Help Shape The Future of Web Marketing

Help us get out of our heads! We’ve been coding Marketing for Mavens for over a year now. Each week, new features are added, new bugs are fixed, and the value of the application grows. Marketing for Mavens is raw, it’s rough, and it’s far from finished (is any application ever finished?) but that doesn’t take away from how effective it can be for you now, in its current state.

Marketing for Mavens is an application that I’m very passionate about. I love web marketing which is a good thing since I’ve been doing it for 12 years. This experience has brought about different frustrations along the way which led me to build an application to address them. The problem is that working specifically on my problems doesn’t mean that it addresses the problems that everyone else shares or experiences. That’s why I’m looking for your help. For Marketing for Mavens to become the essential tool for web marketing that I think it can become, I need your help and feedback.

So, if you’re looking for an opportunity to shape the future of an application which will make your web marketing life/job easier, now’s the chance to join our beta, use the application, break it, push it to its limits, and provide feedback, suggestions, rants, smoke signals, and any other communication channels to help us help you. I want Marketing for Mavens to be a product that we are all proud of. The goal, to transform web sites into highly effective web marketing machines. Let’s make it happen.

At this point, you’re either ready to join the beta and our community and get started or you’re asking yourself, what does Marketing for Mavens do for me? The first is self explanatory, the second goes like this:

• Web Marketing Campaign Management: Track and manage all of your web marketing campaigns in one location. Know who clicked on what campaigns and when. Know which campaigns are most effective and which are under-performing. Create campaign specific calls-to-action that are only displayed to the people responding to that particular campaign.
• Twitter Campaigns: Post Twitter messages and track responses to see which Tweets get the most click-throughs.
• Dynamic Promotions: Share web page real estate amongst several promotions (calls-to-action or page content) and match them to individual visitors based on their interaction on your web site. What does all this mean? It means your promotions are matched to the people who are most interested in seeing them, making it more likely people will respond to your offers. Now you can easily create dynamic content regardless of how your site is configured. No extra cost and just a small amount of JavaScript code which we give you.
• Dashboard: Quickly see how your site is performing on a daily basis and how the day is tracking compared to the previous 7 days.
• Report: See how your site (page views and conversions) and promotions have performed over the past 6 months.
• Citizen View: See what brought each individual visitor to your web site, what they looked at, and what they were interested in so you can do a better job of developing content to match their needs and determine where the holes are in your site that may be losing valuable conversions.

We have a lot of new features on the horizon as well. Both the dashboard and report pages will continue to evolve as they become more effective tools for showing what led to traffic spikes, what campaigns performed best and when, which campaigns should be retired, and where money can be better spent to generate conversions and sales leads. Campaigns will have goals associated with them so you can track how well or how badly a campaign is doing, allowing you to make quick changes or divert money to those that are more effective.

If all of this sounds interesting to you, please feel free to join the community and sign up for the beta. We’d love to have you as part of the community. If you have further questions just send me an email and I’ll respond as soon as possible.

Thank you so much for your time!

Increase Sales Leads without Increasing Traffic

Every person who visits your web site is a potential sales lead. Too many companies focus on the hard part which is increasing traffic each month to increase the number of leads they receive. Instead, focus on what you already have. If you have 1000 people visiting your site each day, your site should be focused on turning each one of these visitors in to a lead.

It’s simple math. If you have 1000 visitors per day and your conversion rate is 2%, your site is acquiring 20 leads per day. Now let’s say you focus your efforts on improving your marketing to your 1000 visitors per day by customizing your web site to each visitor’s specific needs. Not only does this improve the overall satisfaction of each of your visitors but it leads to a 4% conversion rate on your site. Now you receive 40 leads per day. Isn’t the much more likely to happen and easier to do then trying to double your daily traffic to receive the same number of leads? In the first instance, you have the control. In the other, you’re relying on outside help (search engines, advertising, etc.).

Next time you try to find new ways to increase your traffic, remember, the number of visitors doesn’t matter as much as how well you treat them when they come in. Focus on what matters most, the visitors who are already interested in what you have to offer.

A/B and Version Testing Your Web Promotions and Offers

With the recent addition of link tracking, you can now perform A/B Testing (Split Testing or Version Testing as some like to call it). The easiest way to do this is by creating a new tag promotion. You can choose to not tag any of your promotions and Marketing for Mavens will randomly distribute your promotions to your visitors. This will ensure that there are no biases and that the results are based as closely on the content of your promotions as possible. You can also choose to use tags and still do A/B Testing but, to do so, the promotions you’re comparing need to use the same tags to ensure an equal distribution to a similar audience.

Once the promotions have run for several days, you can begin to compare the results across your promotions. For now, you can see how many times a promotion was displayed and see how many times a link in that promotion was clicked. In addition to these statistics, we’re currently adding more statistics and conversion tracking code to further refine the effectiveness of promotions.

Track the Success of Your Promotions and Offers

We’ve added a new link tracking option to the promotion form that allows Marketing for Mavens to track the success of your links. This will allow you to see how successful your promotions and offers are and compare them over time. Right now, the backend system is in place to track each link and display the results as “clicks” on the promotion page. Soon, you will be able to see which visitors clicked on your promotions and track whether the promotion led to a conversion (sale, lead, registration, etc.).

As always, Marketing for Mavens is in beta. If you find any bugs with this new feature, please email us at bugs@marketingformavens.com.

