How Web Design Can Easily Go Down the Tubes
This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about how important web design is. In our Jumpstart series, we dedicated an entire post to evaluating your online presence, and your website is obviously a huge part of that. Bad web design will immediately turn prospects away from your business – it’s just a fact in today’s online-focused world. If your website doesn’t look sophisticated, is hard to navigate or isn’t well designed, your bounce rate will reflect that. How your site looks and works can make a prospect respect and trust you or send them running for the hills. I think we know which one we’d prefer!
How do we tell if web design is going the wrong way, then? A lot of times, first impressions can tell you if your web design sucks. Try looking at your site as an outsider. How would you feel about it if you were a prospect? If you’re not able to disconnect yourself, call in a friend, family member or agency to help you be objective.
Ok, so first impressions matter. But that’s still just a gut reaction and hard to put into a checklist or hard analysis, so how can we be a bit more technical about it? What exactly is it that makes a web design suck?
Here are a few things that you’ll commonly find with bad web design:
It doesn’t work well on your phone, tablet, desktop or all of the above. Non-responsive sites are the #1 sinners of bad web design. We’ve talked about it before. We talked about it again. We’re not going to stop! If your site isn’t responsive, this should be at the top of your to-do list. Making your visitors pinch and scroll back and forth on a mobile phone screen is just plain rude (which is how most people are visiting sites these days, plus Google is Mobile First with ranking and visibility these days – so this isn’t just a passing phase). Not only is it annoying when a site isn’t responsive, but it also says that your company doesn’t care about keeping up with the times. That could translate into an impression of your business overall, which is not a good thing.
It’s difficult to use, and you can’t find what you’re looking for. Don’t you hate it when you’re looking for a simple piece of information about a company (why is it always so hard to find a restaurant’s open hours on their site!?), but it’s nowhere to be found? Crummy web design doesn’t pay attention to what a visitor will likely be asking, and it buries information in a complicated architecture. It should be obvious where you can find answers to questions, and it should be simple to click from one topic to another.
It’s ME-focused. Sure, people visit your website to learn about you, but ultimately, they want to know what you can do to help them. Why should they buy your products or services? Not just because you’re an industry leader, but because you have the solutions that they need. Speak to your target audiences’ pain points while also tooting your horn. That’s Marketing 101, but it is often forgotten when it comes to web design.
It’s just plain ugly. Ok, this one is really back in that “gut feeling” category, but you know what I’m talking about. The fonts, colors and graphics are outdated. They don’t convey a modern image to the world, which in turn says that your products and services probably aren’t modern, either. Yikes. No one wants that.
Bad web design basically boils down to poor architecture and non-responsiveness. Get that right, make sure things look good in the process, and you’ll be on your way to good web design…marketing that doesn’t suck!
Looking for some help to take your web design from bad to good? Contact the experts at Pomerantz Marketing to find out how we help our clients do just that. Put Pom On It >
Your Questions Answered: What Is Outsourced Marketing?
/in Featured, Marketing, Outsourced Marketing, Strategic MarketingHow Outsourced Marketing Can Boost Your Company to the Next Level
The answer to that question – “what is outsourced marketing?” – is as simple as it seems. When you don’t have the capacity to handle marketing your business internally (or if you simply don’t want to do it!), you outsource your marketing to someone else who can do it all.
Often, companies will have one or two in-house marketing people who are expected to get it all done. But marketing responsibilities continue to grow and change, and it can feel impossible to keep up. You can’t expect one marketing director or manager to do it all! And it can be really costly and time consuming to build an internal marketing department that has experts in each area, from social media to graphic design to copywriting to website management to email marketing to…it sometimes seems like a never-ending list.
Or maybe your company has recently realized you have marketing needs but don’t have a single internal resource who can handle it. This is when outsourcing all of your marketing can be really beneficial. Hand it over to a team of experts who can get to know your business and handle all of those little details from project start to finish.
If you’ve outsourced one marketing project, why not outsource them all? Maybe you’ve outsourced certain marketing tasks in the past and have seen the quality of work you get back. Imagine the benefits if that stretched across all of your marketing areas. By giving that work to one outsourced marketing team or agency, you’ll eliminate the need to deal with it internally, and you’ll get a team that has a holistic view of your marketing.
