Archives for July 2016

The Most Coveted Marketing Skills in the Business World

July 14, 2016 by Christine

Earlier this year, the firm SpencerStuart published its survey that revealed the most coveted marketing skills in the business world, according to Chief Marketing Officers. These are skills that small business owners must be able to learn for themselves as well, especially in the early phases of their business when they do not necessarily have the budget to hire dedicated marketing specialists.

Here are the most coveted marketing skills according to CMOs surveyed by the firm when asked “what skills are most important to your marketing team’s success today?”

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Digital marketing strategy (62%)
Data analytics and insights (49%)
Strategic thinking and implementation (48%)
Brand marketing (28%)
Loyalty/CRM/acquisition and retention (22%)
Product marketing (19%)
Product innovation (17%)
Field/channel marketing (15%)
Creativity (15%)
Other (11%)
Marketing communications and advertising (9%)
Financial acumen (9%)
Corporate communications (7%)
Direct mail/email (6%)
Corporate marketing (1%)

What was particularly interesting about this list was that the top three responses to this survey were also the top three responses to the question “What skills are the most difficult to find when building your team?” In that question, “Data analytics and insights” took the top spot at 57%, with digital marketing and strategic thinking both close behind.

This means companies are capable of identifying that these three particular skills are far and away the most important marketing skills a person can have in today’s business world, yet they are having the hardest time finding people who have the level of skill they’re looking for in those areas. Therefore, marketers and small business owners who are able to implement those skills effectively likely find themselves with a leg up on their competition.

Another interesting question from the survey: “What is the top barrier to building strong marketing teams?” Here were the responses:

Budget constraints (33%)
Shortage of talent (29%)
Focusing on other objectives (14%)
Lack of time (12%)
Other (8%)
No significant barriers (5%)

These responses are not surprising, but certainly revealing. Business owners constantly face budget constraints that restrict their ability to bring in new talent. And we’ve already seen from the results of the other survey question that when they do have the money, it can be difficult to find the people with the skills they need.

This survey shows the importance in investing in training for marketing, especially in a digital-driven world.

For more information about supercharging your digital marketing, contact us today at Viral Solutions.

Thomas von Ahn

Chief Elephant Slayer for Viral Solutions LLC

“Achievement seems to be connected with action. Successful

men and women keep moving. They make mistakes but they

don’t quit.” — Conrad Hilton

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Filed Under: Business Tips Tagged With: Business Strategy, Competency Gap Analysis, digital marketer, External Growth Strategy, Lifecycle Marketing, marketing strategy, mobile marketing, Strategy by Viral Solutions

Getting the Most out of Your Business’s Landing Page

July 11, 2016 by Christine

Landing pages are a key component of creating more conversions online. You might have an outstanding email marketing campaign, but ultimately it is meaningless if the landing page your customers are sent to from the email is boring, confusing or worthless.

Keep in mind that the attention span of the average internet user is extremely short. You only have a few seconds to make an impression on them, and if that first impression is bad, they’ll close the page and browse elsewhere. Loading times, therefore, are also key. Research indicates that for every second a page spends loading, seven percent of your conversions will be lost.

This is especially true for mobile sites. Not only do mobile users have an even shorter attention span, but they also need to have landing pages that are optimized for their devices. In today’s world, if you aren’t going to optimize all of your pages for mobile, you are instantly falling behind in your marketing.

Additional factors, such as form lengths, branding consistency and more can also play a role in the effectiveness of your landing page.

Creating an effective landing page

Now that you know the struggles associated with creating a good landing page, let’s focus on some tips to actually help you find success.

First, you should make good use of Google Analytics on all pages of your site. You will be able to track page views, conversions and a wide variety of other metrics that can indicate the page’s success. There are a number of other resources, such as CrazyEgg or LookTracker, that can also be of assistance to you in analyzing and tracking these metrics. Using these tools gives you an idea of what type of success you are experiencing so you know when you should consider tweaking your pages.

