Building a Successful Marketing Dashboard

The marketing mix is getting more and more complicated. It was hard enough to track the results of advertising campaigns, tradeshows and direct mail programs. Now you’ve got search engine marketing, banner ads, pay per click advertising, social networking, mobile marketing and a plethora of other tools at your disposal. One thing that hasn’t changed though is the need to track your results, monitor the performance of your campaigns and measure the return on investment.

Marketing dashboards are a great way of measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing programs. Simply put, a marketing dashboard pulls all the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you are tracking for each marketing initiative and displays this information in a graphical format. It allows you to easily identify those KPIs that are not meeting expectations so that you can move quickly to adjust a poorly performing campaign. Conversely, you can also quickly identify the campaigns that are kicking butt - and put more time, money and effort into expanding the successful programs. In addition to providing both recognition and accountability for the marketing function, it creates a stronger argument for budget dollars and larger campaigns when programs are working successfully. Read more

The difference between SEO & PPC

There seems to be a lot of confusion between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC). Both of these activities fall under the umbrella of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). However, they are very different activities and its the smart marketer that makes a point of learning the difference but embracing both. This is a Heat Map chart created by Google. A heat map is created by tracking where people actually LOOK on a website. This is done using some really cool technology that we’ll talk about on another post.

You use SEO best practices to make sure that your website appears in the “organic search” results of a Google page. That is the column on the left, and in this image, you can see how popular that column is to our search audience. This is the section that has the most credibility. Appearing on the first page, above the “fold” of a Google results page is the goal of all business marketers. However, the process of improving your organic rankings and moving up the food chain of Google (or Yahoo, or any search engine tool) is a laborious process. It takes a long-term commitment — it can sometimes take 6-8 months before you even start moving up the ranks. Read more

Landscaping & Websites

Imagine building a home, meeting with the architect and having that first conversation about your dreams and goals for the house. Then the architect returns with some plans for you to review. You open the drawings and what he’s rendered is the complete landscaping design for your entire property.

“What about the house?” you ask. “What about the bedrooms, the kitchen, how the structure is built? What about how we’ll use the house, the materials and content we want inside the house? What about all that?”

The architect looks at you and waves his hand. “Oh, we’ll get to all that stuff later, but look at these great bushes I want to plant up your driveway. Are they cool or what!!??” At this point, you are probably going to bean the architect and go find someone else a little more qualified.

Every day I see this scenario played out with business websites. The first concern is always about the look of the site, the graphics, the pictures. All the landscaping. But what about your structure? Your information architecture? What thought have you given to how people will use the site, how you’ll track performance, and give the visitors to your site the experience and information they need to move forward in the buying cycle? Read more