One of the favorite hats Wendy and I have enjoyed wearing in our professional careers is being a manager. To many, that probably sounds crazy, since being a manager means you have to be OK with working in a job that, as I like to say, is “110% not about you”:

• you’re always hiring when you wish your team was set…or not hiring when you need more help;
• you have to play the “middle” role, trying to motivate and challenge your staff while serving your own managers and the needs of the business;
• and, ultimately, you give your all to support, mentor and guide staff behind-the-scenes, but personally take credit for nothing tangible – only the success of others.

OK, so there’s some tough parts, but the payoff is awesome. There is nothing better than building, developing and growing a high-performing team. It can truly become a competitive advantage for your company, and a huge personal achievement for you as the manager. For me, one of my proudest moments as a manager was when our team at NI won the state’s Lone Star Award for Best PR Team in Texas. That achievement was only overshadowed by the follow-on national award when we were named one of the top three Best Corporate Communications Departments in America.

Building a high-performing team starts with excellence in recruiting. At TREW, we enjoy bringing our decades of experience recruiting and managing marketing professionals to help our clients build their teams. We work with them to define the role, responsibilities, and ideal candidate qualifications and experience. We also define the culture fit – equally, if not more important, than the skills fit. From here, we develop a recruiting strategy, including promotion and interviewing plan, to ensure we select the best candidate for the job, the team, and the person.

An example of this service is the recruiting we are doing currently for The Academy of Medicine, Engineering, and Science of Texas, a TREW client since our inception in 2008. As TAMEST has grown, so have their needs to expand their marketing team, and we are currently seeking a Director of Communications. The job description is pasted below – please pass along to interested parties, and see below for how to apply.

Overview – Director of Communications

The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas (TAMEST) was founded in 2004 to provide broader recognition of the state’s top achievers in medicine, engineering and science, and to build a stronger identity for Texas as an important destination and center of achievement in these fields. The 240 members include Texas Nobel Laureates and members of the three National Academies (IOM, NAE and NAS).

TAMEST is seeking a senior-level strategic communications professional to partner with the Executive Director and oversee the development, implementation and management of effective communications strategies aligned with the organization’s mission.

Responsibilities

Strategic Planning

• Work with the TAMEST Executive Committee, Board of Directors and Executive Director to develop communications strategies and messages to targeted audiences.
• Set communications goals and metrics; formally track and regularly report to the Board on progress and effectiveness.
• Serve as the lead on all communications-related activities, effectively collaborating with internal and external committees, consultants and constituents.
• Develop a strong understanding of the mission and vision of TAMEST, the National Academies, and key constituent groups.

Key Constituent Management

• Work with the Executive Director to prioritize and strengthen relationships with key constituent groups to increase their awareness and understanding of and engagement with the organization and its mission and vision.
• Identify and recommend the most effective tools, frequency and messaging for communicating with target audiences.
• Prioritize resources to establish effective two-way communication with audience segments.
• Develop dependable mechanisms to learn about and share updates about members and affiliates in a timely and effective manner.
• Build and maintain effective communications network with affiliated institutions, organizations and companies.

Oversee Website, Publications and Constituent Database

• Manage ongoing updates to tamest.org, including setting editorial calendar of all features and developing and/or editing content for posting.
• Develop strategy and oversee implementation of key constituent database, including evaluation and selection of technology platform; defining features, structure and reporting capabilities; and building tie-in with website content management.
• Lead development of all printed and online TAMEST publications, including e-newsletters, annual report, event materials, videos and organizational collateral.

Provide Support for TAMEST Forums and Activities

• Develop and implement communication/marketing plans for all TAMEST events and programs, including media outreach, conference presentations and speaker talking points.
• Develop donor relations plan to include meetings, internal and external communications and public relations opportunities.
• Provide additional communications support for other organizational initiatives as needed (i.e., legislative outreach, advocating for critical issues, etc.)
• Serve as staff liaison for TAMEST committees providing oversight to communications efforts, delivering reports, developing meeting agendas, etc.

