A Playbook for Sustainable B2B Social Marketing

June 17, 2013 by

This post was written by TPN’s Chief Strategy Officer, Allen Bonde, and originally posted on the Digital Clarity Group Blog.

social-blocks

We all know the high-profile successes of consumer brands like Audi, Nike, Old Spice, and Pepsi on social media – for awareness and engagement, and increasingly, for driving social commerce. (See the Facebook Studio winners here and Shorty Awards for best use of Twitter here.) The trend to leverage social media for engagement continues as a growing number of business-to-business brands and marketers are upping their investments in social channels, while others are jumping on the social media bandwagon for the first time.

Consider:

  • 56% of B2B marketers plan to increase their spending on social media in 2013. Sure, even more (70%) are increasing investments in their websites, but clearly social is a key part of the digital toolbox for B2B marketers, and like the world of retail, omni-channel is becoming the name of the game for B2B as well. See more stats on priorities here.
  • B2B marketers are investing in content creation. The demand for rich media assets continues to grow, with nearly half of content now coming from outside the marketing department or other employees according to Forrester.
  • Social channels are becoming key content distribution channels. An amazing 74% of B2B marketers are using Twitter to distribute content, while 70% use Facebook, and 56% use YouTube according to last year’s CMI and MarketingProfs content marketing study. Another cool stat from the same research shows that 20% of marketers use Slideshare to distribute their content, a low-cost way to reach users and syndicate your favorite PPT.
  • Social channels generate leads! According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound Marketing study, 52% of marketers they surveyed (B2C and B2B) get leads from Facebook, 43% get them from LinkedIn, and 36% get them from their blog. Coupled with the opportunity to reach and engage influencers via social listening and outreach, the impact of social marketing (and sales) has never been stronger.

The B2B Playbook

Of course some aspects of B2B are way different than B2C.  Most notably: the length of sales cycles, the complexity of many B2B products (and buying decisions), and the role of influencers, channel partners, and service providers. But most importantly, B2B social marketing is less about discrete campaigns and requires more of a continuous marketing mindset. For these reasons, to build a sustainable program, B2B marketers need to have a distinct B2B social marketing playbook, even if they look to consumer success stories for inspiration.

For starters, this should include looking at how buyers, partners, influencers, and investors interact and consume content on various social channels, along with their reach and topics of interest. This will help isolate the most important targets and the best ways/places to engage them. Then, for each channel, an accompanying action plan should outline roles (e.g., social media manager, content contributor) and tasks (e.g., listening, promotion, outreach), along with the desired frequency of posts, metrics, and suggested tools.

Overall, whether you are just getting started, or an early adopter, B2B marketers need to take an iterative approach and remember to focus on:

  1. Creating a different mix of content and offers versus their consumer counterparts, e.g., white papers and web features vs. multi-channel/mass media promotions and social contests,
  2. Identifying connectors and communities which can amplify and validate key messages, along with syndication channels (earned and paid) that can provide additional reach,
  3. Delivering engaging experiences and tying together social insights with Web and transactional data, as I discuss here,
  4. Looking at ways to harness the power of big and small data to focus messages and offers, align with hot topics and themes, and even identify the most promising prospects and channel partners. A topic I recently discussed at SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW event (see post-session highlights here), and ultimately,
  5. Emphasizing thought leadership and selling big ideas versus simply selling products and being an internal agency, as my colleague Robert Rose eloquently argues in his recent post.

So, how are you using social channels and fan marketing in your B2B campaigns? Are you tapping internal (and external) experts to create rich content to feed your social profiles? Are you looking at the role of big and small data to build high-impact, sustainable programs?

Filed Under: Content Marketing 360, Social Strategy Tagged With: , , ,

3 Ways the PRISM Program May Affect Your Privacy

June 12, 2013 by

Last week, a former security contractor exposed the elaborate details of a clandestine national security abig brothernd electronic surveillance program that has been operated by the United States National Security Agency since 2007. PRISM enabled in-depth surveillance on live communications which has allowed the NSA to collect emails, videos, photos, file transfers, login information and detailed data stemming from the social networks of private citizens.

