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By Bob Speyer, Web Success Team

Trust is one of the most important yet overlooked “intangibles” on the Internet. However, it is key to a decision makers’ mindset whether to give your offerings serious consideration. The Internet is littered with amazing claims and broken promises. So what can you do to instill confidence or trust when a viewer lands on you site looking for a needed product or service? Here are a few guidelines to follow to build trust and increase your sales:

Your Website Should Be Simple, Uncluttered and Informative

You only get one chance at a first impression. Since our lives are complicated enough, your site must be easy to understand and engage the viewer in less than 10 seconds. The simpler the better and the easier to comprehend, the more likely your brand will instill trust. People respond to organization and a clear sincere message. Psychologically, think of whom we trusted first — our parents. If you try to do too much, you will frustrate your viewer and create a negative reaction.

Offer Something Special

We are conditioned to respond to a deal. In fact, promotions are some of the most visited web pages. A promotion may range from a simple discount to packages where you get more value than for individual services. Again, you want to instill trust, so offer a warranty, guarantee or some consumer recourse that is clearly stated. You want to be as transparent as possible.

Use Client Testimonials and Case Studies

People recognize that testimonials are hand picked and hold minimal value. Yet when supported by case studies they can make a convincing reason to read and respect them. Plus if you have recognizable customers, it can create a shared brand appeal. People will connect the dots and reason that if a trusted brand has used this company, then they are that much more appealing.

Use the New Social Medias to Humanize Your Brand

We all respond more to real people, not just a corporate entity. That’s where social media marketing can fill out your resume. Create social profiles on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter and be active in their use. Placing their icons on your website in a viewable spot encourages prospective customers to view your profiles and fill in any questionable gaps.

Building relationships online will give your brand a more human component. Using employees, their pictures and their comments is equally effective and rounds out your company.

Authority Speaks

Knowledge is respect and the more your brand is promoted online, the more credible you become. One of the ways to be viewed as a authority in your field is to create a blog and actively write about your field. Articles that are keyword rich will be circulated throughout the Internet, draw targeted attention and help promote your brand. Writing blogs will also let people view your personality, knowledge and your sense of humor. It makes you “real.” Also, if you won an industry award, written a book or you are a guest speaker at an industry event, then these should be prominently displayed on your website.

Belong, Join, Affiliate

Another key factor in building trust is showing people that you are active in your community or your industry. Are you a Chamber of Commerce member, associated with an industry organization, active in a charity, or a member of the Better Business Bureau? Participation shows commitment, involvement, energy — and respect.

Be Accessible and Consistent

Once the initial barrier is crossed and a potential customer is interested, you must not disappoint them. Be available to talk to them, keep appointments and be consistent in your promises. Dependability is a key factor in maintaining trust and credibility. Have your contact information clearly displayed on your site above the fold; respond to their inquiries within 24 hours; and offer good advice and interest in their situation. These guidelines will help you assess your current website and activities. The bi-product of building trust is an increase in sales that will lead to web success. If your website does not reflect these core components, then people will go to the competition. By giving people reasons to trust you, they will.

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By Bob Speyer and Kristin Tomlinson – Web Success Team

SEO certification is one of the hottest topics among online marketers. It is one of the most controversial and misunderstood because there is no consensus on a uniform certification. Universities offer courses and certification, private industries have their own certification and even Google has entered the fray. What is certain is the growing demand to optimize a website for optimum search performance.

Continue reading “Thoughts on SEO Certification and What it Means” »

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By Bob Speyer, Web Success Team

Is Your Brand Being “Heard”?

There’s a new marketing tool in town you should know about. It’s in Beta testing but it is not only free but produces mountains of great marketing information to help you improve your website. It’s called “Heardable.com,” and quite simple it is the easiest and most efficient way to measure how your online brand is perceived, performs and stacks up against your competition.

Just enter your URL in the free tool and you get a Heardable Score in return. The six measurable sub-scores that will help you determine you brand’s success against your competition are:

1) Portable: Is your site optimized for mobile search? The better positioned you brand is to take advantage of mobile, the higher your ranking and site’s effectiveness. Portability is determined by detecting auto redirects for the four top mobile device platforms; iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile.

