Brafton » Evan Jacobs

Three steps to building better user experiences and catching clicks with content marketing

Evan Jacobs — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 18:14:26 +0000

A notable speaker once said, "Content is king." This is profoundly reflected by Brafton and our core business, but I think that catchphrase is only telling half the story. Beyond words or media, there are a million intangibles that deserve heavy weight and can significantly influence the convertibility of your content.

What is user experience (UX)?

UX is the presentation of the content; overall design, site speed and, fundamentally, flow.

To put it simply, it's the world your content lives in and how a consumer interacts with that world. There are countless books, blogs and academic treatises on the subject if you're interested in digging deeper.

In the case of a website, UX is the presentation of the content; overall design, site speed and, fundamentally, flow, all play important parts.

This can be intimidating - many moving parts make for many breakpoints. But on the flip side, these facets of your website present opportunities for improvement.

Flow: Create a frictionless experience for discovery and sharing

The crux of building an effective user experience is making things easy to find. As I'm sure you've experienced on more painful websites, so many components can be implemented wrong and drive users off your site as quickly as they arrived.

That being said, here are my personal top three areas where discoverability and ease of use can go straight down the drain:

Homepage

What's the first thing you see when loading up your website? If it isn't a statement on what you do, re-evaluate your strategy. It's vitally important that incoming visitors know exactly what they're getting into when they first visit you online.

Another discoverability best practice is to promote fresh content on the homepage. Brafton has reported that frequent blog updates correlate with content-driven conversions. The benefits of doing this reach beyond UX - search engines regard frequently updated websites more favorably than static ones, and Google says it will crawl more often. Many webmasters accomplish this by adding featured headlines or excerpts of newly published content, with a link back to the article.

Navigation

Do you organize your navigation based on user activity or how you think it should be?

Nav menus exist for a few key reasons: to help visitors discover important pages, to allow for quick movement through disparate portions of a website (homepage -> contact form or landing page -> career section, for example) and for search engines to understand what you pages you value by placing links to them on virtually every part of your website. Use analytics tools like Google Analytics to understand what your visitors care about and optimize your navigation accordingly.

Pro Tip: Keep your drop-down lists as short as possible. More than seven links each is too many.

Calls to Action

Relevance, relevance, relevance -- that should be your focus. An effective CTA is one that complements its surrounding content and explains what the user will receive for clicking through. Avoid ambiguous phrasing and use action-oriented language (download, learn more, request etc.) to maximize conversion.

Also, pay attention to the texture of your calls to action in relation to what is around them. If you know the CTA will be surrounded in a cloud of text, use an eye-catching (relevant) image or contrasting color to non-invasively attract attention.

Pro Tip: If you're using blinky ads or something similarly gimmicky, drop them. You can thank me later.

Design: Frame your content for success

A thoughtful design framework for your content directly contributes to positive website flow and improves engagement metrics across the board. According to Curata data covered by Brafton, visuals increase content marketing campaign clicks by 47 percent.

Text

Text content needs the most attention because it takes the most concentration to consume. With video or images, a quick glance can often be enough to extract meaning; the written word must be read, processed and often read again to be fully understood.

To make the reading process as smooth as possible, take cues from the print world by spacing out your lines and paragraphs, use color combinations that are easy on the eyes (black/dark gray text on white backgrounds are the easiest to follow) and use images when appropriate to summarize or provide context to your words.

Want more design tips? Check out my blog, Three Fundamental Design Best Practices to Maximize Content Marketing Success.

Images

Proportion and spacing are the two most important design considerations for consumption of images. Generally speaking, your graphic content should either go the full horizontal length of the content or be compact enough to neatly fit as a sidebar (100 percent or 33 percent width.)

Pro tip: For full-width images, crop the height if necessary to prevent them from overwhelming the other content (250-300px is plenty tall in most cases.)

Spacing is as simple as adding a margin. I recommend matching the amount of space between your paragraphs as a starting point.

Video

For simplicity, embed your videos at full content width (100 percent) and automatic height. It'll save you time and frustration, while scaling down for different browser sizes. Try to host your videos on a HTML5-enabled platform like YouTube, Vimeo or other proprietary CDN so your video content is accessible (and fast) for mobile users.

Speed: Trim the fat and make your site snappy, visitors will thank you

For each second of load time, conversions can drop as much as 7 percent. In addition to running the risk of losing visitors' interest, Brafton has reported that slow page load times affect 1 percent of searches, making speed a factor in SEO and visibility.

For each second of load time, conversions can drop as much as 7 percent.

There are literally hundreds of things you can do to make your site faster. So many that I wrote a three-part blog series about site speed. Please read the following for ideas to make your site more responsive:

Above all else, try to minimize the amount of JavaScript that loads on each page and avoid excessive use of plugins or modules if you use a CMS. They're usually the first culprits of a slow website.

