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Dictionary.com defines analysis as a “detailed examination of the elements or structure of something”. To add context for business analysis, it can be defined as a detailed examination of the elements that contribute to the success or failure of a business. You analyze your customers, your sales, your competition, and as we count down to 2013 you also need to analyze your website traffic. But let’s talk a little bit about what it means to analyze website traffic.

In our example where we talked about counting the number of cars in your parking lot, we said that counting them was not analysis. But what sort of thinking would you do if the parking lot in question was the parking lot for your business? Those cars tell you about your customers. You can count them to see how many people are in your store, you can look at the license plates to see where they came from, and you can time how long each car is in your parking lot to gauge how long their shopping experience was. However, that still only gets you halfway there. Analysis is the part where you connect these observations to the success (or lack thereof) of your business and determine what role these factors play in the success of your company.

Now, in order to translate this example to the web you have to reimagine the cars in the parking lot as sessions to your website. The same way that you count the cars, you count the sessions. The same way that you figure out where the cars came from, you examine how visitors end up on your website. And finally, the same way that you examine how long the cars were in your lot you look at how long a visitor was on your site. Sure there, are other factors we would examine as well, but you get the idea. Finally, we would examine the impact that each of these factors had on the success or conversion factors for the website and that would be our analysis for our web traffic. How do we do that? Well, thats a topic for another blog entry! But for today, we got our big point across – measurement by itself does not constitute analysis. So I ask again: How much analysis does your web analytics actually entail?

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“What….would ya say….ya do here?”

Can anyone tell me what movie that is a quote from? If you guessed “Office Space”, you would be right. In the classic scene where a man tries and fails to proclaim the usefulness of his job to a team of external consultants, one of them finally just looks at him and asks him that question. Now, if you figured out that this is also a question you should be asking about your company’s website, you are one step ahead. What does your site do for you? Although it may sound rhetorical in nature, the question begs to be asked earnestly. What is it that your company needs to get out of its website? The Internet is home to billions of websites. There are millions of companies that each have their own particular online business strategy – some more successful than others – and it’s up to you to craft your own with respect to your particular company and business strategy. The first step is to take a look at your company and figure out what role your online strategy needs to play in your business plan. Then you need to figure out what type of site – or sites – will give you the best shot at being successful to execute that strategy. Finally, you need to assemble the right group of people to execute your strategy. Depending on the size and scope of your operation this could mean anything from hiring a full time employee to work for your company to getting a couple of books and learning how to code your own site. Somewhere in the middle is finding a good interactive marketing company (shameless plug for my own personal web-design services at Findgreatcustomers.com) and contracting them to build and maintain your site. For this entry of the Findgreatcustomers.com Online Marketing Blog, we will focus on the first two steps: Picking an Online Strategy & Building an Online Presence to Match.

Section One – Picking an Online Strategy

They say that a journey of 1,000,000 miles begins with a single step (or something like that). So hopefully it will hold true for your business that a journey of 1,000,000 customers will begin with a single question: “How can I leverage the Internet to add to my bottom line?”. The first piece of information you need to establish is what sort of business it is that you run. Do you have a store? A restaurant?  Do you provide a service? Do you make a product?  So, “Mad Libs” style, lets fill in the blanks here: “The goal of my company’s website is to get <target market> to <target action>”.

Here are a few examples – the target audience is in green and the target action is in blue:

The goal of my company’s website is to get people shopping online to purchase a widget from me.

The goal of my company’s website is to get people near me to eat in my restaurant.

The goal of my company’s website is to get people who need a service to call me for a service estimate.

The goal of my company’s website is to get people who need a product to read about my widget online.

The goal of my company’s website is to get small businesses to fill out a lead form so my sales team can call on them to market my widget.

Now, these examples are not designed to be all encompassing. Your company’s needs and business model might be completely different. But the idea is the same – in order for your company to succeed online, who needs to see your site and what do they need to do after they see it? Once you have identified a target audience and a target action, you have laid a solid foundation to build an online business strategy upon.

Section Two – Building a Website that Matches Your Strategy.

