What exactly is the difference between teal and turquoise? How about purple and violet? I’m sure there is an art school answer, but the point is – color is subjective. My teal could be my client’s turquoise.

At Serengeti, I work with clients on designing their home pages, emails, ad campaigns, and more. Since we all see the world differently – purple vs. violet – this can be tricky work. The more I can guide the creative design process…the better. Below are my rules for driving effective, productive design development:

• Ask clients to provide a list of sites they like and don’t like. Just like bringing a photo of Jennifer Aniston’s hair to your stylist when getting your hair cut; having real world examples to work from helps narrow the field of options for the designer. You can also use their list to manage expectations up front, illustrating why certain sites are successful and others aren’t.
• Always start with a comprehensive creative brief. This document gives the designer valuable background information and also makes the client explore what they truly want from the design, while also making them accountable. Be sure to clearly define the target audience and project goals.
• After reviewing the creative brief, move on to wireframes. By providing a wireframe prior to starting design, you can ensure that all key elements are accounted for. Some clients will have trouble visualizing with just a wireframe, but you’ll catch the most glaring omissions.
• Set the creative deadlines upfront and be generous with padding. Whatever delivery date the designer gives, add a day. This helps avoid disappointed clients.
• Some designers may disagree, but always ask for two mocks for every round of review. Providing multiple solutions to any problem allows the client to more easily define what they like and don’t like.
• Limit the number of revisions. Three or four is usually plenty. Otherwise, the design will die a death by a thousand cuts.
• Remember that you are the expert, as is the designer. Have an opinion and drive the client in the direction you want them to go. Do not allow them to just tear a design apart without also telling you what they like.

In the end, my purple may seem violet to my client, but at least when I follow my rules above – the end result is a strong design that we collaboratively agreed upon in a reasonable timeframe.

Here at Serengeti headquarters, I am seeing something nobody else in the office is: news, blog posts, and video displaying below the third result in Google’s SERPs.

Is anyone else seeing this?

From a three day PPC seminar, you can learn the basics of how to build and manage a PPC campaign. You may even be exposed to advanced topics like A/B and multivariate testing. However, gleaning actionable tools and techniques for your own campaigns will likely require more than three days of classroom training if you are running larger and/or more complex PPC initiatives.

We are currently in the latter half of a year-long PPC training program for one of our clients, American Public University System (APUS). Serengeti managed PPC for APUS for several years; however, increased competition and quality scores pushed up the cost per click substantially a little over a year ago. We ran the numbers on the cost of outsourcing the campaigns versus continuing most of the day to day management in-house and subsequently recommended setting up an in-house PPC department for APUS. Our assessment was that, in addition to improving the direct ROI of PPC, an in-house expert would be better positioned to absorb and react to ongoing business marketing priorities on the fly – a key to maintaining their low-cost marketing strategy and meeting aggressive growth goals.

APUS did not have the human resources to take PPC in-house at the time, so Serengeti’s first step was to define the qualifications, experience, and responsibilities of the PPC Manager, and to help the client locate the right candidate. Ultimately, APUS hired a candidate with some experience, though primarily in the creation of new campaigns with landing pages. By her own admission, “I had some experience, but I didn’t know bid optimization. And I didn’t know the conversion tracking tool being used.”

Serengeti built a custom training program around the new employee’s skill set – less time on ad copywriting and search marketing interface training, and more on reporting, optimization, and analytics skills. Through a tiered approach, we worked from the monthly reports down to the daily reports based on level of detail. Learning the daily reports first helped create an understanding of the overall cost and conversion data, but the monthly report had keyword-specific data that was more actionable. By focusing on monthly reporting first, the client learned optimization tactics. Weekly and daily reporting indicated the immediate gains from the steps taken to optimize.

During the training period, some of the PPC priorities changed for APUS, so the program was altered to accommodate shifting needs. An expanding enterprise means more keyword categories, more ad groups, and more campaigns. The client had no trouble adding new keywords to old campaigns and the training enabled her to work with them in the conversion tracking tool. However, adding new campaigns to the conversion tracking tool was a bit more complicated, so Serengeti provided ongoing phone and email support to ensure a continued level of accuracy and effectiveness.

How did the one-on-one, ongoing training approach work for the client? There was no interruption in quality or results. “The hands-on training was really helpful when I was learning bid optimization and the email and phone support was great. I’ve enjoyed the training experience.”

Thanks! So have we!

It is my turn to host the Nonprofit Blog Carnival, so I’ve chosen one of my favorite topics, Social Media.  I’m a big fan of Social Media for nonprofits because I believe that it can radically improve the efficiency and ROI of the marketing program.  True, the direct ROI of Social isn’t as measurable as a Pay Per Click ad, but remember that the investment you make in direct online channels scales up linearly with budget and often has diminishing returns.  Social Media scales with the size of a growing community. It feeds itself and, done right, it has compounding returns.  The Wild Apricot Blog provides more rationale this week in Making the Case for Social Media Marketing .

