted will be larger because someone retweeted it and your message has now been shared with their audience. This graph can be switched to a table at any time.

On the left navigation toolbar, the dashboard is defaulted to Impressions and the Export Reports tab is greyed because I have a free account and that is not included. Each tab will decide what the graph in the center is referencing. So, as you click down the graph changes accordingly and you can change the date range for these tabs also. Once you have been using it for some time, Crowdbooster will start to make recommendations to you. These include: best times to tweet and which sites to link to that have garnered the most reaction from your followers. Last but definitely not least, Crowdbooster has partnered with @Klout to send you alerts when individuals with high Klout scores start following you.

All of this and they have live customer support to answer your questions. I have posted a question through the support center and I look forward to seeing how long it takes them to respond and the detail at which they do. Because it is still in Beta testing, there is a time lag and you shouldn’t expect it to update immediately. When I emailed them asking about the lag I got a response within 24 hours from the CEO, Ricky Yean @rickyyean, simply explaining that they are working around the clock to improve the rate at which the dashboards update.  For more information or help with you social media marketing contact Softway Solutions where we offer turn-key solutions for all of your social media marketing and management.

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