Skills/Qualifications

• College degree in marketing, journalism, communications, business or related field
  • 7-10 years of marketing communications experience, preferably in scientific, technology or academic organizations
  • Self-starter with strong leadership and project management skills
  • Excellent written and oral communication skills
  • Previous management experience, including hiring, performance management and overseeing external contracts
  • Demonstrated proficiency working with and communicating to senior executives from academia, government and industry
  • Ability to translate top level marketing messages into specific activities that effectively reach key constituents
  • Ability and willingness to contribute at both strategic and tactical levels
  • Commitment to quality internal and external customer service
  • Flexibility and interest in working within a nimble, team-oriented work culture

Compensation

Salary commensurate with relevant experience.

To Apply

Qualified applicants should email cover letter, resume, references and salary requirements to jackie.dobson@trewmarketing.com. Candidates selected for an interview will be notified by February 15th.

What do an architect, engineer, economic strategist, city attorney, nonprofit leader working with homeless teens, and a few marketing and lobbying professionals who have never met have in common? We are among the nine leaders in the Austin and surrounding area selected by the region’s civic-minded elite to the Frank McBee Jr. Fellowship in Civic Entrepreneurship Program for 2010.

The program is a newer component of the larger work of the Austin Area Research Organization (AARO), a nonprofit founded in 1980 by a group of Austin business leaders, including Frank McBee Jr. AARO’s vision is to be the keeper of a dynamic strategic vision for Central Texas, and facilitator of projects important to that strategic vision.

Today, AARO members are a behind-the-scenes group of 90 of Austin and Central Texas’ most influential, non-elected leaders – from business, government, academic, and social equity organizations – committed to giving of their time, talent, and spheres of influence to shape the strategic long-term focus of our burgeoning region. Organized into eight committees, the group works to facilitate the long-term economic and social well-being of Central Texas by researching and addressing strategic, public policy issues in priority areas:  Education, Energy, Health Care, Higher Education, Leadership, Social Equity, Transportation, and Water.

The McBee Fellowship develops young leaders in the region through a year of service in AARO. “In a region with extraordinary growth such as ours, collaborative civic leadership is crucial to ensuring the long-term economic and social well-being of our future,” said Martha Smiley, AARO President and Of Counsel, Winstead Attorneys. “Our rigorous McBee Fellowship in Civic Entrepreneurship Program offers exceptional promising leaders first-hand experience working with many of the most influential business and community leaders as they work strategically to shape our long-term future in complex, critical areas such as energy, water, and public education.”

Frank McBee Jr., who was called the “dean of Austin high tech,” helped found Tracor Inc. in 1955 and encouraged more than 20 former Tracor employees to start their own companies, fueling the development of this now exploding sector of Austin’s economy.

It is an inspiration and a pleasure to be among such promising young leaders working in Frank McBee’s honor. I look forward to a year of learning, mentorship, and inspiration as we work with our mentors and AARO members to ensure the economic and social vitality of our incredibly unique, beautiful and prosperous city and region for the next 50 years and beyond.

Welcome to 2010 — a new year and a new decade for us all.  For many in the non-profit community, January 2010 marks a survival celebration of the tough economy we’ve endured, and a time to invest for growth.

The TREW Crew, and others in the non-profit blog community, have put together some resolutions to consider as you plan your marketing investments for the new year.

I resolve to invest time in a sound strategy. Where do I want my organization to be in January 2011?  January 2013?  What do we hope to accomplish?  How will we measure our success?  Does the whole organization know what our strategy is, and are resources aligned to meet our goals?  Time spent in strategic planning pays off exponentially.  By investing time in developing a strategic marketing plan, you have the ability to tie budget dollars to goals, to prioritize initiatives and ensure each individual activity reinforces the next, and to ensure consistent messages are delivered in an integrated manner so the impact of your investment spreads rapidly.

I resolve to establish partnerships. Cultivating partnership can hold many benefits, including increased credibility, exposure to new audiences, and supplementing your limited budget. Co-marketing partnerships can be time-intensive, but once established with goals aligned, they can have a long and powerful win-win contribution to both organizations. Examples of potential partners include major donors or complementary organizations. We recommend choosing a select few potential partners that best align to your organizational goals, dedicating time to understanding each others’ goals and care-abouts, and creating formal, measurable plans with agreed-upon, consistent messages for joint activities.  Sample partnership activities can be as simple as website cross-linking and joint e-mail campaigns to event presentations and co-service offerings.