Here are some of the many benefits that can come from outsourced marketing:
Instead of piecing things together, find an outsourced marketing agency who can become an extension of your team. If you want to grow your business without investing in the overhead of an internal marketing department, outsourced marketing is the way to go.
Pomerantz is the outsourced marketing engine that makes the marketing magic happen. Put Pom On It >
Marketing that Doesn’t Suck: Good Web Design
/in Featured, Marketing, Strategic MarketingWhat to Focus on for Killer Web Design
Our last post highlighted the things you’ll see with bad web design, so let’s flip it and look at this from a more positive perspective: what you should focus on to ensure you’re falling into the category of good web design. You don’t just want to avoid the bad things – you need to proactively make good choices.
Here are five things to look for when designing or updating your website to ensure it doesn’t suck:
1. Audience Focused
When you’re writing the copy for your website, it’s easy to make it all about you. After all, it’s a website about your company! But instead of talking about why you’re awesome, explain how that benefits your customers. Lay out the ways their business will succeed or improve by working with you. Present your services or products in the context of problem solving, highlighting the types of issues that often face your target customers.
2. Responsive
Like we said in our last post, we’re not going to stop talking about this one. It’s one of the top ways we help our clients, so do yourself a favor and put it at the top of your priority list. To recap, a responsive site is one that looks good on all devices, including mobile, tablet and desktop. A responsive site has so many benefits, from SEO rankings to making viewing easy on your visitors to simply looking like you’re up with the times. Plus, you eliminate the redundant need for a mobile site, which means less to maintain and more SEO power for your one and only main site.
3. Mobile-Friendly
Yes, designing your site as responsive should mean it’s mobile friendly, but it’s important to pay particular attention to this functionality. Once you’ve made it to the editing and QA phase of launching a new site, take a particularly critical look at it on your phone. Do some sections look too big or small? Does it take way too much scrolling to get where you need to go? Would it function better if the top navigation followed you as you scroll? Make sure your developers are on top of these issues!
4. Logical Architecture
You may be used to how your company’s products, services or departments are structured, but will they make sense to a new audience? In other words, don’t just build your site based on your typical organization structure without thinking about it critically. Maybe you go back to that audience focused point above – what would someone be looking for? Instead of listing all your services, perhaps it would better serve you to restructure based on problems solved or vertical markets you work with regularly. And make sure those commonly asked questions are easy to find answers for – whether that’s about your locations, pricing, experience, etc.
5. Intuitive User Experience
This last item kind of sums up all of the above. It’s time to make sure the site works well across the board. Keep in mind both these features you want to include as well as the ones you want to avoid. Put yourself in the shoes of all the types of visitors you hope to attract: prospective clients, partners and recruits. Get some outside help for a new perspective.
Designing and building a website that doesn’t suck requires paying attention to so many factors. It’s something we do here at Pom every day, so reach out for a consultation to learn about our process and how we help clients put their best foot forward on the web.
Learn more about our web design and development capabilities now! Put Pom On It >
Marketing that Sucks: Bad Web Design
/in Featured, Marketing, Strategic MarketingHow Web Design Can Easily Go Down the Tubes
This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about how important web design is. In our Jumpstart series, we dedicated an entire post to evaluating your online presence, and your website is obviously a huge part of that. Bad web design will immediately turn prospects away from your business – it’s just a fact in today’s online-focused world. If your website doesn’t look sophisticated, is hard to navigate or isn’t well designed, your bounce rate will reflect that. How your site looks and works can make a prospect respect and trust you or send them running for the hills. I think we know which one we’d prefer!
Ok, so first impressions matter. But that’s still just a gut reaction and hard to put into a checklist or hard analysis, so how can we be a bit more technical about it? What exactly is it that makes a web design suck?
