Recycling, reusing and being green in general seems to be synonymous of saving money, which made it very popular. I believe that a good way to save energy would be to reduce the use of our work computers 1hr per day. I am sure that most people would support shorter workdays, but as consultants we cannot compromise on delivery. So, the question is: How do we reduce the amount of time we expend in front of the computer and increase our productivity?

When creating collateral content, the approval workflow process tends to be more complicated than most of us actually realize. For example, for an event, a flyer must reflect not only the nature of the event but the organization (company) itself, therefore in many cases there is multiple teams in charge of selecting/approving images, writing/approving text and some times even graphs. Additionally, there might be some brochures handouts during the event, and a couple of PowerPoint presentations. Each of these marketing collateral requiring content and design creation and approval. These processes become more efficient when you can reuse text, pictures, and graph for multiple documents once each piece has been approved.

Reusing approved content start by identifying the pieces (chunks). There are three basic types of chunks: Images or pictures, graphics (bars, pies, etc), and text. Then the combination: text that gives the projections for next quarter is usually best understood with a graph (chunks made out of chunks). These approve chunks of content can now be used to create multiple collateral content. With Perficient’s collateral creation solution now when a chunk of content is updated, all future publication will be updated. The quarter statement now will be automatically producing brochures, and flyers just by updating/approving content in one place and then publishing!

I believe this a great way to improve energy efficiency, what do you think? How does content management can help us go green?

I was inspired by a conversation I had with some colleagues about some ECM implementations that were not being indexed and were lacking in basic HTML standards.

Considering that you are able to either be indexed currently or are working on a site that will comply with standards to be indexed then the fun begins.

After you are being indexed it is time for maintenance.  Maintenance consists of things like evaluating your messaging and your content perhaps by using A/B testing and analytics to determine how your content resonates with your customers.

Maintenance also exists in the form of understanding how to make changes that may include adding, modifying or removing content which could be product inventory or services.

Maintenance, most importantly, needs to be considered a bit of process that is not unpredictable or necessarily a full-time job.  Once you put in place the processes to test and improve content it simply needs to be folded into the existing process of content management.

being able to maintain your content within the context of your website is not difficult, but it is a slightly different way of considering how your website or content are maintained independently.

To the point of my comment I referred to earlier I think that this marketing aspect of maintenance might have been expected based on the post’s title so I felt compelled to squeeze this information into a consecutive post before continuing.

To my commenter, thanks again… it takes a village.

When you think about it, why isn’t it already optimized?   For a large site with a few million pages this can be tons of re-work; maybe too much to even consider engaging without a compelling reason.  In today’s world where we have advanced process management like Six Sigma telling us that a managed process costs us 75% more when that process is repeated for exceptions then why don’t we do it right the first time?

To understand why things have developed this way we have to look back a few decades.

Remember back when you learned HTML?  I do.  I remember downloading HotDog from Sausage software and being very pleased that the installer finished as deafening alarms were ringing and our company was being evacuated for a bomb threat.

I spent the rest of that day building web pages on my laptop in a mall, a restaurant, and a friend’s house publishing locally to Netscape.  If you’re an old geek you remember being led around places while you were almost permanently tethered to your first laptop.  Life was simpler back then.

But why was it simpler?

Could it have been because publishing in HTML was like publishing in a modern word processor like MS Word, Word Perfect or Word Star?  When I started it was more like vi where I actually wrote source tagging.  So why do I remember that it was like using a popular document processor?  Maybe because it was so long ago, but regardless there may be more to this change in editing style.

I faintly remember that there was a time when you were compelled to adhere to HTML standards and then you suddenly did not.  I remember a page that I was working on fixing itself after I upgraded my browser.

That sounds suspicious.

What happened was that I forgot to close a table tag and the browser I upgraded from did not allow the table to render.  Curiously, once I upgraded the browser to the next available version it seemed that the sloppy tagging was no match for the browser and the table rendered as well as if there were no errors at all.

Browser Battle of 1991

The fix was merely a by-product of the browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft who when fighting for market share appealed to webmasters by interpreting code that was falling farther and farther away from proper HTML standards.