What drives Social Media success?  Think Outside the Site from The Connection Café does a nice job of setting out a fundamental truth that drives effective social media engagement: It’s not about your Web site.  Getting past “marketer-think” (i.e., “my goal is to drive people to my Web site so that I can talk to them about what is important to me”) is critical.  Marketers must leave the comfort of their own home (The Web Site) and venture out into the communities of others to have conversations that go beyond “one to many” pitches for donations.

One of the interesting places to venture out to is Twitter.  If you don’t *get* Twitter, read Three of the Latest Reasons Why I Love Twitter from Social Butterfly for a good overview and some useful tips.

Harold Jarche writes this week about using Social as a community building tool (and demonstrates that necessity is often the mother of Social Media invention.)  For another good example on how to use Social, take a look at Cox Communications’ Kudzu.com fundraiser, featured this week on The Cause Related Marketing Blog (I love what Cox has done with this.  It is a great example of taking the time to understand what your community wants and how to incentivize them to become content creators.) 

Love Without Boundaries, the winners of the Facebook Causes Giving Challenge also provides an interesting case study on Social.  Frogleap has a nice interview with the folks at LWB on how they did it.

Rachel Happe’s The Struggle to Measure Social Media Effectiveness sets out some of the thorny issues about Social Media measurement.  Attempting to apply old models to things that are new and hard to understand is only human nature.  In my opinion, this is what is happening with attempts to measure Social Media.  Rachel’s post does a nice job of reminding us that the things we already know how to measure are not the things that provide true insight when it comes to Social Media.

Happy reading!  Remember that only the connected will survive…

Keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, no matter which blog is hosting, by subscribing to the Carnival feed.

Here at Serengeti Towers we talk a lot about social media, getting people involved and interested in your company / product, and building out a community.  On Monday of this week Scott Adams did just that.  The new Dilbert site gives users the ability to create their own punchlines for each strip, then vote on the best ones. Here’s my attempt to SEO it up.

What this does for the Dilbert site is it:

1. creates a community (users must sign up to comment or save their work)
2. gives users the tools to share their thoughts through either the strips, comments, or voting
3. gives Scott Adams ideas for future strips, or at least ideas for what other people find funny, to allow him to fine tune his humor
4. gets people like me linking to it and talking about it.

Nicely done Mr. Adams.  Now let’s see if you can come up with a better punchline than either he or I (and the ‘tastes like chicken’ one has been done to death on the site).

Landing pages are a critical part of any online marketing campaign. Yet too often, they do not get the attention and time necessary to produce the kind of quality that will deliver optimal results. It seems that landing pages frequently are thrown together without much thought and reasoning.  Sometimes, landing pages are no more than a current page on the site that relates only slightly to the marketing campaign.

Creating/choosing landing pages in this way will not deliver ideal results. While you may get lucky and have a positive ROI, you could be missing out on a lot more additional sales/leads/donations or whatever other success metrics have been agreed upon for the campaign.

Here are five tips that can help you improve the performance of your current landing pages or help guide in the creation of new landing pages:

1. The Headline is Key

This will be one of the first parts of the landing page that a visitor will see. Since you only have about 5 seconds to draw them in, it is vital that you have an excellent headline. Your headline needs to match the ad by using the same words so that there is an immediate correlation between the two in a visitor’s mind. This will give instant reassurance to the visitor that their original intent when clicking on the ad will be able to be satisfied on the site.

2. Compelling Image or Graphic

This is usually the first part of the landing page that a visitor actually sees and can either capture their attention or drive them away before they even read the content. It needs to be a compelling image or graphic that catches the visitors’ attention and draws them into the “meat” of the landing page. It should also be on the left side of the landing page. The reason is that eye movement is generally left to right, so you want the landing page to follow the natural eyes movement.

3. Be Persuasive and Stick to the Message

You are driving visitors to the landing page for a specific reason, so make sure that you don’t stray from your goal. The copy should be an extension of your ad and build off of what has been promised to the visitor. It should also be persuasive and show the visitors the benefits that your product or service will provide them and how it will satisfy their current need or desire that originally compelled them to click on the ad in the first place.

4. Great Offer

Provide visitors some sort of incentive that will get them to convert immediately. This could include a limited time discount, free shipping, or receive a free gift with purchase. There is a lot of competition so, enticing them with of a great offer can tip the scales in your favor.

