Just came across this great write up by David Meerman Scott that talks about the new rules of Viral Marketing and how the word of mouth (which he quite amusingly calls ‘word of mouse’ ) is a great tool to spread your ideas for free! Can it get any better than that. All these years, the old-rules and traditional means of marketing were followed but now the game is changing and new rules are being written.

A great example in the short book was how Cindy Gordon, VP of New Media and Marketing Partnerships, Universal Orlando Resort used social media to create buzz and spread word of mouse about The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park. She just told 7 people about it and it spread to 350 million people!! Undoubtedly, Universal has deep pockets and they could choose to go for TV commercials such as superbowl ads, or hire a media agency to harness other mediums but she chose to go the unconventional way.

She knew there are millions of Harry Porter fans globally, after all the book has sold 325 million copies. Seven avid fans of top Harry Porter sites were selected and invited for a top-secret webcast. Going to the fans even before disclosing the news to New York times, made the fans feel privileged. After the webcast, sent out an e-blast to the in-house, opt-in email list of park guests and friends and family. And the news spread like wild fire among 350 million people without any marketing stunts, CEO conference calls and in such a small budget.

Without a doubt, Gordon had the credibility of Harry Potter and Universal to make the campaign go crazy viral and successful and it is not possible in every case to do it with such ease. However, what I intend to share with you through this example is that thinking different, and fresh and creating new rules is the way to go. Gordon could have just spent millions of dollars on tv-ad impressions or news coverage but she chose to accelerate the new product launch using the new media channels. I am sure after reading this story, you won’t underestimate the power of word of mouth!!! Also always be accepting of new ideas and new rules or there is no harm in even creating your own new rules because someone sometime did come up with the rules we follow today. Whether it is our web design vancouver and internet marketing business or your accounting, home renovation, restaurant business, we hope you found a takeaway to apply new rules for your word of mouse! Ciao for now

Got your new website done! Congrats! Sitting next to your phone, refreshing your inbox again and again, or opening the door every 30mins? Sorry to say but all this alone won’t bring in customers. You need to let them know that your business exists.

We get so many clients who believe that building an awesome website with beautiful web design is more than enough to increase their revenues by zillion %age. Had it been so straight forward, then every business owner would have shelled $3,000 to get an awesome website and walked away with zillion dollars as new found revenue. A new website needs to let its visitors know that it exists, just like a new graduate needs to reach out to its potential employers.

3 things which you can do to get your website out there in the market are:-
• Spend thousands of dollars out of your ever increasing cash flow on newspaper ads.
• Hire an Adwords expert and put a budget of $2,000/month for each city you want to target.
• Hire a student to hold your placard on streets and let the by-passers know that your website resides somewhere on internet, go find it!

And if the above mentioned tricks, look NOT so simple to you then:-
Consider getting SEO (Search Engine Optimization) service for your website (see here for more info on Web Design Vancouver services) so that people who are searching for your service/product on Google, can find you there.

Five reasons why SEO should be the first marketing initiative of your new website:-
1. Ranking high on search engines generates instant and regular leads as now you are in front of people who are actively searching for your products/services.
2. Ranking on top doesn’t only means leads but also adds to your credibility in the eyes of your potential customers. Many users believe and associate top search ranks with the credibility of a company.
3. 50% of total clicks happen only on top 5 ranks on page 1. Therefore if you are not in top 5, you are losing a major chunk of potential leads.
4. SEO is not an over night game. It needs consistent work for quite a few months. Starting early gives you a leeway as then you can expect results by the time you start incurring other fixed costs in your business.
5. Last but not the least, search engine ranking is one of the most measureable form of marketing as you can count the dollar amount you spent and the number of leads it generated for you in that year.

Hello folks! It is a cold wet afternoon in Vancouver and our designers are keeping busy with work on several client projects. That’s when one of them feels this itch to express this sudden wave of thoughts and imagery floating inside her head. She looks outside the window. It’s raining and chilly. All she hopes for is that she could get some sun shining and smiling at her while she is in the midst of nature

So she takes her 45 minute break from other tasks and starts expressing herself to create a design where clouds and sun are playing hide and seek. The water is clear blue and fish in the water playfully create bubbles in the water.  Alright! Enough poetry for now.