Great – we know what we want our users to do once they arrive at our site. So we are all done, right? Not so fast. Now we have to make careful preparations in the design phase of our site that will drive the highest possible percentage of users into the desired action. This is trickier than it sounds and it can be a source of frustration. However, like any other problem in life it can be tackled effectively by breaking it down into smaller problems and solving them one by one.

In the first section we identified a broad target audience and a broad target action for our site. In section two, we will get a little more specific and break our broad target audience/action combination into smaller chunks called use cases. Simply put, a use case is a scenario where a member of your target audience has a need that they would utilize your website en route to taking the specified target action that (hopefully) satisfies that need. Over time you may make adjustments based on actual observations of consumer behavior or changes to your business plan.

Here are some use cases that correspond to real-world consumer needs for the scenario where the goal for the company’s website is to get people located nearby to eat at a restaurant. Let’s examine the use cases and then determine how the proprietor of the restaurant could tailor their online strategy to meet the need and thus have the best shot at capturing the business.

Use Case #1 - Consumer is on the go and in need of sustenance, and is looking for nearby places where they can satisfy that need.

Seems reasonable enough – you’ve got a restaurant, and there are hungry people within a reasonable distance of your shop. How can you leverage the web to bring them to your place of business? Remember in the first section where I listed out the steps to this process, and in the second step I said “…what type of site – or sites – will give you the best shot…”? Of course you remember – good. What I was alluding to was that it might take more than just a single web site to make sure your company exists in all the places that consumers might be looking for it. For a restaurant, maybe they are old-school and use an actual printed phone book, or simply drive down the street until they find something good. But more likely, they are searching from a mobile device of some kind. Maybe they are using Google from a smart phone…is your paid search campaign set up to display ads on mobile devices? Maybe they have the Yelp application installed on their iPhone…how does your Yelp profile look? Is all of the information accurate, with lots of great reviews? Perhaps they are searching Google maps from a smart phone. How does your Google Places listing look?

This is where a little field study might be in order. If you feel out of touch with your customers, simply asking them how they heard about you can give you valuable insight into how they might be searching for you. This is partly an exercise in knowing your industry, and partly an exercise in trial and error. Think of some ways to connect with consumers searching for your company, try them, and then assess what worked…rinse, lather, and repeat!

Use Case #2 – Consumer is planning an evening out in advance and wants to peruse suitable establishments within a defined locale to choose a restaurant. In the course of their search, they have happened upon your site.

Ok, so great news – the consumer found you! Of all the billions of sites on the entire Internet, they chose to give yours a closer look to see if your company is the one that best matches their particular need for a good or service. Opportunity is knocking! Getting them to your site is only half the battle though. Actually, it’s less than half the battle. But we will get to more of that later. In any event, what happens next is pretty simple – they perform a quick audit of your site to see if it has the information they are seeking. And they usually do it in record time. Most consumers will give your site about a 6-10 second glance, and if they can’t immediately find the information they are seeking then they head right for the dreaded “Back” button. D’oh!

This is where “beauty is only skin deep” really comes into play. The 10 second long flash intro, gimmicky slide show, ultra-hip low contrast color scheme might have all looked really great while you were sitting in an office with your web designer. It might even win some kind of graphics design award. But will it win your company any business? <pause for dramatic effect>

When potential customers are hitting your site, they are taking part in an evaluation process between your site and that of your competition. They’re probably in a hurry and have 5 browser windows open with everything from their email to their Facebook to a movie streaming from Netflix. Their bottom line is that looking at your site is taking time away from other activities that they would rather be doing.