With the above in mind, take a holistic view of your website. Step outside your role as business owner or webmaster and think about what is physically in front of you.

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What does the website guide you to do? Does it feel inviting or interesting enough to stick around and read more than the first page? If not, it's time to invest in UX.

What are you doing to enhance the UX of your website?

Eight brand success pointers from Coca-Cola: Insight from ad:tech New York

Evan Jacobs — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:30:33 +0000

In today's world, any business can be a brand with effective marketing, but few of them can trumpet the success of industry titans like Apple, Nike and Coca-Cola. At ad:tech New York 2011, Wendy Clark, senior vice president of integrated marketing communications at Coca-Cola Company said that businesses aiming for brand success have to offer users value.

From producing content relevant to target audiences to using platforms that create simple and innovative experiences, Clark shed some light on what she referred to as the "eight principles for maximizing brand value."

Here are some key takeaways from Coke's value principles:

1. Be Shareworthy

Brand success requires more than merely having a social presence online: Creating content that is compelling and relevant enough to warrant sharing is necessary. Mediocre attempts at small ads and half-hearted marketing efforts do not pay off and will not be successful going forward - only well thought out and executed campaigns will move your brand forward and foster loyalty among your stakeholders.

Simply put, the point is to take the time to think about your brand's plans and only do things that have a (positively) significant impact on your audience. If maintaining a blog on your website is part of your marketing plans, make it a destination instead of a channel. For instance, instead of a generic blog post, consider roundtable-like discussions featuring guests or even multiple employees to really jump start a discussion with your readers. Dynamic and interesting content is what retains audiences, not regularity.

2. Integrate

In order to maximize the success of your brand, both tangibly (sales) and intangibly (loyalty), fluid integration between all marketing channels is an essential. Clark gave the example of Coca-Cola's pervasive use of mobile in their Chinese "chok" marketing campaign, uniting TV ad spots with an iPhone app that allowed users to "catch" bottle caps as they appeared to win prizes.

Brafton recently reported on a similar integrated marketing approach taken by the Asian fast food chain Pei Wei, which utilized a blend of social campaigns with email to reach more than 20,000 new subscribers and drive repeat purchases among 20 percent of the campaign recipients.

3. Think Horizontally

Every brand, product and service has interconnected pieces and a supply chain, and businesses have to think end-to-end. Clark spoke about "thinking laterally," taking a bird's eye view of your product chain and identifying every link along it that must be maintained to facilitate a consistent brand experience (which actually sounds like thinking vertically). For Coca-Cola, this goes as far down the chain as the bees that pollinate the flowers of their fruit plants, eventually moving up the supply chain to their end juice products.

For a service-oriented business, keeping your human capital (employees) happy and productive and monitoring the efficacy of the technology stacks that enable your offering represent effective uses of end-to-end thinking.

4. More Good, Not More More

A natural extension of being "shareworthy," always focus your efforts, investments and manpower on projects that you feel will make a major impact on your stakeholders. Money is certainly important, but Clark argues that merging social good and profit is the ultimate key to positive brand buzz and residual loyalty.

"If the campaigns you're looking at aren't keeping you up at night, struggling and wrestling with how to find the funding to do them, they're not good enough." Wendy Clark

5. Listen - "Listen twice as much as you talk."

As with any relationship, communication and mutual understanding are paramount to successful.

Clark argued that listening is what separates a brand from a great brand, and suggested using all available channels to understand what your customers talk about, need and want. Social media in particular, specifically comments and feedback on Facebook and Twitter, are readily accessible directional data that should be used to focus and evolve products to match your fans' desires.

Earlier this year, Dell surveyed a sample of 200 medium and large businesses to better understand the relationship between social media and big business. They drew similar conclusions to Coca Cola, noting that, "Listening and responding to customers is so basic and fundamental. The emergence of social media elevates how companies can act on the feedback they get from customers."

Further, Brafton has reported that more than two-thirds of businesses miss social engagement opportunities with their audiences. The most common use case for social media in business seems to be responding to complaints or providing limited customer support, signaling that most companies have significant room for improvement in how they communicate and listen to their customers online.

6. Consistency x Relevance x Scale (Done Over Time)

Consistency has been an important success factor for Coca Cola over the past decades, and Wendy Clark mandated the virtue in her keynote at ad:tech. She referred to the fact that the classic Coke bottle has been maintained over time, and it is now the second-most recognized symbol in the world (following the Crucifix). Consistency gives your stakeholders a foundation of trust and fulfilled expectations, creating lifetime brand users and invaluable word-of-mouth advertising.

At the same time, Clark explained that being consistently relevant to your audience is the next logical step above product quality. There should be a balance between making adjustments or additions to keep your business current and staying true to core principles. In order to stay relevant, a brand must continually listen to and engage its fans (and detractors) to ensure every project, campaign and initiative it undergoes means something.

