To review where we were at the steps are below those already discussed are marked off.

The steps:

• Determine your goals
• Map them out at a very high level to tie it all together (a find a graphic is best)
• Add the ability to track your goals
• Plan your communication
• Set up your reporting to measure progress

1.     Plan your communications

Every post and newsletter should have your original goals in mind. So before you send your first tweet, post or newsletter, know what you’re aiming to do with it. It’s not enough to just be doing it. You’re in business; you need a return on investment.

If there’s none to be had, or you’re merely ‘just existing’ in the social space ‘because you feel you have to’ you’re wasting valuable time and money. Get out now.

The first step in planning (with your goals in mind) is to know your audience and be aware of the platform you’re working with. Ultimately, your goal with Facebook and your newsletter is probably the same – lead the prospect back to your website to engage deeper or purchase.

However, the way you develop engagement, reach and communicate through each may be significantly different. Why? Many of the followers may be the same people. Surely they’re the same demographic? Why is it then you’d choose a different content strategy between Facebook and your Newsletter?

A few reasons, in short:  Different platforms = Different rules.

The rules on Facebook

• It’s OK to post a few times a week. It amuses me how people will tell you to only post once a week on Facebook. The figures quoted vary, but Facebook ensures no more than roughly 15% of your audience sees your post anyway (part of their monetization strategy). So even posting a few times a week it’s pretty unlikely you’re going to feel ‘spammy’ to any individual in your audience.
• Content should be primarily about increasing reach and virality to improve your chances of being seen in more news feeds. Talking about yourself and your offers all the time won’t do this. Keep audience problems and interests front of mind.
• Mix in some promo posts once in a while. Max out at around 1 to every 4 engagement posts. Your posts aimed at creating engagement will be building your reach, audience and trust by now. Therefore, more users should see your selling post and hence you’re likely to get more engagement on these as well. Bear in mind – your ultimate goal is to push these users back to your site.

The rules on your Newsletter

• Unless you have a super focused user-centric email, you simply won’t be able to send your newsletter any more than once a fortnight. How often you do will of course depend on your audience and your content.
• Preservation of your newsletter audience is important. It’s likely one of the most valuable digital assets you have. Treat the audience with respect; communicate only very relevant, targeted offers or information. Anything less, will see your audience unsubscribe or delete you pretty quick.

For both platforms, you should have a pretty good idea on who you’re communicating with. Facebook Insight offers a pretty good depth of information on your audience and their engagement. Understand their needs, their problems and speak to those. This is ‘Marketing 101’ but still applicable.

The content calendar

Get an example content calendar here. If you’d like a spread sheet version, just drop a comment down below and I’ll send you one.

I use these to help plan communications through social media channels for clients. The example is approached from the perspective of an online video games retailer – with a 15-30 year old male audience in mind. It should give you the picture.

It helps the client keep focused on the TYPE of content to share and the FREQUENCY when to share.

2.     Set up your reporting to measure progress

We’ve probably all been guilty of aimlessly clicking through, glaring at Google Analytics stats for our web sites at some time, without anything really purposeful resulting from it. The sheer volume of data available can be extremely distracting.

For all intents and purposes, most of the stats in Google Analytics are useless to you.  If you keep this in mind, you’ll waste far less time glazing at data and graphs that bear very little relevance to your goals.

Obviously, when you start your content marketing strategy you’re going to want to know if it’s working for you – so where do you start?

In the first article I covered making sure you’re able to track your goals by setting up event and campaign tracking in Google Analytics. If you’ve done this, you should now be in a position to create meaningful actionable reports.

Start by revisiting your goals. Every one of them is measureable through Analytics, Facebook Insights or through Mail Chimp reports.

Remember to approach analysis of the data in the right way. For example: If you’re in a seasonally affected business (e.g. online retail) getting 10 new newsletter subscribers in April is a far better result than getting 10 new subscribers in November when Christmas is a month away and website traffic is triple what it usually is.

The numbers are relative. Compare this April with last April. This quarter with the same quarter last year, and so on.

Unlike your website audience which may vary significantly with seasonality, you’re Facebook and Newsletter audiences are probably pretty stable and predictable in size. Therefore you probably are in a position to compare engagement month in, month out. How many people clicked your call to action compared to how many people saw/received the communication?

