Categories
Social Media Marketing

Using Twitter to market your business

Many businesses are now coming on board with social media marketing. Social media marketing is a fairly new concept where companies promote their products and services to customers through sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Twitter is often harder to use for marketing than Facebook for the average business and some people simply do not understand how it works. Twitter has grown more in the last nine months than in the previous five years and this growth is expected to continue.

When creating a tweet, make sure that the voice is your own and that you bring a bit or your personality or brand in to it. This will make people more likely to click on your links and retweet your posts.

Try and use keywords in your tweets as keywords are key when it comes to online marketing. Make a list of keywords and use them in your tweets. You only have a limited number of characters so chose your word carefully.

Categories
Web Marketing

Analysing time spent on your site

There are many different stats packages out there that will help you understand how visitors find your site and what they do when they are on it. Google Analytics is by far the most popular stats package and best of all it is free to use.

When you have your website set up on Google Analytics you can start to track the progress of a visitor through your site. You can find out how they found you, which page they landed on first and where they went from there onwards. You can also see how long they spent on one page. If you find that people are not spending very long on a page then leaving the site altogether it may be that you are attracting visitors that are looking for something you do not sell or offer or that your site is too hard for them to navigate round.

 

Categories
Web Design

Checking your mobile device stats

All websites should be compatible with mobile phones and tablets and there are a number of ways to do this. Some businesses have a mobile version of the website created, the site will automatically detect if you are using a mobile device and often switch you to the mobile version. You may opt for an app to be built for you to allow your users access to a more mobile based version of your site, if you do this you should still ensure that your main website is compatible too.

There are a large number of people using their mobile devices to view websites and this number is growing year upon year. You need to ensure that you are checking the statistics for your mobile version of the site to see if there are any pages that have a particularly high bounce rate. If they do then you may need to revisit that page and check it is displaying correctly and functioning as it should.

Categories
Web Marketing

Mobile marketing – how does it work?

Mobile marketing is a great way to reach a wider audience. Not only can you reach people browsing on their computer at home but also those that use their phone or other mobile devices such as a tablet.

There are many ways to do mobile marketing. Some companies have an app created to allow the user to download it on to their mobile device. The app is often a mobile optimised version on their website. It may have limited functionality but often there is everything a mobile user is looking for and most importantly it is quick and easy to navigate round.

You can also do SMS marketing where you text your customers with details of offers and updates. This again is a great way to get instant traffic to your site but can be a little costly if sending out a large number of messages on a daily / weekly basis.

 

 

Categories
Web Marketing

Bounce rate reviews

Bounce rates are extremely important when it comes to analysing an Adwords campaign. If a visitor clicks on your ad and visits your website and then leaves on the same page without clicking through or interacting with the website then they are counted as a bounce. The bounce rate is recorded as a percentage of the total visits, so for example, if the bounce rate is 50% then half of your visitors are leaving at this stage.

A High bounce rate (above 30-40%) can indicate a problem with your site or a problem with your keywords / adverts within Google Adwords. You need to have a look at the ads and keywords that have the highest bounce rate. Check that they are relevant to what you are selling and that they are going to the correct page within your site. It is often not advisable to send every ad through to the home page if there is a more relevant page.

 

Categories
Web Design

Creating visuals for your client

If you are a web designer then you will already know how important visuals are to a website creation process. Every website should be visualised prior to programming to ensure that all parties (i.e the client, designer and programmer) agree on how it should look and function. At this stage it is relatively easy to change things around but if left until it has been programmed it can take a lot longer to do incurring more costs for the client or the web management company.

Ideally present your client with a few variations of the website visual to allow them to see how it could look. I would advise showing them on a computer screen (not just printed visuals) as the colours often look different when printed.

Colourways can make a big difference to the way a website looks so you may want to experiment with these to show your client.