Here are a few things that you’ll commonly find with bad web design:
It doesn’t work well on your phone, tablet, desktop or all of the above. Non-responsive sites are the #1 sinners of bad web design. We’ve talked about it before. We talked about it again. We’re not going to stop! If your site isn’t responsive, this should be at the top of your to-do list. Making your visitors pinch and scroll back and forth on a mobile phone screen is just plain rude (which is how most people are visiting sites these days, plus Google is Mobile First with ranking and visibility these days – so this isn’t just a passing phase). Not only is it annoying when a site isn’t responsive, but it also says that your company doesn’t care about keeping up with the times. That could translate into an impression of your business overall, which is not a good thing.
It’s difficult to use, and you can’t find what you’re looking for. Don’t you hate it when you’re looking for a simple piece of information about a company (why is it always so hard to find a restaurant’s open hours on their site!?), but it’s nowhere to be found? Crummy web design doesn’t pay attention to what a visitor will likely be asking, and it buries information in a complicated architecture. It should be obvious where you can find answers to questions, and it should be simple to click from one topic to another.
It’s ME-focused. Sure, people visit your website to learn about you, but ultimately, they want to know what you can do to help them. Why should they buy your products or services? Not just because you’re an industry leader, but because you have the solutions that they need. Speak to your target audiences’ pain points while also tooting your horn. That’s Marketing 101, but it is often forgotten when it comes to web design.
It’s just plain ugly. Ok, this one is really back in that “gut feeling” category, but you know what I’m talking about. The fonts, colors and graphics are outdated. They don’t convey a modern image to the world, which in turn says that your products and services probably aren’t modern, either. Yikes. No one wants that.
Bad web design basically boils down to poor architecture and non-responsiveness. Get that right, make sure things look good in the process, and you’ll be on your way to good web design…marketing that doesn’t suck!
Looking for some help to take your web design from bad to good? Contact the experts at Pomerantz Marketing to find out how we help our clients do just that. Put Pom On It >
Define Integrated Marketing Communications: What Is That, Again?
/in Featured, Marketing, Strategic MarketingAll the Info You Need to Win at Integrated Marketing
Well, it really is what it sounds like: having a cohesive message that you deliver across all channels for your company or brand. It’s not just about a consistent look and feel, though – you’ve got to strategically integrate your marketing efforts in order to maximize their effectiveness.
And it doesn’t mean using the same words everywhere you’re marketing (that’s actually a terrible idea) but keeping your core message at the heart of all efforts. This is why having a marketing plan can make developing integrated marketing communications pretty simple – you know your value proposition as well as your different audiences, channels and main areas and projects you plan to tackle. Take that big picture and push that value proposition consistently but in a variety of ways, and boom! You’re an integrated marketing communications master!
While this is a pretty common sense approach once you dive in, let’s also look at some of the more specific benefits of integrating all of your messaging.
1. Maximize Budget: using that one big idea in a variety of ways can save money on creative, design and copywriting
2. Build Your Brand: consistency only reinforces who you are and solidifies that brand image across channels
3. Strengthen Relationships with Target Audiences: delivering a similar message to everyone but in ways tailored to their preferences balances the need to present a strong value proposition and prove you know what your potential customers need
4. Enhance Effectiveness of Your Campaigns: reiterating your message in a variety of ways bolsters those campaigns, with social posts supporting direct mail which in turn reinforces print advertising, and so on
So turn your brain onto the idea of integrated marketing communications, and reap the benefits!
Still don’t have your marketing plan in order? Reach out to us now, or download our free e-book to get started immediately!
Developing a Content Strategy that Will Take Your Online Marketing to the Next Level
/in Featured, Marketing, Strategic MarketingIn my last Random Thoughts blog post, I talked about how ongoing, consistent effort is required to nurture your website so that it performs how you need it to. You can’t build a site and then just let it roll – you’ve got to keep working on it, improving it and responding to change. A huge part of this can be accomplished by developing a content strategy.
Developing new content can be overwhelming. From blog posts to e-books to site pages, there are endless opportunities for content creation. It even goes beyond your site and into the social media world or writing for other publications to bring readers back to your site. Plus, who’s going to do all that writing and planning?
For the Pom team, writing our JumpStart blog series and then designing and launching our new e-book, How to Make Your B2B Marketing Not Suck, were two (big) pieces of our content strategy puzzle. So how did we decide to do this? What led us to develop these specific pieces? And how did we get it done?