I resolve to deepen my relationships with top audience segments. The better you understand your audience segments, the more success you will have engaging them with your organization.  We recommend you invest time in analyzing a few prioritized audience segments and building a contact strategy customized to them.  Do this thoroughly, even if it means not getting to all of your segments today.  Conduct research — what do they care about?  What are their triggers for engaging with your organization?  For volunteering or donating?  What method of communication do they prefer?  Use low-cost research methods such as online surveys or social networking to gather data. Then, build a profile from this research and craft messages and a communications strategy appropriate for this audience. You will not only speak more effectively to this audience, but you will use your finite dollars more efficiently.

I resolve to learn more ideas through TREW Marketing Spotlight and these other industry blogs supporting the non-profit community:

• Convio ConnectionCafe
• Tech Soup
• Robert Weiner Blog
• Social Actions Blog
• NTEN Blog
• Mobile Commons
• FI Space
• Everyday Giving
• Donor Power Blog
• Beth’s Blog
• Beaconfire Wire
• A View from Judi Sohn

Need help getting started with your new year’s marketing resolutions? Contact TREW Marketing today.

We’ve done it!  TREW Marketing has achieved what a third of all new businesses fail to do – survive and thrive through the second year of business.  Moreover, we did it in one of the worst recessions of the last century. And so, we are ready to raise our glasses in a toast to all we’ve accomplished, learned and muddled through. And to thank our customers, friends, colleagues and family who have chosen and supported us along the way.

We had a fantastic start to the year following the December 2008 launch of The Next Frontier, a report on the state of K-12 math and science education in Texas by TREW customer, The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas.

Following the launch, we were we were honored with two awards by the Texas Public Relations Association — Best in Texas for Non Profit Marketing and Best Publication. Both awards recognized our work in support of TAMEST, including broad media coverage statewide and nationally.

As we all know, early 2009 became a scary time of economic uncertainty. And being a new entrepreneur with little historical compare, the uncertainty was even greater.  Thank goodness we didn’t know what we didn’t know when we didn’t know it when we founded TREW in 2008!

In hindsight, we now see that with adversity and challenge comes opportunity. Such was the case with us. We had a bit of time for soul searching, and the result was to narrow our business focus, leveraging our decades of passion and hard marketing work collaborating with scientists and engineers in industry and academia.

With a renewed sense of purpose, we created the TREW mission statement:

We create smart ideas to promote the innovations of our technical and academic leaders.

And then we did what every marketing pro working with scientists and engineers does – headed out to NIWeek! It was great being back to see our NI friends, meet new people, and identify new opportunities to help engineering and scientific companies achieve their business goals through strategic, creative, smart marketing.

Since narrowing the focus of our business, we have had the incredible good fortune of growing and working with a number of committed, smart, and collaborative customers.  We’d like to brag a bit about them here, and share a few examples of the exciting work we’ve had the opportunity to deliver this year:

• With what felt like a reunion with an old friend, NI Alliance Member Wineman Technology brought TREW Marketing on-board to develop a marketing strategy and manage ongoing implementation, redesign their website, and implement an e-newsletter program. We also created and manage a robust search engine advertising plan.
• Cerium Labs, a semiconductor and electronics manufacturing analytical laboratory, tapped TREW Marketing’s B2B expertise to audit their marketing activities and provide support with targeted marketing efforts to promote their electronics product tear-down services.
• We were proud to see the launch of a new website supporting the Children’s Medical Center Foundation of Central Texas, who raises funds for Dell Children’s Hospital in Austin.  TREW Marketing played a strategic and integral role in this project by developing the website strategy, navigation approach, and content guidance.

• A big milestone for TREW in 2009 was being selected by Europe-based Alfautomazione and its U.S. affiliate, Alfamation USA, to position one company globally in the electronics functional test market. This project has been a fun challenge and even greater reward as we collaborate with the Alfa team to uniquely position them for success in the consumer electronics; video; RF/wireless; medical; and automotive infotainment test markets. Our work includes new branding identity, website, and a targeted marketing plan that includes exciting product launches that we’re looking forward to executing throughout the year.
• And finally, we were very excited to be selected by The University of Texas at Austin as a preferred supplier for marketing research and strategy (Wendy asks that you hold all Aggie jokes – c’mon, it’s business!). One of our first projects has been with the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health to lead a 6-month brand evaluation research project, employing qualitative and quantitative methodologies such as interviews, focus groups, and online surveys.  We look forward to sharing more on the results in our 2010 wrap-up!