The goal with your reporting is to determine cause and effect through your content marketing.

e.g.

• What type of Facebook post gets the best engagement?
• What call to action on you newsletter is most clicked?
• What competitions/offers do audiences engage with most?
• What copy works best on your newsletter subscribe page?

Where to from here? Learn from these findings and try again. The beauty of this game is, you’re never going to achieve 100% engagement, so you’re always going to have room to improve!

If you’ve taken any action as a result of these posts, please comment below. I’d love to hear from you,  how you have or plan to implement what you’ve learnt.

If you do make a decision to compete on price then you need to commoditise your product or service immediately. You will need to ensure that your model and focus is to be the cheapest and the most efficient and for many years to come. If you do take this strategy, remember that there are many competitors who can probably do it cheaper and possibly even better. Having said that, you can still position yourself well enough to create a strong brand. Just make sure you get it right and if you have any doubts then don’t do it at all.

It’s a given that “price” is an inherent factor in any transaction. Buyers understand that they must pay a cost for your product or service. But price is not a differentiator, not even when your aim is to draw people to the perceived value of your product or service by charging a super-high price. Being expensive is one thing but, if you are not positioned at the premium end of your market, that’s another thing entirely and you’re probably doomed to fail.

Just because your price is different from others doesn’t mean that your product or service is any different. It just makes it cheaper or more expensive. These two words are not effective in describing your product or service.

Time for a reality check. Regardless of how unique you think you are, somewhere else in the world someone else is offering the same product or service. More than likely, you have real competitors much closer to home than you think. Even if you were first, you won’t be “only” for long. So you have to compete and reducing your price seems like the obvious answer. Be warned, if you reduce your price, your competitors are likely to follow. Before you know it, you are engaged in a race downward to the cheapest price. That’s a race that has no winners, just occasional survivors.

Even with big retailers, now is the right time to start moving away from price as the main message. The answer lies elsewhere. It lies in the value you can add to consumers that encourages them to come to you, not just that you happen to be slightly cheaper.

You need to come up with a successful differentiation strategy that will move you from competing primarily on price to competing on non-price factors.

So remember, get your positioning right and quality sales leads will follow.

Most importantly in writing this, my aim is to get someone (hopefully you) to take action. At least one step towards understanding your goals or your audience better – and if you do, I’d love you to come back and share it with me.

If you can’t be bothered reading the full article jump to this point to get the most-important-must-do-takeaway. I simply can’t let you leave without it!

The problem

Your success online can be directly attributed to how well you go getting users to engage with your brand and take action. The old adage of ‘more visitors are better’ is dead. You need to be concerned with how many visitors you entice to take action.

Technology moves fast. However true it may be though, I believe it’s the abundance of tools available to help you manage your website which actually ends up intimidating and eventually paralysing you into a state of inaction and the resulting inability to effectively measure your website’s performance.

The tools themselves are not the problem. In isolation, most of them I’ve come across have a very intuitive interface, are learnable in a matter of hours, even for a novice.

I’ve said before in an article on leading a user to a conversion goal online; if you give people too many options they’re likely to choose none. I think the same can be said about the plethora of resources available to manage campaigns and track your website.

The process: Let’s set it up.

Here’s a blueprint – a process if you will – to help you plan your online conversion strategy. This is at its simplest the process I follow to help companies determine their goals online and set up the tools they need to track and report progress.

It’d be impossible in one blog article to run you through everything but hey, that wasn’t the goal of this post anyway! It was to get you take one action and to do this it’s necessary to keep it simple and digestible.

Let’s assume you’re a business that has a website, a Facebook page and you also communicate through a newsletter. This is a pretty common trio, particularly for B2C’s.

The steps:

• Determine your goals
• Map them out at a very high level to tie it all together (I find a graphic is best)
• Add the ability to track your goals
• Plan your communication
• Set up your reporting to measure progress

The tools you’ll need:

• A Mail Chimp account (for emailing your newsletter)
• A Facebook business page (for social media interaction)
• A Hootsuite account (to schedule Facebook content)
• A Google Analytics account (for tracking data)
• Your website (of course!)

1.     Determine your goals

What does your online presence need to do? You want to make a connection with visitors. This’ll be achieved when they subscribe, connect with you on Facebook or make a purchase. One way or another, your goal should be to deepen permission with that visitor to continue to stay in touch, keep them engaged with the brand or make a purchase.

