Resources

Deciding to Build a New Web Site

If you are starting a new business or organization, you realize that developing your web site is one of your top priorities. In today’s online world, those organizations that do not have a web site, just don’t seem like legitimate businesses or ones that prospective buyers, clients or supporters have confidence to do business with. Increasingly, as traditional marketing approaches become less effective, perhaps led by the phone book, it has never been more important to concentrate your marketing efforts in your web site and to effectively implement an online communications strategy to build your business.

Planning a New Web Site

Whether you are starting a new business or entity, or asking yourself if it is time to re-design your organization’s site, setting out to design a new site takes considerable planning. Planning ahead will help you develop a site that is both content-rich and one that visitors will engage with. This will help your site generate business leads and sales or supporters for your cause or organization.

Design Your New Web Site with Your Visitors (Prospective Buyers, Supporters, and Clients) in Mind

The first thing you need to do is to set out to design your web site with your prospective buyers, supporters and clients in mind (heretofore referred to as buyers). To do that, you must begin with the following questions: Who are your prospective buyers? What problems do they have? What services or products do you provide that can meet their needs? What demographic groups do they fall into? What types of Web content will they respond to? Once you determine who your buyers are, you can develop specific content to meet their needs.

Consider the way search engines work. They seek to provide the best results for what people are searching for. Because of this, you will likely have a separate web page for each of your different products, etc. and for each type of buyer and their problems. The more specific the content, the better, as your page content seeks to cover niche markets.

What Pages to Include in Your Web Site

When deciding how to organize your site, you will want to consider how to best organize your buyer-specific content with ease of navigation in mind. All sites have a home page. This page is going to be the first page many visitors see, especially when they type your company name into a search engine, enter your URL into a browser, or are referred to your home page from another site. It is important that the home page be attractive and inviting. However, it is even more important that visitors can easily find the information they are looking for and that it addresses their problems. Intuitive organization and useful content are more important than a fancy design or impressive technology. The home page should be a gateway to your prospective buyers. When they visit the site, they should be able to find the content they are looking for and feel that the site addresses their needs. There should be links to address their problems from the buyer’s perspective.

Choosing Content Formats for Your Web Visitors

Because different visitors have different preferences in how they access content or learn about your services, there should be different content formats for different users, including video, audio and multimedia. Specifically, if your site has younger visitors, then they may be more likely to want to watch a video or download and subscribe to a podcast.

Getting Your Visitors to Interact with Your Web Site

Every page should also have an e-mail sign up, as well as a call to action to a free download. You will also want links to your contact page and contact form. Every page should have a different call to action based on the page’s content. You may also want to provide opportunities for visitors to interact with your site, including social media bookmarks and ways to share your content with others, and to include links to your social media sites and a blog. You can include links and badges or banners for people to add to their site. You can provide content for others to use on their sites. You can also ask visitors to rate your page or interact with an online forum. You can even ask them to take action by providing them content and asking them to e-mail an elected official, for instance. The purpose of all this interaction is to gather contact information and to have your visitors promote your site.

Measuring Web Page Effectiveness

One measure of your site’s effectiveness is its “bounce rate.” This is the percentage of visitors that do not go onto a second page on your site and is measured in Google Analytics. Although the bounce rate applies to all the pages in your site, it tells us that the visitor did not find what they were looking for or that the site was not for them. If you paid for the results through ad words, then you lost money. Either way, you lost a prospective customer. Considering that many web site bounce rates are in excess of 50%, you can double your real traffic by making it easier for people to find the content they are looking for or improving the presentation of the information they find to show that your organization can address their problems.

Another measure is the page’s search function. If a visitor uses it, they are saying they can’t find what they are looking for, using your navigation scheme. Monitor these searches and change your content accordingly. You can also use Google Analytics and your Ad Word keyword results to see what people are searching for. This will help you decide the best keywords to use for your site pages.

Introducing New York Lawyer Pages

PRMG Announces Launch of New York Lawyer Pages Website

www.nylawyerpages.com

The Public Relations and Marketing Group, LLC (PRMG) announced it has launched its newest website-based entity, New York Lawyer Pages (www.nylawyerpages.com). The website was created by PRMG, a leading provider of customized marketing solutions for attorneys in New York State. The site provides important resources for the public by allowing them access to a database of attorneys who practice in the field in which they need assistance based on geographic area, read articles about legal issues and even obtain legal forms.

“By concentrating this site only on New York, it will be easier for the public to find the information they are looking for and that the content provided is more pertinent to their legal issue,” said John C. Zaher, President/CEO, The Public Relations and Marketing Group.

For a monthly membership fee, attorneys can list their firm online in order to promote their practice and further increase their exposure. They can submit a listing, summarizing what the firm does and the practice areas in which they concentrate. Their firm can be searchable within the NYLawyerPages website by name of the attorney or firm, practice area, zip code, city or county. All entries will be optimized and indexed by all major search engines. Attorneys can also post any news and accomplishments they may wish prospective clients to know about.

Currently, PRMG is providing free basic listings through March 31, 2011. The Basic Listing includes a listing in the directory under three categories, news and article postings. Attorneys can also be listed in a Featured Listing, which includes a listing in the directory under three categories with precedence over basic listings, news and article postings for a monthly fee of $49.95. The Front Page Spotlight includes an attorney spotlight ad with a link to the entry on the front page and the same features offered as the Featured Listing. Front Page Spotlight ads are $99.95 per month.

In addition, NYLawyerPages allows attorneys to submit articles to the website, which will be filed under various legal categories. The articles are then “tweeted” on NYLawyerPages’ Twitter page (www.twitter.com/nylawyerpages). Attorneys can also link their firm’s website in their articles as a way to generate more traffic and improve optimization of their firm’s website. NYLawyerPages’ “Submitting an Article Guide” provides knowledge of how search engines work and how keywords affect the firm’s ranking. All legal articles will be optimized and indexed by all major search engines daily.