Let me take you down the path we traveled to help you pull together your own content strategy
1. Target
Figure out who you’re targeting with your new content. In other words, go back to those personas you’ve developed (no clue what I’m talking about? Check this post out.) and think about creating content for each persona type.
2. Research
Once you know who you’re developing content for, figure out what interests them or what kinds of questions they’re asking. Brainstorm ideas for how to help this specific audience. For our e-book, we pictured all of those overwhelmed marketing managers who have so many balls in the air that they don’t know where to start. Then we thought about what kind of content could be helpful to them.
3. Develop
Now it’s time to get writing. We decided to develop an e-book because the topic we wanted to address was so huge. An e-book allowed us to write in depth on the topic and to provide helpful tools in the form of worksheets. If the problem was smaller, a blog post may suffice. Or maybe just a single worksheet. Figure out how to best convey the information you want to share, then gather the right people to get it done.
Often, development of content is where many people get hung up. Maybe the expert on the subject isn’t a writer, or perhaps people won’t commit the time you need. This is an essential part of developing a content strategy – figuring out how exactly you’ll execute. Break it down and figure out how the essential team members can fit the work into their schedules, and make it a priority.
4. Analyze
Once you’ve posted your new content, analyze its performance. Whether that’s by tracking visits to a blog post via Google Analytics or through form fill-outs or even through new leads, see what content is performing best for you. Then, figure out how to replicate that performance. Is it the writing style? The use of good imagery? Did the topic really resonate? Apply this to your future content plans.
5. Repeat
Publishing one awesome blog post is a great start, but it’s not going to get you very far. Consistency is key when it comes to content. Figure out what schedule works for the team you have, then follow through. Develop a content calendar a few months ahead of time to allow you to work ahead and bank content.
And if you just don’t have the capacity to get it done, look outside for help. At Pom, we not only write content and develop supporting graphics for our clients, but we also come up with a robust strategy that fits in with your overall marketing plans.
How to Make Your B2B Marketing Not Suck: an E-Book for Frustrated B2B Marketers
/in Featured, Marketing, Strategic MarketingGAME-CHANGING READING FOR THOSE OVERWHELMED BY B2B MARKETING
We see frustrated B2B marketers pretty much every day – navigating Marketing Land on your own can feel completely daunting. We’d love to help you figure out the best route forward, whether it’s through this e-book or directly as your marketing agency partner. No one should have to go it alone!
This e-book walks you through each step of the process we use to develop strategic marketing plans for our clients, starting with goal prioritization and ending with an actionable list of items to tackle. We’ve taken our JumpStart series and added in even more concrete ways to help you, including a detailed graphic you can use to build your own marketing engine.
Along with the step-by-step guide, this free e-book also includes a handy, interactive worksheet for each step of our proven process. Once you’ve read the e-book and completed each worksheet (type directly in the pdf!), you’ll be well on your way to having a solid marketing plan based on concrete data.
If at any point you need a little extra help, reach out to us! We want you to succeed.
Get your copy of How to Make Your B2B Marketing Not Suck now >
If You Don’t Take Care of Your Website, It Won’t Take Care of Your Business
/in Featured, Marketing, Strategic MarketingTake Care of Your Site for Reliable Lead Generation
Developing the JumpStart 2018 series of blog posts was good for our agency. We applied the techniques and exercises that we successfully use in helping our clients to focus and be strategic for ourselves. After all, just because we’re a marketing agency doesn’t mean we don’t face the same struggles in Marketing Land as our clients. We are all living and working in complicated, overwhelming times. It takes proactive, deliberate effort to push forward and move the needle in today’s world. As a result, we have our marketing plan in place plus an ongoing list of tasks and initiatives dedicated to the proper care and feeding of our website to ensure reliable lead generation.
As a business owner, I rely on our website to generate new business opportunities for our agency and keep our sales pipeline full. This is why one of my business objectives for 2018 is: We are tending to our website on a weekly basis in order to ensure that it’s a steady, reliable lead generation machine for our agency.