What might your SMART goals look like then?

1. How many people subscribed to your newsletter?
2. How many people purchased from you?
3. How many people moved from your website to view your Facebook page?
4. How many people liked your Facebook page?
5. How many people came back to the website from Facebook?
6. How many people used your contact form?
7. How many people took action on your newsletter?

Notice these goals are focusing on the actions taken by users?

If you’re a B2C and you don’t yet have the ability to track these and/or aren’t reporting on them you’re likely missing a big opportunity and your campaigns certainly aren’t going to be targeted and impactful.

2.     Map them out at a very high level to tie it all together (I find a graphic is best)

I like using the graphic because it makes it really easy to see how to components tie together and what each needs to do, to move the audience closer to the most important goal – enquiring about your product or making a sale.

Your Facebook page shouldn’t simply exist to burn up your time. It exists to support a greater strategy to increase engagement with your audience and draw them closer to your brand over time. It’s all related – so view it that way.

3.     Add the ability to track your goals

Once you know your goals, then next step is to add the ability to track them. What gets measured gets done.

Google Analytics is great however you need to know a couple of little tricks in order to get the specific data you need. These two things, are tracking ‘events’ and ‘campaigns’.

Google Analytics Events:

Example: Goal #3 – how many people moved to Facebook from your website? By default Analytics doesn’t capture outbound events. You have to add JavaScript event tracking to your outbound URLs. I won’t go into the technical stuff; this Google article explains how to do it (you might need your web developer to help you on this).

Google Analytics Campaign Tracking:

If there’s one thing you action from this post…. make it this. You absolutely must have the ability to define what is working for you in your digital networks and what isn’t. Without that data, you’re completely guessing on what’s working and what’s not, and probably wasting a lot of time. This will do help you close the loop.

Example: Goal #5 – How many people came back to the website from Facebook? By reviewing ‘referral data’ in Google Analytics you’ll be able see how many people came in from Facebook, to the website. What you won’t be able to do is tell how effective specific campaigns on Facebook or through your newsletter are.

In order to do that you need to add tracking variables to the URL’s you share. You don’t need to be a coder to do it either – use this URL builder from Google. Make sure you give each link you share a specific campaign name, and define the platform you shared it on. Those two pieces of data will be invaluable later.

Once you have this set up, between Google Anlaytics, ‘Facebook Insights’ and ‘MailChimp Reports’ you’re pretty much ready to report on all of your goals.

# Let me say here, the advice in this blog article is for someone starting out. It’s intended not to overwhelm and deliberately does not include marketing automation and other auto responding tips and techniques. No doubt that’d be of value, but this post is neither the time nor place. This post is about action and keeping it simple.  

If you apply these steps, I can guarantee that you’ll start gathering data that’s insightful and actionable and you’ll be in a much better position to create targeted campaigns with specific outcomes and actions in mind.

Hang with me again – In my the next article I’ll cover how you go about planning and scheduling the communication, gathering the data and we’ll set up a concise report to help you stay focused and keep your progress measureable. I’ll even give you an example content calendar.

Please leave a comment below if you learnt something new of value, if you have a questions or if you end up taking some action as a result. That’d be awesome!

This ‘permission’ and power of making a truly personal connection beyond the simplistic mentality of just trying to get ‘one more follower/connection’ can be expanded into our personal and professional social networks online as well.

I touched on how to do this in a blog article recently which highlighted a few short stories (real connections) which I had made in social over the previous couple of months and how they came about being.

I wanted to expand on this to help you understand not only the importance of creating a personal connection and how to do that, but how to develop deeper permission and engagement from someone in your professional network using LinkedIn instead of that person just being ‘another number’.

4 steps to improved professional connections online.

Step 1: Send a personal message when you invite new people to connect.

It’s much more effective than a generic one and it tells that person they’re an individual to you, worth the 20 seconds it takes to learn something (anything at all) about them. It instantly improved the initial connection.

Step 2: Send a follow up message.

Sometimes, not always (but certainly more consistently the more personal your original message) that person will send a message back. It might be a thank you or a personal message. Take this opportunity to open the communication.

Step 3: This time, reply by email.