Then, for real success, brands must be prepared to carry out their messages, products, services, etc. at scale to deliver them to all audiences where there is demand.

7. Collaborate (Collaborate, Collaborate!)

Silos within a company are the quickest bottlenecks to innovation and success. Hire employees with excellent teamwork skills, as well as marketing talent to ensure that cross-departmental interactions are productive and foster ideas that might not have been possible or existed within the narrow scope of one functional division.

Clark elaborated on this, stating that Coca Cola is "... more acutely aware of the behaviors of our marketers than their skill set."

8. Do Not Accept the Status Quo - "Be Relentless."

Coke's final value principle refers directly to drive and the raw ambition of your team and leadership. In order to be a truly successful brand, everyone behind the scenes must be aligned in strategy and passion to spend the hours getting each facet of every campaign right. Each team member should be ready and eager to promote your brand to friends, family and their online audiences, demonstrating personal investment in its success. Great brands are proactive, forward-looking and resilient.

To distill these items into one central philosophy, the bottom line is to be passionate, customer-centric and ultimately, relevant. A brand that encompasses each of these attributes has a much better chance of being successful and converting that success into consistency in the long run.

How do you infuse this philosophy into your own company? What are your brand challenges? We want to know more and would love to hear about them and respond with our own collective experiences in the comments.

Three Fundamental Design Best Practices to Maximize Content Marketing Success

Evan Jacobs — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 21:58:29 +0000

Content marketing is, in my opinion, the most valuable investment that a company can make to grow its web presence, capture mindshare and boost conversions. There are countless tips out there on how to engage your audience(s) and make your content SEO-optimized, but far fewer speaking to the design aspects of web content. Here are some best practices that will make the frame of your content (your website), more aesthetically pleasing and easy to read. After all, what is the point of content marketing if your audience doesn't want to read/share your work?

I. Let the content breathe

I think the most common design crime surrounding content is poor whitespace layout and overly narrow pages. I'm sure you've been to more than a few sites guilty of this; you can barely read the paragraphs and keep getting distracted by the myriad of display ads, widgets and other junk squished in with the content.

Before

After

(Click an image to view its full size.)

The Huffington Post is guilty of both issues. Not only is its content squeezed into a relatively narrow space, there are no less than three widgets packed in (not even on a sidebar) and the columns on the website have a tiny gutter which causes the eye to incessantly bounce back and forth between the news stories and feeds/widgets on the right side. The result is a distracting and disruptive experience for readers. Plus, Brafton has reported that cluttered sites with hard-to-find content may be guilty of "myopic SEO" – search engine optimization strategies that attempt to overly cram on-page SEO with the algorithm in mind. SMX experts shared insight that these were the type of web pages penalized in the Panda updates. What’s good for site visitors is also good for SEO.

II. Mute surrounding site elements

Just as a lack of spacing and clutter can distract users, so does excessive use of color and contrast directly around your content. Using a muted (pale or subtle) palette for adjacent web elements accomplishes two critical objectives:

Emphasis on the two most important site areas: content and calls-to-action or CTAs (conversion links)
A hierarchy of information for your audience to process.

Just as grids and tables can arrange information for you to read and comprehend, color and contrast can do the same thing. Brighter, more vivid color immediately highlights components of a web page as important in our subsconcious, while softer colors cause the elements to slightly recede and take lesser priority. This theory applied to CTAs means that a viewer will immediately lock on to a CTA as important and be much more likely to read and click on the object.

(Click the image to view its full size.)

You can see this in action on Brafton.com. Our content has a neutral, white backdrop and the only vivid object nearby is our CTA leading to a product landing page. The eye recognizes this instantly and processes it before moving on to the content. The secondary widgets (Related Content, Recent News, etc.) are in muted colors, such as our soft blue and pale gray, to subtly define their existence but keep focus on more vital content areas.

III. Optimize for different browser sizes

Let's face it, the once and done approach simply does not work for today's internet; tablets, smartphones and laptops of varying screen sizes require a more sophisticated strategy when it comes to designing our content's "shell." Depending on how your website was built, there may be ready-made modules or plugins available to make mobile optimization easy. For instance, Brafton.com (a Wordpress-run site) utilizes the WPTouch plugin to reflow our news and blog content for mobile visitors. If you'd prefer to let an outside agency craft and update your mobile website, Mobify seems to be a slick solution. Before everything else though, you should pull up your favorite web analytics tool and make sure your audience utilizes mobile browsing enough to justify the implementation cost.

Updates translate into search (and sales) success

The long and short of the above best practices is that simply producing quality content isn't enough to maximize the value of your marketing efforts. In order to get the most of your time and spend, attention must be paid to the human experience of your content, namely usability. To give a little context to these recommendations, we implemented each of them on our own site (relaunched in January 2011) and have seen our traffic double and conversion rates increase dramatically as a result. Have you made any website changes to better present your content?

