Thankfully, it’s quite simple. A hashtag is just a way to categorize or tag a tweet on Twitter, which makes it easier for Twitter users to find tweets about a particular subject. Basically, when using a hashtag you are helping to organize Twitter for yourself and others.

Hashtags define your search. For instance, if you have a favorite show that you watch, want to tweet about it, and would like for other people who watch the show to be able to easily search for tweets associated with the show, a hashtag is exactly what you need. For example, if you watch Fringe and want to tweet about it, #Fringe will define your tweet as a tweet about the show and separate it from other tweets that might not have anything to do with the show.

Take a look at the difference between these two searches made within seconds of each other. One was searched with the hashtag and the other with just the keyword:

While there isn’t a big difference in this example, you can see that it does help define the search.

Although anyone can make up a new hashtag just by putting a # sign in front of a word, there are optimal ways to use hashtags. Here are a few tips and sugguestions:

1. Only use 1 to 3 hashtags in a tweet. People generally consider more than 3 in a tweet to look like spam. Putting more than 3 may cause people to stop following you.

2. Only use hashtags when they bring value to your post. Don’t over do it by making up a new hashtag for everything or by putting a # in front of every word in your tweet. Do a quick search and see if there is already an established hashtag referring to your subject or event before tweeting. After all, the point of hashtags is for others tweeters to be able to see what other people on Twitter are discussing. For example, if you are going to a large event, find out what the hashtag is that people are using and use it in every tweet associated with the event.

3. Hashtags can be used anywhere in a tweet, but is usually used within the content of the sentence (in a place that makes sense) or at the very end. For instance, if you were attending the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2011 tradeshow, your tweets might look something like these:

Loved the first day at the #SCTEexpo. Did anyone see the new interactive display by Motorola?

Wow! There’s a wreck right outside parking deck A. Where else is there to park? #SCTEexpo

5. Tell people! If you are going to make up your own hashtag, make sure it’s easy to understand, even if you didn’t know what it was about and, most importantly, tell your followers. Something as simple as this would be a useful tweet for your followers:

Are you tweeting about the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo? I am, and I’ll be using this tag on all my tweets #SCTEexpo.

Do you currently use hashtags? Do you find them helpful? I would love to hear your thoughts!

Who are you? Decide.

If you are already a specialist in your field, then this one will be easy. You just need to concentrate on your area of expertise. If not, you need to start thinking of yourself as an expert in something, but what? What are you passionate about? What makes you different? What makes you interesting? What makes you valuable to others?

Branding is about finding what features are useful to others and appealing to the particular audience who will appreciate these features, while remaining consistent with your image. Think about yourself like a product. What do you offer? What are your features? Pick one to three and concentrate on these.

Grab a Domain Name

See if your name is available, if so…grab it! If not, try variations until you find something that works for you. Keep in mind that you want to use your name, if possible, so when people search for you in search engines, they can find you. For instance, if your name is John Smith and johnsmith.com is taken, try john-smith.com or johnsmith.org.

Add Your Own Blog or Website

Once you have your domain name, get hosting and set up a website or blog. Web hosting accounts are very reasonable, and you can set up a simple blog or website for free or very little cost. At the very least, set up a page with your bio, picture, email address (name@yourdomain.com), and links to your profiles on different social networking sites.

If you decide to go with a blog, once you are up and running, list your blog in blog directories.

Recommendation: For around $30, you can find a professional looking WordPress blog or website on sites like themeforest.net and put it together yourself. Find one that is highly rated and simple for beginners.

Set Up Your Email

It is very important that you use an email address with your own domain name, firstname@yourdomain.com.

Note: I personally use Gmail and have emails from all my different websites/blogs forwarded to my personal Gmail account. Gmail allows the option to respond to the email from each of those individual email addresses as well. This allows me to check all my emails and respond to all emails in one account.

Make a Custom Signature

Put together a signature for your email account which gives your important contact information and has links to your website and top social media profile links. Use this same signatures in forums, if allowed.

Colors

Just like you would for a branding a company image, pick 2-3 colors that work well together and use them everywhere you can online, such as your website, blog, blog posts, forum signatures, social media profiles, etc. Be consistent.