2) Shareable: Sharing is a reciprocal exchange, giving and getting. Heardable scans for RSS feeds with the more feeds the more you are likely to share content and thus more engaged in social activity. The more you share, the more you will be picked up and shared as well. Social media is all about engagement.

3) Measurable: Does your website have analytics that track, monitor and optimize site activity, including on-page performance, ecommerce and online advertising? A low score would indicate you need to set up more tracking indicators for your marketing efforts.

4) Actionable: Does your website interact with your visitors and connect with them using visitor focused words? A higher ranking is achieved if your website speaks in personal tones to customers, using ‘you’ or ‘your’ as ways to connect with them. A low ranking focuses more on brand information and corporate policy.

5) Sociable: Word of mouth marketing is becoming a major player in brand image and how consumers react through the power of the purse. Make sure you have a brand blog set up with at least a few employees making regular contributions. Set up social accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg and YouTube immediately and participate on a daily basis.

6) Searchable: Ranking in this category depends on search engine visibility, number of inbound links, and local search determinants. Keywords, original content and linkage to your site will improve your site’s performance and searchability.

Facing Down the Competition

Business is all about competing and the goal is gaining market share and customers. Heardable can give you a powerful tool to find the answers about improving your business and achieve web success. It provides you with real time data that you can use to make better marketing decisions, and turn them into an action-based plan backed by indisputable metrics. Your boss wants proof, well show them the stats!

Brand Comparisons

Heardable’s extensive research of category brand leaders mirrors a Heardable Score. This means you can now get the statistical intelligence to help you dramatically improve your site’s performance and take the lead of your chosen category of business. Heardable Category Overviews factor in over one million URLs covering seven critical areas of analysis.

Learn from the Best Brands

The Heardable 100 is a sort of gold standard of online branding. They share with you the best of the best and what makes them tick. Heardable takes the features and functions that these 100 online brand leaders have in common. There are plenty of take-a-way lessons in this batch to give your site that needed marketing boost.

Make Your Website Heard!

In today’s competitive environment, online branding is critical to building your business online. Getting qualified visitors is a marketing imperative. Tools like Heardable are critical in understanding your site’s performance and visibility. The Web Success Team can analyze and optimize your website, increase your Heardable Score to make it ‘Heard’ throughout the Internet. Contact us today for an complimentary analysis of your website and the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts.

Images: from Heardable, Inc.

The Web Success Team specializes in developing and marketing direct response websites that take full advantage of the latest developments on the Internet. The Team has an arsenal of effective web strategies, online marketing tools and proven customized social media techniques to promote your products and services. And we’ll show you ways to increase the amount of qualified traffic to your site.

For more tips, tools and articles of interest, become a fan of the WebSuccessTeam Facebook page and learn more about online marketing, SEO and social media. Visit us at http://www.facebook.com/WebSuccessTeam. Contact the Team today for a complimentary consultation to your web success!

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By Bob Speyer and Kristen Tomlinson, Web Success Team

Text messaging has officially jumped ship from being a high school phase made popular by teenagers to an advertising craze utilized by business powerhouses to promote their brands. SMS stands for “short message service,” and is more commonly known as texting. This type of service can be found on an array of cell phones and allows text messages to be sent from one phone to another or from the Web to a cell phone.

The Coming of Age of Mobile Marketing
Demographically speaking, there are over 2 billion people in the world that own a cell phone, and of that number, 200 million are in the U.S. These figures alone make SMS Marketing very appealing to businesses. There is now great opportunity to target untapped markets for new and existing customers cost-effectively and achieve web success by delivering promotional online campaigns direct to cell. SMS Marketing gives corporations the ability to personalize and customize messages via text. Mobile SMS marketing is a quick, personal, and direct way to publicize products and services, producing real time measurable results.