This is the point you’re moving that connection/person closer to your personal brand. Email is instantly more personal again. Email is a level of permission ‘up’ from just a LinkedIn connection and the conduit you need to really freely start communiting with that person – outside the dependence of a social platform.

Step 4: Stay in touch with people.

You won’t want to do this with everyone you connect with, just like in life you naturally connect with some people better than others; this is equally true through digital. People like to be heard and supported. Find reasons to promote the person, support them or talk about/mention them. They’ll love you for it and you’ll start enjoying social and digital networking even more and during the process you’ll be building your own personal brand along the way as well.

Why would you do this? Digital Karma. Whether you believe in it or not, this is how the best networkers build strong connections online. They’re contributors, looking to add value to others is the primary reason to be in social. Digital Karma brings it back around.

It’s one of the old pillars of leadership – you have to have a person’s heart before you can ask for their hand. Just as true in digital as well. Be genuine, or you risk being transparent.

And, after the first 2012 deadline you’re probably in one of two situations.

1)     You’re now an accessibility Ninja and your website is your dojo – bring on 2014.
2)     You think your site may comply with Level A but goodness knows what needs to be done for Level AA in 2014 – frankly you’re dreading it.

If you find yourself in the latter group, spend the next 2 minutes of your day getting yourself up to pace on what accessibility should mean to you, and how should go about approaching the new incarnation of your current website.

Accessibility is “designing content which is accessible for everyone.”

Notice in this definition from humanrights.gov.au  there is no discrimination? ‘Everyone’ means you can’t develop a website that is brilliant for a screen reader which fails to be usable for the hearing impaired or even the able audience. Likewise you can’t develop an awesome experience for an able audience, neglecting the needs of the disabled audience.

Like anything in business there’s a need to balance budget with requirements – in this case a conforming accessible website. Add to this to the aforementioned need to provide a functional experience for a broader audience as well, and you’re left with what can seem like a pretty steep learning curve.

How to balance budget, functionality and accessibility.

A strategic process should guide the development of any website. Accessibility in mind from the outset will give you the best chance of neatly intertwining accessibility features through the site without compromising the graphic design or functionality of the site.

As mentioned in my last article, if your trying to build in accessibility features retrospectively  (in particular Level AA requirements) you’re likely either going to fail or come up against pretty significant  obstacles in the underlying code or current user experience.

I can tell you with confidence, you’ll end compromising one of three things; the user experience, the accessibility features or the budget. I’m sure you’ll agree, none of which are situations you want to get yourself into.

Your website should strike a balance of usability, great brand representation and easy access to information for user.

To do this, make sure you’re working with someone that not only knows how to build websites and brands, but also knows accessibility. Building an accessible website is complicated and the WCAG standards can be interpreted quite subjectively.

When you work with someone that’s done it all before you leverage off their experience and the learning curve becomes a non-issue. Through doing so you’ll also decrease your risk and are more likely to get a website with accessibility and functionality harmonised, within budget.

Want to see an example of an accessible site, striking the balance?

We worked with Karingal to develop an accesible website, yet maintain good design and solid usability. The website meets the WCAG Level AA standards and demonstrates accessible features such as;

• Contrasting elements to help the visually impaired identify different elements
• The ability to control the movement on the page through pause and play buttons on interactive elements
• The HTML flows in a logical order to provide a blind user with sequential information (available through a screen reader)
• Alternative versions of pages where accessibility needed to be further improved
• Ability to resize text (without breaking the page layout!)
• HTML markup includes elements to describe content to screen readers

You can choose to approach Level AA compliance in two ways; as a chore, or as an opportunity. The latter will leave you far more satisfied with the experience and result, and you may just gain some insight into how valuable it is to offer accessible content to all audiences.

Legally you can’t discriminate against people living with a disability and neither should you. They have the same needs and rights for information and services as everybody else.

Like this article? Check out my previous article which discusses why it’s important to have an accessible website – the real people that benefit. Or contact us if you like a Level AA accessibility audit on your website to help you know where you are, and where you need to go.

An important need for people living with a disability is equality of access to information on the internet. This user group has all the same needs to access information just like everyone else – for research, services information, purchasing online and staying connected and informed.

Just like any other audience, building a website from the outset with this group in mind is critical to developing a well-structured and accessible site. Dealing with accessibility as an afterthought, or merely as a token gesture is a great way to fail to provide a really useful experience.