You should also experiment with your Call to Action section. Not only can you change up the messaging to figure out what’s most effective, but you can also play around with the colors, positioning, headline, subheader, countdown timers and more.

Finally, the content and design of the page should be consistent with the rest of your website and your overall brand image. The content should be informative, yet short enough to be easily digestible in a small amount of time for readers. It should have the same tone as found in all of your other messaging. Any colors, images or design elements should be consistent with your brand.

For more tips about creating an effective landing page for your business, contact us at Viral Solutions.

We help overwhelmed small business owners duplicate themselves – so business can be fun again

Viral Solutions LLC is a Digital Marketer Certified Partner, an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant and a Google Partner – Certified in AdWords.

Filed Under: Business Tips Tagged With: landing page design, Website Design

This Year’s Biggest Web Design Trends

July 7, 2016 by Christine

2016 has seen some significant leaps forward in terms of web design trends, technologies and capabilities. Skilled designers are implementing a number of these new tools to help give themselves a leg up on the competition.

Here are just a few of the biggest web design trends we’ve seen so far this year:

Written content may be what keeps users on your website, but the quality of your graphic design is what makes a great first impression and prevents them from instantly clicking away.Visual content is incredibly important in the world of digital marketing. Unprofessional images or use of colors reflects poorly on your business and could severely damage your ability to create sales online. The Viral Solutions graphic design team works with you to create custom graphics that are both professional and eye-appealing. Take a look at some of our graphic design work for yourself:

Artificial intelligence: Mobile apps have already experienced a proliferation of artificial intelligence, and that technology is expected to see leaps in other platforms moving forward as well. The biggest example this year is Facebook M, which is essentially the same sort of tool as Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana. Facebook describes M as a “personal digital assistant.” Google also introduced Smart Reply for Gmail this year, which makes it easier for users to suggest any of three different replies based on the message that was sent.
Interactive focus: In the past, the focus in web design had been on layout. Today it’s all about functionality and interactivity, with layout being the cherry on top. Designers are spending less time going into painstaking detail in the early phases in programs like Photoshop or InDesign and more time tinkering with how certain functions feel in programs like Adobe Comet and Sparkbox.
Storytelling: Storytelling has always been a major part of advertising. Now it’s starting to merge with the web design world as well. People are drawn to interesting and compelling stories, and designers are finding new ways to engage in visual storytelling in their work. The way a website flows and functions, as well as the content included on the website, all goes into creating a consistent story that will have visitors continuing to click through to different pages on the site.
Long scroll sites: With an increased focus on storytelling, long scroll sites have become the go-to tool to create a coherent and interesting story. These sites offer a lot more design possibilities than your standard static pages, which provides companies with more opportunities to set themselves apart from their competitors.
Design for data: No longer are aesthetics the sole emphasis of web design. While designers are still focused on creating sites that look good and function well, they are doing so within the spectrum of what research and data tells them is going to be an effective format. Certain information like click through rates, browsing time, conversions and other metrics all can reflect the effectiveness of a website.

At Viral Solutions, we constantly stay up to date with the latest design trends to ensure our clients are on the cutting edge. Contact us today for more information about our design services.

Prior to joining Viral Solutions, Christine held executive leadership roles at some of the largest small business consulting firms in the USA. Her experience includes leading direct reports of over 130 remote sales agents who generated $38mm in annual revenue. She obtained her Marketing degree from British Columbia Institute of Technology. Bring her C-Suite experience to your small business. Although our company is virtual, and we can work with you wherever you are located, she is located in Denver, Colorado and owns a second home in Vancouver, BC Canada.

Viral Solutions LLC is a Digital Marketer Certified Partner and an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant.

We help overwhelmed small business owners duplicate themselves – so business can be fun again.

Filed Under: Tools & Technology Tagged With: landing page design, website, Website Design

Conversion Rate Optimization: Driving incremental revenue and profit

July 5, 2016 by Christine

The effectiveness and user experience of a website is paramount to graphic design, yet design is a factor in conversion rate optimization. This has been an art form for digital marketers for many years now. However, structured testing has recently been kicked into high gear by the likes of Google and many other digital behemoths. That is evidenced by the move away from simple conversion rate optimization to the art of driving incremental revenue and profit.