A good barometer for how well your site will function is to ask some friends to help you test it. However, since nearly everyone in 2011 fashions themselves as some sort of Internet expert, you need to be cautious how you ask for their advice. Simply asking them to “let me know what you think of my company’s new website” will invariably lead them to try to think of ways to outsmart your web designer, and reinvent the proverbial wheel. They will likely focus on intricate design related aspects of the site and completely ignore the function of it. You will get much more useful feedback if you ask specific questions that might be related to one of your use cases, like “Can you look at this proposed website design and tell me if we are open late on Saturday and offer a menu that your family will enjoy…in less than 30 seconds?” or “Can you tell me if we are located conveniently to you and if our menu is friendly to your child’s food allergy…in less than 30 seconds?”. The key is to give them specific information to look for, and a time limit, because your consumers will all have something specific they are looking for and a short attention span. For bonus points, give them the sites of one or two competitors and ask how easy it was for them to find the same information from your competition. If users consistently encounter difficulty with quickly finding information that is pertinent to your business, you haven’t designed your site properly. Period.  If the information in question actually exists on your site and users consistently have trouble finding it, it represents an even bigger problem…probably a good time to consider some design changes.

Use Case #3 – Consumer has an upcoming business function, and needs to assess service availability and get price quotes from available catering operations.

I included this use case for a specific reason. Not so much to help you learn to plan for how to build a website for a catering business, but to illustrate how to design for a use case that is outside of the main function of your business. If you have multiple use cases for your site, some of them will be more common than others. Many businesses will encounter a situation where they have one use case that is very common and another that is less common yet more lucrative so the business owner will not want to ignore it. In this example, the first two use cases are a lot more common. It is certainly not difficult to imagine that the demand for a restaurant is more widely reaching than the demand for catering services. However, a restaurant owner will make more money catering a meal for a large group than they will serving one meal to one person. So what is a business owner with multiple conflicting use cases to do?

The answers to that question are actually as varied as the use cases themselves. It depends on the size of the company, the structure of the website, and the amount of time, energy and potential revenue associated with each use case. If the company in question here had a full time catering operation associated with it, maybe a dedicated website would be the best thing. It could be dedicated completely to supply information pertaining to catering services to users that are in search of such information, and incorporate a similar look and feel to the main restaurant website in order to maintain brand solidarity. The two sites could link to each other, and each have appropriate freedom to target consumers effectively. But what if the catering service is more of an occasional thing? Maybe it would be enough to just have a page for catering within the larger site, and a tabbed navigation menu could have a link for “Catering” apart from the more clicked on tabs like “Menu” and “Locations”. This would allow for the restaurant portion of the site to operate with relative autonomy but still provide the catering portion with adequate space along with some prime real estate in the tabbed navigational menu.

Hopefully you’re still reading and you find all of this information helpful! I know this was a lot of information to take in (and this was only part one of a three part series!)  but it is important to take your time and develop the right online marketing strategy for your company. Please join us next week, for part one of a two part series on using the Internet to research your company, industry, and competitors!

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Earlier this year, I switched jobs from the online marketing department of one company to the online marketing department of one of its direct competitors. That afternoon, talk swirled around the office about how I was going to “reveal the secrets of the online marketing strategy” to my new company. While on some level I understood the concern, I had to chuckle at least a little bit. Nothing that happens on the Internet is even remotely private, and any online marketer worth his or her salt could quickly research and tell you anything you wanted to know about their competitor’s online strategy without much difficulty. Simply put, anything your customers can see, your competitors can see too.

However, this doesn’t mean you should abandon or even reduce your online marketing efforts. Quite the opposite actually – depending on exactly what you do, the Internet is still probably the best place for your marketing efforts. What it does mean is that in order to be as successful as possible, you need to learn how to understand what the Internet is telling you about your company, your competitors, and your industry. Learn the best places to look, learn the best information to look for, and learn how to act on it when you find it. It may sound simple, but you would be surprised how many business owners I have talked to that go straight to the Internet to search for something in their personal life, and had never thought of using the Internet for competitive research. Ok, so we have established that it is both possible and important. Now let’s focus on how to do it.

