Online Marketing and Website optimization. Corporate Communication in practice.

Online Marketing and website optimization seem to be the future of communication. Therefore finding the answers of the following marketing questions is essential: When setting up a website how do we do it? How do we communicate with consumers? How do we make sure that our website reflects who we are? How can we be found by consumers? What about SEO?

Setting up a website as a communication tool

We are used to think that setting up a website is a programmer’s job. They know how to do it and we trust them. However, a website is not simply a bundle of code made to look good. A website is a business’ face towards millions of consumers online. As such it needs to comply with business strategy reflecting image, vision and mission. Even more importantly, it needs to represent the business in a way communicating branch, niche, products, services and all subthemes relevant to consumer searches on the web.

There is no doubt that a website needs to be set up by a programmer. To ensure high quality though a close collaboration between the programming team and the company’s marketing or communication department is necessary. Naming, tagging, titles, highlights, products, etc. need to be done in a way facilitating both the company’s best interest and consumer searches. This is done by reviewing business strategy and pointing out what you want consumers to find about you the easiest. After setting your communication goals for your website you have different options in terms of how you are going to implement your communication strategy. You can do it either through careful coding and content management or through helping search engines understand your content (if your website has already been set up and recoding/content optimization it is not an option). Ideally, you could use both strategies.

What does our website communicate?

Monitoring your website performance in terms of visitors, time spent, visitor behavior, returning visitors, keywords can help you understand the way your website functions and is used by consumers. That is done by your Webmaster using tools as Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. Analyzing those parameters can give you an overview of how good a work you have done setting up a website. If for example you only have new visitors you might want to rethink website structure or content. It might be a sign that your consumers do not like either your website or your business. Which is the case, you might more or less determine by evaluating time users spent on your website. A quick look to your website’s top keywords will give you a good opportunity to find out whether you have made coding/content mistakes.

It is also very important to control how your website appears in searches and on which position it appears. As search engines (mostly) try to provide the most relevant and highly rated results to their users a low position in a search result might signal problems with either popularity or keywords settings and website structure. Keep in mind that the quality of the website in terms of speed is also taken into account when showing search results. Last but not least, be aware that a lot of the content which is not in plain text form might lower your website’s relevance evaluation as it is often skipped by search engines. Therefore you need to provide your key information in a text form.

Consumer searches and SEO

We are made to believe that SEO is the key to success online. However, Google warns that the SEO business has become a bit shadowy and thus not always a good idea. If you though decide that you want someone specializing in the field to optimize your website, you might need to take a look at Google’s warnings and guidelines. The truth is that in most cases you do not need a SEO specialist. What you need is to keep track of your website’s data and optimize content and structure in such a way that you make it easy for both search engines and consumers find what they need.

Still one of the best ways to make consumers aware of you is advertising and marketing yourself both online and offline. In addition to advertising you have the option of establishing links towards your website from different relevant web places. Some of those links you would need to pay for but others like the links on your Facebook or Google + pages will be free.

 

Basically, one of the most prominent rules in Business is to create something of value. Only after you are sure that your product is sellable it makes sense to start marketing it. Therefore think of your business and the process of communicating it as a process of discovery. You have discovered something which you want to share with others. Who are the others and how you get their interest should be what should guide you, not SEO concerns.

A small tip: when starting a business you often lack resources. But you already have a large public thanks to Social media. Use it. Use your friends as your marketers. Asking them to like your Facebook page or share it (once, do not abuse your friends) will instantly give you access to a larger target group than you have imagined.

Communication strategy failure: Information overload

How do we know what is true and what is not? How do we define trustworthiness? How do we get rid of the communication overload? How should a responsible company/public figure communicate? 

The overload

 

There are many who argue that the freedom of expression which Internet and other media provide giving basically everyone the opportunity to speak up has led to a society where nothing can stay hidden forever and thus honesty and transparency should be everybody’s policy in order to avoid image crashes.  However, it might turn out that accepting a reality where information is freely accessible makes us naive and lazy. As we are “drowned” in democracy rhetoric we do not necessarily reflect over the possibility that somebody might be manipulating information to serve someone’s interests. We read news, posts, blogs, forum threads, etc. and sometimes we cannot even tell the difference between them which most of the time is not as clear as one might think. Thus, we take a comment in a forum as seriously as a news post. Furthermore, we do not have the time or the energy to check all referrals and sources of an article for example. Last but not least, we face the so called Clickworker workforce which basically are people hired to write reviews and other consumer content. How do we then separate trustworthy from what is not? On top of that we need to process much more information daily than we actually are capable of: around 5 000 to 30 000 advertising messages alone.

The result is a tired mind nonstop bombarded with information which is a perfect target for manipulation.

Get rid of it

To help ourselves get rid of the overload and thus concentrate on what is really important we need to shut off all distracters. A distracter is a source or a type of information which either is not trustworthy or is not important. It is furthermore what affects our concentration, uses up our processing resources and prevents us from focusing on what is really important. To be more effective and function better both at work and in our private lives we need to learn to prioritize. We need to accept the fact that our brains have limits and we need to use them for what makes most sense.

What to trust?

When we talk about information overload vs. trustworthiness the prioritizing we need to do includes some drastic measures. However, according to your own needs, you might adjust them.

Rule nr. 1 would be to turn all electronics off. Sit down and think what is important to you. Is it really important personally to you that the Greek economic is going down? Do you have some personal investment in the war in Iraq? Do you really care to look through the pictures of a friend of a friend on Facebook or you simply do it automatically? Do you care that that and that public figure in some country had an affair?

Rule nr. 2: Turn off for everything that you are not interested in. If you watch the news because you are bored, that is not a good reason to put your brain through yet another informational attack. If you are interested in sport, watch sports. If you are into politics, follow politics. Especially nowadays it is more than easy to find the perfect source for your needs as there are countless sources and media variations.

Rule nr. 3 comes in connection to trustworthiness. After you have managed to filter the incoming information you should have the time and the energy to separate reliable from unreliable sources. You do that by checking credentials, sources, image, and disclaimers. Normally you will only need to do that once as serious companies value their image and will not allow it to be destroyed by publishing false information. However, a cross-referencing with other publications or following 2-3, maybe more if you have the time, sources provides always a better guarantee that you are being properly informed.

Rule nr. 4 is mostly for those who like reading forums, blogs, reviews. Do not forget that the people writing there are most of the time simply users who come up with some commentary based either on something they somehow have learned or on their own thoughts/experience. Sometimes they also might be people hired to write what they wrote. Trusting them fully is never a good idea without doing some research on your own.

For companies

Even though most consumers do not follow the described steps and often are easy to manipulate by putting images and ideas in their heads it is not recommended taking advantage. Merely from an image point of view you are going to risk destroying your image if your manipulation tactics are ever revealed. Unfortunately for you there are opinion leaders and a bit crazy conspiracy theorists that are always on a lookout for something like that.

There have been many companies through time who have got away with manipulation and even more politicians and public figures who have mastered the art of getting what they want. This does not mean that you will succeed. It is about time companies realize that success may but should not rest on deceiving consumers. Business is always more productive and successful in the long term when you cooperate with your stakeholders and are honest with them.

Instead of taking advantage of the informational clutter, try to stand out with 100 % professionalism and responsibility. Having a clear policy and a clear message will guarantee you a strong position on the market. Imagine being the trustworthy source conscious consumers are choosing. Becoming the trusted partner of your stakeholder brings more value than leaching of them. The time of synergy between companies and consumers has come.

 

DIDI