Are +1 and Facebook ‘Likes’ inherently flawed?

Evan Jacobs — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 08:00:17 +0000

On our Facebook page, a reader (@Patrickberzai) commented on a recent +1 story, mentioning that, "They should make a G- (minus) button." That got me thinking: Why is there a lack of counterbalance to "Likes" and +1's? On one hand, you have the notion that the mere act of giving a positive spin to a neutral object is enough to differentiate "good" content from the rest. This system is used by Facebook and Google (and Matt Cutts has suggested +1 might ultimately become a Google ranking signal). Bing does not have a +1 equivalent, but instead integrates Facebook social data on an opt-in basis for their searchers. Alternatively, social commenting system Disqus allows both up and down ranking - encouraging users to vote up useful comments and bury irrelevant or spammy ones.

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The Implications of +/- vs. +

For content marketers, a positive/negative rating system can be daunting. What if a competitor launches a smear campaign and enlists users to down-rank your content unnecessarily? Would negative ratings be abused by spammers to skew (potential) ranking signals and elevate their own domains above legitimate websites? Does a negative rating for one piece of content compromise the rest of your pool? On the flipside, the existence of -1 and "Dislike" buttons could deflate sites with inferior content and help eliminate spam through crowdsourcing. It also would keep content creators sharp about their readership, giving fast insight into which topics, writing styles and designs are successful (as well as which types don't pass the bar.) Currently, this type of insight is expensive and time-consuming to acquire; many businesses spend thousands of dollars on market research and sophisticated analytics platforms in an attempt to gather such data. Of course, for this negative rating system to work, Google, Facebook and other implementors would have to institute flood limits. Most abusers or spammers of rating systems like +1 will systematically vote for themselves multiple times in one sitting. A flood limit (perhaps three consecutive +1s or -1s per five minutes) would go a long way toward limiting fraudulent rankings. In my opinion, the benefits outweigh the risks in this case. Quality content will continue to be rewarded with a "Like" or +1, while scammers, spammers and copycats will be pushed down in results for logged in users, leading to immediate benefits for content marketers.

How +/- could work for your business

With any system, smart design analysis and proactiveness are key to ensure the desired result is achieved. Here's a few ways marketers might see some positive results from negative ratings:

De-emphasize, don't bury. Although it may be tempting to remove content with negative feedback from your site and search results, de-emphasizing the results with a lighter color or lower opacity should be enough to show differences in reported quality. This also helps avoid spammers from doing permanent damage to your content ratings because the manipulated results are still visible but given less prominence; searchers/readers will still be able to view your content if that is what they are seeking. Burying/removal should only occur from a mixture of poor rank and user-submitted spam reports.

Reward "good" content more publicly. To set the right precedent for adoption, quality content should be given a greater spotlight. If social data becomes a confirmed ranking signal, marketers might benefit if Google devoted a special area on the homepage for top +1'ed content. Facebook could take the idea of their sponsored "Likes" and push it further to show recently liked companies, pages etc. from friends - a "You might like X" concept. Additionally, marketers can promote their well-received pages themselves with a "featured" spotlight for content with high ratings, such as what we have done on our category landing pages.
More feedback = more trust. According to a survey by Invoke, the quality of comments (and potentially, social ratings) impacts 62 percent of consumers' perceptions of a business blog. Thus, it stands to reason that the more (socially) engaged your content is, the greater potential ROI and goodwill you can collect from its consumption. For example, if a blog post received a negative rating, marketers could confront the problem head on, using this as an opportunity to engage prospects and ask them what type of information would be more valuable to them.

Closing Thoughts

According to the July 2011 Netcraft Web Server Survey, there are more than 357 million websites on the internet. The task of finding quality (and reliable) content becomes more difficult every day and necessitates the existence of a more complete rating system - especially as social ratings may become ranking signals. Whether it be social in nature, or relegated more specifically to search engines, I think down rating is a basic need that is mostly unmet by the current internet status quo. What do you think? Would a "Dislike" button be a complete content marketing nightmare, or can you see potential advantages from this type of feedback? Vote in the above poll and voice your opinion in the comments.

Three Free Analytics Tools to Find Your Most Valuable Content Pages

Evan Jacobs — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 20:02:22 +0000

Previously, we've outlined why quality content should be a #1 priority in your web marketing mix, but how do you quantitatively measure its success? In our experience, a combination of tools like Google Analytics (general), dlvr.it (social) and Quantcast (demographic) give an excellent baseline of data for evaluation.

Getting Started

Depending on what marketing objectives your website was built to accomplish, Google Analytics tends to be an excellent swiss army knife for measuring ROI on the web. Generally speaking, your most valuable pages will have a large volume of unique, converting visitors with a dwell time of more than one minute.* This blend of metrics signifies that your page is pulling in a variety of different viewers who are interested in what you have to say and are more likely to click on your calls to action. In addition, pages with a greater proportion of search engine-based (organic) visitors are even more valuable because they offer essentially free traffic.

