Web Analytics is the one thing that all web marketers do and it continues to be the least understood. Every corporate site uses some form of Web Analytics software. Whether it’s Google Analytics, WebTrends, WebSideStory, or some other package, companies spend thousands of dollars a year on these applications. The problem is that these packages record too much information with too little time to respond. When we do respond, it’s to make small changes designed to appeal to the masses that have already been to your site and that if we’ve even interpretted the data correctly.
If we’ve learned anything in the ClueTrain era it’s that mass anything no longer works. Just look at mass advertising, mass email, and mass mailings. These marketing techniques require that you hit as many people as you can because you’re only going to reach about 3% to 5% of them. Well what about the other 95%. Shouldn’t we at least try to appeal to them? Well we can.
To appeal to the other 95% on the web, we need to be able to customize and target our content directly to them. We need to learn about our visitors as they use our sites and we need to respond to their needs in real-time, not weeks and months later when we have time to analyze our reports. We don’t have the time. Many people will only visit our sites once to decide if they want to do business with us. These lost opportunities will never come back.
We’re now well into the Web 2.0 era but our web analytics software has done little to catch up. It’s now time to look for ways to communicate as close to a 1 on 1 basis as possible. I’ve been formulating these ideas for some time now and have begun integrating them in the Marketing for Mavens web application. It focuses on communicating with each of your visitors and I welcome you to try the free beta and let us know what you think.
Posts Tagged ‘web marketing’
Web Analytics is Dead
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008Developing a Better Home Page
Thursday, August 28th, 2008Over the last few days, I’ve put a good deal of time into reconfiguring the home page. The previous design was very text heavy and the feedback I received revealed that it didn’t clearly explain the services provided by Marketing for Mavens.
It’s funny how you can be a web marketer for 10 years and still find yourself reverting to poor design practices. In this case, I’m far too close to the content then I’d prefer to be. I know how valuable Marketing for Mavens can be to a web marketer but when you’ve been so focused on developing the product for the last 6 months, what you consider to be a clear and concise explanation, turns out to be confusing to people who are learning about your services for the first time.
I still feel like the content needs to be revised further especially on the pages beyond the home page. I’ll be updating it over the next several days and will continue to listen to the feedback we’ve been receiving and update the site accordingly.
Treat Your Web Visitors with Respect. Stop Herding Cattle.
Thursday, August 21st, 2008One of the features of Marketing for Mavens is the ability to see how each visitor comes to your site and where they go. The real value is that it forces you to see your visitors as individuals instead of a crowd of people.
When you look at your typical web report, you see how all of your visitors interact with your site. You know that a majority of people visit your home page and that a certain percentage go to your product pages but you miss out on the details like how did this person get here, what were they looking for, and did they find it. The other problem is that any changes you make to your site based on these reports is designed to appeal to the masses. Web reports force us to treat our visitors as cattle that we can herd around. We try to find the path of least resistance that we can push them towards and then track the results through funnel analysis knowing that a certain number will drop out but if we can convert 10% to leads we’ll be very happy.
This leads us to the niche that Marketing for Mavens fills. There’s a very good reason to use all those web reports and you should continue to do so but you should also be looking at your individual visitors as well. Marketing for Mavens will assist you in treating each visitor, or as we like to call them citizen, with respect and open up a new way of communication that will transform how you interact with your potential customers. With this approach, you will understand what your citizens needs are and assist them in fulfilling these needs turning your citizens into customers more quickly and more efficiently then pushing them through a path that you already know loses 90% of your potential leads.
Giving back to the web community
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008Today, I’ve been working on a little side project. This idea popped into my head during lunch and I feel compelled to act upon it. Over the years, I’ve received a lot of help from web community. Whether it’s support for a particular product or learning a new programming language, I couldn’t imagine having the success I’ve had without someone answering these questions or showing the steps necessary to solve various problems.
It is for this reason that I’ve decided to devote an hour of each day to answering one person’s web marketing questions. The questions can be from a wide range of topics including coding, web design, development, SEO, paid advertising, database design. No questions is too dumb and I welcome questions from those who have no clue about the web but find it fascinating or need help getting started. I don’t pretend to have all the answers but I can, more often than not, point you in the right direction.
Of course this is free and in return I want nothing other than for you try to pass the knowledge along or help others as best you can. This is my opportunity to pay forward all the help that people have given me in the past. If you’re interested please fill out the form at www.marketingformavens.com/free_web_marketing_help.html.
Web Site Visitors: Tag and Learn
Friday, July 18th, 2008One of the side benefits of using Marketing for Mavens is learning what topics (tags) your visitors are interested in and how they relate to other topics. For example, you can tag all of your web pages with keywords associated with your content, as each visitor navigates your site, a list of tags become associated with them. Through this relationship you begin get a different level of insight into how your individual pages relate to one another. Unfortunately, right now, most of this analysis must be done by hand. I’m trying to come up with a better way to show this relationship in a report which would remove a lot of complexity. Either way it give a unique view into your visitors and your site that I believe you’ll find valuable.