5. Anchor Text or Button

It may not seem important, but this can play a big role in how your landing page performs. Since these generally stand out, they are often read before the actual content. Because of this, you should never use “Click Here” or similar language. Instead, try using language that builds off the offer that you’re giving visitors. If using buttons, make sure they stand out and will catch the visitors’ eye.

Lastly, this should be an ongoing process. Continually testing your landing pages will lead to incremental increases in your ROI by converting your visitors at a higher rate.

Joy did a nice post yesterday on how Analytics can help you fix problems on your Web site that may negatively impact conversions.  Analytics data can provide a gold mine of information and is the logical place to start in terms of assessing the efficacy, or persuasiveness of your current site. 

In addition to Analytics, today’s audience research methods can provide even more information that can be critical to the success of a redesign or a new site build.  Audience research bridges the gap between what the customer’s buying process is and what your selling process should be on the Web.

Sounds like good common sense, right?  Yes, but unfortunately, the reality is that both the Analytics review and audience research are steps in the redesign/build process that – more often than not – get skipped completely.

Think back to the last time your company redesigned or built a new site.   What happened?  Most likely, a committee of internal staff got together and decided on the requirements for a new site, with “requirements” being defined as “what my department needs to have published on our Web site”.   Site objectives were probably brought up in this or subsequent meetings as well, but they were likely vague (as opposed to hard objectives such as “I want x number of people to download this whitepaper, submit a Request for Information, or purchase this particular product”).  The next thing you knew, a Web Development firm put some wireframes and a “design” together, and within weeks (maybe even days), developers were writing code.

What’s wrong with this process?  It tends to produce finished products that are designed for internal stakeholders, not potential customers — a mistake that will negatively impact your marketing ROI significantly.

Audience research methods (ethnography, usability testing, persona development and testing) are becoming more sophisticated every day.  Skipping the audience research step because of cost concerns is penny wise and pound foolish.  After all, if your Web site can’t convert traffic, why spend the money on marketing to drive that traffic in the first place?  And, if time is the issue (a launch deadline), remember that fixing something that was built wrong will take more time (and money) than doing it right in the first place.

There are some aspects of Web analytics that can be very complicated. But, when it comes to using analytics to create persuasive architecture, it is a no-brainer.

Persuasive architecture is creating the framework on your site to funnel traffic into desired paths to create desired behaviors (e.g. conversions).

The simple way to do this is a three-step process.  Figure out what on your site is working (pages, sections, navigation), figure out what on your site is not working, and create changes to make what is not working work.

Step 1- Figure out what is working
There are several different ways to do this. First, segment out the ‘conversion’ traffic and analyze it. Ask what referrers are driving traffic that converts, identify the pages where visitors who convert enter the site, what paths they are taking.

Many analytics packages offer a decent view of the data in context. So, you can see each page with the percentage of clicks superimposed over the links.

ClickTracks offers a great view of this data, not only with clicks for each segment that you create, but with detailed page analysis.  More importantly for this task, paths to and from the page for each segment are identified.

That way, you can see where all of the visitors are clicking on a page.  But, you also can see the links and paths that the visitors who convert take. Then, you can compare the high volume-low conversion pages to the lower volume-high conversion pages to get clues about why one page is more effective than others (e.g. better looking imagery, more interesting copy).

If your analytic package does not offer this visual option, you can analyze the reverse path from your goal page and then bring up your site in a browser and follow those paths forward to get the clues.

Step 2 – Find out what is not working
My favorite way of figuring what is not working can be done with the help of a visual analytics package like ClickTracks or just on your site itself.

It is very helpful to use a tool like ClickTracks to figure this out by tracing the path through the conversion process using the visual report. Often times, people on the internet are in a hurry or just don’t pay a lot of attention to the details of a page. Using a more narrow view of your page, you may realize that most visitors don’t see your ‘Buy now’ button, or that description and special pricing.

Another great way to see where visitors ‘fall off’ the process is by using funnel reports or scenario analysis. You may see that visitors abandon your cart looking at the Privacy Policy or the Shipping Costs.  Or, they ‘ping-pong’ through the process, a good indication that the process is too confusing.

If you don’t have access to visual tools like these, you can always use the old-school method of user testing. Enlist several people who do not spend a lot of time on the internet and have them try to make a purchase, fill out a form, or perform whatever process is your conversion.

Step 3 – Use your knowledge to fix what is not working
Armed with the insight you gather from your analytics, you can continually evolve your site so it becomes more and more effective. The concept of ‘iterative design’ is still just as important today as it was when introduced 25 years ago. Make changes and test, make changes and test.

One final note: Knowing best practices never hurts either
A few years ago when my job was to launch a new Interactive department for a traditional ad agency, I had the opportunity to attend a ‘Usability Week’ conference. The condition was that rather than just my choosing the sessions to attend, the owner of the agency and I would decide on them together.