Below is the design that the designer created. It looks like a water color painting. The beauty of this web design is that it is unique, simple, expressive and out of the box. Your web design does not need to follow the traditional format but it can be a story or a tale that can captivate the attention of your potential customers/website visitors. Indeed, this painting style of web design is not suited for an industry such as a plastic manufacturing company or a consultant but may be for a digital agency or an art gallery etc. However, the point I am trying to make here is that when you are going for Web Design Vancouver service to get your own business website, don’t overlook the potential of being creative with it. Creativity can be incorporated in any design, for any industry without compromising the corporate image. It is just about maintaining the right balance between creativity, utility, usability and corporate/brand image.

Who could imagine that a giant corporation like McDonalds could ever land in soup with their social media campaign. Yes it did happen recently when a twitter campaign run by McDonalds backfired on them. People began sharing wrong #McDStories. Definitely the fast food giant isn’t lovin it!

On Thursday McDonalds started off with the hashtag #MeetTheFarmers. The strategy behind this campaign was to draw its customers’ attention and to re-emphasize the brand’s promise of fresh produce. However, then the burger company used a vague hashtag that proved quite dangerous: “When u make something w/ pride, people can taste it,” McD potato supplier #McDstories. Both the hashtags #meetthefarmers and #McDstories proved quite detrimental for McDonald’s when people and started sharing some horrible stuff that no company would like on their social media landscape and this outburst of hatred could negatively influence the customers.

One of the worst attacks on the fast food giant was: @MuzzaFuzza who wrote ‘I haven’t been to McDonalds in years, because I’d rather eat my own diarrhea.’ Here are some more of the outbursts (courtesy: thedailymail)

Social media director Rick Wion admitted when speaking with paidcontent.org: ‘Within an hour, we saw that it wasn’t going as planned.’

Lesson to Learn

Social Media is a two-way communication process. The control does not lie solely in the hands of the company but in the hands of the users, customers, tweeters, facebookers….Social Media is powerful in its virality. It can spread positive word of mouth among a company’s target market and help build a strong brand, however, at the same time it can spread negative emotions and viewpoints like a wild fire.

Therefore it is very important to have a well thought out social media strategy, company policies on social media and most importantly proper content strategy. We are sure McDonald’s had all of that in place and yes sometimes in a space like social media things can go out of control even though when you try to do everything right. How companies can prevent this is by constantly monitoring the campaign and doing sentiment analysis of the kind of comments people are posting to prevent unrepairable damage to the brand.

Adding Facebook buttons on your website or blog can tremendously boost the traffic of your pages and even benefit your overall online promotions strategy. Go through the various tolls that this social networking platform has to offer.

Adding Facebook functionalities on your web portals is a fascinating way to integrate a social functionality onto your online business activities. If you are able to make good use of these innovative features, you will be able to facilitate an effort free initiative in web promotions and business growth.

Facebook is known to offer a range of free plug-ins that will benefit your cause of making your web design social media friendly.

Do I really need Facebook Integration?

Any progressive thinker will agree when we say that Facebook has played a significant role in connecting every website and internet user through comprehensive social integration. Not participating in this giant social experiment can only prove to be a loss for your personal business. With over 10 social tools that are made available to individuals, bloggers and online business owners, it is up to you to make the best possible use of these plug-ins to boost the popularity of your business.

Statistics have shown tremendous growth in referral traffic, readership and business in general among websites that have opted to utilize these social elements on their pages. Lets venture into the specifications of each one of these elements and high-light how they can help you in your business.

1. The Very Popular ‘Like’ Button:

The ‘Like’ button enables facebook users to easily share pages from your blog or website on their profile pages with a simple click. When the ‘Like’ button is clicked on, an automated update will appear on the news feed of everyone on the user’s friend list. This update will consist of a link back to your page, blog article or website.

This is an amazing way to drive traffic to more specific and less popular pages of your website, by sharing the URL to a page among users who most likely belong to the same user group.