Avatar

Create an avatar that will show up on blog posts and comments across the web when you post. People identify best with a photograph of a person, so find a picture of yourself, which best represents your image and add it gravatar. If for some reason you do not want to use your picture, make a personal logo, which you will also need to add to your website or blog and other online profiles.

How to Brand and Promote Yourself Online (Part Two) will include ways to establish yourself as an expert and build ongoing relevant content.

Have other suggestions or tips? Please leave a comment, we would love to hear from you!

Create a newsletter

Create a newsletter for your website or blog and send it out once a month. Visit MailChimp.com and see if their free plan will work for you. If you have WordPress for your blog or website, you can easily add the code supplied by MailChimp to a text widget and insert in one of your sidebars.

Giveaways and Contests

A great way to promote your blog or website is to have giveaways. Find something to giveaway, such as a gift card, book, or anything directly related to your niche and have people post comments to enter. You can offer additional entries by asking visitors to like your Twitter or Facebook page, tweet about the giveaway, etc. and come back to post another comment showing they have done so. Search for “blog giveaways” on Google to get lots of ideas on ways to do this.

Share Buttons

Make sure you make it easy for people to share your articles and blog posts. If your blog theme does not already include share buttons, search the plug-ins for AddThis or other related plug-ins so it will be easy for others to like and share your content with others.

Be an expert

The easiest way to be seen as an expert in your field is to teach others and/or help others. For example, if you are a graphic designer, you could design a free graphic once a month for others to download and use, or if you are a software developer, you could write open source software. Whatever your field, you could start a blog with “how to” type articles focusing on what you want to be known for, while helping others.

More ideas:

• Make a commitment to write a certain amount of articles a week and stick to it
• Join free article sites like ezine.com and submit your articles there as well
• Join sites like Quora and answer questions that focus on your niche
• Put together a free tool branded with your information that can be downloaded and used by your audience
• Look for industry blogs, communities, and LinkedIn groups that are important in your industry and get involved
• Start producing free, helpful podcasts, videos, and/or webinars
• Interview people of interest
• Be a guest blogger (make sure to include a link to your website)
• Write an ebook
• Start a Facebook page about a specific part of your industry (not a personal page)
• Find out about Google Authorship. This will help brand your articles in search engine results

Follow experts

Find blogs that specialize in your particular niche and add their RSS to your Google Reader. Search for experts in your field and follow them on Twitter, Google+, and other social networking sites. Respond to the very best tweets or blog posts by commenting or sharing.

Set up Google Alerts

Set up Google Alerts with your name and keywords to your topics of interest. Monitor these on a daily basis. You can also set these up through RSS and view them on your Google Reader.

Tweet about your topic everyday

Tweet several times a day on your topic. You can use Hootsuite or TweetDeck to set up tweets in advance.

LinkedIn

Don’t just complete your profile, make it interesting! Look up ideas on how to make a better professional header. Connect with your current and past colleagues. Write recommendations for others ask them to reciprocate. You can post these recommendations on your blog or website as well.

Content and Keywords

Think like a Googlebot crawling the web for content! While images are interesting to look at, you need actual words with specific keywords that match your niche. For instance, if you want to have your resume on your website, do not upload an image, actually type in the words for your resume. If you post videos or podcasts, add the script below it. Do not use Flash sites! They are pretty, but unreadable by search engines  unless you plan to have an identical html site to go along with it. Look up Google keywords tool and see what are the most popular keywords and strings of keywords words searched for in your industry. Try to use these words when appropriate.

Continue to connect!

Be engaging, ask questions, and start real conversations; be yourself. Write, tweet, and post on social media sites frequently; make this an everyday routine.

Have other suggestions or tips? Please leave a comment, we would love to hear from you!

One of the ways we add value to the services we offer broadband providers is through marketing assistance. That can mean anything from quick advice to an overall marketing campaign. In the quick advice category, I’d like to point you to some resources that I’ve found very helpful.

Need creative inspiration? Another font? Background textures? Stock photography? Or something else to help you with your current project, but don’t have the budget needed to purchase the items you want?

There are plenty of great places on the web where you can find free design resources. Some of my favorites are listed below. If you have a favorite that’s not listed, by all means feel free to share a link to your favorites in the comments section.