Not only were sloppy tables rendering correctly but all sorts of things began to work by using less and less conventional coding.

It seems we have identified that the ‘natural looking’ evolution of poor HTML coding standards was not organic to technology at all.  It was driven by the browsers vying for market share.

I’m glad we’re past that. But are we?

I’m going to be 40 this fall.  Go look at your webmasters and see if they look older or younger than 40, and here is why.

How can someone that didn’t even see the evolution of the browser wars be expected to really understand HTML source code standards?  During the internet boom there was not enough time to publish everything.  So time spent publishing with good source code was considered unnecessary.  After all, since browsers didn’t care and customers didn’t care so why should editing tools or webmasters care?

Unfortunately, there was no money in good HTML source.  “Finish that page” meant “make it render and get on with the project”.  No muss – no fuss and none of that extra stuff you don’t see anyway.

Well guess what?  The unfortunate reality is that companies are only now compelled to repeat the process and it is costing more to do it now than the first time.  Six Sigma belts would call poor coding standards the exception to building web pages.  I call it the phenomenon of convention.  Regardless of what you name it the fact is that implementing good HTML coding standards today is re-work.  I guess when we thought there was no money in good HTML source we were wrong.

Who do we have to thank for this?  For me, I have to say thanks to the competition in the early 90’s for browser market share.  If you are responsible for managing a multi-million page commerce site you should probably schedule to thank your SEO team before your competition has time to thanks theirs for implementing an effective SEO strategy.

Are you using all the tools in your Online Marketing Toolbox?

The ongoing argument of whether to promote a website by optimizing organically or by virtue of paid ads is a struggle every online marketer has to balance. Although agreeing that both methods are important rarely are companies prepared to exercise the synergies between the two.

Before we discuss the relationship we should begin with definitions:

Organic

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

Paid Ads

Paid Ads typically refer to the sponsored areas on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) that allow companies to rank for keywords based on bidding on them rather than actually earning them with relevancy.

It’s easy enough to solve ranking problems by throwing money into paid campaigns and some companies choose to promote themselves by investing anywhere from under $10k /mo. to over 1M/mo. buying keywords.

Do you know that if you have a poorly optimized site chances are you can replace 10-50% of the paid traffic with free organic results?

Paid Advertising will get you in front of customers but more and more often customers move past the sponsored section of SERP’s and look at the organic results confident in the natural results.

The synergy between Paid Ads and Organic Optimization is that the more traffic you can get from Organic sources the less traffic you need from Paid Ads and therefore reducing Ad spend.

To begin, a baseline traffic analytics review can tell you how much traffic you are getting from SERP’s and by rolling up information about your paid campaigns you can determine what equity you have in the Organic camp vs. the Paid camp.

Next, review your terms so you can promote current terms and be nimble with maintenance to respond to changes in your site, your industry or search algorithms.

To increase paid results you may want to consider a budget increase, but before throwing money at it review your Paid strategy. Whether it is in house or at an agency meet regularly with your team and don’t forget it’s your budget that is funding the process so it is fiscally responsible to understand exactly how and why the spend strategy is working.

Increasing your Organic results can be done by learning what terms are currently driving traffic to your website by using and identifying gaps of terms that work for you in Paid channels but not in SERP’s. It is very possible that as the world is changing around the site a term that was added to the Paid listings was never added to the content of your website to rank organically.

There are also good reasons to exercise Paid campaigns is that you can use the speed of Paid campaigns to drive new terms recognition while you are waiting for the same terms to be processed through internal change control or for crawlers to index them.

Then and now

The phrase ‘it takes money to make money’ implies some blind spending.  Blind spending that business people agree to after shiny marketing pitches.  Remember Darren Stevens from Bewitched?  Darren was an Ad guy and (as ad guys had to do back then) worked by this premise.  Darren didn’t have digital billboards or the internet, he had poster board and markers.  Darren didn’t have data points about every sale, he relied on the sold inventory net above the status quo and took credit.

Today we have the ability to collect data and monitor all aspects of online marketing.  Today blind spending is unnecessary.

Using  cohesive Online Marketing practice that includes monitored paid spends and vigilant Organic optimization to mitigate the spend should be a far cry from writing a blank check to your marketing department/agency.