In Text We Trust — to Promote

SMS allows you to send a variety of promotional materials, such as coupons, daily reminders for upcoming events, specials on products, and emergency alerts with the click of button. This form of direct response marketing is also beneficial because it allows you more personal contact with your clients “one-to-one” and enables you to reach customers anytime, anywhere. SMS Marketing is a great way to let your audience interact with your brand. Notable marketing campaigns include President Obama’s text notification of his pick for Vice President during the 2008 Campaign and the current Red Cross 90-999 Mobile Campaign to raise money for the earthquake victims of Haiti were groundbreaking and very successful.

Valuable Take-A-Ways to Consider

1. Pricing: At present SMS Marketing is new and therefore very reasonable.
2. Branding and Updates: It is a quick and easy way to connect with your customers and potential customers.
3. Captive and Unlimited Audience: Everyone has a cell phone. And they read their messages.

Get Your Slice of the Mobile Pie

With the Mobile Advertising Industry worth at least $1 billion, the informed are positioning to slice up the mobile pie. So now is the time to get in on the action. With Google’s recent purchase of AdMob and news that Apple is buying Quattro Wireless, the mobile advertising industry is fast becoming one of the biggest social media outlets since Facebook and Twitter. SMS marketing is easy, quick, and it falls directly into the palm of your very own hand.

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by Bob Speyer, Web Success Team

The human mind is a remarkable thing, but it can also be fooled. Everyday, whether we want to or not, we are bombarded by advertisements and marketing in magazines, on TV, radio, billboards, etc. Almost everywhere we look, we see ads and brands telling us what we need, adding to our own views and preferences even creating a placebo effect.

Perception Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Stan Reents, PharmD writes in his article “Don’t Underestimate the Power of Suggestion” about how placebos affect the human mind in various studies. One example was a taste test study on different types of vodka. The subjects were asked what their favorite vodka was before the test. However, the results showed that many rated their favorites poorly. Why did they insist that one brand of vodka was their favorite when their taste buds said differently? The answer can be said in two words: brand loyalty.

Brand loyalty is when a consumer buys and continues to buy a specific brand, because he or she believes the product’s features are better. This can be done either consciously or unconsciously. This explains why some people in the above study preferred certain brands of vodka over others despite their liking to them. Those brands favored must have had the right images, features and prices to create a higher perceived level of quality.

Establishing Your Own Online Identity

Creating an online brand will give consumers an image of your company and add interest to your products and/or services. The job of an online marketer is to try to break the habits of the consumers that buy your competitor’s products by offering something fresh, new and better. If you suggest that your product is better, it puts the possibility out there.

Now I’m not advocating lying to potential consumers or offering products and services that are of poor quality. The idea is to sell the best quality that you can offer and to market a specific image in order to attract potential clients.

You want to distinguish your brand from your competitors but in an interesting, positive, and memorable way in order to leave consumers wondering if they should give your products and/or services a chance. Once you have a clear and strong brand image, your products and/or services become something more, a brand. They stop being items and start being something better, different and not something that can be imitated.

Momentum Marketing

Having established a branding, you now need to deliver your message online and keep the momentum going. Obviously your website is “brand central” but you still need to actively promote your brand through direct response marketing and the various social media network marketing channels like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube. Also you need to support your brand by blogging and article marketing where you can write and post informative content that positions you as an expert in your field. Set a realistic budget for marketing and promotions. If done correctly, it will be well worth the return on investment and move you closer to web success.

The Web Success Team specializes in developing and marketing direct response websites that take full advantage of the latest developments on the Internet. The Team has an arsenal of effective web strategies, online marketing tools and proven customized social media techniques to promote your products and services. And we’ll show you ways to increase the amount of qualified traffic to your site.

For more tips, tools and articles of interest, become a fan of the WebSuccessTeam Facebook page and learn more about online marketing, SEO and social media. Visit us at http://www.facebook.com/WebSuccessTeam. Contact the Team today for a complimentary consultation to your web success!