Clipart
Color Inspiration
Design Inspiration
Fonts
Icons
Photoshop Freebies
Stock Photography
Textures
Vector Art
Various Freebies

*Pay careful attention to check the license of each item/site before you use any free design element to make sure you can use it fits within the scope of your particular project.*

Clipart:

OpenClipArt- Clip art that is free to use for anything!

Color Inspiration:

COLORlovers – Create and share colors, palettes and patterns.

AdobeKuler – Explore, create and share color themes

Design Inspiration:

Logopond – Logo/Identity Inspiration

TheDesignInspiration -Logo, illustration, website, business card, font, photo, and pattern inspiration

Creattica – Inspiration gallery showcasing everything from print media to webdesign. Also, many more categories than most galleries including email design, power point presentations, packaging design, vector graphics, digital painting, and more. Lots of freebies, too!

deviantART – A community of different types of artists. You will not only find inspiration on almost any type of design project, but lots of different types of freebies as well.

Dribbble – Another inspiration gallery which is accurately self-described as being “show and tell for creatives.”

Fonts:

FREE FONTS

dafont- Archive of freely downloadable fonts and digbats.

urbanfonts – More free fonts and digbats.

WebPagePublicity – 6500 free fonts

AbstractFonts – More free fonts

AddictiveFonts – Even more fonts!

FONT TOOLS

Whatthefont – See a font online, in a publication, or have the image, but don’t know what the name of it is? This is what you need–and it’s free! Although, I can’t promise the font you identify will be. =)

WhatFontIs -  Tried What the Font, but it didn’t work? Try What Font Is and see if you have better luck.

Icons:

IconFinder – Quickly search through 150k free icons. Has easy license filter as well, so you can search for “allowed by commercialuse” or other license types.

DryIcons – Has 4k+ free icons available with free, commercial, and/or extended licenses.

Iconsetc – 128k+ icons and clipart stock images.

FindIcons -  Easily search through over 308k+ icons and save your favs on their site.

Photoshop Freebies:

BRUSHES

Brusheezy – Huge free collection of PS brushes, patterns, textures, actions, shapes, styles, & gradients.

BrushKing -  Lots of free PS brushes

PSBrushes – 500+ free PS brushes

QBrushes – More PS brushes

BrushLovers – This site has a mixture of free and premium brushes, but most of them are free.

FBrushes – Free PS brushes, textures, and patterns.

ACTIONS

100 FreePhotoshopActions -  From cross processing to vintage, there is something for everybody in this set of high-quality actions.

TUTORIALS

pshero – Lots more cool and interesting PS tutorials, such as; how to make a scrapbook alphabet, how to make 3-D looking text that looks like dimensional signage, and how to make a realistic scrap of notebook paper.

psdtuts+ - Huge amount of various PS tutorials. From “How to Animate a Demo of an iPad App with Photoshop” to “Create a Medieval Landscape in Photoshop”, you will find more than enough to get the creative juices flowing on this site.

PhotoshopEssentials – Many of these tutorials are for beginners, but include  simple photo editing to more complex photo effects, such as; reduce wrinkles, getting rid of blemishes, making vintage textured photographs, and more.

Stock Photography:

stock.xchng – Free stock photography site owned by Getty Images.

Stockvault – Free stock images. Be careful to stay in the free part though and not click on the premium stock photos from Dreamtime.

EveryStockPhoto – This is a search engine for free stock photography.

flickerCreativeCommons – Check the license info closely to make sure you can use it for your application and be prepared to have to give credit to the artist/photographer. You can search by license type!

Textures:

TextureKing – Free high resolution, high quality textures for personal and commercial use.

CGTextures -  Free high resolution textures for personal and commercial use (you can only download a certain amount within a 24 hour time period).

Lost & Taken – Another wonderful site for high resolution texture for personal and commercial use.

FreeStockTextures – More high resolution textures for personal and commercial use.

HighResolutionTextures – Another resources for free, high-res textures for personal and commercial use.

TextureLovers – And, just in case that wasn’t enough, here’s one more!

Vector Art:

Vecteezy – Great free vector site. Owned by the same people who own Brusheezy!

FreeVectors – Free vector graphics and icons.

QVectors – Free vector images & graphics from around the web.

VectorArt – More free vector art, graphics, and illustrations.

