I’m currently bridging the gap between data as a science and as an art, in order to tell a story and craft a strategy. At least, that’s how I summarized it in a tweet.

Digital strategy is sometimes a complicated idea. Let’s boil this down to basics. I’m assessing: web analytics, marketing and financial reports, market profile data, and more. The result is the calculated formation of how the client will present online and connect with target markets.

And it’s pretty awesome. Data paints a pretty clear picture, when you know how to put it all together.

That said, I apologize for the gaps in my updates. I’ll be sure to get blogging back on track as soon as I can. Thanks for your patience!

Perhaps you realize you need a “good conversion rate,” but you may not understand exactly what that means. That’s okay. Here’s what you, as a business owner or marketing professional, need to know.

Definitions:
Conversion: A user of your website completes a desired task (such as making a purchase, initiating contact, signing up for an eNewsletter, leaving a blog comment, etc). The desired task is completely relative to your business website. Here’s an offline example: A customer walks into your store and makes a purchase.

Conversion rate: The percentage of ALL website users who complete the desired task. If your conversion rate is 5%, this means 5 out of every 100 website visitors have completed your desired task. You may have multiple desired tasks; each will have a unique conversion rate.

Bounce rate: The percentage of all website visitors who immediately leave your website once they arrive. If your bounce rate is 30%, this means 30 out of 100 website visitors saw your one page of your website and left immediately.
My favorite way to illustrate this concept is with the bouncy ball. A user is a bouncy ball. Your website is the wall. Unless your wall is permeable and friendly, the ball bounces right off.

How do I track conversion rates?
Your analytics tool (such as Google Analytics) must be set up to accurately track conversions. Website developers typically do this for you when installing the analytics tool, though you must define what counts as a “conversion.”

How do I impact my conversion rate?
Qualified traffic: Driving traffic is often a large part of the online marketing budget; it is completely for shame if the traffic being driven doesn’t convert. Ensuring your website visitors are actually relevant or interested in your business website’s content is critical to success. Do not waste time blindly pushing people to visit your website. Understand your target market, know where to find them, then work on traffic building.

Information architecture: The way the content on your website is organized needs to intuitively make sense to users. If it’s confusing, they’ll probably just leave. (As a bonus, your information architecture also impacts your search engine visibility.)

User experience: The way a user interacts with your website is essentially the “user experience.” Things are laid out and designed in such a way to create a seamless, easy interaction. An offline example is interior design.
Creating a product experience online isn’t easy. In fact, it takes a lot of work. Once a user has become aware of your website, they either bounce (leave) or consume information. If your user experience is planned and implemented well, they might progress into participating, converting or even advocating on your behalf.

Engaging a Target Market: Graduating from User Traffic to User Advocate
Driving website traffic is often a significant part of your online marketing budget. Make the most of your investment by turning traffic into an engaged user advocate. You’ll learn how to turn your users into brand promoters by qualifying traffic sources, creating an engagement-friendly website, and letting your users know you’re plugged in!

Here is the presentation slides and video:

Presentation begins at 20:00 below:

More information at LA2M.

Official url: www.digitalmark.me (currently re-directs here)

Many have asked when the launch party is. I assure you we’ll get that on the books shortly. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, check out the business card mockups and let me know what you think. Screenshots include front and back. The difference? Highlight. Dislike both? Please comment with your suggestions. (It’s true: Your most difficult client will always be yourself!)

Click each image to enlarge.

Digital Mark Business Card sans highlight

Digital Mark Business Card with highlight

Photo by Acacia Shanklin

I’m starting an adventure to help my talented friend, Acacia Shanklin, combine what she loves (fashion photography) with what I love (online business). We had our first photo shoot in Detroit this Saturday with some phenomenal results.

Acacia shoots like a true professional–she even brought us a veggie tray for the 3.5 hour session. While she worked, I tried my best to guide what we’d need for the web. The reality is she didn’t need much guidance!

While we work together to bring some incredible new things to the table, I’ll keep sliding in sneak previews pre-launch.

Get ready. This will be incredible.