This turned out to be way more interesting than I expected. His background focused more on traditional advertising, creativity and emotion. My background was more technical. Needless to say, my ‘wish’ list and his list were completely different. As a result, I ended up at a few sessions that I had not initially considered.

The most interesting session that I had not considered was ‘Web Credibility and Persausive Technology.’ I still have the handouts and notes I took (five years later – which says a lot).

One of the most important lessons that I took away from that session about persuasion is the importance of the credibility of your Web site in order to change visitors attitudes and then, change their behavior.

Changing attitudes:
Make users feel comfortable interacting with your site – getting to know you (your company).

Results in changing behaviors:
The user ultimately begins a relationship with you (places an order, requests information, signs up for a webinar).

So your marketing plan has you pushing the advertising for your company through several seeming disparate marketing channels at the same time. Let’s say that you’re doing search, online video, email, tv, radio, billboard. Should those mediums interact? Should they carry their own messages? Should they all carry the same message? Should one funnel to another? How can you track which is providing value for money and therefore generating a higher ROI for you?

The active word for this multi channel marketing strategy is synergy . When you get all of those seeming disparate pieces working together, what you can get out is much more than if you had them working separately.

So, if we have a tv ad that ends with a URL, and a radio ad that ends with a url, how do we tell which is driving the traffic, if they’re both running at the same time? Easy, simply have your ads mention different landing page URLs. The tv ad can send people to a page that reinforces the visuals that they’ve seen on the tv directed at one demographic, an email landing page reinforcing the message sent to either an in-house list, or a rented list (different demographic potentials) and a radio landing page that reinforces the message heard through that medium. Could they be the same look and feel pages with just different tracking URLs? Yes they could, as long as you create the structure such that you avoid duplicate content issues.

If your company devises a new term, or product name, or service offering, or slogan, then your search effort should focus on ranking for that term, for people will search for it after they locate it through another medium, and by getting yourself listed you’re not losing that further opportunity to direct them through your sales funnel.

There have been many instances of companies doing their traditional marketing push, and not involving their search team. All that does is give someone else (your competitors) the opportunity to swoop in and pluck customers from your grasp, when by simply involving all of the channel owners in the planning, strategy and execution of the marketing plan you’d keep them and hopefully convert them.

Co-operation is the name of the game when it comes to making the most of your marketing budget, and we at Serengeti can help you determine the right mix for your Multi-Channel Digital Marketing Plan, and ensure that the message is consistent, and that the funnels to conversion flow as smoothly as possible.

There’s your website. To you it looks great, you can’t imagine anyone not liking it. All of the features you feel that a user could want are there; the navigation, the logo, the specials, etc.
Then you get feedback from one or two people that it looks a bit 1999-ish. Is that a problem? More often than not, yes.

As different techniques are applied to different website, users experience them and begin to accept those newer features as ‘the norm’, if your site doesn’t keep pace, then it may be seen to be antiquated. Now, this doesn’t mean that your site isn’t usable, that’s something for you to examine using your analytics, or through usability testing, but it can lead to a general uneasiness of the user, that the site isn’t where it should be.

Let’s take a look at the evolution of a site. Below is the Burger King site from January 1999, as you can see, it doesn’t suffer from a common problem of that time – Frames – but it did have a splash screen.

Looking at the same site today, you can see that the navigation has vanished (it’s dynamic when you mouse over the ‘Explore BK’ text), and the center of the site is interactive, with the user able to rotate the image to see the special features. Look-wise, there’s a nice gradient in the background, which just gives the site more of a 3-D feel to it.

It’s quite clear to see the difference between the 2 sites, and to see which offers a user the more ‘modern’, expected experience. So if your competition has the 2008 site, and yours looks like the 1999 one, you’re going to start off at a disadvantage when you try to get those customers to walk through your site, let alone getting them to order / donate. Updating the look and feel of your site on a regular basis can aid in both retaining and attracting new customers, as long as it’s more than just a ‘fresh coat of paint’, and there’s content and functionality behind it.

If your site is stuck in 1999, 2002 or 2005, then we can guide you on the way to where you need to be today. Typically our process involves the following:

1. Analytics Audit – What’s working for you now? Where are the roadblocks? Are you tracking the right metrics?
2. Search Audit – Where it the site now as far as the Search Engines are concerned? Where could it be? What are your competitors doing? Where are your ‘golden’ opportunities?
3. Infrastructure Selection – What platform(s) should the site use? What 3rd party applications / tools need to be integrated? What architecture needs to be in place to support the goals?
4. Site Build – The final step is to design and build the site, including the look and feel, as well as appropriate content for your site to succeed.
5. Site Audit – Is the new site functioning as expected? What tweaks need to be made to get customers through the appropriate funnels to your conversion event?