Various High-Quality Freebies from Blogs + Communities:

BittBox – Great textures, PS brushes, and more.

deviantART – Get creative! Search for free brushes, free vectors, stock, etc. to find goodies that artists are giving away. As always, check the license before you use.

psdtuts+ Freebies – Free textures, wallpapers, icons, styles and more!

SmashingMagFreebies – Free high quality tools, fonts, icons, and WordPress themes.

Jump back to the top of the page.

As we all know, if someone is frustrated and angry with a company, they’re much more likely to tell their friends (and even total strangers) than someone who’s blissfully happy.  That’s our nature.  We often focus on the negative, and don’t always pass on positive stories about the companies and products we really like.  Sure, we want to say nice things about those companies that consistently provide us great products and services. We’re just busy. If we’re happy with a company, we have other things on our mind that are more pressing (including those companies we’re unhappy with). But, there are some things you can do to give your happy customers a reason to brag about you.

Run a Contest

You can run a contest, and provide customers an incentive to say why they like you.  For example, today we launched a video contest for our customers called “I Love TruVizion.”  TruVizion is our cloud-based application for cable modem and CMTS diagnostics. We know we have fans out there.  To provide additional motivation for customers to tell us and others their story, we’re giving away a trip for two to the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, which is here in our home base of Atlanta this year.  We’re asking our TruVizion customers to create a video showing and/or telling why they love TruVizion.  We’ve even produced few sample videos like the one below to help generate some fun and creative ideas.

Social media

We all see in our Facebook feeds when this or that person “likes” this or that company. While it may appear as just another “like’ so someone can get free stuff, we know intrinsically that someone will not click that “like” button if they don’t like the company.  Having a Facebook page and then finding creative ways to get folks to like it is a great way to promote your brand and stay in touch with customers.  It’s also important to monitor social networks like Twitter to see what customers are saying about you.  If you’re good at what you do, positive comments will come up and you can share those with others.

Referral Programs

Another way to leverage your good reputation into additional sales is by rewarding customers when they send you referrals.  I wrote about customer referral programs in a post a while back. It’s inexpensive, easy to promote, and a great way to motivate happy customers to brag about you to their friends and family.

You may be thinking at this point that running a contest or a referral program seems like you’re paying someone to say nice things about you. That’s because it is.  But, only those people who really want to say something nice are going to participate.  We all have our reputation to think about, and are not going to recommend something we don’t believe in (unless we’re an infomercial actor who’ll say anything).  Remember, people who are angry are plenty motivated.  On the other hand, even if someone loves your company, it’s not usually at the top of their mind to tell others. You’re just giving them a reason to think about it and providing some motivation to take action.

Do the Unexpected

Of course, the key component in getting people to brag about you is to create fans, not just happy customers.  Sometimes that means doing the unexpected.  If you do what’s expected, the most you’ll do is make someone happy.  If you surprise them and take it to the next level, you’ll make a fan.  Whether it’s that “certain extra something” you add to your product or service, or going the extra mile to help a customer in need, those are the types of things that make a fan, and fans are the most likely folks to sing your praises.

 
Rick’s Google+ profile

Decide what sets your business apart from the rest. Then, get started!

Find your customers online. Of course, you want to be where they are, but be careful to pick one or two social media sites to start with, such as Facebook and Twitter, which are generally the most widely used social media sites by consumers. Don’t fall into the trap of signing up for as many accounts as possible just because they’re free. While it’s good for you to be seen in as many places on the internet as possible—it will work out better for your image to start with a small amount of accounts, which you can more easily manage on a daily basis. If a customer or potential customer finds you and posts a comment or question on a social network, you need to respond as promptly as possible. You don’t want their question sitting on the site for days or even weeks without any response. Not only will that customer notice, but so will everyone else who visits your page—hurting your image instead of helping it.

Show interest in others! This is probably one of the biggest secrets to success in social media. Go to other people’s social media sites, listen, and give helpful comments. If you’re on Twitter, you can search for keywords of what people are tweeting about in your local area. If it’s something interesting and relevant to your industry, you can retweet what they say. This is a complement in the world of Twitter. Or, you can find interesting discussions and offer helpful advice; again, not selling, but helping. Basically, try to think about how you can give or help others before thinking of your own agenda. Be genuine though, because people can see right through someone who seems like they are trying to be helpful, but are just trying to sell them something. Build your online presence slow and steady, and always remember to show attention to others.