The reality is that having a website that is a reliable lead generation machine takes a village. It’s not realistic for one webmaster to know how to do it all. In our agency, we have someone who eats, sleeps and breathes Google and keeps us up to speed on any/all algorithm and protocol changes we need to address. She also happens to be a whiz at keyword research. Then, we have an online marketing specialist who studies our Google Analytics every month and strategizes and implements various ways for us to grow our online presence. We have a web developer (or, web mechanic as I like to call him) that troubleshoots and fixes the annoying, inevitable issues that arise when you’re really paying attention to what’s going on with your website. He also helps us add new functionality to our site. Add to this mix a designer and copywriter who fuel our site with new graphics and content to keep it fresh. And then there is me and the rest of our team who pretend we are potential customers and regularly scout around our website calling out issues we spot, mentioning ideas we have for new content and testing functionality.
All of the work we do on our website is documented and maintained so we have a log that we can refer back to in order to recall the work that has been performed. It’s sort of like the records you hope your doctor maintains on your visits but maybe even better.
The reality check that I hope to impart from all of this is that if you’re serious about relying on your website as an integral part of your business — whether for lead generation, recruiting, brand awareness, etc. — it’s not a set it and forget it kind of thing. It requires the ongoing, regular, consistent effort of people who know what they are doing. Plus, it’s becoming more complicated, not less. You need to either staff up with the right mix of talent or outsource it to a team of professionals that do this stuff all day everyday — like us.
How to Bring It All Together in A Realistic 12-Month Strategic B2B Marketing Plan
/in Featured, JumpStart, Marketing, Strategic MarketingJUMPSTART STEP 7: STRATEGIC B2B MARKETING PLAN
How to Bring It All Together In A Realistic 12-Month Strategic B2B Marketing Plan
If you’ve been following our JumpStart plan from the beginning, you now have a ton of valuable information at your fingertips. (Just joining us? Read through our first six blogs to learn what you need to do to get your building blocks in place!) But what do you do with all of this information? Put it into an actionable, functional plan. By developing a 12-month strategic B2B marketing plan, you will have a clear path forward for the year, making your marketing much more effective and purposeful.
It can seem daunting to get started, but lucky for you, you’ve already gathered most of the information you need to build a strong marketing plan. Now you just need to write it down and translate it into actual strategy and tasks.
Personally, the Pom team likes to build marketing plans in PowerPoint rather than a dense all-text document. Breaking your plan up into slides makes it easier to see the big picture while still being able to drill down into the details – it helps you simplify and focus your plan. Here’s an outline we use to build such a document:
As you can see, the first 6 sections are basically already done! You don’t want to repeat everything you’ve learned from your research into these areas – you just need to pull out the highlights and key takeaways. Try to keep it at one slide per item. The idea is to have all the work you’ve done easily accessible and readable to share with others in your company and for you and your marketing team to reference throughout the year.
The marketing engine is where you really start to get strategic. Break up your marketing efforts into pieces like:
What marketing areas have you worked on in the past, and are there any new ones to add?
Next, create a slide for each section of the marketing engine – here, you may want more than one for each area. This is the meat of your marketing plan. Write down specifics for each one. Think about what the research from the first six parts have told you. Is it time for a website overhaul? Do you need to focus on SEO? Do you want to send more email to your target audiences to better communicate your value proposition? This part will take a good amount of time and brainstorming, but remember, you have the building blocks in place.
We like to develop a simple visual that captures the marketing machine to make sure we (or our clients) stick to our marketing plan. This is really helpful to refer back to throughout the year while following your plan. Print it out and put it up front and center in your office. You’ll be able to see at a glance if you’re staying on top of all parts of your mix and maintain focus.
The last two steps are how you’ll stay on track and prove the value of your marketing plan. You want to be sure you have measurement tools set up to capture your ROI for all of these efforts. Continuous tracking, measuring and reporting should be a key part of your plan.
Finally, set your budget. Maybe you know your budget and need to fit the puzzle pieces into it, or maybe you need to present and get a budget approved based on what you’ve outlined in your plan. Either way, it’s good to have it as part of this ultimate marketing plan document.
Whew, you’ve made it! After following all of the JumpStart steps, you’ll have a really solid grasp on your marketing for the year. With the research and discovery to back up your plans, plus the tools in place to keep you on track, your 2018 marketing should be your best yet.