* If you run an online store, lower dwell time and higher conversion is probably preferred to evaluate your best pages.

Using Google Analytics

If you haven't already set up an Analytics profile and inserted the tracking tag on your website, start there. You'll realistically want about a month of collected data to make an accurate judgement of your content. Data in hand, let's click on the "Content" tab on the left sidebar and the sub-page, "Top Content." Here, you'll see the most basic breakdown of your pages and their value initially sorted by pageviews. Although pageviews are useful, the metrics we want to measure are actually unique pageviews, time on page and bounce rate. Bounce rate in particular is important to minimize, because it refers to the proportion of visitors that find your page and leave your site immediately after. An example would be finding a content page from Google, consuming it and going back to the search engine without clicking onto other pages (or calls to action.) There is another view I find very useful called "Pivot" which makes it much easier to breakdown not only the raw traffic numbers, but also the sources like Google, social media and "direct" traffic. If you use AdWords to drive paid search traffic to your site, you can choose to have that cost data brought into Google Analytics and used as an additional metric. AdSense data is automatically displayed as well, if you use Google's ad network to make money off incoming website traffic. Aside from "Top Content", I find "Content Drilldown" to be useful, because it lets you see the top pages in any given website folder. We use it to figure out which product landing pages are the highest performers and identify our top news and blog pages for the month.

dlvr.it, Social Tools

If you have a social media setup and there is an analytics package associated, feel free to use it, but we love dlvr.it for its simplicity. It analyzes all of your distributed content and presents a minimal dashboard to monitor followers, engagement and top content. Consider it the answer to Google Analytics' "Top Content" for social media. Also, see which content headlines and shared links drive the most traffic back to your site. This gives a good sense of the type of site content that most appeals to your social followers.

Quantcast, Demographics Tools

This tool in particular is most useful for making sure that your content is targeting and attracting the right audience. While Google Analytics measures your ability to pull in visitors, Quantcast qualitatively measures demographic information. To give a case example, our preferred audience for Brafton News is marketing professionals above college age, and Quantcast allows us detect how much business traffic visits our websites. You simply can't discover that type of information with Google Analytics yet, and this tool will show if your content is mistakenly attracting college kids to a professionally-targeted website. In summary, the analytics tools above will go a long way toward identifying your most valuable content and giving directional information on types of content for further investment. As with any other marketing initative, ROI is a top concern for an online business. In fact, Brafton reported earlier today that (83 percent) of marketers say they would boost their use of content marketing if they could more easily measure ROI. Take the time to set up analytics tools and consistently check them to capitalize on every quality lead and traffic opportunity.

To Blog, or Not to Blog?

Evan Jacobs — Tue, 31 May 2011 11:26:44 +0000

It's no secret that blogging is a bit of an internet marketing craze today, but is it the type of content that will be the best use of your time and resources? The kind of content you invest in should really depend on how you want to communicate with your stakeholders. To give a real life example, let's consider Amazon.com. Amazon is a primarily B2C company, sporting their homegrown products like the Kindle and a gargantuan variety of commodities from thousands of third-party merchants. Due to the fact that Amazon is such an ecommerce giant, it is reasonable to assume that almost all its web traffic is transactional - meaning that a visitor is searching for a specific item with the intent to purchase (now or in the near future.) With a visitor base exhibiting search-buy-exit behavior, would a blog succeed? I believe yes, but the marketing blog would need to be very targeted. By targeted, I mean it needs to have a lot of personality and engage visitors in ways that only Amazon can. One example could be reviews of goods sold on the site by actual Amazon.com employees, a C-level executive's take on the company's future or a weekly new product "roundup." In other words, a successful Amazon blog would need to be a hybrid between the traditional "corporate blog" and the conversational blogs popular today. (And, by the way, profiling your target audience to achieve maximum ROI is essential no matter what type of content you choose for marketing.) Some businesses look at social content as an alternative to blog marketing, but the two work best in tandem. For instance, the recent trend has been to offer social interaction with branded Twitter accounts, such as Lionel @ Dell and Express's CMO Lisa G. Translating these social efforts into a supplemental blog format helps make the content search-friendly and may have greater impact than just using Twitter alone. So, how about your business? If you've tried blogging (internally or externally) and it didn't seem to pay off for you, another content marketing option is news. Consider the fact that over 75 percent of internet-connected Americans read news online; that's a 220+ million person group that may not be as accessible by social media or blog marketing. If you're interested in learning more about news content marketing, check out our information page. To wrap things up, whether you decide to engage in some form of blogging or not, define a content strategy early and leave wiggle room for improvements and tweaks as visitors begin to engage you. A targeted blog will never hurt your business, but do your due diligence and see what content mix is best suited to both your resources and audience.