Follow the Golden Rule.  Always treat people as you would like to be treated and never post anything on the internet about someone else that you wouldn’t want said about yourself or your company. If you have something to say, make sure it’s positive. If someone else other than you will manage your social networking sites; make sure they understand this important point. Nothing can hurt your image more than badmouthing other companies or arguing with unsatisfied customers. Your company should present itself as positive, helpful, and considerate on the web. Remember, what you say might be there for years to come!

Don’t sell; engage. Social media should be engaging, and not just self-promoting. Strive to develop relationships with your current customers and with new ones by offering interesting content. Think of social media more like having a conversation, not selling. Sure you can post interesting new offerings for your company, events, and specials—but also post other things of interest. For example, if you’re a cable company, you might remind your viewers of the season premiere of a highly watched show, or you might poll your viewers on what their favorite shows are and why. Try asking questions, providing interesting information, and think about what would be helpful to your audience. You could run a weekly sweepstakes and ask people to post a picture on a certain day of the week on a local event and pick the best one to win one a free month of your services. There are a lot of fun and interesting ways you can engage people and have them coming back to your site on a regular basis.

Listen to what people are saying about you. Go to Google Alerts and enter the name of your business as a keyword. You will then be notified when the name of your company is found on websites, blogs, or articles. This can be very helpful for you to get a better idea of what people are saying about you. Remember, if you ever find a negative comment; do not match it with negativity. Whatever you say on the internet can stay there forever, so always be positive. If you have an unhappy customer, do what you can to resolve the situation, so they become a satisfied customer. You can also use Google Alerts to see what is being said about your competitors. If your competitor is getting complaints about a certain level of service, try to make sure your company excels in this area. However, never make posts under something that was said negatively about a competitor to sway the person to use your service—just use the information to better your own company.

Make sure people can find you. As soon as you’re ready for people to start visiting your social media sites, start advertising them! There are many quick and easy ways you can put the word out. For instance, put a link to your Facebook page on your website, add a little sign to your front desk to remind customers to like your company, add the links to your email signature, and send out an email letting everyone know where they can find you.

Track your results.  Finally, put Google Analytics on your website, a free service Google offers.  By generating a bit of code, which you add to your website, you will to be able to track where your traffic is coming from and much more. You will be able to see how many people visit your website, how long they stayed, what pages they visited, plus you’ll see how many people visited your website directly from your social media accounts. Having this knowledge can be very helpful in seeing how successful your social media efforts actually are.

Now, get online and start connecting with people in your community!

 
Jessica Holbrook

For those of us in sales, this final time of uncertainty in the buying process can be frustrating (even though we’re also guilty of it).  You’ve listened to your prospect. You understand where his or her issues lie and have demonstrated how your product is a perfect solution.  You can provide a clear set of benefits that will produce a return on their investment. Still, some will not take the step to make a decision, and it’s often because they are struggling with uncertainty.

The Power of the Test Drive

One way to overcome this final hurdle is to offer a trial of your product or service.  Car dealers know they need to let someone drive a car before they’ll buy it. Some will even let a qualified buyer take the car home for a period of time.  You can do the same. If your prospect is truly interested in your solution and they are clear on the benefits, letting them try it for a month will often seal the deal.  If you’re confident in your what you’re selling, and it will deliver on what you’ve promised, this can be a great strategy. You can talk until your blue in the face, but sometimes letting someone experience the benefits first-hand is what’s needed to close the deal.

Back in the earlier days of broadband we had a cable provider that was very successful in their use of the trial.  They had two different challenges when selling broadband.  First, they needed to convince people who did not have the Internet why it was something they needed.  Second, many prospects had dial-up, so they had to demonstrate why broadband was so much better.

They decided to go door-to-door offering residents a free 30 day trial of their broadband  service.  They would install the modem on the spot, give a quick demo, and told them they’d be back in 30 days to take out the service if the customer no longer wanted it.  As you might imagine, it was was rare that the customer decided not to keep the service once they had used it for 30 days.  They didn’t need to imagine the benefits or worry about the decision, since it was risk free.  By the time 30 days was over, the decision was easy to make because they had been using the service and could experience the value in the faster speeds and always-on connection of cable broadband.

