Posts About ‘strategy’

The Optimal Website User Experience (Part 2)

Buy-Key

Last month I wrote about my experiences on how I recently for the first time had been involved with website re-design and creating valuable on-site directions for site visitors to improve the user’s online experience. In my first post I talked about the ‘Flow’ Notion, Identifying Your Visitors Online Persona, The 4 Online Personas, Trust and a Community and Social User Experience.

This is part two of my learnings in which I will be talking about looking at your competitors, mobile and devices, perceived affordance and the differences between offline and online customer experience management. (more…)

The Optimal Website User Experience

facebook-frustration

Recently I have for the first time been involved with website re-design and creating valuable on-site directions for site visitors to improve the user’s online experience. My professional background is not too tech-heavy therefore I started by looking at the psychology of online users to gain an understanding (in the deeper sense) why someone is visiting your website and what the motivations are for doing so.

I came across the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi  who is best-known as the architect of the notion of ‘flow’, as well as being one of the leading researchers on ‘positive psychology’.  His theory is that people are at their happiest when they are in “flow” mode. In other words the condition where motivation, attention and the current situation meet resulting in a kind of productive harmony or feedback. The challenging part for us marketers though is to create the right conditions for individuals to achieve this state. The art though is to strike the right balance between the skill of the performer and the challenge of the task level. If one or the other is too easy/difficult ‘flow’ will not occur. So how can we transmit that to a website? To increase the likelihood for your visitor to experience the flow state try to remove unnecessarily distractions from your site. Reason being that once the visitor is in the ‘flow’ he/she has to ‘automatically’ block stimuli that are interfering with the task/purchase/sign-up engagement. Therefore we ought to help users not to get distracted. (more…)

Video Is The Winner In Branded Content Marketing

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Via Panda, Penguin and other subtler algo updates, Google are hammering home the message that content is everything when it comes to judging the worth of a site and how often they are prepared to return it in the search results for its target keywords.

Savvy marketers have been using a variety of methods for years to attract visitors, both on and off page but the latest report from ContentWise and the Custom Content Council shows that it is video content that is proving to be an invaluable addition to their branded marketing repertoire. (more…)

Ray-Ban Hoax on Facebook Shows Even Marketers Fall for Peer Pressure

Peer-Pressure

If something is popular and a lot of people go to a specific place you are certain that that place is going to be the target of those trying to do wrong. A busy shopping street will attract a lot of pick pockets. A busy website will attract hackers and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook will attract spam and hoaxes.

Usually most marketers know when something is a hoax or not and don’t respond to it. Last Friday however we witnessed a hoax attempt on Facebook go viral. The interesting part there was that most of the people who ‘fell for it’ were marketers. A funny side effect here was that they ‘fell’ for what is part of their own strategy: human psychology. (more…)

The Case for Specialisations

Newton's pendulum containing five metal balls

In many of the SEO consultancies I’ve worked alongside, little silos are appearing. One person or team does the link building. One does the onsite. One does the editorial. And some poor soul gets to write the monthly report.

This reflects what happened with some PR consultancies years ago – someone doing the ‘telesales’ to journalists, someone doing the writing. Many who took that approach didn’t last long – the focus moves away from creating rounded ‘consultants’ organised around clients’ needs for someone who understands their business and market, and a single point of contact.

With Google starting to focus on the ‘who’ as well as the ‘what’ of online content, with author credence beginning to matter, has SEO matured to a level where SEO consultancies are beginning to specialise around industry specialisms? (more…)

We Will Need To Work On Authority

authority

This article was originally written for Affiliates4U.

The last few months have been crazy if you are a ‘Google watcher’, somebody who follows what Google and the other search engines are up to. Google has been ‘under siege’ on several occasions. Most of the time they themselves were to blame.

In between a lot of little things which changed one thing was rolled out which we had seen coming ever since Google+ made its entrance, different articles we wrote at State of Search all saw Google heading this way. This change however will significantly change the way we search and the way we as website owners work: Google Search Plus Your World.