With great customers, we need a truly great team. As we’ve continued to grow, so has the TREW Crew. We are happy to welcome new members – including Denise Goluboff, Gail Folkins, Charlie Brown and Birgit Sund – and thank those who are now considered TREW Old Timers– including Kelly Cottrell, Steve Goodwin, and Ryan Kagan.

We are passionate about our work creating ideas for our world’s technical and academic leaders. We are proud of our achievements and growth in 2009, and are grateful to our customers for allowing us to come into their organizations and become a partner to them. As we raise our glasses to 2009, we look forward to more good lessons to be learned and TREW growth in 2010 as strive to reach our vision:

To be the smartest and most collaborative marketing partner serving engineering, science, and academia.

December is here and will quickly fly by.  If you have marketing budget dollars to spend before the year’s end, you are feeling the pressure.  We’ve put together a list of quick, effective marketing investments for you to consider.

1.  Invest in Google Adwords.  Not only are Adwords ideal for reaching a very specific audience, and easy to measure; you can have them live within 24 hours using your corporate credit card.  Be sure to follow best practices — see our Spotlight blog post on this topic for more details.

2.  Reach out to your database. Send an end-of-year email to your customers and prospects.  Be sure the message is not too sales-oriented…offer valuable information such as tech tips and industry news.  Or simply say thank you for their business.  Have not been keeping up with your database?  Use December to update your records, determine ways to segment your target audiences, and perhaps begin plans for a 2010 quarterly newsletter.

3.  Start a blog. December is a great time to set up the back-end mechanics of your new company blog (which would launch in 2010).  These include creating a WordPress account and feeding that account into your website.  Your blog should match the look and feel of your website, which likely means a small amount of creative work.

4.  Refresh content on your website. Conduct a head-to-toe sweep of your website, updating messages and improving your writing (active voice, tighten phrases, etc.).  While looking through your site, uncover lead acquisition opportunities, such as existing white papers and presentations, and post them behind short forms for web visitors to complete.  TREW Marketing writers/editors can be a great resource for this work.

5.  Thank your staff. Has your team gone above and beyond to meet their goals this year?  Be sure they are recognized for their efforts.  This can range from the very simple, such as bringing in bagels and coffee for a surprise treat, to gift certificates or a formal holiday/appreciation event.  An appreciated team will be a motivated team for you in 2010.

6. Gather 2010 marketing plan feedback from an expert. This is an ideal time to bring in a TREW Marketing consultant as a sounding board for your 2010 plans.  During the one or two-day session, we review goals, major marketing campaigns, core messages, and investment by media.  We uncover ways to strengthen your messages, integrate innovative marketing tactics, and measure impact and success.

Contact TREW Marketing and put your December and 2010 marketing plans in motion.

TREW Marketing is pleased to announce the launch of a completely redesigned website for the Children’s Medical Center Foundation of Central Texas, who raises funds for Dell Children’s Medical Center.

TREW Marketing played a critical role in this redesign by developing a strategic marketing plan – starting with a focus on the website – that would create a strong, consistent foundation for the many fundraising programs they lead and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of donor outreach and engagement.

Snapshot of new Children’s Medical Center Foundation website

Snapshot of Former Children’s Medical Center Foundation Website

Armando Zambrano, Annual Giving Director of the Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas, said “TREW Marketing took a strategic and thorough approach to strengthen our marketing efforts at the foundation.  And best of all — I gave direction and they went to work, requiring very little time during the project.  We are thrilled with the results.”

TREW Marketing provided numerous project deliverables, including:

• E-marketing SWOT analysis
• Web goals and strategy, including visitor experience, content categorization, prospect capture, and internal efficiency gains
• Detailed web redesign plan, including navigation, content management and measurement
• Future e-marketing investment prioritized plan

TREW Marketing and the Foundation engaged web design firm Monkee-Boy of Austin Texas to execute the web plan.  Their work included design and programming, including comprehensive content management and the installation of online giving and “my fundraiser” technology solutions.  Moving forward they will provide on-going maintenance of the site.