If you live in this world you may recall the story of the $300 million dollar button by Jared Spool. Mr. Spool writes, “It’s hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem.” Or perhaps the $500 million dollar button as reported by Jan Panhoff. The objective of Panhoff's study was to identify the UX of a new mobile site in 2012. Panhoff writes, “By conducting a number of interviews with current users, we identified the core issue with the mobile site was that users could not locate the “Buy” button on the product detail page. The button itself was displayed on the top of the page embedded in a table layout that also contained other links. Ultimately, users expected the button to be located below the item picture.”

The examples provided suggest that the fix is easy, obvious and full of great results from quick fixes. Obviously this is not the case.

What factors deserve greater consideration in order to make split testing and conversion rate optimization a success?

Ask the right people the right questions. Analytics and data can tell a web site owner where to make changes for optional results but it cannot tell them why. Engaging the end user, the customer, sales people and your customer service team is critical. Talking to real customers or to those that face the customer every day is where a web site owner will find the why. Never go without talking to the real customer that is experiencing the use of your site. There are always customers – understanding them, reaching out to them, surveying them, measuring them, comprehending them, empathizing with their situation – is a limitless field of useful information for any site owner.
Subtle changes over time. Google has been known to add massive revenue to an advertisement by simply testing color. It is not uncommon for such an entity, for example, to test 41 shades of blue on a button. As reported by Alissa Walker, “Marissa Mayer, “keeper” of the Google homepage since 1998, walked into a room filled with over 1,200 mostly graphic designers to talk about how well design worked at the design-dismissive Google. She even had the charts and graphs of user-tested research to prove it, she said. Designers shifted uncomfortably in their seats.”
Timing your testing environment. When you conduct your split testing can be as critical as how you conduct split testing of landing pages and check outs. During certain times of the year a business can have a change in customers, slower traffic, mix of products purchased and the buying cycle can be impacted by advertising ratios. Expand your testing over several business cycles and do not get emotional about including or excluding certain customer behaviors.

How to build the perfect landing page so that you actually have something to test.

Most businesses have some sort of “funnel” for generating leads and converting those leads into paying customers, but very few have a truly OPTIMIZED funnel that maximizes immediate average order value while simultaneously reducing overall acquisition costs. That’s where you come in. In this mastery course, you’ll learn how to architect a “conversion funnel” that gives businesses exactly what they want: MORE customers, that are MORE valuable, all while spending LESS to acquire them.

Ryan Deiss and the team at DigitalMarketer publish a 16 point landing page checklist. We reference Digital Marketer here because we believe that if you wish to be the best you should emulate the best. Viral Solutions also believes that graphic design, color choice and page layout are very important. We do not believe that graphic design converts at a high rate without understanding the psychology of building a page for greater user experience.

Here is a partial list of critical components every landing page should have according to Digital Marketer:

Contrasting Button Color. There’s a lot of debate about button colors, but one constant is that the button color should contrast (NOT blend in) with the surrounding design elements.
Social Proof. Social share icons, “As seen on” logos, testimonials, or referencing the number of downloads/ subscribers all let your visitors know they’re making a smart decision by opting-in.
Compelling Headline. You need a clear, concise, benefit-rich headline that grabs your reader’s attention and tells them they’ve come to the right place.
Call to Action above the Fold. Most of your visitors won’t scroll below the fold, so if you’re make a free offer, give them a chance to take action without scrolling.
Source Congruency. The text and imagery on the landing page should match (ideally exactly) the text and imagery that was in whatever ad or creative that brought the visitor to the landing page.
Enable Sharing. While landing pages don’t typically go viral, some of your more altruistic visitors will click Facebook and Twitter share buttons, so make it easy and obvious for them to do it.

How to become a Conversion Rate Optimzation Expert.

