Creating Your Brand Online, Part 2: Top 10 Content Management Systems

Creating Your Brand Online, Part 2: Top 10 Content…

The second installment in a series of posts explaining the different types of digital assets that are required to setup, support and fuel the online presence for your business or brand.

You have your website design, you have your content, but you don’t know how to bring the two together? Content Management Systems might be the right option for you. Gone are the times where a swanky website design was enough to draw in your audience. Competition in the online world is fierce,  ranking high in search engines and remaining attractive to your audience is essential and that means you have to keep your content up to date.  This is where content management systems come in.

What are Content Management Systems?

Essentially, Content Management Systems (CMSs) are powerful web development tools, enabling users to create, edit and store web content. For most CMSs, this can be done without much or any knowledge of how to code. Plugins or themes are available for many CMSs which increase the functionality and provide a variety of pre-coded design options. Content Management Systems give an end-user the flexibility of changing content with ease, whilst enabling developers to deliver quality products to their clients in a convenient and efficient way.

Which CMS is right for me?

There a numerous CMSs available, some are tailored to specific functionality such as blogging or selling products/services online (e-commerce), whilst others can be customized to provide the function you require. In order to decide which Content Management System is right for you and your business, ask yourself the following question:

What kind of site do I need?

From a one page website with simple information, to blogs, to shopping sites, there are many options and its vital for you to determine what it is that you want to achieve with your site. To narrow it down, consider the following:

What functionality do I want to provide to the user?

• easy navigation through blog content
• sign up options to newsletters
• a shopping cart and payment options
• contact form

…the list is endless. Determine everything that you want your site to do, how you want your user to interact with it and the features that make you stand out from your competitors.

Once you have established what it is that you want your online presence to look like you can dive further and explore the different CMSs available. In particular, explore their functionality and ease of use based on your knowledge of code, to ensure you choose the most effective system for your needs and your niche. When conducting your research consider the following:

• Is there a cost involved with the CMS?
• How are CMS updates managed? Are they easy to do myself? How do they affect plugins?
• What design and functionalities are available? Are there many options?
• How easy is it to implement your own code?
• Check out Demo sites – nothing beats first hand experience

Top 10 Content Management Systems*

Market Lead

WordPress is clearly the market leader, taking over 60% of the market, with hundreds of competitor CMSs sharing the remaining 40%. However, as competitors gain momentum, it will be interesting to see how long WordPress can sustain it’s lead.

In conclusion, there are numerous options out there that cater for a variety of applications and skill levels. Another consideration when choosing a content management system is your web hosting provider, this is a topic that will be covered in a future post.

*Market Share statistics as of March 2019 (source: w3techs, web technology surveys)

Everything You Need to Create Your Online Brand Presence,…

This is the first in a series of posts that will explain the different types of digital assets that are required to setup, support and fuel the online presence for your business or brand.

This post will explore domain names. A domain name is essentially the physical (albeit virtual) address that represents your brand online.

Lets begin with the assumption that you already have a company/brand name, an awesome logo and a clear understanding of your company’s unique selling points (USPs); these assets will help when making decisions on content at various stages.

Choosing Your Domain

There are various important factors to take into consideration when choosing your domain name, also known as a URL – or Uniform Resource Locator for any die-hard techies out there.

In an ideal world you would own a domain name that directly correlates to your brand name and if possible, include a keyword that helps to identify your service offering, which will help with your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts at a later date. For example if you own a used car dealership called Sterling, it would make sense to try and register sterlingusedcars.co.uk.

Over the past couple of years the choices of domain extensions (the characters after the final full stop) have increased significantly with the inclusion of new and exciting TLDs (top level domains). These currently range from .academy, .adult and .aero through to .you, .zero and .zone; these new extensions have really broadened the creative and descriptive possibilities for the humble domain name.

Domain Availability

So, you have a great domain name idea and now you want to purchase it, how do you do that?  This is actually quite straightforward, simply head over to any web host that offers domain registration and type in your domain in the search box, the service will then tell you if it’s available and probably provide alternative available options, which may or may not be useful.

It can be likely that your first choice domain is already taken, especially if you are going for a .com or .co.uk extension. This is when you need to get creative. While searching for our domain, most variants of ‘method’ (.co.uk, .com etc.) were already taken. As such, we decided the concept of ‘weare<brand-name>’ was a great alternative, especially when combined with the .io extension which has become synonymous with tech companies.

Before committing to purchase your domain name it is worth considering your registrar of choice, factors that should influence your decision are Domain Name Server (DNS) lookup speeds and hosting costs. The speed of a DNS lookup request is a consideration that will impact the time it takes for your webpage to load, more specifically the time it takes before your web site even starts to load, which in turn will have an impact on your SEO performance.

It can be helpful to keep your domain registration and web hosting with the same company, this will make managing your web assets that little bit simpler, but by no means is this an essential requirement.

So where do you go to find the perfect web host for your exciting new website? This will be covered in the next post of this series along with steps for choosing the right platform to run your site on, as these go hand in hand.

Stay tuned!

Conversion rate optimisation | For the healthcare industry

If you’re spending a tonne of budget driving traffic to your website and struggling to deliver the downloads/sign-ups/registrations you hoped for, this article is for you. We’ll demonstrate how optimal landing page design drives customer action, supporting your marketing goals.

And if you take nothing else away from this article, remember: Never Start A Marketing Campaign Without A Dedicated Landing page

What we’ll cover:

1. Landing page: a definition
2. Landing page types
3. Long vs short landing pages
4. Well-designed landing pages
5. The psychology of colour
6. Benefit-driven content
7. Where NOT to send campaign traffic
8. Matched design: why it increases conversions
9. Conversion tracking

Landing page: a definition

A landing page is a dedicated webpage with a single objective: to close a deal. It’s the foundation of a successful digital marketing campaign.