Are you considering redesigning your website?  Contact TREW Marketing today to discuss your goals, explore options, and get rolling.

It looked easy.  I chose a few keywords, gave Google my credit card number, and BAM!  My website should be crawling with qualified prospects, right?  But instead my website bounce rate skyrocketed and I quickly spent my monthly marketing budget with nothing to show for it.

Sound familiar?  If so, it is time to better understand the 5 steps of building an outrageously successful paid search, or pay-per-click (PPC) campaign.  But first, why should you invest in PPC instead of improving your natural search results?

Search engine optimization is a journey, and the destination can sometimes be far in the distance, especially for small start-ups.  While working to improve natural relevancy, PPC can be a good bridge marketing activity.

PPC is a highly targeted marketing activity with excellent accountability.  For example, you can purchase  ”long tail” terms, very specific to exactly who you would like to target.  You can measure exactly how many prospects saw and clicked through on your ad.  Then measure their behavior on your website.

Let’s Get Started!

1.  Keyword selection

You’ll likely invest a good deal of time determining which keywords to purchase.  I recommend selecting fairly specific keywords.  They may not be quite as well-trafficked as more general terms, but those seeking these keywords will be a more qualified audience, and your return-on-investment will be higher.

Give some thought to how your target audience seeks information.  Will they search by typing in their challenge/problem, or will they seek a solution?  Test keywords both ways and see which is more fruitful.

As you pull your preliminary list together, give thought to your budget.  You can quickly run up the tab by selecting very popular words, or by trying to be in the #1 spot.  We do not recommend these tactics.  Choose less crowded search terms, and embrace the bargain #2 or #3 position, knowing that you will be every bit as successful at #1, but pay much less for your results.

2.  Driver (Ad Text)

Now that you’ve chosen your keywords, each will need a catchy title and ad text that drives the reader to visit your site.  Focus on what you offer, and be specific.  Try to capture qualified leads, and steer away everyone else.  Otherwise you’ll pay for undesirable visitors to click and bounce away — not a good use of your marketing dollars.

Take some time to study other companies’ adwords.  You will quickly obtain ideas of the good, bad and ugly.  Here is a recent ad run by TREW Marketing:

On one hand, this ad is specific.  If you were reading and not a test and measurement company, or not interested in marketing, you would probably not click.  The ad could be improved by utilizing a more compelling offer, such as a white paper.

3.  Landing Page

I’ve clicked on your ad…where do you send me?  To your home page?  Or is there a more specific area of your site that provides targeted information?  The most important thing is to deliver on whatever offer you’ve promised.  If you have a general ad, sending someone to your home page is fine.  If your ad offers a white paper on the latest changes in industry test standards, make sure the visitor can easily find the white paper after they click .

Often our TREW clients will run ads specific to an industry or application, and then drive traffic to that specific landing page on their site.  This is very effective to retain visitors and compel them to learn more.

4.  Call to action (offer)

Use your landing page to continue a relationship with this new visitor.  What action would you like the visitor to take?  Subscribe to your newsletter?  Call your sales team?  Craft one or several calls to action, placed prominently on the landing page.  Set goals for conversion to next activity, and measure how well you are doing.  If this is an area of weakness, consider creating new offers, such webcasts or white papers.

5.  Next steps

After all the work that you’ve done, be sure you follow through.  If you’ve promised a sales person will call, be sure that information is passed to the sales team.  If you’ve offered a newsletter, be sure they are added to the list and you actually send something out.  And so on.  This is your opportunity to close the sale.

PPC campaigns do not run on autopilot.  We recommend measuring often, experimenting and tweaking your keywords, ad titles, ad copy, landing pages, and offers.  Other areas to test include frequency, languages, and 3rd party Google ad feeds.  It is a busy job managing Google adwords, but the payoff can be quite outstanding.

TREW Marketing has deep expertise in PPC, and offers monthly retainers to manage paid search campaigns.  Interested in learning more?  Contact us today at info@trewmarketing.com.

