Written by Spot MarketingMay 24, 2017

Marketing and Website Evaluation in Your Spring Cleaning

Website Evaluation

As a business owner, staying current is of utmost importance. You want to stay on top of the latest marketing trends. You want to make sure your inventory is up to date. You want to make sure your employees continue to provide the highest level of service and courtesy.

So when evaluating the state of your business, don’t neglect your website and digital marketing plan.

You should perform one of these evaluations, at the minimum, at least once per year. Spring is the season of rebirth and new growth, making it an excellent time to evaluate your marketing strategy. When doing so, here are some key factors to consider during the “spring clean-up” of your business’s online presence and the performance of your website.

Traffic report: Compare your traffic to that from one month ago, or one year ago at this time. Determine if there is an increase or decrease and, if so, what led to the change. What pages or content are producing the most traffic? What are the top external sources driving traffic to your site? Are they coming from search engines? And if so, which ones? This can help you tweak your marketing strategy.

Location, location, location: What is the geographic location of the visitors to your site? Are the majority of them close to your home base?

Be brutally honest: Take a look at what aspects of your plan are working and which are not. Is the original content on your site generating traffic? If so, why or why not? Do you have a social media presence? If so, how is it performing? Is the message of your branding consistent? Answering these questions honestly by looking at the hard data will give you the best course of action for the future.

All of the data regarding a website and its traffic can be overwhelming. However, we can perform an audit report on your website and search engine optimization at Spot Color Marketing. This report evaluates the rank and health of your website and, best of all, it’s absolutely free.

Spot Marketing is a Google Certified Partner and based in Portland, OR. We’re considered a premier digital marketing agency with clients Nationwide. If you are a business owner, entrepreneur and would like a free website audit for your site, contact us today by calling (503) 477-4355 or sending an email to spot@spotcolormarketing.com.

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Written by Spot MarketingAugust 29, 2014

Social Media Dead Zones: Is Your Message Being Heard?

Even though it seems like everyone is on social media ALL OF THE TIME, research shows there are, in fact, times where not very many people will be around to catch your latest post. If you’re spending any amount of time curating content for your social media channels, you want to be sure your target audience is getting that information. Below is a list of the social media dead zones, by channel.

Facebook

Avoid posting carefully curated content over the weekend and from 8:00pm – 8:00am. During these times people are more likely out doing whatever they’re going to later post on Facebook, rather than looking at it.

Twitter

Save your special tweets for the next day if it’s after 8:00pm on all days or 3:00pm on Fridays. You’ll get their attention tomorrow!

LinkedIn

In keeping with LinkedIn’s professional persona, most users are not reading on LinkedIn during normal work hours, so avoid posting anything between 9:00am and 5:00pm. Also, LinkedInners drop off after 10:00pm. So post that content in the sweet spot, between 5:00 and 9:00pm.

Google+

Google demands to be heard most of the time, so the only times you should avoid posting here are in the early AM and early evening.

Pinterest

Pinners are not active during normal working hours. Save those precious pins for late afternoon and evening.

Tumblr

Apparently reading blogs usually happens after work, so release those posts at or after 4:00pm.

Hopefully you know your audience well and have figured out when is the best time to engage with them. If not and you’d like to learn how, give the Spot social media team a call today!

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Written by Spot MarketingAugust 15, 2014

Are You Really Engaging with your Audience on Social Media?

Business owners today know that social media can be a valuable tool for building brand awareness, increasing consumer traffic and engaging in conversations with their clients and customers.

What many businesses don’t know, though, are the best ways to communicate over these channels. Most companies don’t have a formalized social media strategy. They start posting, commenting, and liking on a whim. Maybe they’ve seen some results, maybe not, but most likely, they’re just not sure. We find that when our clients plan and utilize social media like any other aspect of your marketing plan, they are able to connect with their target audience with dramatically higher success rates.

There are plenty of things to think about when creating a social media strategy, and the following questions can help get you started in the process.

  1. What business objectives are you trying to achieve through social media marketing?
  2. How effectively are you currently achieving those objectives?
  3. Who is your social media target audience? Is it the same as your walk-in or website audience?
  4. How effectively are you targeting this audience? Do you know what they want to talk about on social media?
  5. What social media tools are you using? Did you know there are tools to automate the content curation?
  6. What is the current content published on those social media channels?
  7. Is your target audience engaging with this content?

The Spot Color Marketing team members are experts at creating and implementing social media strategies that get results. We tailor plans for each business that include a posting calendar, topic generation, and can even curate and manage your social media content for you. Give us a call and let us get you in shape for the social world.

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Written by Spot MarketingAugust 4, 2014

Is Your Web Content Bringing in Leads? Do a Web Audit to Find Out

Let’s face it. Any task that includes the word “audit” sounds a little terrifying, but auditing your web content is completely painless compared to any interaction you might have with the IRS.

The goal of a web audit is to make sure that your site’s design, structure and content are driving traffic, speaking clearly to your customers, and improving conversions.

When it comes down to it, there are a few simple steps that will get you going in the right direction.

1. Decide on the goals of your audit.

Determining a set of goals for your audit is the most essential step as it will guide every step of the process.

What are the big changes you’re hoping will result from your audit? Increased traffic?

More links to your site?

Establishing thought leadership?

Take some time to think about exactly what you hope to accomplish. This clearly defined set of goals will help you determine exactly what information you need to collect from your site and which information you can ignore at this time. Compartmentalizing your content in this way will prevent you from feeling like you’ve taken on an overwhelming task and help you determine what decisions you need to make during the audit.

2. Create a spreadsheet outlining all of your content.

Gathering your list of web pages and collecting information about them is the most time consuming part of the audit. It’s easy to get lost in the enormity of the task, but there are plenty of ways to divide it up into more manageable chunks.

  • Assign segments of your site to different members of your team. Collecting this information is something that anyone can do. Distribute these less-strategic tasks among your colleagues to make the work go faster.
  • Generate a list of pages from your content management system. Whether you use WordPress, Drupal or another CMS, the system can export a site map and provide you with extra information about each page, including metadata, keywords and dates created.
  • Get a directory listing from your web server. Sifting through the list of files will take some time, but a list from your server will give you a good starting place.

So you know to collect the URL, page title and date created, but what other information do you need to know about each page? Here’s a basic list of information you might need, with an example.

  • Page ID
  • Category
  • URL
  • Page title
  • Topic
  • Type of page (landing, contact, content, etc.)
  • Audience (Who is the customer this page is meant to appeal to?)
  • Author
  • Usage statistics, including traffic and links (You can use information from Google Analytics for this.)

 3. Use your business strategy to determine how to create, edit or delete content.

 With all of this information collected, now is the time to take a good, honest look at your content. Ask yourself some questions to determine how to proceed.

  • Which pages are getting a lot of attention? Can you create more like them?
  • Which pages aren’t working for you and why? Do they need to be revised?
  • Which business messages are and are not being communicated? Do you have a lot of pages about one segment of your business and not enough about another?
  • Do you have a lot of similar pages that are competing with each other? Should you combine them?
  • Is it easy to navigate between pages, or does it seem like you can never get back to where you started?

Answers to questions like these will give you a solid plan for moving forward and will make sure the entire procedure has been worthwhile.

Most importantly, take the time to look at your website while putting yourself in your customers’ shoes. While you may know exactly why you chose your content, you need to look at it from the perspective of someone who may not be intimately familiar with your business.

Does the whole process feel overwhelming? We’re here to help! Spot Color Marketing conducts audits for clients all the time. We can facilitate your next web audit so that it is painless, productive and profitable.

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