2. Integrating Facebook Comments:

Using this plug-in allows users to comment on the content on your site. This works a website that follows the format of blogs and even with online catalogues where you can get direct feedback from your users. This feature is extremely useful for websites that do not have a sophisticated content management system in place.

3. The Send Button:

This is another tool which lets Facebook users share their content with other users. Unlike the ‘Like’ button, this one follows a more private route , where users are able to send out targeted shares with people they are sure will be interested in that particular article or any other form of content.

In addition to this, there also a range of other creative plug-ins such as the Activity Feed, this showcases the activities of their friends on your website. Websites with heavy traffic such as news channels choose to add this tab to inform users about articles and videos that have been recently viewed or ‘liked’ by their friend. Adding the ‘Login’ button on your website can help you easily integrate your registration function and make use of Facebook to build communities of users who frequent your pages and enabling consistent growth in online presence.

“It’s a Google Thing”
Google+ hasn’t been in the social media realm for long. But, are we beginning to see the dotted lines connect between Google plus and its Search Rankings?

Google Plus has been in the social realm for less than six months – and comparisons of its positioning itself for a full-fledged battle with Facebook and Twitter has already provoked an intense debate. It may not be a direct threat yet for Facebook, nevertheless Google Plus’s current figures of 40 to 60 million users foreshadow a future where Google could directly compete for the top spot in the world of social networking. Although G+ doesn’t have everything just right, but it does have one thing going for it that Facebook and Twitter doesn’t …and… yes it’s good for rankings…in Google.

Google doesn’t index all of Facebook at present. It’s a lame-duck for SEO. But, Google does index anything publicly for Google+.

Google Search and the Power of +1

Google+ provides the feature that can link your site to your G+ page so that all your +1s – from your Page, your website, and search results – will get tallied together and appear as a single total. You can link your site to your Page either using the Google+ badge or with a piece of code. Markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages is the rel=author tag – the integration that Google’s been supporting since the summer. Advantage SEO – potential visitors are more likely to see the +1’s your page or site has received, meaning your +1’s will reach not only the 40 million users of Google+, but all the people who come to Google every day.

Google+ Content to conquer Search Results

While it would be hasty to dismiss Facebook and Twitters impact on SERPs in Google – Google+ content is slowly and surely sweeping through Search Engine results. For it, Google is now linking the Author Information image in the main search directly with recent Google Plus posts in a result much like the Plus Places integration seen earlier.  In addition, Google has taken the extra step to add this markup to everything hosted by YouTube and Blogger. In the future, both platforms will automatically include this markup when you publish content.

When a search result with rel=author appears in Google’s search results, the author’s avatar and the adjacent byline both now link to a new Google search results page that begins with the author’s Google+ profile.

The Google+ profile integration is even more substantial if you’re searching directly on the author’s name. In this case, Google shows a couple recent Google+ posts in addition to the profile information.

Google has been slowly and quietly inserting Google+ into its main search results recently. It seems safe to say that it’s the next Google thing 

The web evolves constantly, round-the-clock. And Search engine marketing is an ongoing process. In order to create new ideas to help spread your brand exposure, you should reserve some time each week for reading the market, viewing the competition, understanding customer intent and analysing new information. If you are stagnant, chances are that you are falling behind.

Web analytics tools have transformed itself over the years from‘pleasant add-on’ analytics software to a ‘must have’ analytics software. A means to measure business objectives, reports and improvisations, these tools go way beyond tracking a sales funnel.

Google Analytics – Advanced Segmentation

Here when we talk about segmenting your traffic data in order to have a better understanding, we are only referring to the Advanced Segments Tool from Google Analytics. Why is this important? Because this is an incredibly powerful segmentation tool that we can use to identify which segments of our traffic are performing and which are not.

Google Analytics offers many different ways to segment data. Each has its pros and cons but there is always a way to get the data you need…. well, almost always.

For all your Analytics reports you have the option of either using one of the default advanced segments to filter your data or create your very own from scratch. For Example you can apply default templates (created by Google) associated with visits data (e.g. All Visits, New Visitors, Paid Traffic, etc.) or think about an appropriate custom segment that you want to design (e.g. Unique Purchases etc.)

