RJM's
Insights

There’s a wonderful ambiguity to marketing. It’s creative, ever changing, and no matter how many books are written on the subject, there really is no formula. Best practices exist, but there’s always something that comes and changes the game.

Figuring ROI; now that isn’t exactly creative. It’s a simple formula: ROI = (R – C)/C : where R is your income return from the marketing effort and C is your marketing cost. Hasn’t changed since the first person tried to figure out which 50% of their marketing wasn’t working. But while the cost is easily figured, trying to accurately track the income is a little difficult sometimes.

2017 is well underway—but are your digital strategies? If you were living under a rock the past few years and don’t understand how important search rankings are—93% of online experiences begin with search. When it comes to SEO, not only are Google’s algorithm updates changing rapidly, but also customers’ usage and expectations. Usability has heavily influenced Google’s algorithm in the past year. Here are my top 3 SEO updates of 2016 influenced by consumer usability:

After all is said and done, what do we know for sure? First, we know that it's rare, if not unheard of, for a business owner to say that their website isn't important to their business. Years ago it was established that to not be online was to miss out on opportunities that could elevate business sales to numbers beyond normal expectations. Second, we know that the average business is reaching thousands of people per month with their site. This in itself deserves congratulations for many business owners.

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.