Unlike times past when companies could not track how much business came from sources like billboards mailing campaigns or television advertising today we can throw a bank of 800 numbers at those sources and then glue them together to get some very good data.

Considering that online marketing is essentially the electronic versions of the above marketing, how could anyone expect to get less data when everyone involved is using computers?

It even sounds silly when typing it.

How can the efficiencies of computing add value to the marketing process?

• conversion analytics - Yes we sold a widget but to whom… and where did they come from?  How can we improve?
• traffic analytics - how many people are looking but not buying?  How did they find us?  How can we improve qualified traffic?
• faster response - computers are not smart; they are fast.  Use the speed to collect data points and make decisions quickly.  Consider how to improve turn-around.
• a/b testing – identify superior design and messaging that resonates with your audience (not just with you!) and let the data drive the decisions to improve.

Do you see a commonality?  Improvement!

The effectiveness of Online Marketing is being poised to review nearly instant data points and implement changes swiftly to improve.

If you asked Daren Stevens to think like he was George Jetson and describe how he would have handled a campaign in the future he would have described what we have today; a living campaign that can be modified during it’s promotion cycle to improve results.

The Best Practices model used for analytics can be broken into seven steps which are listed below.

1. Identify Conversion Goals & KPIs

There are two types of indicators to monitor traffic and conversion.

Traffic monitoring is the practice of recording every person on every page regardless of source, relationship or authentication.  Typically a tag of source code is placed into a global footer of a website so that every page includes the tag.  Once the tagging is implemented you can review the traffic using a dashboard provided by the analytics tool which will report on information about the traffic like how long was the average customer on your site and where they went.

Conversion tracking is different than traffic tracking in that you will want to define a goal and track that independently of the traffic monitoring.  An example of this may be that you have a landing page used for an email campaign or perhaps a confirmation page after an ecommerce transaction.

Conversion tracking is very powerful because you can include values used in your application in the reporting dashboards.  Typically for an ecommerce site the itemized receipt values would be important to track so those values can be used to populate the dashboard and then your reporting will include sales data in the summaries.

Every site and organization has its own unique set of goals and these goals may change rapidly as data is collected and tuning is performed.

2. Define & Acquire Target Profiles

Do you know who your customer is?  Is it possible to define the average customer that visits your site, perhaps using attributes such as average age, sex, education level and experience on the internet?  Depending on your site you may have a singularly definable user profile, but probably not.  Generally, there are a few types of users that can be defined as profiles to whom you can exclusively market.  If you do not yet have profiles and are looking to begin, a general rule of thumb is to try and break down the user community into 3 groups of 40%, 40% and 20%.

Understanding the user profiles is extremely valuable information to have when considering changes to your site.

3. Organize and Optimize Site Structure

An organized website seems to make sense to everyone and every webmaster will tell you that they’re site is well organized; but then why this paragraph?

Analytics will not determine if you site is organized but it will tell you if your customers think it is organized.  Heat map reporting and traffic analytics can show you how customers by the 10’s, 100’s or 1,000,000’s are traversing your site.  Analytics review is an opportunity to review your customers’ behavior and learn what they find confusing in an effort to make your site better for your customer.

4. Develop a Compelling Message

Does your site clearly present a message that defines why it is important to your customer?  Is your content organized so that everything has a place and there is a place for everything?  It is important to ensure that your website pages all have a distinct message and reason to be published AND that those messages build a site-wide message that is clearly a benefit to your customers.  If the messages are unclear, inconsistent or unorganized then users can become frustrated and will try another site.  If a customer learns that another site speaks more clearly to them then the customer has made a decision to choose your competition.

5. Place Effective Calls to Action

Once people get to your site it makes sense to get them to where they want as efficiently as possible.  Instead of using text links hidden within paragraphs that say ‘click here’, showcase the navigation you want people to use.

Analytics will help you decide what is important by review of what people are using.  In addition to what there is also a where.  Analytics packages generally offer a form of A/B testing that allows sites to present different version of a webpage.  Perhaps you have decided on a great call to action but are considering multiple places to showcase it within the page.  A/B testing allows you to publish multiple versions of a page which will be presented in a round robin fashion to your customer.  Once combined with the data available from heat mapping, traffic analytics and conversions you will be able to race each page version to see what is more successful.