According to government officials, PRISM can NOT be used to collect information on American citizens or those residing within the United States. While the US government recent acknowledged the existence of PRISM, the companies being fingered as the major data providers are vehemently denying any previous knowledge of the program and its existence before the information became public knowledge.

Some of the companies who are being accused as being data providers for this covert operation include Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook – companies that have the highest number of regular users and who are sitting on top of databases with information about hundreds of millions of people.

Here are three ways that you may be affected by PRISM:

1. Data logging: There is a decent chance that your information has been logged by the government. While you may Google “Ryan Gosling Memes” or “Evil Goat Videos”, those probably aren’t the types of behaviors the government is mining this data for.  Email conversations, text messages, voice mails, videos,  and photos all belonging to you may very well big sitting in a database along with billions of other pieces of information from people around the world. Usernames and passwords, stored on the servers of the companies being named, could also be logged by the government.

2. Hacker Issues: Just imagine what the results would be if a hacker group was able to access the extensive information collected by the government. Identities could be stolen, overall fraud would increase and national security would be at a very high risk.

3. You Probably Won’t: Well, the chances of the government mining this seemingly endless collection of data on Internet users to find specific information on an individual who is not deemed a threat to others are pretty slim. The fact that the government actually has that information is really a violation of privacy, but the PRISM program will most likely not have a significant impact on you as an individual.

While your privacy may have been violated, your personal information most likely has not been made public to the masses. It is concerning to know that the government and potentially hackers can use this data as leverage against people, but you can rest assured – at least for tonight.

We will update this post as the story develops.

Filed Under: Communication Tagged With: , , , , ,

5 Reasons Real-Time Marketing Isn’t Just for the Big Brands

June 7, 2013 by

by: Victoria Fields, Copywriter for Momentum Telecom, a cloud-based communications provider

Content marketing today is all about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. Relevant ideas must be developed in minutes, rather than days or weeks, and messaging has to center around real-time events or feedback from customers around events that happen.

By now, most marketoreoers have heard about recent feats in the new trend of real-time marketing like Oreo’s Dunk in the Dark Super Bowl image, a tweet at the Oreo team sent out during this year’s Super Bowl power outage that earned more than 16,000 retweets and was covered in countless news stories and marketing blogs.

Most small businesses that aren’t working with a big agency or have a large marketing team at their disposal may feel left in the dark when it comes to real-time marketing. It can be hard to stay on top of trends and have the resources to create relevant messaging quickly with just a few marketers on your team.

In reality, you don’t need the resources of a giant consumer brand like Oreo to become a successful real-time marketer. What you do need is to change the way you think about your marketing strategy.

Here are 5 reasons that real-time marketing can be utilized by businesses of any size:

1. The Tools Don’t Need to Be Expensive. They Just Need to Be Used in the Right Way. In general, small businesses don’t have the resources to hire a large team or purchase expensive software to track and manage relevant brand conversations on social media. But the tools you can use for real-time marketing don’t have to be sophisticated; you just need to use what’s available appropriately. Use Twitter to search for mentions of your brand, set up notifications and create a list of key influencers, customers or prospects that follow you and then retweet and engage in other ways.

2. No One Has Real-Time Marketing Completely Figured Out. You Just Need to Get Going. Don’t be overly concerned about making a misstep or two when you’re getting used to producing content and engaging with customers so quickly. Develop a business culture that encourages speed over sloth, and be open and transparent about what you’re doing and why. Your competitors are already on social media and getting immersed in real-time marketing; you need to be doing the same.

3. Real-Time Isn’t Only About Speed. It’s Also about Listening. Real-time doesn’t only mean instant. You still need to remember that you’re engaging in a conversation by responding to things your customers are saying or inserting yourself into events that matter to your customers. Traditional marketing was about taking at your customers. Now you need to be sharing an experience with them and listening to what they have to say. That’s something any SMB can do, regardless of size.