We’ve used trials very successfully here at ZCorum.  Recently we’ve been offering 30-day trials of TruVizion, our cable modem diagnostics software.  In fact, we just up signed Ritter Communications, who tried the software for 30 days and were able to clearly see during that time how it was helping their staff and operation.

What kinds of trial offers have you been a part of?  Have they been successful?

We also like to share some of that expertise not only with our customers, but also with our prospects and other service providers, like you.  Why do we do it?  We love broadband, and we’re all about growing broadband services and adoption rates, even if you’re not a ZCorum customer.  As they say, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

Of course, one example of how we focus on providing marketing assistance to service providers would be some of the articles you will see from time to time in this blog.  For instance, if you didn’t already get a chance to read it,  earlier this week Rick Yuzzi wrote an article that includes eight low-cost marketing tactics that won’t bust your budget.  Another example that you might not be aware of are some of the marketing resources that we’ve made available for free on our Website.  You’ll find white papers on subjects like social media marketing and how to track and manage customer churn, as well as a complete marketing manual and some collateral that you can customize.  We plan on adding even more soon.  I hope when you get a chance, you’ll check it out and hopefully you or your colleagues can put some of the material to good use as you also raise the broadband tide.

Snickers 2010 Super Bowl Ad with Betty White & Abe Vigoda (click image to play)

When business owners  think about Marketing, they often cringe at how expensive it is, and it certainly can be. Just look at the mother of all advertising opportunities—the Super Bowl. The cost of an ad during the first Super Bowl in 1967 was $42,000 for a 30-second spot.  That was a lot back then.  Adjusted for inflation, that’s worth about $260,000 today, although that seems like a pittance when compared to this last Superbowl, which was over ten times that at 3 million for 30 seconds.  That’s $100,000 every second. Ouch!

Thankfully, local TV advertising is a bit cheaper, and you don’t need Betty White or Abe Vigoda to make an impact in your business.  Yes, it still can be a little pricey to advertise on TV, radio or print, even in a local market.  The good news is there are a lot of sales and marketing activities that are low cost to almost no cost.  Best of all, the lower the cost of the marketing initiative, the easier it is to justify a the return on your investment.  This is not to say you should abandon traditional media, but there’s a lot you can do to augment your sales and marketing efforts on the cheap.

Social Media

Social Media is a relatively new way to reach out to your customers and prospects to leverage positive word-of-mouth, increase brand awareness and improve customer satisfaction. Both Facebook and Twitter are ways to get folks talking about your service, and they may be talking even if you’re not, so it’s best that you be involved in the conversation.

On-hold Messages

Hopefully customers aren’t holding too long when they call your office, but you can put up a quick message when they do call in.  It doesn’t have to be long. Add something as simple as this to your greeting: “Ask about our high-speed Internet service. Free Installation, and starting at only $xx.xx.”

Referral Programs

Happy customers can be your best sales people.  Why not give them an incentive to spread the word through a referral program.  I wrote more about that here.

Suggestive Selling

You already have customers calling you to place orders. While you’re at it, why not see if you can upsell or cross-sell additional products while they’re in a buying mood.  Fast food restaurants have used this tactic successfully for years because it doesn’t take too many hot apple pies to make a nice incremental bump in the bottom line.  When talking to new customers your service reps should be recommending additional services and bundles.  In addition to those calling in to order new service, you get regular calls from customers with questions about their existing service.  That’s also a time your reps should have their ears open for opportunities for incremental sales.  To provide additional incentive, set up a spiff program for any incremental sales that your service reps generate.  I wrote more about Suggestive Selling here.

Advertise on Company Vehicles

If you have technicians driving around in the field in company vehicles, make use of that opportunity and ready-made space to advertise.  There are plenty of companies that will wrap vehicles and will even do the artwork for you.  Include your phone number, website address, and something about your company or services, such as your tag line or a core value or feature (quality, speed, friendly and local service, etc.).

Door Hangers

You can give those same technicians stacks of door hangers to canvas areas at certain times.  Create a promotion that will give the recipient a reason to call, and leave a place for the technician to write their initials.  If someone calls in and orders, spiff the tech.