Step One – Read EVERYTHING You Can About Yourself

No, this isn’t an attempt to turn you into a narcissist. Think of it as being self aware. Scour the Internet looking for your company name, click on every single link, read every last page, and keep a log of what you found. Repeat this process at least a few times a month. This serves a number of purposes:

1. Ensure the accuracy of information. This is as simple as making sure that all of the data posted for your company is accurate and consistent. Double check the addresses, phone numbers, hours, and anything else posted to make sure it’s all correct. Earlier this month, I looked up a restaurant, decided to eat there and drove to the address listed on both their website and Google Places. Nowhere to be found was the restaurant. So I called the phone number on their website, and was given directions to a new address. Upon arrival, I told the manager of the problem and she kind of shrugged and said “oh yeah, we moved about a year ago”. Uh…ok. A year, and their website still had the wrong address. Well, I wonder how many of their customers ate someplace else in the meantime when they couldn’t find them?
2. Read your own reviews. Depending on your industry, there are different avenues to check. But review sites are all the rage in 2011 and negative reviews (or even a lack of positive revues) can sink your business in the eyes of a new client. If consumers are posting their negative experiences with your company you need to take appropriate action to address their concerns. Many review sites will allow you to post a response in the event a situation has been atoned for. If they are posting their positive experiences…well, everyone loves a pat on the back, right?
3. Stay on top of social media. Even more so than a review site, social media allows the opportunity for a service recovery in the event of a negative comment. If someone tweets that they hated your restaurant, reply to apologize and ask them how you could have been better (and offer a free meal). If someone’s Facebook status says that your carwash only got 1/3 of the dirt off their SUV you can reply with an apology and offer some coupons in exchange for a second chance. In the event someone says something completely false, baseless, or tasteless…well, you can always let your attorney know.

Step Two – Read EVERYTHING You Can About Your Competitors

When it comes to learning about your competitors, the Internet is a virtual goldmine, full of nuggets of priceless information.  Hopefully, after last week’s look at how to design your site (and online presence) to be as successful as possible, you took my advice and identified a few competitors to take compare your site to. But don’t just stop with the usability of their site – look up every possible piece of information you can. You might be surprised how far some competitive data can go in terms of explaining what might have otherwise been a mystery. If you have a sudden drop (or increase) in sales, it would certainly be good to know what the other guy is (and is not) doing. A few things to look for:

1. Their Website. Sounds simple, but raise your hands if you have identified your top competitors and look at their websites at least once a week (and be honest!). Chances are, if they are in the midst of a major change of strategy or product lineup, their website will say so.  If they are making dramatic changes to the site itself, take note of what the changes are see if you can learn something from them. There are a lot of things to take note of here – how quickly did it load? Does it look correct in different browsers? Try loading it from a smart phone or tablet – does it retain its look and feel? Aside from the nuts and bolts, what can you tell about their business strategy and value proposition from their website?
2. Their Links. Inbound links that is, meaning which websites have a link on them that will lead consumers to their site. A good SEO (search engine optimizer) will be able to help you with this, or, visit Open Site Explorer and take a peek for yourself. What this is saying is that you need to understand all of the places that are linking to one of your competitors. Why? Two reasons – 1. You should probably be trying to get links from these same sites and 2. Inbound links (also called “backlinks” in the SEO industry) play a major determining factor in who gets ranked higher in Google search. Next week, our entire entry will deal with SEO and the value it can provide to your company.
3. Their Advertising.  Let’s think about this logically for a second – if your competitors are doing it, and keep doing it, either A) It is working for them or B) They are not paying attention. I am thinking it’s probably A, but I will let you be the judge of that. Look for all of the ads they are placing – banner ads, paid search, and email marketing. Take note of a few things – the placement of the ad, the product/service offered, and the avenue. Are they running paid search campaigns on Google? Banner campaigns on Facebook? Mobile ads? These are all things you need to know and compare to your own marketing strategy. A good interactive agency will be able to figure out where their ads are without just simply going from page to page looking for them. Also, numerous tools are available to help you harvest competitive advertising data – my personal favorite is SpyFu.
4. Their Reviews. What are customers saying about them? If they’re getting positive reviews from the same reviewers or on the same sites you’re getting negative reviews…well, that doesn’t look good for you. Studies have proven time and time again that even if someone doesn’t know the person writing the review, it can have a huge impact on their purchase decision. Amazon built an empire on the concept that people want to know what other people just like them think, even if they don’t know each other. In any event – read their reviews (bad and good) and take note of what consumers think the other guy is doing right or wrong.  Maybe you need to up your game, maybe not. The first step is knowing.
5. Their Social Media. This goes double if you are not yet participating in social media. Take note of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. Social Media is an extremely powerful medium for reaching consumers, but it can also be a minefield. You need to be careful to control the message and engage with your customers without overstepping your relationship with them. Be careful not to underestimate the value of a Facebook like. An upcoming entry in this blog will explore Social Media in far greater detail.