Segmenting by Location

The concept here is that you choose the location dimension that you want to segment by, specify a value for that dimension or metric, and then create a relationship between the two.

To quote an instance, we were working for a website who was selling services to Canadian people exclusively. When we started, they were driving exclusive organic traffic, and the overall landing page conversion rate was as good as expected. When we started to segment the data by location and checked Canada conversion rate against overall conversion rate – it turned out to be quite insightful. The Canadian conversion rate was more than decent; in fact the overall conversion rate seemed low due to the mass traffic coming from other locations. Unfortunately for which we had nothing to offer. This could have led to a wrong business decision. The solution was to drive more Canadian traffic and sort some SEO problem in fact.

Keyword Segmentation

Adwords is probably the most plain ad network, and you can easily see which keyword converts, which one does not. It is very important to determine the best course of action i.e. if you are running PPC campaigns; you can shift spending from low-performers to high performing keywords. Or you can update the home page of your site to push the best-performing keywords more strongly.

Advanced segmentation further helps to monitor the progress of individual keywords and see how your optimization efforts are paying off. You can have a permanently defined segment for all of your GA data that is organized around your chosen keyword. And, by using the Segmentation drop-down, it is possible to view data through the segmentation filter you have created.

Content Segmentation

Say, the content on a website is about appliances. To track the content by two categories only: home appliances and garden appliances, we could create two advanced segments in Google Analytics, and categorize them by its URL address. The idea here is to put pages into groups of related content. Collect these pages together on one page and treat them as a single entity. To do so you can specify the URLs that you want to include by defining the url patterns and then create a filter for each group. Each filter in GA will search for the group identifier and replace the entire url with a new url.

Now we have created content groups that allow us look at all pages for any brand appliance as a single entity. We can now study the links where people exit, the entrance keywords, the entrance sources, other pages they visit on the site, and more.

For each site there is a different goal and that goal requires the site owner to look at a unique set of metrics. Segmentation is a great resource to indicate the KPI’s and where the owner may look to minimize its expenses.

Even though Google controls 65% of the search market, there are still an alarming number of users who use Bing on a daily basis to get to Google.

Every month, roughly 117 million searched are made for “Google” in Bing. It’s modestly ironic to think of one searching for a search engine while using a search engine, but we must first acknowledge that the demographic of users for each search engine is very different. Also its users are aware that Bing and Google provide very different results. To put this number in perspective, consider the fact that, on average by month, only 55 million searches are made for “google” in Google and 4 million searches are made for “bing” in Google.

The IE Interface

Bing being the default search engine on Internet Explorer is still the world’s most popular web browser, mainly because it comes standard on all Windows operating systems. This could explain why so many users search “google” in Bing to get to Google’s homepage. They simply choose to stay with Internet Explorer instead of using an alternative web browser, like Firefox or Chrome. Also, changing the default search engine on Internet Explorer from Bing to Google is no easy task. The fact that Bing is the default search engine for over 38% of all users significantly affects user behaviour.

How do the CTR curves for Google and Bing compare with each Other

A major SEO firm conducted a study on user behaviour to help define the impact of Page 1 search engine rankings. The study was over the course of six months and examined 324 total (stable) keywords in both  the search engines.

As we know –

EXACT CTR = (# of visits) / (# of searches)
The Observed CTR curve for organic U.S. results for positions #1-10 in Google SERPs and Bing SERPS were as follows –

For Google – It was observed an 18.20% average CTR for a No. 1 rank and 10.05% for Position 2. Average CTR for each position below the fold was observed to be below 4%.

If so few users are clicking on Bing organic results after a search, where are they going? Possibilities include “related searches” on the sidebar, re-queries, Page 2, one of the tabs at the top, a paid result, or the images, videos, news, shopping, local listings results within the SERP. The lower click-through rates could be attributed to Bing users abandoning their results and heading to Google. Perhaps users are trying their searches and then re-querying in Google.