What is web accessibility?

Defined by www.humanrights.gov.au “accessible web design refers to the philosophy and practice of designing web content so that it can be navigated and read by everyone, regardless of location, experience, or the type of computer technology used.”

Are you accountable to provide an accessible site?

Yes. The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (“the DDA”) expects you to provide equal access (to products, services and information) for people with a disability where it can reasonably be provided.

Obviously, there’s a bit of ‘grey’ or subjectivity in this. The fact is however, that it can’t be completely ignored. As it stands at the moment, should your site be challenged on its lack of website accessibility (due to this subjective interpretation) you’d probably be given an opportunity to rectify the issue before you were flat out taken to the cleaners. Phew…!

An example of this, and probably the most high profile case in Australia was that of the Sydney Olympics website. In short: A complaint was filed on the grounds of inaccessibility of the website, the website owner was given an opportunity to rectify the issue, which to cut a long story short, was determined to be unsatisfactory and thereby in breach of the DDA. Result: Time to pay up buddy!

Government institutions are now being held to account on a higher level (WCAG 2.0). These standards outline the best practices and common ways to achieve said best practices to provide an accessible site. I guess this stems from the fact there’s really not much ‘grey’ that if you’re government you exist to provide information and services to 100% of the community.

Take law and government out of the picture and you’re still left with moral obligation and possibly even financial it’ll make sense to provide a site accessible to the broadest audience possible – discriminating no one.

Why is web accessibility important for people with disabilities?

1 in 6 Australians are affected by hearing loss. Around 300,000 Australians have a substantial vision impairment (and.org.au). That’s a lot of web users that potentially get a very compromised online experience if we (as an industry whole) ignore the importance of catering for their needs.

As human’s we tend to find it easier to ignore the faceless. Real stories, real people and not just statistics drive action and change. I could go on with a bunch of reasons why you should consider doing more to make your site accessible…. or you could just watch this. It takes just 2 minutes.

How can you improve the user experience for people with disabilities?

I’ll be honest. If you’re retrospectively trying to build in accessibility to an existing website it’s going to come with its challenges (and costs). That doesn’t mean it’s not worth at least taking account of where the site sits at the moment and looking at what you can to do improve it. A well considered approach to take baby steps to improve your sites accessibility will no doubt help.

A much better approach though, is to consider this audience from the outset – prior to starting development on the website. When you have them in mind from that point, you’ll find it far easier to meet the standards of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0).

For example, two very important considerations for accessibility are ‘Contrast’ and ‘Reading Flow’ – for different reasons and for different disabilities.

• How elements must ‘Contrast’ against each other will affect everything on the page in terms of design.
• Where ‘Reading Flow’ is determined by how the underlying HTML is laid out. That is, how the code flows in a logical and sequential order.

Whatever the motivation – law, bound as a government agency, moral or financial – any of these that motivates a website owner to see and hear their website through the eyes and ears of the disable user is surely a good one.

Contact us if you’d like to look at your options to improve your website to cater for this important group of users online.

As an example, few could argue that financial institutes rank first amongst the most highly customer focussed service industries. But what differentiates any one financial institute from another? If you ask them, they’d likely reply “service”. But in a chorus of “service” answers, is any one of them really different? Not so you’d notice.

Can a company’s customer service actually be that much better than anyone else’s that it will make people deal with them and them alone just because they have outstanding customer service? You’re kidding yourself if you think that’s at all possible.

For any service business, customer service has to be great. If it’s not, you won’t be around for very long. Customer service is simply just another given.

I’ve heard over and over again companies say things like “We’re more personal…well whoopee!

If everyone says “our service is better” then who’s actually telling the truth? Think about it.

Don’t get me wrong here, customer service can make up a very important part of your amour and can be quite powerful. But if you start hanging your hat on it, you will be caught out. If people can’t tell who’s telling the truth, they will walk away.

I understand that customer service may be something your business does best but that doesn’t mean you do it better than anyone else.

Back to the financial institutes. The majority of them fork out fortunes for training in customer service, which is fine and all for a good cause. Do you think that one of them is going to end up that much “nicer” to customers than the other?

As far as I’m concerned they are getting it all wrong. They are all singing the same song and have not taken the effort to dig deep and find a real differentiator.