Scarf featured by stylist/designer Sha’ree Shanklin

Whether coming from HIPPA or Joe Blow, a law suit is always a headache. You can avoid these issues by following a few rules:

1. Start with strategy. Organizing your efforts will make all of the difference. While you should have a method for listening for your brand across the web, focusing efforts on social media websites that are most relevant to your brand’s community will reap the greatest benefits. Outline where boundaries lie.
2. Choose your team wisely. Interns are great for teaching, not for de-facto project management. Avoid traditional PR pros, as they may stifle the conversational-feel, but keep them close by. Those responsible for conversations on behalf of your brand need to be people you would put on your sales floor, manage your press conference, and “live” the brand. These critical thinkers need to understand the boundaries of the industry and of the company. This generally discludes those who use stuffy press releases, RSS feeds, or overly technical jargon to communicate. Remember: Social media is akin to a conference call, not a megaphone.
3. Consider what you CAN share. Consider your everyday offline conversations with potential clients. What do you discuss? How do you engage them? Is it always all-business?
4. Start with which resources you CAN provide. Your business is successful because you provide things your consumers need. This makes you the expert. Take a look around the office for trade publications and books. These topics influence your business for a reason. Check out the content within them and share it.
5. Understand what makes your brand human. Chances are your consumers don’t have particularly fuzzy feelings your brand’s legal team. In fact, those guys have probably never crossed your consumers’ minds. Most of the conversations in social media are topical and resourceful.

CASE STUDY: Hospital system & HIPAA

A hospital system I’ve worked with had the same concern:

How do we honor patient privacy (and HIPAA) while connecting with the social web community?

Let’s consult the rules:

1. Start with strategy.
   We plugged in a few tools to listen for relevant keywords. We identified what types of hospital information we could not go into detail about. For example: No discussing patient-specific care. No mentioning doctors by name without prior consent. No providing specific medical advice.
2. Choose your team wisely.
   This particular hospital system had a great network of hospital support staff ready to jump in. While a member of the marketing team managed most of the day-to-day engagement, doctors, nurses, and pharmacists took a few hours each month to help out. With the marketing team member guiding things, getting “buy in” from other team members was a breeze.
3. Start with what you CAN share.
   Just as the hospital had receptionists on each floor the marketing team member could guide the social community around their website and direct to external resources (see number 4). They could talk about and share images from company picnics, published (and exciting!) research milestones, and the latest charity.
4. Consider what resources you CAN provide.
   Just like major health magazines–and even the government–providing topical health information was very much on the table. For this particular type of information a disclaimer was always required. We chose condition-specific advice (“Cooking for New Diabetics: The sugar exchange”) and general healthy living topics (“Family Health: Exercises every age will love”).
   
5. Understand what makes your brand human.
   We took a look at how some members of the community were already engaging with each other. The hospital system was encouraged by budding condition-specific communities such as My Cancer Place and KnowCancer. While they avoided joining communities like this, it was clear the community was actively discussing their experiences online.
   Listening is an incredible tool for building trust. So we took a look at what causes a community to trust a hospital system. It was clear: The trust fell in the hands of the human element–the staff. Consumers trust doctors beyond their credentials. Consumers trust them because they feel doctors understand their human-needs–and their bodies.

The result was an engaged hospital system. They knew the community unlike many businesses within it. Opening up to the social web community allowed this client even greater understanding and way to connect and share resources in an unprecedented manor. They were able to provide healthy living tips without the exorbitant costs of printing. They were able to follow up on consumer concerns because they were listening. They were able to further the communities’ trust because they participated.

YOUR TURN: What red tape has your company run into? How can these tips change your approach to the social web?

Focus on conversion rate and avoid getting lost in the details–just for a minute.

For all of you nerds out there: Video shot with an HTC Droid

Business websites can hold similar potential, when used correctly. “Used correctly” means regarding a business website with the similar time, strategy and consideration as you might a brick-and-mortar.

How we determined investments: The Research

There are many critical pieces of data I examine before making recommendations on a project. Here are a few examples:

• Current and historical website performance
• Multiple offline business considerations (such as new markets, fulfillment constraints and benefits, etc)
• Traffic origins
• Search demand
• Market opportunity
• Competition
• Conversion rates

Once a complete audit is finished, recommendations on moving forward can be made. Recommendations detail what it takes to achieve detailed performance goals and return on investment projections.