Public Relations

Whenever you do something newsworthy, make sure you let the local media know about it with a press release.  It’s free, and it’s a great way to build awareness in the community.  Examples of things you should publicize would be a new service or product offering, opening a new service area, reaching a milestone, signing an important customer, charitable contributions, sponsorships, etc.

Bill Inserts

You’re probably already sending mail to all of your customers once a month in the form of a bill.  If you’re not already making use of that, print a note on your bill or use bill inserts to market additional services to your existing customers.

These are just a few of the things that can add to your marketing efforts.  What low-cost marketing strategies have you tried that have worked for you?

If you don’t know the answers to those kinds of questions, how do you know if your online marketing efforts are paying off?

ISPs need web analytics, just like other businesses. It’s important for you to know how many people come to your site, how many of them stick around awhile and how many of them complete a contact or order form to become a customer.

So how can you, as a marketing or general manager for an independent broadband provider, figure out what to count, how to count it and then analyze what it means?

Simple – you just need to install analytics software on your website.

Free & Easy: Google Analytics

There are lots of analytics tools floating around on the web. Some are costly. Some are oversized for what you need (and have the time) to collect and analyze.

And some are free and easy. That’s why we like Google Analytics.

Whether you built your site in plain HTML, or used a content management system like Joomla or WordPress, you can install Google Analytics pretty quickly:

1. Create a Google Analytics account
2. Copy your custom tracking code
3. Paste the code into the appropriate sections of each of your web pages (or into the Google Analytics plugin, extension or module for your content management system)

Once you’ve installed the tracking code, you can log back into your Google Analytics to confirm data is being collected. Then you can view a slew of reports to measure your site’s performance.

Which Measurements are Meaningful?

The days of counting hits are long gone. If you want to understand how your website is performing, you’re going to have to dig deeper.  What should you look for?

• Visitors, Pageviews & Time on Site: Yes, these are three separate statistics. Look at them together to get an understanding of the baseline traffic on your site. Are you getting more visitors this month than last month? Are they looking are more pages and spending more time on your site? It’s not so much the hard numbers you’re interested in here – you want to watch for trends up or down in traffic.
• Referring Sites: Tracking sites that refer traffic to your site helps you better understand inbound links to your site (and growing relevant inbound links boosts your search rankings). Look for referrals from your social media outposts (your Facebook Page, your Twitter profile, your YouTube Channel, etc.) to see which networks generate the most traffic to your site. You can also keep an eye on how many visitors are referred from any web advertising you may do, such as banner ads on the local Chamber of Commerce website.
• Keywords: What words and phrases did users enter in a search engine to find your site? Are they the words you want? If not, it’s probably a good idea to check your copy and see if you’re using the keywords for which you want to rank. This is also a good place to look for ideas for marketing copy. The phrases used to search for information might also grab attention in a banner ad, blog post, on-hold message or print ad.
• Bounce Rate: This one might be scary – bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that arrived at your site, looked at a single page and left your site. Improve your bounce rate by: 1) making your pages more relevant to the terms used to search for it 2) placing important content in a prominent, easy to see place on the page and 3) making sure that ads or links pointing to your homepage or landing pages are a good match for what visitor will see when they get to your site.
• Conversion Rate: This could mean different things to different ISPs. If you allow new customers to order new service on your website, then a visitor landing on your site, completing that order and viewing the confirmation page would constitute a conversion. If you allow customers to pay their bills online, a visitor creating a login and password for your payment system might also constitute a conversion. Essentially, you want to measure the number of times visitors do something that makes you money (or gets you closer to making money)and divide that by the total number of visitors.

How to Get More from Google Analytics

Once you’ve mastered these few key metrics, you might like to explore a little further to learn more about how visitors behave on your site.

For example, you might be working like crazy to create content for your Facebook Page. Use Custom Segments in Google Analytics to see if visitors referred to your site from Facebook behave differently than the average user. You could see if the Facebook visitors go straight to your order page or contact page to buy services, or if they’re still wandering your site trying to make a decision. If they’re wandering, take a look at the pages they view most frequently and incorporate some of that content in your Facebook page. Then, future visitors referred from Facebook could be one step closer to buying.

You can also visit Google Analytics Support for more information and advice.

What Do You Track?

What web marketing measurements are most important to your business? Do you use another analytics tool to capture them? Please share your experience in the comments below.