4. Develop a Personality Online. It’s Easy to Humanize Your Brand that Way. In a world where social media is increasingly important, we judge the brands we interact with and purchase from by their personality online. We would all rather patronize a business that is friendly and knows our name, right? No matter what industry you’re in, customers want a brand to acknowledge them. Here’s a rule of thumb: If a human being wouldn’t say what you’re posting, neither should you when you’re posting on behalf of your brand.

5. People Love to Share Their Opinions. Give Them a Way to Engage. Most people tell a friend about a great experience with a business (or a terrible one). If you have happy customers, you want to make it easy for them to share their feedback. Facebook Pages and Communities can be a great place to start, but even Twitter chats with hashtags can be helpful for giving customers an outlet to share about your brand. If a customer has had a bad experience, you want to be able to address it directly, and it’s important that they have a transparent way to give feedback as well.

Filed Under: Content Marketing 360 Tagged With: , , , ,

5 Takeaways from Content Marketing Bootcamp in Boston

June 6, 2013 by

Today’s Content Marketing Bootcamp, hosted by Kapost and Eloqua, provided attendees with valuable insights from industevent_locationry professionals and marketers all working towards the same goal: creating engaging content to drive inbound leads.

Speakers and panelists from companies like HubSpot, BzzAgents, Eloqua, SiriusDecision, AT&T and Brainshark shared their best practices and case studies as to how their companies have leveraged content marketing to drive engagement an increase conversations from customers.

Here are five takeaways from Content Marketing Bootcamp:

1.  Build Your Own Audience Instead Of Renting Someone Else’s: Many content marketers become frustrated when their efforts are not showing results immediately, and in order to drive results they may try to speak to another company’s audience. Take the time to step back, build your audience patiently and understand that things will begin to improve and gains traction.

2.  Go Rogue: Getting buy-in from upper management in some organizations is difficult, especially when the results take several months to start to appear. Upper management may also think of content marketing as a fad, but as a marketer you must understand that the buyer’s now have all of the power, so content marketing is not going anywhere. If managers are taking too long to make decisions, start creating content. Start your blog, create a YouTube account. Once you start to build an audience, take those results back to share with your manger. Having results will significantly help move along the approval process.

3.  Read Everything Your Targets Are Ingesting And Create Relevant Content: Understanding your buyer personas is important, but grasping the type of content that they are ingesting and sharing regularly is crucial for being able to go forward and create that content. To put it simply, “if you build it, they will come…”

4.   You Need to Be The New York Times of Your Industry: When it comes to breaking industry news, you always want to be first. When it comes to speed vs. quality, both are equally important. Newsjacking is encouraged, by your goal should be to be the first with the idea.Many struggle with the concept of “newsjacking”, but if you can’t be the first source to break the story, you should be the first one sharing that breaking news. Content curation is just as powerful as creating original content in that it truly proves that you are following relevant news and topics and have a broad understanding of your industry.

5.   Think On A Strategic Level, Not A Tactical Level: Another struggle many content marketers have is being able to think on a strategic level. As marketers, we all wear many hats. On some days we may be taking photos, writing blog posts, creating email campaigns or speaking at events. Don’t just check the box when it comes to creating content. Determine your overall strategy and ensure that each piece of content you have is able to support your storytelling efforts.

Filed Under: Content Marketing 360, Digital Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

The Power of Digital Media in Natural Disasters

June 4, 2013 by

Americans are no strangers to natural disasters. Over the past ten years, we have witnessed some of the most devastating disasters which have caused major cities to shut down, created major loss of infrastructure, caused billions of dollars in damage and, worst of all, thousands of fatalities.

Through the development of digital technologies that allow for us to be constantly connected to one another – mobile phones, tablets, laptops, etc. – which have had an incredible impact on the way we communicate with one another during crises.