Promoting Marketing Campaigns Based on Site Visits

Currently, Marketing for Mavens offers 3 types of promotions; tags, visits, and individual. I’d like to take a moment to explain the visit promotions.

Visit promotions are designed to show different content based on the number of visits a person makes to your web site. For instance, the first time someone visits your site you may want a home page promotion that explains what your company does. Then for all subsequent visits, you can change the promotion to go into more detail about your products, events, and services.

Visit promotions aren’t distributed to your visitors based on their needs the way tag promotions are but they can be very valuable in certain circumstances. Just remember, a new visit is determined by the time in-between page views which is 30 minutes. When you test your visit promotions, you will need to wait 30 minutes between page checks for a new visit to be recorded.

Web Analytics is Dead!

Web Analytics is the one thing that all web marketers do and it continues to be the least understood. Every corporate site uses some form of Web Analytics software. Whether it’s Google Analytics, WebTrends, WebSideStory, or some other package, companies spend thousands of dollars a year on these applications. The problem is that these packages record too much information with too little time to respond. When we do respond, it’s to make small changes designed to appeal to the masses that have already been to your site and that if we’ve even interpretted the data correctly.

If we’ve learned anything in the ClueTrain era it’s that mass anything no longer works. Just look at mass advertising, mass email, and mass mailings. These marketing techniques require that you hit as many people as you can because you’re only going to reach about 3% to 5% of them. Well what about the other 95%. Shouldn’t we at least try to appeal to them? Well we can.

To appeal to the other 95% on the web, we need to be able to customize and target our content directly to them. We need to learn about our visitors as they use our sites and we need to respond to their needs in real-time, not weeks and months later when we have time to analyze our reports. We don’t have the time. Many people will only visit our sites once to decide if they want to do business with us. These lost opportunities will never come back.

We’re now well into the Web 2.0 era but our web analytics software has done little to catch up. It’s now time to look for ways to communicate as close to a 1 on 1 basis as possible. I’ve been formulating these ideas for some time now and have begun integrating them in the Marketing for Mavens web application. It focuses on communicating with each of your visitors and I welcome you to try the free beta and let us know what you think.

Treat Your Web Visitors with Respect. Stop Herding Cattle.

We’ve moved to a local version of WordPress. Please visit www.marketingformavens.com/blog.

One of the features of Marketing for Mavens is the ability to see how each visitor comes to your site and where they go. The real value is that it forces you to see your visitors as individuals instead of a crowd of people.

When you look at your typical web report, you see how all of your visitors interact with your site. You know that a majority of people visit your home page and that a certain percentage go to your product pages but you miss out on the details like how did this person get here, what were they looking for, and did they find it. The other problem is that any changes you make to your site based on these reports is designed to appeal to the masses. Web reports force us to treat our visitors as cattle that we can herd around. We try to find the path of least resistance that we can push them towards and then track the results through funnel analysis knowing that a certain number will drop out but if we can convert 10% to leads we’ll be very happy.

This leads us to the niche that Marketing for Mavens fills. There’s a very good reason to use all those web reports and you should continue to do so but you should also be looking at your individual visitors as well. Marketing for Mavens will assist you in treating each visitor, or as we like to call them citizen, with respect and open up a new way of communication that will transform how you interact with your potential customers. With this approach, you will understand what your citizens needs are and assist them in fulfilling these needs turning your citizens into customers more quickly and more efficiently then pushing them through a path that you already know loses 90% of your potential leads.

New Feature: Track Referrer and Search Words

A new feature has been added which allows you to see if your visitors found your site through Google or Yahoo and what keywords they used. This information is now listed in the citizen profile. For now, the code only looks for Google and Yahoo user but it will be expanded in the future to include other search engines and paid advertising campaigns.

Integrating Content Management Systems with Web Analytics Data

One of the problems which Marketing for Mavens solves is that content management systems and a separate web analytics applications don’t talk to one another.

Every day your content management system pushes out the same content to the same people and it doesn’t know whether that person has visited your site in the past or what they were looking for. Instead, web marketers are left looking at reports on a monthly basis and then trying to configure the site content accordingly. This response is far too slow and you’re reacting to the masses and not individual visitors.

Marketing for Mavens helps to solve this problem by tagging you’re visitors based on the web pages they view. It then knows each visitors interests and can push the appropriate promotions and content to them in real time based on these interests. Now your site can be personalized to your visitors without them having to register for your site. This is important as you can now target your content and messages to only the visitors interested in seeing it. If you are interested in seeing how Marketing for Mavens can help you to manage your web content and promotions and deliver them to targeted visitors, please check our our short demo video and join or beta program.

Giving back to the web community

Today, I’ve been working on a little side project. This idea popped into my head during lunch and I feel compelled to act upon it. Over the years, I’ve received a lot of help from web community. Whether it’s support for a particular product or learning a new programming language, I couldn’t imagine having the success I’ve had without someone answering these questions or showing the steps necessary to solve various problems.

It is for this reason that I’ve decided to devote an hour of each day to answering one person’s web marketing questions. The questions can be from a wide range of topics including coding, web design, development, SEO, paid advertising, database design. No questions is too dumb and I welcome questions from those who have no clue about the web but find it fascinating or need help getting started. I don’t pretend to have all the answers but I can, more often than not, point you in the right direction.

Of course this is free and in return I want nothing other than for you try to pass the knowledge along or help others as best you can. This is my opportunity to pay forward all the help that people have given me in the past. If you’re interested please fill out the form at www.marketingformavens.com/free_web_marketing_help.html.