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.

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.

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.

These days it’s hard to escape the endless barrage of social media. Even if your phone isn’t constantly notifying you of Facebook posts, Twitter re-tweets, LinkedIn requests, or Instagram comments, you are still very aware of the presence of these sites, and how they are infiltrating our lives, and by extension, the way we do business.

RJM recently sent out our first survey to current clients in order to pick their brains and gauge their perceptions of digital media—specifically websites. We wanted to know everything there is to know about how they see their website: what they use them for, how often they update their content, how often they update the graphics/layout, how long they think building a website should take, and so on.

Maintaining constant and continuous communication with both prospects and clients is of the utmost importance to entrepreneurs. Sometimes, normal mediums such as newsletters or advertisements just aren’t enough. In today’s technology-driven market, a business blog may be the answer to not only connecting with prospects and clients, but also to opening up communication channels that might not have otherwise existed.