Trust me: if you nail your differentiation and get your positioning right, then quality sales leads will follow.

Although it’d be wonderfully rewarding to work with businesses to determine their requirements, the scope and feasibility of digital projects for free, it hardly pays the bills.

Just as you’re not sitting there waiting to pick up the phone to give away your expertise, professionals that work in the digital space aren’t eagerly waiting the next email to come into the inbox which broadly-outlines-some-great-idea-for-you­­r-website which you’d ‘love our thoughts on’, ‘like our advice’ or simply haven’t thought through much so we can gratefully research it for you for free.

Valuing expertise.

I’m still yet to quite put my finger on why in the digital industry there seems to be a reluctance to pay for expertise.

If there’s any conjecture about the definition of ‘expertise’ here, let me point something out – you’re coming to the person/agency for leadership on a very specific vocation, something presumably you can’t answer yourself, otherwise you wouldn’t be asking right? To me that seems like you’re asking for someone’s expertise.

Execution of that expertise doesn’t start when someone starts typing code. It starts well before. Furthermore, arguably the real value in that expertise is delivered well before the first ‘try-catch’ block is coded.

Is it simply because there’s no professional accreditation process for the industry? Well that’d be easy to fix, and would probably tidy things up a bit. I assure you, the ‘real deal’ professionals in the industry would most certainly welcome such measures.

Are there too many rogue unskilled and inexperienced charlatans out there devaluing and diluting what the profession stands for as a whole? Truth is – it’s probably a combination of those and many more issues.

Why should you want to pay for scoping?

I feel it’s misunderstood by clients that the scoping process and subsequent cost involved is some ‘extra-fee’ we try to get by clients. It’s really not.

For more complex jobs or jobs which haven’t had the requirements documented well from the clients end, without the scoping we’d all be forced to quote a broad ‘range’ for the job, as there’d simply be too many loose ends existing in the project.

This initial stage allows us to more tightly define the scope and requirements and find the best solution to fit those needs. With the aim through this process, to identify and provide the smartest and most cost effective approach to ultimately deliver better value for the client.

How to ensure the project fails – don’t communicate the budget.

Asking for the budget is often misjudged by clients as some back handed technique we use to find out how much we can ‘get away charging’. It’s quite the opposite.

We always use it as a guide to providing the most affordable solution that meets the needs of the client. If the costs involved in doing so are less than the budget, we’d never quote more. If we’re not going to get there in any way with that budget, at least we can then cut straight to the chase.

The best relationships in this game are the ones where the agency and the client trust each other, to talk openly and honestly about the budget and requirements. That’s the best way you can get yourself a solutions that works (form, function, fit) and is IN BUDGET.

Sure, a well-designed, highly creative, distinctive logo can make a big difference to your organisation. It can also make an imprint in people’s minds and last for decades. Over a long period of time, your logo can become significantly valuable.

Is that enough though? No, of course it isn’t. One of the big mistakes companies make when rebranding is starting the process with a new logo or logo revamp. This is where it can all go pear-shaped right from the beginning. Your logo is not the first step and also far from the most important. It’s pretty much just the icing on the cake. First you must decide what ingredients you need and get the mixture right otherwise the icing will just cover up what is a complete mess underneath. It won’t take long for others to see that you are simply hiding something and you will lose trust. A brand cannot survive without trust.

Take Red Bull for example. Do you think Red Bull designed their logo first and then worked out what they were going to become? Of course not. What they did first and foremost was find a niche in the over-crowded beverage market and then worked out what their brand would look like. This is where it must all begin. You must find a differentiator first otherwise you will always end up in the middle of the pack. Whether you were or are a start-up business, like Red Bull was, or you have been in business for decades, you must be significantly different from your competitors. If you are not, then it’s time you rebranded and refocussed to become a leader in your space.

Once you have worked out what your differentiation is and created a new position in the market place, then you can start icing the cake and, depending what business you are in, sometimes the simplest designs can work the best. Don’t get carried away with how creative it needs to be, just make sure your creative is strategically aligned with your new positioning.

You’ve seen it yourself. People are on trains, in restaurants, on the street and even unfortunately driving their cars, swiping and tapping for their information on the go. No longer do we ‘plan’ before we leave. We get what we need on the go or don’t get it at all.