Webcasts are an effective, low-cost marketing tool to deliver content to your prospects and customers. In a recent workshop, sponsored by the Austin Entrepreneur Network, I presented an overview and best practices for creating webcasts.  (The full presentation is available on SlideShare).  Below is a how-to guide to help you create webcasts based upon the presentation.

Where do I start?

There are five steps to the webcast creation process.  I’ll walk you through each step of the process, and point you to additional resources to learn more.

Goals

As with any new marketing project, it is important to identify why you are engaging in this activity and how to measure the outcome.  Sample goals for webcasts include capturing leads and moving prospects closer to purchase.  Sample metrics may include web visits, webcast registrationts, webcast attendees, percentage close rate to next activity, and cost per lead.

Content and Presenter

Creating a compelling title and meaty content is paramount to the success of your webcast.  Think from the prospect’s point of view:  what problem can you help them solve?  What innovative new approach can you educate them about?

As you begin to assemble your powerpoint slides and dynamic elements, such as videos, demos, etc. for the webcast, follow presentation best practices such as limiting the amount of text per slide.  See my checklist, Top 12 Webcast Presentation Tips for more details.

Select a presenter who performs well in this environment, and set them up for success through preparation and run-throughs.  In the Top 12 list, you’ll see advice for this presenter, such as energy, variation in tone, and first-person language.

Delivery Platform

There are many technology platforms available for webcasts.  If you are a small business and/or not sure you are ready to make the webcast technology investment, considering starting off with a 3rd party host, such as an industry publication with a robust online presence (example:  TechOnline) or an industry association with webcast opportunities.

If you are seeking a technology solution, begin with your list of requirements and then match possible vendors to these requirements.  While there are clear industry leaders for webcasts (Adobe Connect and Cisco WebEx, among a few others), there are also smaller vendors who have robust features and a low monthly price tag. Gartner recently published a study of technology providers called The Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing that may be helpful in your evaluation.

Promotion

There are many ways you can promote your webcast.  First you need to determine whether or not the webcast will be live, as this time constraint adds an important dimension to your marketing efforts.  Another question to ask is whether this webcast is a call-to-action from another marketing activity, such as a trade show.  The slide below provides ideas of what activities you might take advantage of when promoting your webcast.

It is key to communicate to your webcast attendees not only to invite them, but to provide important logistics information and reminders.  Once the webcast has taken place, you should follow up immediately with two key items:  a short survey (so that you can determine whether you met their expectations) and a….

Call to Action

Once your attendee has participated in the webcast, what would you like them to do next?  How will you move them closer to purchasing your product or service? Some sample calls to action are included below:

By following these steps and utilizing marketing best practices, you can create webcasts that are extremely effective and low-cost.

Need help kicking off a webcast program?  Contact TREW Marketing today.

I recently attended a local meeting of the Austin Social Media Breakfast Club where I had the pleasure of hearing John Moore talk about – or more accurately, test us on – the power of Word of Mouth Marketing from his years in leadership roles at companies such as Starbucks and Whole Foods. Based on the findings from research conducted by Keller Fay in June 2009 in the US, I thought John did a good job of testing our knowledge while also incorporating social media and word of mouth tactics into this talk, so I’ll do the same here in this post.

To start, my first question – what is Word of Mouth (WOM) Marketing? Give this some thought and tweet your answer now using the hashtag #smbaustin. We’ll come back to this later.

And now a few quiz questions:

1. 76% of consumers believe companies are untruthful in their advertising – True or False?

2. 68% of of global consumes say recommendations from other consumers are the most credible form of advertising – True of False?

3.

4.

5. 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity on Twitter – True or False?

6. 22% of all brand-related conversations are sparked directly from advertising – True or False?

One of the greatest takeaways for me from this discussion was the power of the total customer experience in reinforcing your brand promise and creating great word of mouth buzz about your company, product, or service. If the brand promise of your company or service is marketed one way, but the real life customer experience is contrary to this, then your brand will suffer. At the end of the day, while having a thoughtful and well-executed marketing strategy is critical, if every employee and every customer interaction is not aligned to the brand, not only is a huge opportunity missed to reinforce the marketing message and strengthen the brand, but likely the brand will be or is already damaged from the broken promise.