Henceforth — Specifically optimizing for Bing is still important, especially since the demographic of users is different. Hit-wise the study showed that 58% of Bing users are female, whereas only 45% of Google users are female. It also found that most Bing users are age of 35 or older. This is incredibly valuable information for marketers because it affects the target audience. If you have a product geared towards females or an older group, Bing may be more valuable to you.

[i] Source: A study from Slingshot SEO that examined the CTR for positions 1 through 10 on Google.

Much as the most robust real estate markets in Canada, there is a land grab happening right now in the internet world. Site owners know that the success of their business can depend on one significant aspect and that is –Location.

Instead of being placed at a busy Vancouver intersection, a great deal of today’s internet businesses is vying to be in the first 10 spots on Google – for a keyword their customer might search. As search engine optimization (SEO) begins to mature, obtaining one of these choice locations is going to get a lot tougher, real fast.

Why? Google keeps hush about the secret network of computers delivering lightning-fast search results the same way KFC safeguards its recipe. What we do know is that to see your business on a prominent listing in search rankings, the age of a domain and the number of sites linking into the site is considered valuable by Google. The age of the url is a considerable factor to be ranked. If you bought a domain a few weeks, or months ago – there is a long road ahead. As time passes, sites already in the top 10 of specific keywords continue to age. The reality is the age of your website helps build trust and with time, they continue of strengthen a few of the items that influence the Google algorithm. . If the domain name matches the keyword, it’s even easier. So over the next 3 to 8 years many organizations that currently rank in Google’s top 10 for valuable keywords will likely be immovable unless, of course, there is a major change in how Google ranks results.

So we come back to the question as to why should your business care about ranking in Google? Think about yourself as a consumer with a need. This need could be a simple consumer purchase or a complex business need. How do you research this need – by typing a keyword or phrase in Google.  Now this could be a great opportunity for your company if your site is properly SEO’ed for those certain search keywords. Should your company site rank well in the first few pages on Google, chances are that customer searching for answers will find it.

As product category and service offering keywords continue to be traffic “hot spots” online, it is imperative to grab those key, top 10 location-grabs while it is still possible to do so. If you aren’t focusing on search engine optimization now, you may well regret it in the future.

Marketing researchers have long used the eye-tracking technique to determine what features of product advertising and packaging attracts buyer attention. Advances in Eye tracking technology have allowed testers to determine eye movement and eye-fixation patterns to evaluate the usability of their screen layouts and visual appeals.

Before a click comes a look, and according to new research, advertisers are often wrong about what attracts our attention. The effectiveness of any successful advertisement relies on understanding how the eye moves across a page, why it is drawn to particular areas, and what causes a viewer to linger at a given spot. You can apply the basics of these conversion and eye movement techniques even when you are getting your own website designed and see if your Vancouver web design company uses these concepts.

Applied and experimental studies have stemmed from classical and renaissance artists that investigate visual attention and eye movements to gain insight in eye movement control, cognition and attention – which is now being used for design evaluation of visual stimuli.

Coming into the 21st century – modern research suggests that as soon as attention moves to a new position, the eyes follow. For those that buy, sell and plan digital advertising – away from the numbers-driven reporting that digital advertising is – it is now steeped in towards softer insights that explore and understand the why as well as the what.

Eye Trackers does some things well – others Not

Usability findings have stated that, eye trackers can:

-  Tell whether users are looking at the screen or not

-  Differentiate reading from scanning for particular words or phrases.

-  Learn the relative intensity of a user’s attention to various parts of a web page.

-  Determine whether a user is searching for a specific item. Pupil diameter appears to increase

-  When users are not sure what words they are looking for.

Eye trackers cannot:

- Let you know whether users actually “see” something.

- Prove that users did not see something (Users can acquire information through peripheral vision).

- Determine why users are looking at something.-  Test everybody (there are certain constraints which make certain persons unfit to be tested)

Eye-tracking measures can enrich our understanding of what emotional reactions consumers experience when they see an ad. An integrated approach can identify a relationship between a marketing communication and emotions. We thus can identify which emotional reaction is triggered by each ad element.