Hurricane Sandy strnyc-poweroutageuck the East Coast late last October and destroyed homes, businesses and livelihoods. Areas in New York and New Jersey lost power for weeks after the storm. Many places had no running water or gas. The lack of electricity made it particularly difficult for communities to begin rebuild and recover.

Organizations like LIPA (Long Island Power Authority) and New Jersey’s PSE&G took to social networks like Twitter to inform their customers as to when crews would be making repairs. The Long Island Railroad, the PATH and Amtrak all experienced severe delays and closures and are still working to repair damages from the powerful hurricane, yet also used social media communicate with customers to inform them of closures and alternative means for working.

Food trucks posted on Facebook and Twitter different locations that they were stationed and distributing free food to those stranded by the storm. The NYPD and NYFD used Facebook to update residents who needed to locate shelters and find food, as well as documenting their experiences throughout the storm

The primary reason that social media was so effective for victims of the powerful hurricane was because of the diverse suite of applications smartphone owners have. For those without electricity, sitting in their cars to charge their mobile devices became a necessity in order to keep in touch. Supermarkets and malls with generators invited residents to come in to charge their devices. A friend of mine spent two weeks without electricity in Elizabeth, NJ, and charged her phone at a local Toys-R-Us.

The gas crisis which followed Hurricane Sandy evoked the need for a gas rationing system throughout all of New Jersey and most of lower New York. Gas lines were miles long. Gas stations closed down while few remained open, but nowhere near close enough to the number of stations needed to service residents. An application called “Gas Buddy” soon popped up. By entering your zip code or current location, the app showed users what gas stations were open, how long the lines were and how high gas prices were at specific stations.

New Yorkers and New Jerseyans truly came together during the hurricane and in the months afterwards, but the ability to communicate important messages to large audiences was critical and may have saved lives. The outpouring of support through social media was overwhelming to many communities and helped people tell their stories and get the support they needed, whether it was financial or emotional support. It helped people reunite with their pets, with personal items lost in the wreckage of their homes. Despite the ruthlessness and severity of the storm, social media provided many with the resources they needed to move forward after Hurricane Sandy.

Filed Under: Content Marketing 360, Digital Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

Access IMS NY Keynote Presentations and Catch of Glimpse of IMS

May 29, 2013 by

Last month, hundreds of mSONY DSCarketing professionals from around the world joined together in New York City for IMS 13. Keynote speakers and expert panelists shared valuable information with IMS attendees, including professional insight into developing trends, customer data and future technologies.

The insight shared with attendees provided many content marketers with new perspectives and create ideas for their marketing efforts going forward from the event.  Three of the major takeaways from IMS NY include:

  1. Be the authentic information hub about your brand, and report about your company like a media outlet. You need to give people the inside scoop that will make them come back to your site because your “raving fans” are your best advocates.
  2.  Marketing content will always need to be tailored to be interesting for your customers. The biggest misconception about marketing is that there’s an out-of-the-box solution to drive sales and bring in leads.
  3. Inbound marketing is all about creating the experience that your customers enjoy through engaging, interesting content. Traditional marketing was all about interrupting an experience that your customers enjoy.

Interested in watching keyno425928_619835764711378_1867856963_nte sessions from IMS NY That expand on these takeaways? Click here to view presentations from Michelle Andres of the Baltimore Ravens, Julie Roehm of SAP, Jim Howard of Crownpeak and more!

The Pulse Network is eagerly preparing for IMS San Francisco, taking place July 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center.

You can register today for as little as $50 – click here to reserve your spot for this low price.
Check out our Spotlight on IMS New York series, featuring some of the brightest minds from the IMS Community, as we roll them out over the next few weeks leading up to the next show.
Want to join this conversation? Feel free to Tweet to us and follow @IMS_Conference, @ThePulse, and with the rest of the IMS Community using #IMS13.

