Archive for February, 2009

Every Visitor to Your Site is a Potential Customer

Friday, February 27th, 2009

Stop lumping all of your visitor traffic into one big bucket. In tough economic times, you can’t afford to let one visitor go without making the best effort that you can to understand their needs and solve their problems.

If the extent of your web analytics reporting is to track visitors and pageviews on a monthly basis and assuming that more visitors/pageviews equals more leads/purchases, then you’re missing a huge opportunity. In this scenario you’re playing the percentages. You know that you can convert leads at a certain rate and, therefore, more traffic is good for your business. Well what happens when the number of people to your site levels off or when the people coming to your site have less and less budget to purchase your products? Now you can see how this isn’t an effective strategy.

Too many companies focus all there attention on increasing their web site traffic but far fewer focus the attention that each individual visitor deserves once they get to their site. If you’ve done an effective job of getting people to your site then they should already be interested in what you have to offer. Take advantage of this and start nurturing these visitors by helping them fulfill their wants and needs. Treat them as individuals and stop counting them as traffic.

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Spring Brings the Official Launch of Marketing for Mavens

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

It’s been almost a year since the first lines of code were written for Marketing for Mavens and we’ve come a long way. The beta has been available since last July and we’ve made hundreds of improvements since then. Now we’re approaching the final stretch with a target release date of May 4th. That leaves about 6 more weeks of beta testing before we freeze the code for our go live date.

We’re very excited about moving Marketing for Mavens out of beta and very thankful for all the help and support our beta testers have given us. In return, all current beta testers will be given 3 free months of service when the site launches in May. If you haven’t joined the beta, you still have time to get in on the action and receive this offer. We’ll only be accepting beta testers through March 31st so you better hurry.

Now, as many of you are aware, we’ve not yet announced our pricing. It’s our goal to make our services as cost effective as possible while also allowing us to provide the high level of service and support that you expect. We’ll be rolling out the Marketing for Mavens service at a cost $47 per month. This will be available as a subscription service. For new users who join after May 4th, you’ll receive a 30 day trial so you can test our services on your site to be sure it will work effectively for you.

Thank you again for all your help and support and, as always, if you have any questions please send them directly to me at chris@marketingformavens.com.

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Top 5 Ways Marketing for Mavens is Helping Web Marketers Today

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

It’s our goal to provide the most effective solution to help match your content to your visitors, exceed your sales lead goals, determine your most effective marketing campaigns, and deliver results that you can easily track through a simple reporting system. Here are the top 5 ways Marketing for Mavens is helping you to accomplish your goals:

1. Customize Your Site to Your Visitors

Every person who comes to your site is an opportunity for your business. They are looking for product/service information, support, to solve a business problem, or investment information and each of them is going to walk away from your web site with an opinion based on how well you served them.

To serve your visitors better, we’ve created a solution that will help you match your content to their needs. As each person navigates your site, we learn more about what they want and serve your content and/or promotions that best match this need. Now each visitor receives a customized web experience tailored to their needs allowing you to market and connect more effectively with your visitors.

2. Campaign Management: One View of All Your Campaigns

Now you can manage all of your marketing campaigns in one location. Instantly see who clicked on your campaign links, see which campaigns led to the most PDF, video, and audio downloads. Know what campaigns are driving the most traffic and leads to determine the overall effectiveness of your programs.

3. Detailed Visitor Information

Know who your most loyal visitors are and determine how likely they are to become clients and customers. You can see a detailed history of each visitor on your web site, what videos they watched and documents they downloaded. A grading system is used to help you spot your hot sales leads and unique promotions can be setup per visitor to help convert them into promising leads.

4. Reporting: Just the Information You Need

We’ve focused on giving you just the statistics you need to make business decisions. A 6 month history is broken down into weekly performance for each of your promotions and conversion pages. You can see who clicked on your promotions and who completed your forms. Quickly see how your content is performing over time to determine what promotions are working and where changes need to be made.

5. Manage Limited Web Page Real Estate

We’ve all been there. There’s a constant battle for page real estate, especially on the home page. With Marketing for Mavens you can share the real estate on your web pages and feel confident that your visitors are seeing the content and promotions that are most relevant to them. Content can be displayed based on the number of visits, previous site usage, and, soon, the campaign that a particular person is responding to. You will no longer have to make compromises to display your companies promotions.

Let Us Help You…

Join the free beta and get started today!

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Posted in custom web content, marketing, targeted web content, web campaigns, web marketing | View Comments

Web Marketing Campaign Tracking

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Here’s a quick update on some new marketing campaign features that will be coming soon.

    • Linking page views to marketing campaigns. This new feature will allow you to see what page views were the result of a visitor coming to your site from a particular marketing campaign. Instead of only seeing how many click-throughs you received, you will know how many page views, what the most popular content was, and where people went once the got to your web site.
    • See exactly which PDF’s, videos, downloads, and podcasts were viewed/downloaded as a direct result of one of you marketing campaigns.
    • Create customized campaign promotions so you can seamlessly extend the story from your marketing campaign to your web site for each of your visitors.

      Not all of the features will be available at the same time. We’d prefer to make smaller more frequent updates so you can report back to us with your feedback and bugs. The goal is to make all of these features available over the next couple of weeks with the first update coming as soon as today.