“All businesses need a way to optimize the traffic they're already getting to generate more leads and more sales. They need a proven and repeatable process to identify exactly where they should focus optimization efforts to truly “move the needle” in their business. Unlike everyone else who simply calls themselves a “conversion expert,” you’re going to outshine the rest, because while everyone else is grasping at ideas, and trying random things (the majority of which won’t work) you’re applying a proven process that gets results, every time.” ~ Digital Marketer

These are the same systems and strategies our internal team uses to generate traffic, and then convert that traffic into sales.

We're here to help. Together we will make a difference in the lives of those who need YOU!

Rather than forcing technology to be a solution to every problem, they apply their outstanding knowledge and sales processes to the technology that’s available to them. This makes for much more effective, streamlined marketing campaigns.

Today, Viral Solutions’ mission is to provide its clients with the assistance needed to experience bursts of growth in their operations, and a big part of that is through the use of technology. When business owners feel overwhelmed, burnt out or unmotivated, Viral Solutions steps in to give them the tools they need to achieve new levels of success. At Viral Solutions, we help small business owners duplicate themselves – so business can be fun again!

We help overwhelmed small business owners duplicate themselves – so business can be fun again

Viral Solutions LLC is a Digital Marketer Certified Partner, an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant and a Google Partner – Certified in AdWords.

Filed Under: Business Tips Tagged With: customer value optimization, digital marketer, landing page design, marketing tactics, social media strategy, Website Design

How to Write Headlines that Attract Readers

July 1, 2016 by Christine

It goes without saying that headlines are the first thing a consumer reads in your copy — but are you making the most of your headline opportunities? Often, the headline is the only piece of your copy a consumer will read. If they’re not hooked by what they see, they’ll move on to the next advertisement, even if the rest of your copy is compelling and well-written.

How to Write Headlines that Attract Readers

Is there anything magical about a headline formula for your blog? It is a familiar struggle for content writers – finishing a well-crafted, useful blog post, but coming up short when it comes to the headline…especially when the click-through rate on Twitter is less than 2%. Daunting, isn’t it? We’ve compiled a list of headline-writing strategies to help combat those attention-getting woes.

The consumer always wants to know what the benefit of paying attention to an advertisement is, but keep in mind that click-bait headlines are not effective ways to gain readership. Headlines that boast phrases such as, “I thought I was just using fuel points to save gas. You’ll never guess what happened next!” are classic click-bait schemes that most consumers have come to ignore, so keep that in mind as you consider these tips.

Use inclusive qualifiers. An inclusive qualifier is a descriptive word or phrase that seems to speak to an exclusive group of people, when it really encompasses a broader audience. An example is a marketing email with the subject, “Travel lovers: save on gas!” The guise of the headline is that it is speaking to travelers, when in fact anyone who drives a car is likely to be interested in saving money on gas. The specificity of “travel lovers” causes a consumer to pause on your headline because they feel it applies to them.
Be up front. Use your headline to tell the reader what benefit they will receive by reading your copy. Your headline should always hint at a question you will answer in the body of your email or article. This entices a reader to engage with your copy, especially when they feel that knowing the answer would help of apply to them.
Don’t be afraid to use subheads. If you’re working on a piece with a good bit of copy, consider using subheads to break it up. If a person is skimming your brochure and sees a bolded subhead with a topic relevant to them, there’s a better chance that he or she will go back to the beginning and read the entire piece.
Know your medium and your audience. If you’re writing similar copy for print and the web, consider your voice and audience. When you’re creating copy for print, you can be certain you’re essentially speaking directly to your reader. When you’re writing for the web, search engines are often seeking keywords and phrases to determine if your copy is relevant. Adjust your copy appropriately to make the most out of both media.

by Christine Kelly

CEO and Queen Bee | Viral Solutions LLC

Viral Solutions LLC is a Digital Marketer Certified Partner and an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant.

We help overwhelmed small business owners duplicate themselves – so business can be fun again.

Filed Under: Content Creation Tagged With: blog posting, content, content marketing, email marketing campaign, marketing tactics, social media strategy