We know building a marketing plan from scratch may sound like a huge undertaking, but it’s totally doable.
If you don’t have the time or resources to do it yourself, though, the experts at Pom are ready to take over for you. Reach out to us now! Put POM On It >
Value Proposition & Brand Positioning
/in Branding, Featured, JumpStart, Marketing, Strategic Marketing, UncategorizedJUMPSTART STEP 6: VALUE PROPOSITION & BRAND POSITIONING
How to Create a B2B Value Proposition that Rocks
Up until now, every step of the JumpStart plan has been all about discovery. Discovery of what you want to accomplish, who you should be talking to, how your past efforts are working, what your competition is up to and how your internal teams think you’re doing. Now we start to bring all of that together with your value proposition. So let’s talk about how to create a B2B value proposition and what exactly that is.
A value proposition tells your prospective customers why they should choose your business over your competitors, and what makes your services unique and better than other options.
By thinking about all of the factors you’ve been evaluating, your value proposition should start to become obvious. Take everything you’ve discovered, and think about what stands out about your business.
Now, align that with what you know you do well, and it all starts to come together.
We’re not talking about creating one perfect statement that does it all. You’re going to want to edit and tweak it to different audiences, channels, etc. A value proposition can include a few pieces that you put together in multiple ways for different purposes. It can help to break those pieces down into core values and the brand promise.
Core values are the building blocks of your brand. Why do you do what you do? How do you do it? These are what you believe in as a company. By connecting them to each other (via everything you’ve already discovered about your business), you can come up with your brand promise. This simple statement should encompass your core values and easily say what makes you special.
Often, the trickiest part of defining core values and brand promise is getting consensus from the decision makers of your business. After all, your company can be something pretty different to all of the members of your C-suite, board or even marketing team. But by going back to the research and all you’ve discovered by following the JumpStart steps, you should be able to distill it into words and statements that make sense on a broader scale for your business.
By combining those pieces with great marketing writing, creativity and strategy, you will be able to communicate your value proposition in any situation and bring it to life. Whether it’s on your website, a trade show display, print materials, digital advertisements, social media or in a presentation to a prospect, your value proposition should be front and center, leading the way.
Want someone else to pull it all together for you? Our team of experts is happy to help! Put POM On It >
Sales Team Market Insights
/in Featured, JumpStart, Marketing, UncategorizedJUMPSTART STEP 5: SALES TEAM MARKET INSIGHTS
Tap Your Most Valuable Resource for Insights…Your Sales Team!
Sales and marketing obviously go hand in hand, so you don’t want to develop your marketing plan without involving the sales side of your organization. One of the best ways to do that is by digging into your sales team’s market insights. You can find out a lot about how your marketing efforts are (and aren’t) working by talking to the sales team. They’ll also provide valuable insight into your current and prospective clients as well as your competitors.
How do you go about organizing all of these opinions? We’ve found the most efficient method is via individual interviews with sales team members. It can be helpful to have an outsider perform these so everyone can speak freely and honestly. We have done countless interviews with our clients’ employees and sales teams, and we’d be happy to do the same for you! Just reach out to us via the form here.
Want to give it a shot yourself? Here are some examples of the types of questions we typically ask. You should spend some time ahead of the interviews thinking about what areas you really want to cover, and then customize this question list to match your needs. Some of the answers to these questions probably seem obvious to you – if you know the sales team is on the same page as you and your marketing team, you can skip those. But it may be helpful to get their perspective to be sure! And make sure to note who you’re speaking with and what their specific role in sales is when you’re documenting these interviews.
Click the image below to get your own copy of this question checklist!
Questions to Help You Get Started on Gathering Sales Team Market Insights
Once you’ve completed interviews from enough team members (that could just be a representative group if you’re a large company, or it could be every salesperson if you’re smaller), pull out the highlights and comments that really stood out to you. It can be helpful to compile a master list of the questions with the notable takeaways from multiple contributors. You should come away with clear direction on where you need to make some changes to your marketing plan or where you may need to re-focus your energy.
Want some outside help interviewing your sales team? Don’t want to spend all that time wading through their answers for the helpful insights? Pomerantz Marketing has the expertise you need. >Put Pom On It