According to Unbouce “Landing pages live separately from your website and are designed to only receive campaign traffic”.

This separation allows them to be focused on a single objective and makes analytics, reporting and testing simpler.

Landing page types

There are two types of landing page; lead generation and click-through.

Lead generation landing pages

The primary objective of a lead generation landing page is to get the contact details of your target audience, so you can follow-up with them later. Usually with sales or marketing content.

To get site visitors to relinquish their contact details, you’ll need to offer something in return. Something of [perceived] value greater than their contact details. This is called your Lead magnet.

Possible Lead magnets include:

1. Access to exclusive content
2. A webinar with a Key Opinion Leader (KOL)
3. A presentation or report
4. Infographics or graphical abstracts
5. Symposium recordings (video or audio)
6. Competition to win a car (JOKE!!!)

If you’re a pharmaceutical or healthcare marketer, your Lead magnet must be compliant with industry regulations. So too the language used to describe the value exchange.

But whatever your offer, offer something of high perceived value.

Click-through landing pages

Click-through pages are designed to ‘warm up’ your audience and generally used as the middleman between your ad and desired target page. These pages provide enough information about the value of your product/service before pushing your audience further down the funnel.

For example, if you are a healthcare publisher and you want to direct your audience to research specific blog articles, instead of creating multiple off-page ads/URLs create a click-through page that introduces your content and the benefits along with clear call-to-action buttons to direct the visitor to the various content pieces.

Long vs short landing pages

In short [forgive the pun] both work.

If you’re offering low risk activity [e.g. to download, subscribe or view] a short landing page may be all you need.

Where the perceived risk is perhaps a little higher [e.g. to buy, trial or sample] you’re likely to need longer landing pages, providing more detail on the benefits and features you’re offering.

If you’re not sure which to use, test them both! Conversion rates will tell you all you need to know.

Well-designed landing pages

It takes 0.05 seconds for users to form an opinion about your website. First impressions count.

Make sure your audience – healthcare professionals [HCPs] and consumers – have a positive first impression of your site.

Successful landing pages aren’t just about having a straightforward objective and message, they’re about providing a clear and visually appealing journey for users.

Every aspect of the landing page must be considered: from font size, colour and graphics to the positioning of your calls to action [CTAs] and how well pages are optimised for different devices.

Recommendation use relevant images, videos and graphics that support your landing page objectives. 40% of people respond better to visual information than text. It provides a more positive user experience.

Anatomy of a perfect landing page

The psychology of colour

It’ll come as no surprise that colour is an essential aspect of a landing page design. If done correctly it will increase on-site conversions significantly.

Don’t go overboard with too many colours and, if using background colours, be sure not distract attention away from your primary objective: lead generation or click through.

CTA colour is key 

You must convince and inspire HCPs, consumers and patients to take action on your website i.e. click your CTA button. But how?! Make your CTAs STAND OUT! Use a contrasting colour from the rest of the page.

Furthermore, test your colours. Create two identical landing pages and test a different coloured CTA button on each by driving similar volumes of traffic to both pages.

Benefit-driven content

As per classic marketing communications, start all your on-page communications with service or product benefits, followed by features. Not the other way around.

Consider the key challenges your customers are trying to address by visiting your site and ranking these in priority order.

From these, create a bulleted list. This makes the benefits and features super-easy for site visitors to understand.

That’s it.

Where NOT to send campaign traffic

Your homepage.

Do not drive traffic to your homepage. Ever. Your homepage likely contains various sections, services and links. What’s your customer to do? Where should they click next?

I don’t know and neither do they!

Think about all those links on your page as ‘leaks’. Each link that doesn’t represent your conversion goal is a distraction that will dilute your message and reduce your conversion rate.

If you want someone to perform a specific action – MAKE IT OBVIOUS. Have only one action on that page that they can perform. Nothing else.

Matched design: why it increases conversions

In a nutshell: your campaign messaging and design must be consistent along the entire customer journey: from original ad to landing page.

 Your landing page must reinforce the messaging presented on the original ad. This will increase conversions and time spent on your site.

Conversion tracking

What gets measured gets improved.

Like all campaigns, it’s important to track how many conversions you get and from which sources. This will provide valuable insight into what works, what doesn’t and where to focus more attention.

Golden rule: keep testing.

Traffic from one source

This is fairly straightforward. If your landing page is getting traffic from one source it’s fairly easy to measure the results. Make sure you link your main CTA to Google Analytics and set it as a goal. This will give you a clear indication on conversions along with other useful stats.

You could even link the landing page with your CRM using some great third-party software, like Zapier.

Traffic from multiple sources

If your landing page is getting campaign traffic from multiple sources, it’s vital you track which channel provides the best results.

Do this by creating unique UTM URL codes for every campaign. They’re variables recognised by Google Analytics to track your marketing campaigns.

A good article called The 10 Best Ways to Use UTM Codes For Conversion Tracking by Search Engine Journal will show you how to set them up.

Social media optimisation tags

If you are running paid social media campaigns, make sure your landing page includes all the relevant tracking pixels and key pieces of content are tagged correctly to help increase social optimisation. (I will go into more details about this in another article)

In summary

As I’ve described above, a dedicated landing page is key to campaign success. Remember these top tips when you approach this:

1.    Focus on your campaign objective

2.    Align creatives and messaging to your CTA

3.    Create your landing page with only one CTA

4.    Populate it with benefit-driven content that’s easy to understand

5.    Track and measure everything, using UTM URL codes

Got a question about any of the above? Drop me a note in the comments below