Reinvention: When is it time for a total website makeover?

Evan Jacobs — Fri, 06 May 2011 13:53:35 +0000

At some point in the lifetime of our web properties - just as with out homes - there comes a moment when you look around and creativity takes hold. You'll want to tear everything down and start anew; perhaps you've outgrown the old design paradigm or it no longer fits your business model. Maybe you notice people aren't clicking through your conversion pages the way you would have hoped. In any case, the decision to tweak, innovate or remain constant is at your discretion.

This choice to redesign has countless marketing implications. Perhaps a new layout would allow you to capitalize on previously underused white space for display ad revenue, or refocus the master content in a different direction. In the case of Brafton.com, starting over meant a rededication to our bread and butter, our core essence, our news services.

Previously, the colors and structure of our website crowded our news content and information about our content marketing services. Much like cooking mushrooms, if you crowd the key information on your site, it won't develop the full breadth of its value (or flavor in the case of the vegetable.) Thus, we re-imagined the flow of text and color to place the highest contrast on the content - a proven method of granting emphasis in design. With the new content and stylistic scheme in place, dwell time, repeat visits and social sharing have grown significantly and continue to rise.

Reasons for a Redesign

Redesigns are generally propelled by one of two sources: statistics (web analytics) and the human element (usability, relevance). Both are important - some argue equally, some disproportionately biased; this is a whole another debate, but the bottom line is optimizing for usability is much more likely to lead to improved web metrics, versus the other way around. That being said, when you look at your website, the first question you should ask is, "Is it easy to accomplish the goal of my visit?"

If you run a news site, is the news easily accessible? Legible? Are deep links to related content present if the reader is curious for more?

If you run an e-commerce site, is your "cart" directly viewable and editable with minimum fuss? Are (legitimate) customer reviews front and center, with full product specifications a click away? Do you recommend complimentary products, such as a memory card to go with a digital camera and perhaps even bundle them as a sale?

If you're a financial institution offering online services, are 99 percent of account management options available in an automated fashion? Is it easy to obtain rapid, useful customer service? Do you provide intuitive tools (like budgeting, loan calculators, etc.) for your customers to make smart monetary decisions?

If site visitors can't easily and intuitively convert, it's time to think about reshaping your online presence. Although your first instinct may be to hire a design firm to whip up something new and fresh, the first people you should consult are your stakeholders - namely, your employees and visitors.

Gather Insight from Within

In most cases (I can think of), employees of a company frequent their website and will have feedback to improve the browsing experience. The beauty is internal market research is as cheap as sending an email. Thanks to the variety of personalities and use cases among your colleagues, they will be able to give surprisingly deep, honest and invaluable feedback. Use this insight as directional research and then pursue more qualitative and quantitative studies with your external visitors.

After all that, solicit some outside opinions and use your research to fact check and ensure you aren't spending time, money and resources ineffectively. The only worse thing than a failed redesign are the sunk costs and lost engagement to follow.

The Cloud and You: a microguide for marketers

Evan Jacobs — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:34:57 +0000

The "cloud" has become a buzzword in today's marketing vocabulary, but (in my experience) few seem to know what it actually refers to or how cloud services are used. Today, I'd like to rectify that disparity of knowledge and equip you with some basic tools for understanding how the "cloud" can fit into your business/marketing strategy.

What is this cloud anyhow?

From now on, when you hear the word cloud, I want you to think about sharing. No no, you don't have to share your software, business creations, or intellectual property, only the infrastructure that supports them. You see, cloud platforms are a large collection of physical hardware combined in such a way that the end user (you) can approach the cloud vendor, quote how many resources you expect to need and near-instantly be set up with your own private island in their virtualized ocean.

Aside from being able to modify how many resources you use on the fly (previously impossible with dedicated hardware), you will never notice a difference between traditional hosting and cloud hosting through a solid, reputable vendor.

Today, cloud services refer to many things beyond mere hosting, and some other common uses include data synchronization, backup for computers and devices and grid computation. If you own an Android phone and use its contact sync service, that would be a cloud application. If you've used a web service such as Microsoft's Office Live or Google Docs, those are cloud apps, too.

In short, the cloud means scalable resources for people and businesses to lease and use that are free of maintenance costs and supported by redundancy in case of system failures.

Why use a cloud, instead of purchasing our own resources?

In some cases, like when absolute vertical control is necessary for your product offerings, cloud services won't be suitable for your business. However, in 99 percent of the time, the "cloud" is more cost-effective and reliable enough to fulfill your processing needs. To give an example of how cheap cloud products can be, let's examine Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering.

EC2 offers a free tier of "Micro" service, which comes with 750 hours of usage per month, 15GB of data processing, 10GB of storage and 15GB of cumulative bandwidth. Essentially, a small campaign's web app, site or service could be run for free (yes, free.) As your computing needs rise, the price ranges from $0.085 (less than a cent) to $2.10 an hour. Note that the $2.10 an hour is for leasing the equivalent of an entire small data center.