Step Three – Learn About Your Industry

Odds are you probably did learn a lot about your industry by reading up on your own web presence, as well as researching your competitors. But there is always more to learn and to track. No matter what your industry, the Internet contains an almost endless wealth of great information about what you do. Branch out and learn new things. And also, track the following:

1. Search Results for Your Product/Service. Google search results (called SERP’s, for Search Engine Result Placement) are kind of like a mini popularity contest. Google crawls the web, and based on their assessment of the quality of a site’s content and the likelihood that someone will click on it, they rank all of the sites that they feel pertain to a particular keyword. We will cover keywords in greater detail down the road, but for now just pick out a couple of terms that you think consumers might be searching for when they shop for your product and keep track of how (or if) you rank for them.
2. Competitive Landscape. Odds are, if a competing shop opened up down the street from yours, the proprietor of that shop didn’t walk into your store and introduce themselves and announce their presence. But since knowing your competition is extremely important, you need to know when a new threat suddenly appears on the horizon. The good thing is that even if they didn’t announce their new venture to you, they probably announced it to Google. So by keeping track of Google searches appropriate to your company, you can know pretty quickly when someone is on your heels.
3. Consumer Landscape. This is where trade-specific publications and blogs can offer a lot of value. You can learn about new products, services, industry trends, and more. Even if you’re not tweeting anything, join Twitter and find some thought-leaders in your industry and follow their tweets. You will be surprised how much great information is floating around cyberspace that is free for anyone who wants to read it. Another great source of information can be to just type “<your product/service name> blog” into Google and see who Google thinks is doing the best writing. Bloggers will often have great insight into how consumers are shopping for your product/service, and what is important to them. Also, an authoritative blog can be a great place to get a link that will provide tremendous value to your site – more on that in next week’s entry on SEO!

Thank you for joining us this week for another installment of the Findgreatcustomers.com Online Marketing Blog! Please join us next week for a brief intro into the world of Search Engine Optimization. Also, there will be an additional related entry (Knowledge is Power Part II) upcoming (date TBD) that will examine how to gain insight into your customers by analyzing traffic patterns on your own website. As always, please feel free to email me comments or questions, or leave comments below. Thanks!

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There are a lot of ways that different consumer segments approach purchase decisions in various industries, but there a few aspects that are common to many of them. One of the great distinguishing factors for predicting a consumer’s purchase decision process is purchase involvement. It’s a pretty simple concept – a more involved purchase will generally have a more extensive decision process. In order to assess the involvement of your particular good or service put yourself in the shoes of an average consumer and walk yourself through a couple of questions:

1. How many times in my life will I make a similar purchase?
2. How expensive is this item?

Now, let’s consider a couple of purchase decisions that many people would be familiar with and answer these questions. For example, lunch – assuming the consumer in question is a living, breathing human being that requires sustenance, they will likely purchase something to eat nearly every day. And depending on that person’s tastes, lunch is fairly inexpensive. On the other end of that spectrum is an automobile. Although there are exceptions to every rule, most people will likely purchase fewer automobiles in their lifetime than they will meals. And it probably isn’t going too far out on a limb to speculate that your car costs more than your lunch.

We can then revisit economics 101 (or visit for the first time, if that is the case) and make a diagram as follows that depicts some common items along our purchase involvement graph: (exhibit a)

The top right corner of this graph represents highly involved purchases, for which consumers are more likely to consider multiple alternatives, do extensive research, and in general they will agonize over which choice to make. For example, several steps commonly involved in purchasing an automobile would be to read government safety ratings, compare fuel efficiency, research future maintenance costs, and then test drive multiple vehicles. These steps would be far less common in a less involved purchase, such as a bag of potato chips or a pencil.