NYLawyerPages also has legal documents that can be downloaded from the site, provided by LegalZoom. Documents are available for those who wish to form a business, protect their intellectual property, plan a will or seek other personal services (power of attorney, small claims, divorce, name change).

For the latest news from the legal world, NYLawyerPages has a Legal News tab which receives RSS feeds of articles from various media sources. There is also a lead generation function in which visitors can fill out a form online to request to be contacted by legal counsel. Prospective clients can request to be contacted by a firm concentrating in their area of need. The firm closest in geography which concentrates in that practice area will receive their request via e-mail.

“We are very pleased to launch NYLawyerPages. The site’s technology and user-friendly interface will help attorneys build their practices not only through its directory, but also by using its content-based optimization tools to drive traffic to their own firm web sites. Over time, we believe that by empowering attorneys and by providing a value-based alternative that is specific to New York State, NYLawyerPages has the potential to rival its leading competitors,” said Mr. Zaher.

For more information, call (631) 207-1057 or visit www.nylawyerpages.com.

Today we were contacted by the Long Island Business Journal to renew our subscription. The sales rep shared some information with me that I thought might interest our readers.

The Journal is now offering a Business discount on its annual subscription. $99 gets you 52 weekly issues plus 4 seasonal issues and entitles you to a 4 week “listing ad” about the size of a business card. Also, the subscription is tax deductible if used for “business purposes.” To take advantage of this offer, call 1-866-913-4691.

Just because we are in the middle of a recession, it doesn’t mean your business has to be in one. In fact, I have never been more optimistic than I am about 2009 and the prospects of growing my business and that of our clients.

At PRMG, we continue to grow our business. Like many businesses, we’ve had a few losses and a few gains, but our clients realize that we provide them with value for our services and continue to provide them with the opportunity to grow in good times and in bad.

First, it is important to take an historical perspective which tells me that things are never as good or as bad as they seem. Yes, retail sales reports for November and December showed a 2% decline, but that means that sales were 98% of what they were the year before and higher than what they were in 2006. A number of retailers had their best years yet. Nationally, unemployment is up about 2% from its average during the past decade of about 5% (economists consider employment full at about a 4% unemployment rate to account for persons leaving jobs for non-economic reasons). In other words, 93% of Americans are employed and our unemployment rate remains 3 percentage points better than what many Western European countries see during good economic times. Locally (Suffolk/Nassau, New York), for November, unemployment stood at 5.2%. With lower costs, including the cost of advertising, labor and greater availability of qualified personnel, recessions are often the best time for businesses to expand. In recessions, new industries and opportunities are created. Effective marketing can help you tap into these new opportunities and expand your business, despite the poor economy.

Here are PRMG’s tips for marketing in a recession:

Focus on your Current Clients. Hold on to your current clients with an iron fist. Increase your client contact and continue to provide value. Put in any extra time you may have into nurturing your client base. Make sure that you are on the bottom of their list to cut back on. Now that you’ve put up a client firewall, you can take advantage of market conditions and expand your business.

Expand Business from Current Clients. Increase the amount of business that you are getting from your current clients. For retailers and restaurants, market to your client database. If you don’t have a client database, it’s never too late to start. Restaurants can use comment cards. Leave e-mail lists at the register. Ask customers to drop off business cards to participate in a raffle. Increase the number of e-newsletters you send them. Provide coupons and value to increase traffic, especially during slow times of the week. Get them in and sell them more. Send printed newsletters to your customers and clients.

Grow by Concentrating on Prospects. To expand your business, concentrate your direct mail and e-mail marketing to current and past prospects. Follow up with phone calls. These are the lowest hanging fruit and provide the best potential return on investment.

Solicit New Business using Low-Cost Methods. Use e-marketing. Develop databases to include e-mails. Send out regular customized e-mails to solicit new business. Track and place follow-up phone calls to prospects.

Gain Earned Media. Write press releases and contact television, radio, print and Internet media regarding your products and services. Submit press releases to web sites. If you can interest the media to write a story about your business, it won’t cost you anything. Especially if you advertise, many weekly newspapers will run editorial stories for you.

Build your Web Traffic. Use search engine optimization techniques to increase web traffic. Start a blog. Post content and links to your site on web sites. Increase one-way links to your site.

Pay for Results. Use pay-per-click and pay-per-phone calls to increase traffic to landing pages on your site. Once on your site, capture contact information by providing a call to action download. With these campaigns, you are ensured that you are only paying for increased traffic and phone calls, and can control your budget to minimize advertising costs.

Get out of the Office or Store. Professionals and service businesses should go door to door. Drop off marketing materials and samples. This is especially good for restaurants. Attend networking events and pay at the door. No need to increase your marketing costs by joining a multitude of groups and associations. Attend what you can and pay the extra amount for non-members.

Create Events to Increase Traffic. Professionals can develop lectures and market them to prospects and others using the techniques above. Restaurants and retailers can hold product demonstrations and again market to current clients and promote to the public using press releases and advertising.

Advertise, Advertise, Advertise! I left this one last, only because it involves the greatest outlay of funds, not because it is the least effective. The opposite is true. There is no better time than during a recession to advertise. Advertising space and inventories are up, leading to rate and production discounts. On television and radio, use broad rotations rather than fixed positions. With greater inventory, you’ll get the times/programs you want anyway, as well as more bonuses and auto-fill as inventory is unsold. Take advantage of gift certificate programs on radio to advertise for free and increase traffic, especially during slow periods. Use specialty publications to hit targets. (See our upcoming report on Advertising in a Recession for more information.)