Filed Under: Content Marketing 360, IMS New York 2013, Inbound Marketing Summit Tagged With: , , , ,

5 Reasons Why Content Marketing is Here to Stay

May 24, 2013 by

As with any popular trend, skeptics of content marketing have begun to rear their heads and discuss why they think content marketing is just another bubble that will burst. This satirical blog from the Huffington Post indicates that the population of content marketing experts is surging out of control. It may seem that content marketers are popping up everywhere, but that is because of the increasing need for content marketers. Here are five reasons why content marketing is here to stay and, most likely, will continue to expand.

1.       Companies Need It

People wonder why notable companies spend money on advertising and marketing campaigns. One example of an organization that usesbruins content marketing (despite their lack of inventory) is the Boston Bruins. Right now, the Bruins are in the playoffs and if you look at the Bruins’ website you will notice that the playoff games are all sold out. So why is the Bruins’ marketing team busy creating content for their website and for television spots, when there is no inventory left to sell? The purpose of this content is to engage fans throughout the playoffs and to create shareable content to excite them.

But what about during the summer months, when the team isn’t playing? Season tickets are sold out for years to come – fans have to join a waiting list to buy them. But, the Bruins marketing will continue to market and promote the team throughout the off season to keep the fans excited for the next 142 games.

The Bruins use content marketing year long to keep their fans engaged and informed about their team, and the fans love it, which leads to the next point:

2.       Consumers Love Content

People love having an inside scoop on what’s going on within a company. They also love to see that the people behind the brand are actually people with dynamic personalities.  Aside from the humor and entertaining forms of content marketing, however, there is a business-focused type of content, particularly for B2Bs, that consumers also look for. Reading whitepapers written by successful CEOs of large companies and attending webinars hosted by industry-leaders are an insightful method of connecting with customers.

mayhemAll State Insurance Company executes content marketing with an incredible sense of humor. Their “Mayhem” campaign (click here to view the Mayhem Facebook page) takes a comical approach to storytelling that their audience loves.  Fans of the Mayhem Facebook page are constantly engaging with the posts, videos and video content shared on the page, very little of which actually advertising the insurance solutions that All State offers.

 

3.       Consumers Are Skeptical (and rightly so)

B2B consumers demonstrate skepticism when answering a sales call or hearing a sales pitch from a company they know very little about. If a consumer types a company’s name into a search engine and only finds a poorly designed website, the chances that they will continue with the buying process are slim. On the other hand, a prospective customer who search for a company and finds a plethora of information created, distributed and syndicated surrounding the company; they will have a considerably different buyer experience.  Creating content increases credibility.

4.       Your Customers Want to Be Heard

In the past, marketing walmartand advertising was always a brand selling a product to consumers. Commercials and print ads spoke to their audiences directly promoting their product, and that was that. But now, the explosion of social media and technologies have provided not only multiple platforms for consumers to view a brand’s messages, but they have provided thousands of outlets for customers to share their experiences – and boy do they. Consumers take to platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to share their most positive experiences and speak out against companies and products they view negatively.

The conversations sparked by customers involving customer service issues and complaints can be seen by just about anybody with an account, and some brands try to react by either deleting negative comments or banning members from the page. Taking a more proactive approach to content marketing on social media tends to be received in a much more optimistic way by the customers. The platforms are here for conversations, so talk to your customers.

 

5.       Content Marketing is Truly Measurable 

In the past, many marketers struggled to accurately prove their ROI. Placing a billboard at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel going into beatlesManhattan from New Jersey may mean that your advertisement is seen by millions of people each day, but how do you verify the conversion rate from those views? You can’t click on a billboard. Print ads can be placed in magazines and distributed to millions, but can you prove how many people saw your advertisement and bought your product because of it? Once again, you can’t click on a print ad in a magazine.