We trust the savvy marketer, ne ‘best companies’ will have their shit together if they want us to consume their content. And if it’s not easy, we’ll just go get it from somewhere else.

A mobile website is no longer a show of a company’s innovation or progressive culture. Web users now see it as their god given right.

As a website owner you can either be ready for these users, or choose not to be.

How do you assess if you need a mobile website?

Before you start researching whether you need a responsive, adaptive, mobile dedicated website or a native app (or whatever else) you should be asking and answering these two guiding questions.

Where are my audience?   and     What is a mobile site worth to my business?

There are a number of other questions you’ll need to pose during your thought process. These two questions are the starting place.

Don’t be too polarised by the fact that more people are mobile than ever. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re looking for your business or content that way. That’s why when trying to answer these questions it’s important that you do so assessing against data relevant to your business.

Q1. Where is my audience?

Knowing the answer to this question is critical to leading you to the right decision. If you don’t know how you audience is coming to you, you don’t know how to best fit the purpose for them.

Consider these two offline vehicles for delivering a business’s content.

1. Billboards: we drive past them every day. They have big text, big images and a clear message. Fit for one purpose, one audience.
2. Product Brochures: they usually contain a lot of information. Much of the info a reader needs to enable a buying decision.

The way consumers interact with both content mediums is very different in time and response.

What if we did this: carefully fold out the brochure, mount it to the billboard and erect it on the side of the highway. The example is a bit tongue in cheek, but you get it don’t you? This is no way to deliver content to this audience, if you want them to get the message.

So are your audience looking for you on the run (phone), on the couch (tablet) or at the desk (desktop)? There are plenty of data analytics tools available to track the audience coming to you from mobile devices.  You need this information to make your decision.

Q2. What is a mobile website worth to my business?

The answer lies in the value of each lead for the business and the increased probability a mobile version adds to create conversions.

A formula for assessing the value to the business of the mobile site:

Mobile Visitors   x    Conversion Rate     x     Value of Lead     =     Value to Business

Mobile Visitors – website visitors hitting your site from mobile devices (non-tablet).

Conversion Rate – how many of these visitors take action to visit, contact you or enquire.

Value of Lead – what each lead is worth to you in profitability terms.

How much you’re prepared to invest to obtain the increase value to the business will be based on your own business rules, expectations on marketing ROI, budgets, risk profiles and much more.

If the numbers stack up…..

Let’s assume you’ve followed the process above. You’ve identified there’s an audience there, and there’s also financial benefits to be had for the business by investing in mobile. It’s fair to say, you probably now also know what you’re prepared to invest to seek that benefit.

The next step is to identify what that audience needs and how you’re going to deliver it to them. It’s now when you start asking the question – do I need a responsive, adaptive, dedicated mobile site or even an app?

The process behind coming to a decision is another article all together, so let’s use a tangible example to illustrate the benefits of the delivery method we thing is most suitable, in most cases and provide some reasons why that is.

A case for Responsive Web Design (RWD).

RWD aims to deliver an experience where the site reacts and structures itself around the size and constraints of the screen of the device that is accessing it – small and large. It’s a new and emerging approach to website design born from the dramatic increase in uptake of mobile and tablet devices.

Three distinct advantages RWD has over other methods of going mobile;

• Your website will have the ability to serve up this same content in various forms to accommodate varying screen size. This means, you’re not duplicating content in various places for different screen sizes. Resulting in an easier to manage website.
• You can both tailor content for small devices, but also take advantage of the trend towards larger desktop screens.
• Unlike an app, it’s not native to a particular platform or technology. More users can access your content.

We recently built a world class responsive site for a tourism bureau which demonstrates the value the versatility that responsive design can provide. I could tell you ‘It’s a cutting edge solution putting them ahead of the curve globally in their market’ – which it is – but that’ll probably only sound like marketing guff.

If you want to see something really cool and most importantly, useful, we encourage you to test it out – resize the browser window (up and down) even check it out on your phone or tablet.

Desktop View
Tablet View	Mobile View

The result?

It provides their prospects (and would yours) a far better and more useful user experience and in turn delivers more and better qualified leads.

If that sounds like something you’re business could use, 2013 is the time to start asking questions, analysing relevant data and setting an investment budget. If you’re not doing it, chances are your competitor is.

Feel free to contact us if you’d like to discuss your mobile website.