      There is still time to join the free beta. Sign up today.

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      Posted in marketing, web campaigns, web marketing | View Comments

      View Your Web Marketing Campaigns in a Whole New Light

      Thursday, February 12th, 2009

      Web marketing tends to be made up of several different systems all creating different campaigns that don’t talk to one another. Email marketing creates campaigns in their tools, the web team creates ad and search campaigns in another system, bloggers post to yet another system, and on and on. When it comes time to measure a campaign, you find yourself tyring to pull different data from all of these systems into a single report so you can assess the effectiveness of the campaign. This is a huge problem.

      Lately, we’ve been thinking of ways that Marketing for Mavens can help solve this problem. The latest feature release which went out on Tuesday now includes campaign management. This is just the first phase but it already gives you the ability to create a campaign in Marketing for Mavens and develop a URL tracking code which you can use to track the effectiveness of your online campaigns. This is the start of what will become an in-depth measurement tool which will allow you to see:

      • how many people responded to a campaign
      • where each individual visitor went on your site
      • what PDF’s, videos, and audio files people were interested in
      • what forms were completed

      This give you significantly more knowledge and a better understanding of the effectiveness of your campaigns. You know what works and what didn’t work and you can make changes accordingly.

      This is Just the Beginning

      Phase 2 is currently underway and will give you the ability to match your web content and promotions to the campaigns people respond to. So if you send out an email campaign, you can extend the campaign to your web site by using Marketing for Mavens to provide content that’s inline with the email message. Your web site now becomes a continuation of the story.

      Detailed reporting is also coming in phase 2. Each campaign will be updated in real-time with the latest information all on one screen. Currently, individual campaign pages show you who was interested in your campaigns and you can drill down into each profile to gather more data. In phase 2, the information will be available on the campaign page so you can see all the information at quick glance.

      We are very excited about the potential that campaign management brings to Marketing for Mavens. There is a world of potential here and we’re just scratching the surface. In the end, we want to make it as simple as possible for you to manage all of your web marketing campaigns in one location. To get started, join the beta, and email us with your feedback.

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      Posted in marketing, web campaigns, web marketing | View Comments

      Filtering Active_Scaffold in Rails Using Drop Down Box

      Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

      We use active_scaffold throughout the Marketing for Mavens application and love it. There are several instances where we wanted to filter the generated tables based on a selected item in a drop down box. Since we couldn’t find this process documented any where on the web, I’ve decided to highlight what we did to get this working.

      First you’ll want to start with you drop down box. We used Rails observe_field to generate an onselect JavaScript action when an item was selected from the drop down box.

      INDEX.HTML.ERB

      <%= observe_field   :widget_widget_type_id,                       
        # The field to observe
:with => "'widget_type_id=' + escape(value)",                    
        # The input to validate :o n  => "onselect",                                               
        # The frequency in seconds to watch for changes
:url  => {:action => 'filter_widget', :controller => 'widgets' }, 
        # The action to call when changes occur
:update => :filter_widget
        # Name of the <div> to update
%>

<div id="filter_widget"><%= render :active_scaffold => 'widgets',
   :constraints => {:company_id => @company.id}, :condition => @condition %></div>

      You will notice we created a <div> tag to hold the generated table. This is important because the filter will replace this code after the user selects an item from the drop down box, effectively filtering your results.

      Now we need to update the widgets controller to handle the new “filter_widget” action.

      WIDGETS_CONTROLLER.RB

      def filter_widget
  @conditions = "widget_type_id=#{params[:widget_type_id]}"
  render :inline => "<%= render :active_scaffold => 'widgets',
     :constraints => {:company_id => #{@company.id}}, :conditions => @conditions %>"
end

def conditions_for_collection
  @conditions
end

      condition_for_collection creates the initial conditions for the table. After a selection is made from the drop down, filter_widget is called and the <div> in the INDEX.HTML.ERB file is replaced with the new code. Now your table is filter accordingly.

      When implementing this code you may receive an “ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken” error message. One fix for this is to use the following code in your controller.

      protect_from_forgery :o nly => [:create, :update, :destroy]

      This may make your application vulnerable to hackers so research the side effects before implementing to make sure it’s right for your environment.

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      Posted in ruby on rails | View Comments

      Update: Marketing Campaign Tracking and UI Changes Coming Soon

      Monday, February 2nd, 2009

      I wanted to post a quick update on where we’re at since it’s been a little while. The past couple of weeks have been filled with updating the promotion tracking interface and adding the ability to track marketing campaigns.

      Marketing campaign tracking will be a significant addition to Marketing for Mavens. It will allow you to track your visitors across all of your campaigns. For example, if someone visits your site from an email campaign, you will see when they came in, where they went, and what they were interested in. Even more importantly, we are working on a system to expand your campaigns to your web site. So if you have a message you’re using in the email campaign, you can seamlessly advance the story using your web site and your Marketing for Maven’s promotion spots.

      We are very excited about the potential of adding campaign tracking. It will not only help you see the value of your campaigns but also help you build better connections with your visitors by delivering a customized content experience. We hope to have the first phase of campaign tracking available within the next couple of weeks. This will be the last major enhancement to Marketing for Mavens before we come out of beta in the March/April time frame.

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