New technologies and new methods for sharing marketing methods have eliminated this issue for content marketers who use online tactics. Links are trackable, “likes” and “follows” can be counted. Analytics tools can break down individual users and their web habits on your site and can prove the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

That might just be the best art about real-time analytics for content marketing: proving the effectiveness of your efforts. In doing so you can gauge your audiences’ response quickly and pivot when necessary.

Despite skepticism around the terminology, content marketing is here to stay. Companies now need to market through content in order to establish relationships with their customers and open up the conversations.

 

 

Want to learn more about content marketing? Check out CEO Jim Howard of Crownpeak spoke at IMS NY this past April, and delivered a great presentation about content marketing. Click here to see Jim’s presentation, “What the Hell is Content Marketing?”.

 

Filed Under: Content Marketing 360 Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Spotlight on IMS – Five Keys Habits to Successful Real-Time Marketing from Leigh George of R2 Integrated

May 17, 2013 by

Practicing real-time marketing is a challenge for many marketers. Leigh George of R2 Integrated shares her advice for successful real-time marketing strategies in this Spotlight on IMS.

YouTube Preview Image

1.    Do Your Research

Doing the appropriate research and relying on big data is critical for implementing real-time marketing. Through analyzing big data and understanding trends that resonate with your target audience, you will be able to gauge what types of content and marketing messages will be best received.

2.    Think Like a Publisher

Marketing is rapidly becoming more like publishing with the rise of social media. It’s important now for marketers to think like a newsroom and hiring individuals with strong storytelling skills. In order to be relevant, you need to offer value and establish a connection with what your audience is most interested in.

3.    Act Like a Person, Not Like a Company

Online interactions from brands tend to be very reactive – customer service complaints, etc. As marketers, taking a proactive approach and searching for the right opportunities to engage with your customers is critical.

4.    Know When and Where to Scale

When the lights infamously went out during this year’s Super Bowl, Oreo took advantage of the trending moment quickly. Knowing when to tap into a trend or an event is critical – having bad timing and saying the wrong thing could result in poor public perception. Make sure that you are natural

5.    Don’t Fake It

Sometimes, brands try too hard to be relevant and will jump at the chance to join a conversation that is not appropriate. Again, research is crucial to ensure that you are involved in trending topics that are meaningful and tactful to your audience.

The Pulse Network is very excited about our upcoming Inbound Marketing Summit is taking place in San Francisco on July 30-31. You can register today for as little as $50 – click here to reserve your spot for this low price.
Check out our Spotlight on IMS New York series, featuring some of the brightest minds from the IMS Community, as we roll them out over the next few weeks leading up to the next show.
Want to continue this conversation? Feel free to Tweet to us and follow @IMS_Conference, @ThePulse, or join in this conversations with the rest of the IMS Community using #IMS13.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Spotlight on IMS: Tips on Reaching Your Email User Base from Mike Veilleux of Dyn

May 15, 2013 by

Check out this Spotlight on IMS as Mike Veilleux, Direct of Email Product at Dyn, shares his advice for email marketers who are trying to provide their customers with valuable messaging through email marketing.

YouTube Preview Image

1.       Evolution of Deliverability

Over the past decade, spam has significantly changed the way people receive emails and engage with them. In the past, nearly all spam emails contained ads for free Viagra and Viagra knock-off products. Now, spam is defined as unsolicited emails from a company, website or individual – emails that customers do not sign up for or don’ want to receive. Since the days of the Viagra spam, however, spam has evolved to the point of outsmarting many filters. Key deliverability aspects emails marketers need to take control of are engagement among email customers and building a strong, credible reputation of your brand, domains and IP address in order to avoid being noted as spam.

2.       Protect Your Brand

Hackers tend to try to impersonate brands and companies digitally in order to phish your recipients.