Now, imagine if your company bought physical hardware for the campaign instead of utilizing cloud services. For the sake of illustration, let's use IBM's BladeCenter servers and HP's ProLiant servers as our reference. IBM's BladeCenter hardware costs well over $2,000 a unit as you can see from Google Shopping. HP's ProLiant servers clock in anywhere from $400 into the thousands. Where would you rather spend your budget, on hardware or better media/ad placement?

To be fair, most IT departments purchase these resources with long-term use in mind, so the cost is diluted. However, they also suffer from depreciation, something avoided when using leased equipment like any cloud offering. There's no real "investment" going on when using cloud products, just an on-demand pool of resources.

How can I integrate cloud services into my next marketing campaign?

Does your campaign involve a website? Most web hosts use a cloud service in one way or another to keep costs their costs low, while offering better performance and reliability for their customers. If you aren't familiar with web hosting, check out my Site Speed Primer for Marketers.

Is that website targeted globally? A cloud-based content delivery network (CDN) like Amazon's CloudFront or NetDNA's Cloud Force will keep browsing speed quick in many countries throughout the globe. Read part three of my Site Speed Primer for Marketers to learn more about the benefits of using a CDN.

Are you building a mobile app? Use a cloud product to facilitate the processing and transfer of data from point A to B to save money.

I hope you found this guide useful; with the growing prevalence of cloud products and immense cost efficiencies, its in everyone's best interest to at least learn the basics of cloud technology.

Have a recommendation for my next guide? Let me know in the comments!

Is Content King on Twitter?

Evan Jacobs — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 13:31:58 +0000

In the online marketing world, the axiom for a strong and popular website is and will remain to be relevant, searchable content. However, the addage "Content is King" needs some adjustment for today's Internet.

Consider social media, specifically Twitter and Facebook. On Twitter in particular, there are millions of people tweeting more than 155 million articles, media and other content every day; how can the value of good content be retained in a social maelstrom? The chaos has to be sorted - it must be tamed to extract the "diamonds in the rough." Those curators, creators and distributors are your social "friends."

Thus the real question becomes, is relationship king on Twitter (and other social media)? I argue, wholeheartedly, yes!

With this new philosophy in hand, our new focus as social marketers needs to be accessing these important, valuable relationships online. Is content still vitally important? Absolutely, and developing strong online relationships will only be beneficial if you provide your social "friends" with content that is useful to them. (Brafton has reported that internet marketing experts agree on the value of relevant social content.)

What we need to concentrate on is finding our key followers in our sector and converting them into brand and content promoters. A retweet is great, but a retweet from a follower with strong connections and influence is invaluable.

As Microsoft said in an infamous advertising campaign for its (now defunct) KIN product, "You have Friends, 'friends' and FRIENDS." Each type of friend has a different social value, and the potential for content to be shared varies. For the sake of illustration let's label,

Friends as 'people from your offline life that you're friendly with' - Passerbys
"friends" as 'online social acquaintances' - Connected Influencers
FRIENDS as 'your best offline/online friends'. - Besties

The Personal Point of View

Depending on the strength of your relationship with another person, content he or she presents and shares with you online will carry more or less weight in relevance. If you see a tweet on Twitter from one of your besties, chances are you are much more likely to click and consume the media on the flip side than from a connected influencer or passerby. The continuum of social heft when it comes to relationships seems to be: Besties > Connected Influencers > Passerbys.

The Marketing Point of View

From an outside perspective, it seems clear that we need need to specifically target at least one half of each "bestie" pairing to maximize the ROI of distributing content on Twitter. However, this is near impossible because we only see one side of the story and have no real idea of how deep the relationship goes between two people on social media. Unless we live in a world with perfect information, the next best course of action is to target connected influencers.

So, how do we find influencers? One tool that has made the process easier is Klout, a social intelligence agency based in San Francisco. From their About Us page,

"Klout isn't about figuring out who is on the "A-list." We believe that every person who creates content has influence. Our mission is to help every individual understand and leverage their influence."

Based on their method of sorting, people with high Klout score may prove most valuable on social media when it comes to earning retweets and brand recognition. Seek them out, reach out in an honest way and show them why your brand, product or idea is worthy of spreading - the rest will come naturally.

Another method to find strong influencer/follower pairings is to watch the output of tools like http://twitterbffs.com/, "top followers" listings like what is found through mytopfollowersin2010.com, or topic rankings like what can be found on WeFollow. A simple Twitter search of the keywords should return sufficiently relevant results. These methods aren't perfect, but as we learn from usage, social media is by far not an exact science.

The bottom line is to make sure you are targeting Twitter users with a clear voice and followers that are actively engaged in their conversations. The stronger and deeper the social relationships go, the more potential reach and value your tweets will accumulate.