Returns on Investment: The Results

Then the project kicks off. I love logging into Google Analytics and seeing those green arrows. They indicate results; namely, gangbuster traffic. Looking further into the analytics revealed increasing conversion rates (read: SALES), a bounce rate that surpassed my original goals, and diversified traffic streams.

How we got here: The Tools Using carefully evaluated data, strategies were created to best capitalize on opportunity for sustained  growth. Some of the investment tactics we used:

• Used social media to share educational, entertaining content (Site traffic up by over 600 visits/day!)
• Established relevant SEO with content marketing (Ranked and linked for keywords that convert traffic)
• Made both major and minor user experience (website design and layout) updates (Made it easy for the user to convert)
• Stabilized infrastructure (Ensuring increased website performance, as well as improved search engine ranking)
• Used Google Adwords to drive traffic throughout updates for “quick wins” (Keep cash flow moving in during construction)

And this is only the beginning!

Obvious disclaimer: All projects are unique, so don’t automatically anticipate the same results I’ve had in this instance for your own. As I’ve said, it takes a calculated projections to completely understand what an eCommerce (or business) website is capable of–and not capable of.

I invite you to share your stories in the comments. What has worked best for you?

View the rest of the answers on LinkedIn here

Transcribed after the jump

Q. “As a recent grad, I have been thinking about what do you feel is the #1 skill to know for Online and Internet Marketers? Thanks in advance.”

A. “Measurement, measurement, measurement.

The reality is the tools will always been changing and adapting. The critical element that will never waver is measurement. Understand performance measurements, which vary by medium (of course), and you will best understand how to make the biggest impact for your clients.”

Have you ever noticed extra advertising on the products you buy? A GAP label on a t-shirt. A movie promotion on a coke can. A movie-themed toy in a McDonald’s kid’s meal. What has made these products so strong that they are now able to cross promote sometimes completely unrelated products?

There are a few components in creating a brand that transcend off-and-online realms, so keep that in mind if you’re working on an offline campaign as well.

1. Be consistent. The web is full of properties to engage markets upon; each has its own rules, trends, and unique qualities. This provides a perfect storm for inconsistent branding. Have a clear vision of how you will communicate branding messages and, if on social media, how you will transform a branding message into engagement or conversation. Determine how the brand “voice” will sound and only change that voice to meet the norm for the property.
2. Cross-link engagement properties. If you’re on Facebook, share your Twitter account. If you’re on LinkedIn, share your Skype. If you’re on BusinessExchange, share your blog. (Funny how I did that, no?) It gives users a way to learn more, connect more solidly, and/or chose how they want to engage with your business. As a bonus, it also helps you build link popularity for better search engine visibility.
   The rest of the tips after the jump…
   
3. Reserve usernames. Your username for posting or sharing should be (surprise, surprise) consistent. Use the name your market already knows you by (ie: Don’t change “McDonalds” to “Best Burgers” or “McBurgerLover”). You’ll only create more for your market to remember, as well as a recognition curve for user engagement.
4. Treat avatars as secondary logos. Just because it’s a small graphic, doesn’t mean it doesn’t make a big impact. It does. The Huffington Post has quite a long name–not something easy to read in an 150×150 pixel box. Instead they used the same color scheme but created a clean, simple, symbolic piece that their existing market could pair with their messages.


Huffington Post logo

transformed into this:



HuffingtonPost avatar

5. Keep content moving. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds are a beautiful thing. They allow businesses to (almost) effortlessly share content throughout the web. If you’re doing it right, your business is creating content on a regular basis. Keep the content moving beyond just your company’s website through things like content market and social media sharing.

Please share your own tips and what you’ve done to reinforce a solid online brand in the comments!

Side note: The photo of the Coke Zero can is from a flight this week. Have you noticed the insane amount of cross-promotions there are on airplanes these days? It’s a way of cutting costs–and I don’t mind that a bit. If you’re interested in a great example of this, check out this short (60 second) video blog from last year: