Packing them in, part 2
03/02/2009
What do you see as the key ways to attract visitors to your site in 2009?
Business expert
Hiljamaria Immonen
Conchango
Easy-to-use and well-designed quality content and applications, which will make users’ everyday lives easier. People are increasingly fed up with pointless noise online, and really don’t have time for it.
Hiljamaria Immonen is business consultant for creative web design consultancy Conchango
Media & PR expert
Tim Gibbon
Elemental Communications
If there was ever a time to differentiate and carve niches for your business and brand, it’s 2009. It wasn’t that long ago that we were talking about a possible recession (http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/big-question/crunch-time) and whether it had arrived. Well unfortunately it has; it’s already in full swing, making a huge impact upon advertising, marketing and PR budgets. We’ve witnessed a mixture of the reduction of digital and traditional spend across above, below and through-the-line marketing. Even though seasoned professionals know that spending through recession sees brands emerge stronger the other side, we haven’t seen this school of thought realised yet.
With many large networks shedding jobs you could jump on the gloom-ridden band wagon, or embrace the creative, entrepreneurial and progressive way technology has been rapidly changing the way messages are being communicated to us. There are five initial basic steps that we will be managing for clients and ourselves to drive, build and sustain brand loyalty.
1. Get your site in order first. Know what is transpiring across your site, how traffic arrives at it, what it does once there and how it leaves (employ Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to assist you.
2. Ensure that existing content is being used properly whether it is press releases, how-tos, instructions, guidelines, blogs and so on via RSS and similar technologies.
3. Create regular, interesting, sticky and useful content (be it copy, video or otherwise) and make it more accessible by using site maps (http://www.sitemaps.org and http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en=40318) and ensure it is presented and communicated properly for the web and now mobile as they seem to be more precious than life itself.
4. Embrace social media (apps, tools and widgets), but don’t be a slave to them; ensure that they bring and add value (mash-up if you can’t create from scratch, but keep it relevant). Learn how to work with the new mediums as they evolve, but not at the expense of your audiences.
5. Differentiate products, services and the brand behind them; know your niche and unique selling points (USPs), review and adapt to how the aforementioned is perceived online simply.
The mediums that we’re working with ‘mostly’ this year are strongly led by quality content creation, communication and management including online PR and media relations, search marketing (paid and organic), social media/viral marketing and PR. Social networks of course play their role, but as we repeatedly convey at the Social Media Portal, they aren’t exactly new and if you have been working with chatroom forums, news groups and similar, they are closely related. Although there may be a crossover it’s going to be how the aforementioned are integrated into traditional approaches with the underlying focused ‘less is more attitude’. 2008 started with a social media, app and widget frenzy and we envisage that 2009 will be more of the same, creating a saturated environment in a fiercely competitive arena whatever your industry. If you look to strong and successful brands, the strengths that they possess lie in bringing simplicity to challenging markets with core messaging broken down - yes, you’ve guessed again - simply.
Tim is director of Elemental Communications
Content specialist
Stuart Dean
Cognifide
During a tough financial climate businesses should be looking for as many cost-effective ways of driving and sustaining traffic throughout 2009. Natural search will always be a major source of traffic for businesses, regardless of the industry, so looking at ways of improving SEO is key.
Of paramount importance is having a robust web analytics package employed across the site, particularly before, during and after any upgrades or campaigns. This allows website owners to gauge any improvement in traffic, see what is bringing users to their site. From this information, you can quickly and easily work with your web development team and/or agency to make any necessary improvements - or it may even be a simple fix you can do yourself through a content management system (CMS), such as adding hyperlinks both internally and externally, improving the copy (think simple), and naming files (images and documents) clearly and descriptively.
Having a well built, user- and search friendly site is vital; setting a solid foundation not only for other SEO methods but also to cater for the needs of your audience so they continue coming back to your website after the initial visit. Website owners should look for simple means of improving visibility, such as the content on the site, implementing RSS feeds and social bookmarking functionality where appropriate. These not only enhance the user experience, but they also drive traffic both through search engines and Web 2.0 sites.