Site Speed Primer for Marketers, Part 3: On-Page Optimization

Evan Jacobs — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 11:43:45 +0000

In Parts 1 and 2, we covered the basic and finer aspects of choosing the right web hosting and selecting server software to maximize browsing speed for visitors. Today, we are going to explore the last puzzle piece, website code and on-page optimization.

A typical web page is made of a few different components: HTML code, an attached Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), images and usually at least one piece of Javascript. Unless your page is extremely lean and devoid of interactivity, the overall weight is likely at least 50 - 100 kilobytes. To give a point of reference, our image-heavy home page clocks in at about 600kb (measured with YSlow.)

Load Speed Breakdown

In order to understand the best way to speed up your site, you need to know how web pages actually deliver information to a browser. Technically speaking, the HTML code directs your browser to perform HTTP requests on the components it needs to assemble and render the page.

In simpler terms, the raw HTML code of your website is like a map, and every time you add an image or link a piece of a Javascript to it, you're giving your browser more places to look before it can build what your page is supposed to look like. If these items are scattered across the web, that means it will take progressively longer to gather all the page's elements, ultimately slowing down loading time.

A good rule of thumb for web design and development is to use as few outside codes and images to build your pages as possible; certain ones are a modern necessity, such as Google Analytics, but the kitschy Javascript or Flash effects many sites use are not. Keep in mind that if you use any Google AdSense advertising blocks on your site, they count as an outside element that can slow down your browsing.

Tips and Tricks for Maximizing Speed

Aside from stripping out unnecessary images, removing excess white space and HTML comments etc. from your web pages, there are a number of tricks that can accomplish speed gains without sacrificing functionality.

Use CSS, Not Text Images

Did you know that most modern browsers (IE8, Chrome, Firefox, Safari) can render text in advanced ways that mimic and perform on-par with many image creation tools? There is some variance between browsers on supported standards, but high-end text effects and even recreating logos can be achieved through a combination of HTML and CSS, eliminating the need for additional images on your web page.

1st Web Designer has a great list of CSS text effects you can use on your site to avoid including more images.

CSS Sprites

A sprite is a mash-up of two or more images to save downloading time in your browser. Essentially, you can use an image editing application like Adobe Photoshop to stack the images horizontally or vertically and use a bit of CSS code to center the browser appropriately on the needed part of the sprite. Skyje.com has a great list of CSS sprite tutorials to get you started, and there is even an online generator at Project Fondue.

Pro Tip: Saving CSS sprites horizontally instead of vertically-stacked will result is a slightly smaller file size. (Smaller is better.)

Minify CSS and Javascript

Minification of code relates to stripping out unneeded white space and converting overly complex functions or lines of code to simpler ones, reducing file size and potentially easing the processing burden of your visitor's browser. CSS in particular is very easy to minify, as manipulating white space in this type of file will not cause any detrimental effects to the code itself. Javascript (JS) is much more complex, and testing is necessary to ensure that a minified version of the file will operate properly.

CSS Minifier - http://www.minifycss.com/css-compressor/
Javascript Compressor / Minifier - http://jscompress.com/

If you want to go a step further, concatenating (combining) like CSS or Javascript files will also result in a speed bonus. As with minifying, this usually works fine for CSS files, but Javascript files usually need additional performance testing.

Caching

One quick way to speed up your website is to use a caching solution to pre-build your pages and deliver them with far fewer HTTP requests. If you are using a Content Management System (CMS) to house your content, chances are there is a caching module or plug-in available for your use. Brafton.com uses the W3 Total Cache system to accelerate our content.

Caching is also possible on the browser level by setting special headers and tags for the elements of your pages, such as images, scripts, etc. If your server runs Apache, check out this tutorial for more information. For friends using NGINX, a code snippet like this will do the trick in your site's configuration file:

location ~* .(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {
expires 30d;
log_not_found off;
}

Use a CDN

Thanks to the advent of cheaper Content Distribution Networks (CDN) such as Amazon's Cloudfront service, these services are now economical enough for even small or personal websites to use - often at a cost of as little as a dollar or two a month. Note that to use Cloudfront, you will need to have an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) account to store the content first.

A CDN works by hosting all of your website's "static" content in the cloud and maintaining a network of "edge" servers that are strategically located around the world. "Static" content refers to files including images, themeing assets like CSS and Javascript and any other file on your website that is not routinely updated.

In practice, delivering these static web assets from a server geographically closer to the visitor will speed up their browsing experience.

Well, I hope you enjoyed our guide to getting maximum speed performance out of the hardware, software and content of your website. As a final tip (and it's an important one), never trade usability for speed. It is my personal opinion that usability should always come first because if your website isn't easy to use and navigate, the speed won't really matter because visitors won't want to stay on it.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to sharing more insights and tricks in the future.