6. Enhance Shopping Cart / Lead Capture Process

After investing the time to get your content organized on your website and then putting the maintenance in place to make the incremental improvements that your analytics indicates it’s natural to take a big sigh of relief.  And it is well earned.  The good news is you are almost there and we have already introduced the tools needed to take the last steps.  The reason for this section is because more often than not people stop here.

Shopping cart abandonment refers to customers who actually put products into a cart and then leave without purchasing.  Form abandonment is also used to describe this phenomenon but both terms refer to the process when customers fail to finish a form based process whether it is a cart purchase, newsletter sign-up or an employment inquiry.

After organizing your content and incorporating testing and process to make incremental changes for improvement why would you not perform the same diligence on capturing customer data?  On paper it seems silly that a company would choose to skip this step, it can only be called ‘taking your eyes of the prize’.

It is unfortunate that at this stage companies stop but most of them do.  Why?  It is usually a complex answer that includes resources competition for other projects that have been waiting and the 80/20 rule.  Often websites are purchased systems that are customized and it is easier to leave the data collection components to run as they came out of the box; they work right?  It is true that they may work however so your site before did and so did analytics when you merely referred to a traffic count monthly and if you have come along this far you know better.

Setup conversion based analytics on all form verification pages so you can track as much data as you can about the form entry process.  A personal recommendation that works very well is to modify your forms to include a quick submit.  A quick submit is a data-store call that submits each field of data as the individual field is exited and the next one is entered.  Once you have SOME data to work with you can at least learn where the process failed and possibly even follow up with that customer with an apology that your form didn’t let them finish and perhaps save a conversion.

There are lots of reasons that people abandon carts, maybe the process is too difficult to finish or maybe the shipping information is hidden and the customer has to start the checkout process to get a real price estimate of a product.  Maybe the customer started filling out a contact form and decided halfway through that the required information was too intrusive.  At the end of the day, all that really matters is that it is your responsibly to convince that customer that it is worth submitting their data; and if they do not because you cannot work on your forms then the 80/20 rule is a failure.

7. Test, Measure, and Refine

One of the most important things to consider when you are reviewing analytics is that the data is your window into the behavior of your customers.  Analytics is a powerful tool but it can only be as good as an organization is willing to use it.  If you have a website that has confusing navigation or perhaps some objects that look like links which are not you will be able to determine that by reviewing your users activity – but knowing is only half of the battle.  The wonderful power of analytics is that it allows you to make decision driven by the data.

Don’t neglect your analytics. Analytics is not something that you install to review to merely wonder why traffic is increasing or decreasing, it is there to make sure you that you can make your traffic increase.

• Organic SEO
• PPC
• Analytics
• Link Building, and
• Social Media

into client sites.

This new framework  is flexible to support online marking across any platform or hybrid environment while still staying focused on the individual needs of a customer.

For details about this service look forward to additional publications here or contact John Sisler for more information.

We’re always trying to help our customers gain a better ROI from their web content management (“WCM”) initiatives by providing strategic WCM planning, design, implementation and migration consulting services through the use of our web content migration methodologies and WCM process lifecycle.

Ed Rawson, General Manager of Perficient ECM business unit, was asked about this partnership and what it will do to help our customers’ projects:

“Partnering with FatWire provides us another avenue for delivering quality, integrated Web Delivery Platforms for our customers. We’ve had a long tenure of success implementing Web User Experience and WCM solutions for Fortune 1000 companies and we believe implementing FatWire products as part of our proprietary processes will give us a competitive advantage over other implementers.”

We also asked Jonathan Botter, vice president of global partnerships for FatWire, about this arrangement:

“Organizations today need to use the web to drive the success of their initiatives for customer loyalty, increased sales, and greater operational efficiencies.  We are very pleased to partner with Perficient to offer customers a robust Web Experience Management solution that will help them achieve their goals.”

More about our partnership here.

You can follow FatWire on Twitter at @FatWireSoftware

Follow Perficient’s ECM team on Twitter at @Perficient_ECM