Why do you need to understand the consumer purchase process for your product or service? Once you understand how consumers typically go about purchasing your product/service, you can then be more productive in developing an effective strategy for how to reach them with your message. For example, in many high involvement purchase decision processes, it is best to catch consumers in the evaluation stage. They have already identified their need for the product/service, and your best opportunity is to sell them on your company while they are evaluating alternatives. Alternatively, for many low involvement purchases, you may be best off hitting an unsuspecting consumer with an ad in order to create demand. More on this below. In the meantime, let’s examine a couple of examples of purchase processes.

For more involved purchases, the steps usually resemble those below:

Notice I didn’t title the last step “Consumer Makes Purchase”, because in many cases, the consumer may have come up with an option that doesn’t involve making a purchase. Maybe your pitch wasn’t convincing enough? Maybe. But more likely, you didn’t even get to make your pitch.

According to a recent study by ComScore, approximately 70% of consumers research purchases online prior to making a purchase. Many of them use Search Engines to find information relating to the product/service they are researching. Want to know if keywords that relate to your product/service was among the searched for terms in your area? I thought so. I’ll explain how to do that in next week’s blog entry. In the meantime however, it’s a pretty safe assumption that if your product/service is legally and logistically available for purchase or consumption in your chosen area of business then consumers are probably using search engines to look for it.

This means that even if the typical sales process for your product or service is very hands on and involves a sales team, chances are likely that your customer has already done considerable research before they ever engaged you in the process. In this scenario, your sales pitch is coming between steps three and four, and thus the consumer has already identified and evaluated their options prior to ever talking to you. Not exactly the point in the process you were hoping to engage them, right? I didn’t think so. Enter search engine marketing (herein referred to as “SEM”) and thus, the ability to change your location in the process.

Wouldn’t you like your odds better if the process looked like this?

The core concept behind SEM is that if a user is performing a search for a term related to your product/service, that represents an opportune time and place for you to serve them an advertisement.

Let that one sink in for a minute, and consider some examples. If you sell cars, wouldn’t you love to have the opportunity to get a few words across to everyone who types “reviews for new cars” into a Google search bar? If you build houses in Charlotte, NC, wouldn’t you love to chat with someone who types “homebuilder in Charlotte, NC” into their browser? If you said yes, then consider yourself a great candidate for SEM. You have a few options:

• We offer both SEM set-up and SEM management at Findgreatcustomers.com
• You may refer to the Google guide to SEM agencies to find an agency for your business
• Read up on SEM yourself, and run your own campaigns. I am a big fan of Advanced Google Adwords by Brad Geddes.

Now, for less involved purchases. The purchase decision process for a product with low purchase involvement differs from that of a product with a high purchase involvement in that the evaluation stage is often much shorter, and that the consumer is not always aware of their own need for a particular product. A great example of a consumer not being aware of their own need for a product includes a billboard for a restaurant along the side of a highway. The consumer may have not identified their need at that point, but after a tempting photo of a delicious looking meal, they may suddenly be hungry. And the evaluation process for a purchase that a consumer will make many times in their life is shorter since the repercussions of making a poor decision are generally much lower. For example, if you don’t like your potato chips – just get another bag of different ones. If your pen runs out of ink, just get another. A consumer might make a choice for a low-involvement purchase based solely on convenience, timing, proximity, or just to try something new. They might also do far less research. The process might look like this:

Or

However, that doesn’t mean that SEM is necessarily ineffective to promote a low-involvement product or service. It just means a different strategy is necessary. Rather than focusing on keywords for searches that would indicate a consumer is looking specifically for your product/service, you could instead focus on creating the need for your product/service in the mind of your consumer. For example, if you are marketing a restaurant that is located near a hotel, airport, stadium or other landmark, you could focus on searches that include the title of the landmark and plant the idea of eating in your restaurant in the mind of someone preoccupied with another task in the same manner that marketers placing billboards on the side of the highway do.

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