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By Kristin Tomlinson-Web Success Team

With the Winter Olympics and Super Bowl just around the corner and with the World Cup taking center stage this summer, sponsors are taking a new and different approach to advertising their brands. They are scrambling to invest more in social media campaigns and less on expensive TV and print advertisements. Aside from the obvious cost savings, the big question is why social media? The answer is two-fold. Social media is personal and it builds relationships. Advertisers are fast recognizing that to build brand loyalty they need to connect with their consumers in new ways through online direct response marketing. What better way than through sports marketing where fans identify with athletes and their national teams.

Social media is playing a critical part in presenting brands and athletes in a manner that interacts with fans on a worldwide basis. It creates anticipation and excitement for fans that can communicate directly with their favorite athlete and connect with them on a more personal level. Social media is enabling brands to create lasting relationships with people around the globe that isn’t possible with television and print media.

The Crossover to the New Media

NBC, who has exclusive broadcast rights to air the Vancouver Olympics, is making a big play with online marketing as a major part of their promotions to achieve web success. It has partnered with the social media firm The Swarm Collective to produce Olympic Pulse, a place where visitors can look up tweets from athletes, Olympic blogs and top trending stories. The Super Bowl promotions have also been very active in social media on Twitter, Facebook and blogging. Athletes and teams are scrambling to hype the event and gain more followers.

In order to prep for the World Cup in the coming months, the corporate partners of FIFA, football’s world governing body, are moving away from the use of traditional TV and billboard campaigns. Instead they are trying out social networking sites to promote their brands, to sell their pitch and build their business online. Calum MacDougall, director of global marketing partnerships at Sony Ericsson, says 2010 will be the first “social networking World Cup.”

Changing the Way the Game Is Played

What makes social media so attractive to powerhouse companies is the realization that more and more people are resorting to popular social destinations like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to get their daily dose of their favorite brands and athletes. In addition to this, these sites come with major audiences and give brands a huge boost and a way to reach millions of consumers. As an added bonus, these sites give brands the viral, online hype that they’ve been searching for in their audiences and their markets. In addition to this, it’s cheaper than spending millions on TV, billboard and print campaigns, and they can get real-time results in relation to how many people are engaging in these sites and taking advantage of their promotional offers.

The consumer has changed and companies have finally recognized that they need to be where the consumers are most responsive. Is social media the advertising vehicle of the future, replacing more traditional media? Probably not, but it may run an effective second.

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By Bob Speyer, Web Success Team

The New York Times is making news instead of just delivering it to its readers. Times have been hard on newspapers across the country. As the size of your daily newspaper dwindles, so have their profits. The NY Times operated at a $35 million loss in the third quarter of 2009.

To shore up its bottom line, the Times will now charge consumers for its web content. By increasing online revenue, it hopes to offset print advertising losses and utilize the digital press to build your business online. Let’s face it, we need our news organizations to be profitable. They provide a valuable service. As the “Fourth Estate” they act as our eyes and ears around the nation and world to keep watch on government while keeping us informed.

The New York Times’ “metered model” will permit visitors to read a fixed number of articles before charging a monthly fee. Any subscriber will have free unlimited access. It’s their way to boost readership and flip visitors into paid customers. They may even have to be more aggressive and use some online direct response marketing tactics and take advantage of social media marketing using Facebook and Twitter. Incidentally, the Wall Street Journal already charges for their online subscriptions.

So What’s Next? Our Predictions

We predict that charging for blog content will be the next online reality — and its coming to a computer screen near you! We have all been weaned on free web content, but most analysts conclude that newspapers and magazines will have to charge customers to remain in the news business.

With the explosion of smart phones, like the Apple’s iphone, delivering content to mobile devices will be the next big revenue source for providers of news and blog-worthy content. Content providers will be offering you subscriptions to news, sports, finance and more. And it may not stop there. Popular blogs may also charge a premium to be part of the “inner circle” to receive cutting edge content, such as proprietary information, insider tips and strategies.

We anticipate the pricing to be very modest but increase over time as the consumer gets use to paying for content. Paid value always is perceived to be better than “free advice.” In the end, the marketplace will decide and determine your web success.

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