Sometimes people impersonate you to phish recipients to steal people’s information, including their login credentials and passwords. A new specification for email marketers has been implemented to help email marketers and end-consumers keep their information safe, called DMARC:

New specification called DMARC

  • Domain-Based
  • Message
  • Authentication
  • Reporting &
  • Conformance

3.       Incorporate Transactional Email

Transactional email is one of the least focused email assets in most companies. Transactional emails are emails sent by companies welcoming a new member to their database, confirmation emails sent after a purchase and follow-up mails sent after a product has been delivered. These emails have a statistically higher open rate as they tend to contain information specific to the recipient. There is plenty of valuable space in these emails for companies to explain more about their brand, take advantage of upsell opportunities and cross-sell additional products and services. Marketers should make sure that they are focusing equally on their transactional emails as they are on their brand marketing emails.

 4.       Offer Unique Messages and Content

Providing your email recipients with unique messages and content will help your brand gain value, deliver the highest engagement rate (opens, click-thrus), and assist in deliverability. Your recipients will be more likely to actively participate in your email campaigns if you provide them with value.

 5.       Incorporate Real-Time Information

Providing real-time information is essential to unique messages and content. By developing an infrastructure which drives real-time information from your website, social networks and including timely, relevant industry news, you can position your brand as a resource for current events.

 

The Pulse Network is very excited about our upcoming Inbound Marketing Summit is taking place in San Francisco on July 30-31. You can register today for as little as $50 – click here to reserve your spot for this low price.

Check out our Spotlight on IMS New York series, featuring some of the brightest minds from the IMS Community, as we roll them out over the next few weeks leading up to the next show.

Want to continue this conversation? Feel free to Tweet to us and follow @IMS_Conference, @ThePulse, or join in this conversations with the rest of the IMS Community using #IMS13.

Filed Under: IMS New York 2013, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

Spotlight on IMS: Three Myths of Website Errors From Dave Dabbah, GM of Hawq

May 13, 2013 by

Every day, thousands of website pages are created and edited. Most of the time, the creators of these sites are unaware of any errors in the content that they are publishing – mostly because they don’t think that there are any errors in their content. Dave Dabbah, General Manager of Hawq, wants to clear up some of the myths about website errors.

YouTube Preview Image

Three Myths of Website Errors:

1.    Our Website is Perfect – We Don’t Have Any Errors

Last year, Hawq scanned the top 50 e-commerce sites in North America and found that each of these sites had over 200 website errors.

Hawq defines website errors as:
•    Broken links (external and internal)
•    Spelling errors
•    Branding errors
•    Typos
•    Accessibility mistakes

How do you fix these types of errors?
-Monitor your website content regularly. Performing content inventory audits regularly (daily, monthly, or weekly) depending on the size and depth of your website will greatly help these efforts.
-Fix these errors in a timely fashion.
-Make fixing these errors a priority and a large part of your organizational goals.

2.    Our CMS Prevents Errors From Being Published

Between commercial and open source content management systems, these platforms struggle to identify content errors. They won’t always recognized typos or bad URLs.

What’s the fix?
-Develop processes for locating errors before they are published.
-Monitor your site using secondary tools.
-Customize your site scans to incorporate your brand and product names

These three steps will help your CMS function better

3.    We Have an Editorial Process Which Eliminates Errors
Although having an editorial process is great, these processes always tend to break down. Sometimes these processes become so convoluted that it’s impossible to publish any content.

How do you fix your process?
-Identify the gaps in your process.
-Implement process improvements on a regular basis.
-Monitor your site with an automated tool
-Don’t be afraid to be the brand police! (Somebody has to do it!)

The Pulse Network is very excited about our upcoming Inbound Marketing Summit is taking place in San Francisco on July 30-31. You can register today for as little as $50 – click here to reserve your spot for this low price.

Check out our Spotlight on IMS New York series, featuring some of the brightest minds from the IMS Community, as we roll them out over the next few weeks leading up to the next show.

Want to continue this conversation? Feel free to Tweet to us and follow @IMS_Conference, @ThePulse, or join in this conversations with the rest of the IMS Community using #IMS13.

Filed Under: Content Marketing 360, IMS New York 2013, The Pulse on Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , ,
«Older Posts