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Having “Fans” Does Not Mean Engagement: Only 1% of Fans Engage

holland-fans

Social Media is a weird science, if you can call it a science at all. In essence it is very close to what we as human beings have always been doing: recommending things to others and communicating about what we see happening around us. Still marketers seem to have difficulties grabbing and understanding this and making the best use of this.

This probably comes from decades of ‘old school marketing’ we have been doing. Trying to reach as many people at once, hoping that some of them will respond to it. This type of old marketing leads to a ‘wrong’ approach of Social Media. We try to reach as many people as possible hoping they will interact with us.

Recent research shows that the way marketers and users look at Social Media differs quite a bit. Where marketers still believe ‘presence’ counts and people will engage if you just share things with them, users actually don’t care that much. It turns out that only one percent of Facebook users for example tend to ‘engage’ with brands. (more…)

Ranking Reports that Inspire Focus and Decision Making

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Reporting on the success of your SEO work by using ranking reports alone doesn’t really paint a full picture. Good SEO should be about way more than just improving rankings; for starters is your client making more money, how’s their organic traffic growing, what does their brand look like online? Using ranking reports in conjunction with other metrics can provide a wider picture of how your website is performing and help to educate the client as to what they are getting from SEO, and what areas might need more attention.

However, despite explaining other important KPI’s and trying our best to explain how to measure true success and value; the one thing clients often want to know about first is where their pages are ranking. Sometimes this question can come before discussing traffic, conversions and other such metrics that actually make a real difference to their business. (more…)

Your Influence (and Klout Score) is Worth Money

Klout Perks

As you may know I am not a big fan of Klout or the services like Klout. Simply because it in most cases gives people the wrong impression of influence. You can be an influencer with a low Klout score or you can seem to be an influencer because you may have a high Klout score while in fact nobody cares about your opinion.

Still it is inevitable that we have to deal with services like this, because it is how we try to get a grip on the whole ‘influence’ matter. Because influence and authority will matter. We’ve seen it with Search Plus Your World. The more influence you have the more visible you get to be, so you need to be as visibile as possible. And your influence is going to be worth money. Lots of it. And Klout is one of the first to actually show us that. (more…)

People Searching For Rebecca Black Are Not Stupid

stupid

I have been doing training sessions for quite a while now. And for years one thing has been coming back on the table multiple times in sessions: listen to what your potential client has to say and act on that. It started off years ago with keyword research: trying to find what people searched for and act on that with your texts instead of trying to push your own ‘language’ and hoping people will adapt to that.

It has evolved to using not just the right keywords, but also the right platforms: be where your potential audience is and address them in a way they feel comfortable and familiar with.

It still strikes me however how few marketeers and tech people actually do this and how they sometimes respond to what ‘the real world’ is doing online. They don’t seem to understand that it is not them what makes the world go around but the bigger audience. Even people like Bill Gross don’t seem to understand. (more…)

How X-Factor Can Help You Win in Online Marketing

x-factor-logo

The end of September / early October is the time of the year in which in many countries the talent shows start again. Usually (you can never be sure again in these days so it seems) the weather turns bad an people want to stay inside on the weekend nights.

So shows like the X-Factor and “The Voice” in the Netherlands are pushed onto the TV channels to give the viewer what they want: entertainment, competition, the idea you could have been one of the winners and the social element: something everybody talks about. But what could these shows tell us in our online marketing jobs? Quite a lot actually. If you look carefully they can teach you how you can win, in online marketing. (more…)

The Target Audience Companies Keep Forgetting About

whisper

I do a lot of training sessions, I speak a lot and I help companies figure out what their strategy should be when it comes to online. Even though every client is different, there is always one question which I will ask every client, every attendee at training sessions and sometimes even the audience when I speak: what is your target audience?

Funny enough in nine out of ten times the answer is wrong. Or at least partially wrong. They are always missing one part of their target audience. Let me explain. (more…)

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