From My Screen

When we launch a new website, nearly all clients opt for us to include Google Analytics. It would be foolish, really, not to. . .it's free and offers a great deal of insight about your web traffic sources, number of page hits, what parts of your site are drawing the most interest and more.

But Google Analytics is not and was never intended to be a marketing automation platform. That is, a tool designed specifically to give your marketing (and sales) departments a way to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, track leads, and create forms and landing pages, to name a few.

However a number of powerful and surprisingly affordable marketing automation systems are now available and catching on fast. Most are sold as cloud-based services that integrate pretty easily into a wide variety of sites. One that we've used for several of our client sites is called Pardot. And our clients swear by its effectiveness.

Most smaller website use forms to gather leads. Information collected by the forms is then sent via email to a mailbox (e.g., sales@companyX.com) where they are then distributed to salespeople or manually entered into a CRM system.

As sales pick up that email system can become a bottleneck. A few days may slip by before the leads get entered in. Some names and names might be entered wrong. Or worse, leads could be lost altogether. Relying on any manual system like this once a certain level of traffic is reached is risky.  Here at Radar Media, we're seeing this more as our smaller clients grow up into larger, more successful ventures.

One of the mistakes that many companies make when redesigning their websites is trying to say too much on their product pages. It's understandable how this happens. Company insiders work in a bubble where much of their day is spent talking about product features - what they have now, how competitors stack up, and where they need to be when the next release or big customer comes along. From this vantage point, it's easy to assume that outsiders want this detail as well.

Problem is, it's mostly not true. Some readers may stay longer and drill deeper for information. But most prospects want the big picture. They want to quickly learn what business you're in, what services you offer and whether you may have something to solve their business problem.

Radar Media has always been about providing outsourced marketing services to busy executives who don't have the time or wherewithal to create top quality sales and marketing materials on their own. That said, we've learned from our years of experience that our most effective clients are those that choose not to outsource their entire marketing effort -- but work with us on providing quality tools that enable them to update their marketing materials on their own.

Think of it as Radar helping to create a more sustainable client.

We launched a newly-designed Radar Media Group website late last month. The previous design was still perfectly serviceable and less than three years old. It had lots of examples of Radar's work and was fully SEO-optimized. That all said, it had a few issues that made us want to start fresh.

Here at Radar Media we do a lot of work with Microsoft and its partners. While you can easily argue about what it does wrong in marketing (remember Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld? Ouch.) one thing we've learned from Microsoft -- and incorporated into our own practice -- is the regular use of customer scenarios.

If anyone has any doubts whether video has come of age on the web, I have a simple answer to help them see the light: YouTube. 

Keeping your website up to date is obviously important. Most business people, me included, think first and foremost about updating the content. Equally important is the need to keep your website platform up to date. If you don't, you run the risk of getting your site hacked, increased junk email, or worse.  

Most search engine mavens like to point that pay per click (PPC) advertising does nothing in and of itself to increase the organic search engine results on your site. True enough. You could easily blow through $500 in pay per click advertising over the course of a month by creating all kinds of simple keyword combinations to drive boatloads your way. If you do nothing else but sit back and watch the traffic -- and then shut down the PPC ads in month two -- you'll no doubt watch traffic levels return to their previous sub-optimal levels.

I don't necessarily buy that Google can do no evil, but they've sure done something good in launching Google Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools is a great way to get lots of information about the traffic on your site. And like a lot of what Google provides, Webmaster Tools is free.

It was a long time coming. I hate to think about the last time we redesigned the Radar Media site. It was in the distant past, and oh so many clients and web projects ago. That's what happens when you get busy for long stretches of time. Customers demand a piece of every waking moment. Actually, come to think of it, we are very glad they do.