This power of real-world customer interactions also reinforces a key finding made by Keller Fay COO Brad Fay in this article by Marketing Daily, “…more than 80% [of WOM] relates to the experiences that consumers have with brands.” So while Twitter and Facebook are all the rage (and they can play an effective, complimentary role in employee, customer and community engagement), good old in-person and phone conversations are still king.

OK, so now for the answers. First, a definition of WOM Marketing. The one I wrote down was “When someone passes along information about a company, product or experience.” John offered this at the end, “The act of giving consumers a reason to talk about your company/product.” He followed this with another take which I thought was very cool – “earning an opinion” – and offered that if you’re doing something polarizing in the market, it’s good. Some will love and some will hate, but you have earned an opinion, and that builds awareness and discussion, which marketers can then turn into action.

Here are the other answers:

1. True

2. False – it’s 68%

3 &4. I’ll report on this in a week after the poll closes and the votes are tallied

5. True

6. True (which means 78% of WOM is sparked by something other than advertising, such as great customer experiences as noted above)

A big thanks to John Moore, whose talk was as good as his website and blog. For anyone interested in WOM marketing, I highly recommend a regular visit to his site to hear great stories, learn about new books, and be entertained while becoming more knowledgeable. I am getting ready to start reading one John gave to me at the meeting, I Love You More Than My Dog. I’ll report out on it in a future post.

If you are like me, owner of a small-medium-sized business, you want to know how your website is performing but have limited time on your hands.  Most likely you use Google Analytics as your reporting tool, but don’t spend much time understanding all the details in the basic dashboard or digging into some of the more advanced reporting features.

In this blog I’ll describe some metrics that you may not have taken the time to understand, and highlight a few more advanced features.  To do this, I’ll walk you through a recent experience of mine when catching up on our TREW website.

My goal was to refresh some of our web content, but first I needed to dig in and measure how well my site was performing, as this informs some of the changes I should make.  I was also curious how a recent Google Adword I purchased performed.

When our website was developed, we included some code from Google which enables me to gather data via Google Analytics.  As you may know, this tool is free, easy to read, and provides a nice dashboard to show how your website is performing.

The basic dashboard from Google Analytics quickly provided me with the overall health of my site.  It showed me how people found my site, how they navigated through, and ultimately how they converted.

Most of the metrics are self-explanatory, such as visits and average time on site, but in seeking more context to these metrics, here is what I learned:

• Bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit your site and immediately leave.  In other words, they found your site irrelevant.  This could indicate an issue with your home page content, or the manner in which you drive traffic to your site.
• Sites with blogs tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on site.  Visitors will quickly “stop by” and see what the blog topic is, perhaps read the article quickly, and navigate away.
• The data on referring sites was wonderful.  I found out about new sites who are recommending TREW Marketing, and can monitor referrals from sites where I have established relationships.
• The list of keywords gave me an idea of my site’s search performance with my desired keywords.

After moving past the basic report, I noticed that I can set up goals and funnels.  Hello, wonderful Google engineers, what is this?  It seems that you’ve taken the basic marketing principles of funnels and conversion rates, and made them easy to customize and track for my website.  This too is free and convenient.

Here is how it works:  first you define a goal for your website.  As an example, let’s say your goal is to increase subscriptions to your newsletter.  You then identify the before and after pages where you a) ask for the subscription, and b) measure completion of the subscription, such as the exit page “thank you for subscribing to my fabulous newsletter.”  Congratulations, you’ve just now completed a goal, and part of your funnel.  You can now easily monitor this goal through your Google Analytics reports.

To create the entire funnel, you identify several different goals that are linked together, designed to usher a prospect through the buying cycle.  Think of this as a mini funnel to your overarching marketing funnel of activities and conversions.  It may not fill in every datapoint you need, but it brings you a long way down the road.

Google has a great resource on their site called Conversion University.  Here you can find more in-depth information on all the Google Analytics features and capabilities in the form of online tutorials.  I have just scratched the surface in this blog.  In particular, If you sell products or services through your website, you’ll want to take a deeper dive.

Need help interpreting your Google analytics report, taking your website performance metrics to the next level, or building a comprehensive marketing funnel?  Contact TREW Marketing today.