RJM's
Insights

While certainly not the only solution, a commitment to marketing a business website will be one of the ways to reverse the trend of non-returning visitors. Building feedback loops into the site, where customers can easily subscribe to a secondary source of information, be that a newsletter or Facebook account, provides a way to bring a visitor back to your site. If these methods of marketing are not utilized, continue to expect that 75% of your visitors will only see your site once.

One of the great privileges that RjM has enjoyed over the years is to have built well over 200 websites for businesses of different sizes serving a variety of industries in many of the fifty states. This allows us to take a look at online trends at a macro level that many people will never be able to see. We can see where the trend lines are pointing, but often individual businesses have no way to compare themselves to their peer group. That's about to change.

Over time we've grown accustomed to not knowing how well marketing efforts are performing. John Wanamaker famously said in the 1920's that half of his advertising didn't work; he just didn't know what half. In almost 100 years, we've been trying to quantify and qualify the effectiveness of our marketing efforts.

Too often we think of marketing as a once and done, unconnected activity. When our marketing choices were limited to direct mail, television, radio and print, this might have been the case. It was difficult to connect each media to the other through anything other than message and brand. Now the world has changed. Not only has technology allowed us to connect multiple media seamlessly, it also allows us to create messaging campaigns that combat our ever shortening attention spans.

I am an unabashed car enthusiast just as likely to quote horsepower numbers from the 1960s as I am to talk about advertising. As a graphic designer, cars provide an endless supply of inspiration in color, attitude and shape. Every one has the same goal, but each gets you there in a slightly different manner. They're also a wonderful study in branding. Each manufacturer crafts their own brand, sometimes many under the same company. Miss the target market though, and you're out millions of dollars. Talk about a lot riding on a brand - entire factories are built on the hope that it appeals to the market.

RjM has finished the second in our series of surveys about our client’s websites. This survey, conducted over our current client base, examines how companies are using their websites in a grander marketing sense. As we consider how the website functions in a yearly marketing budget, knowing how you’re utilizing your website as a marketing piece allows us increase our value to you.

From coast to coast, in almost every field, small business owners are looking save money where they can. While you may be thinking about slashing your marketing budget, cutting marketing efforts is not an option for anyone hoping to sustain and grow their small business.

RjM, a marketing agency based in Jackson, Mich., recently won multiple Gold and Silver awards honoring excellence in advertising, marketing and business at the 2011 Marketing Communications Agency Network (MCAN) awards ceremony. RjM was also presented the prestigious award for Overall Excellence in Business to Business Advertising.

If you’re involved with a business-to-business business in any way, you almost certainly know of LinkedIn, a social network geared specifically toward professionals looking to build business connections and promote themselves or their companies. But, what have you done with that knowledge? Does your B2B business have a robust and active presence on LinkedIn? Or maybe you have a profile that you check in on every few months. Or perhaps, getting on LinkedIn is just another thing far on the bottom of your “to do” list.

They say that numbers never lie, and in this case, that may have never been a more true statement. During a recent client campaign, RjM was able to put three different online media up against each other. With each media getting the same goals, budget and timeline, patterns started to emerge that we can use to shape all future campaigns.