The value of RSS feeds when it comes to retaining and attracting traffic and thus audience cannot be undervalued. Adding RSS syndication to a website adds the benefit of feeding news to those who have opted in to receive information about news, promotions, campaigns and otherwise in a manner convenient to them, driving qualified traffic back to the point of origin.
Having a corporate blog, or industry blogs written by individuals within the company is a really effective way of bringing in new traffic and is one of the biggest drivers (next to natural search) of traffic coming to the Cognifide website.
Lastly (but not least) is Web 2.0 and social media. Organisations should build in social aspects to their websites (either through something such as Google’s Friend Connect or otherwise), allowing users to share information and interact with each other on the site itself is one way. Another is to become part of this community yourself, find relevant directories, networks and similar and participate, share knowledge and become part of the wider community. This was a big element of driving traffic throughout 2008 and will continue well into 2009.
Stuart Dean is the chief executive at Cognifide
Social media and comms expert
Rachel Hawkes
Elemental Communications
With the recession supposedly to deepen throughout 2009, the most cost efficient ways of driving traffic to a website the better. Thankfully, these ways can also bring a more targeted audience, have the ‘added benefit’ of building relationships and are sustainable in the short and long-term.
Social media played a pivotal role during 2007 and 2008 and the next 12 months will be no different. If anything it will have a more central part to play. Evident through the many specialist ‘social media agencies’ that have popped up over the last year, the Web 2.0 potential cannot and should not be underestimated. Although there is still uncertainty about which practice is best served to take the lead in this space (i.e. marketers, search professionals or public relations executives), all can agree on its multi-faceted benefits.
From blogs, to directories, to online communities, to email forums, to micro-blogging, social media offers the opportunity to converse with existing and potential customers, peers and media and drive qualified traffic back to your website. Critical to any business is that by building and maintaining a consistent presence with your online audience you are ensuring that you are not forgotten, so you not only increase traffic, but build a healthy level of returned traffic.
Another area of growth this year will be local search and small business directors such as BT Tradingspace and popular US site Yelp, which has just announced its foray into the UK market. This will enable small business owners, many of whom don’t have their own website, to connect with an entirely new audience and potentially build their business.
Whilst it’s one thing to drive masses of traffic to your website, it’s entirely another to ensure that it’s the right kind of traffic and that once arrived, that audience is having their needs (both information wise and usability and accessibility wise) met.
Rachel Hawkes is an account director at Elemental
Publishing specialist
Lee Griffin
TradeDoubler
With the economy currently as it is, consumers are eager to save money and find good bargains. An obvious way for publishers to attract visitors to a site is to run promotions, such as special offers and voucher codes. More and more sites are benefitting from the advent of aggregated offers feeds to make the job of publishing offers an easy one. Many loyalty and promotional sites rank highly on the search engines and users are already posting links to these sites all over forums and blogs, which increases traffic even more. Sites like hotukdeals, promotions.co.uk and myvouchercodes are being cited on social networks all the time. Online loyalty will be the boom sector of 2009, so watch this space!
Lee Griffin is publisher services director for digital marketing company TradeDoubler
Client services expert
Jilly Welch
Fortune Cookie
Digital agencies will develop new ways of attracting visitors by getting to know our clients’ audiences better so that we can give them what they want. User experience will live and breathe the brand. Customers’ enjoyment, trust and sales will come from offering them a great mix of information, interaction and platform flexibility. ‘Retention’ will be the new ‘conversion’ and relationships with existing customers will be strengthened and deepened across the year. Online marcomms campaigns will be better targeted and better financed; hot areas for development include geo-tagging, smarter deals with users’ existing social networks and credit-crunch busting ‘voucher clubs’.
Jilly Welch is account director for Fortune Cookie
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