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Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany
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Contents
About Lars Hilse ....................................................................................................................... 4 Executive Summary ................................................................................................................. 5 Step 1: Attracting (the right) people to your website .................................................................... 6 1.1 Speaking to over 2 billion prospects .............................................................................. 6
1.2 Social Media Marketing..................................................................................................... 6 1.2.1 Facebook .................................................................................................................. 6 1.2.2 LinkedIn ................................................................................................................... 7 1.2.3 Twitter ..................................................................................................................... 8 1.3 Corporate Online Reputation Management .......................................................................... 9 1.4 Search Engine Optimization .............................................................................................10 1.4.1 The technical aspect .................................................................................................10 1.4.2 The Keywords and Content ........................................................................................10 1.4.3 Your Competition ......................................................................................................11 1.4.4 Mobile Search Placement ...........................................................................................11 1.5 Email Marketing .............................................................................................................11 1.6. Mobile Marketing ...........................................................................................................12 1.7 Search Engine Marketing & Paid Inclusion..........................................................................12 1.8 Offline Marketing and the internet ....................................................................................13 1.8.1 Offline Advertising ....................................................................................................13 1.8.2 Event Marketing .......................................................................................................13 Step 2: Your Website...............................................................................................................15 2.1 Advanced Web & User Interface Design .............................................................................15 2.1.1 Accessibility .............................................................................................................15 2.1.2 Mobile Devices .........................................................................................................16 2.1.3 Navigation and Menus ...............................................................................................17 2.1.4 Search Ability on your site .........................................................................................17 2.2 User Experience .............................................................................................................18 2.3 Web Analytics ................................................................................................................18 2.4 Proactive Website Visitor Engagement...............................................................................19 2.5 Corporate Blogging .........................................................................................................19 2.6 The Community Aspect of Your Website ............................................................................19 Step 3: Your Customer Relationship and Knowledge Management .................................................20 Step 4: The Community Metric in your Strategy ..........................................................................21 Free Market Research ...........................................................................................................21 Improving Your Products & Services (crowdsourcing) ...............................................................22
Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany US +1 206 203 5212 UK +44 845 5089559 DE +49 1801 5557775788
WWW.LARSHILSE.COM
A print version of this publication will be available under ISBN 978-0-557-57342-4 starting Aug. 1st, 2010
Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany
WWW.LARSHILSE.COM
complex workflow, customer relationship management, customer-service, and other related issues. The services we provide include but are not limited to status quo assessment upon which we improve internet related strategies, interim placement at management and C-Level to help clients during the creation or evolution their processes, crisis management for organizations in temporary turmoil, advisory board member placement to help organizations evolve. Our customer base is in the financial services, public health, military/defense, HR, politics, legal and a variety of other sectors spread across the Americas, Europe, Middle and Far East.
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Executive Summary
A few must haves to acclaim Digital Economy Leadership
The fundamental must haves in any modern web strategy can be segmented as follows: 1. Getting (the right) prospects to your point-of-sale, your website, through a variety of marketing channels like Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Marketing, offline marketing efforts, etc., 2. Converting prospects to leads directly on your website, for instance through proactive website visitor engagement, 3. Ensuring the continued customer relationship through the implementation of a customer relationship management system and associated strategy built around your existing business processes, along with offering your customers and prospects plenty of unique incentives for them to return to your website regularly and giving them many opportunities to engage with and see your brand on the web.
Diversify your budget and efforts - Dont dedicate all your resources to a hype
Particularly during the last few months we have seen a variety of organizations follow the Facebook hype, dedicating a majority or their resources and budget towards this one portal. The consequence was that many of them neglected what should have been their primary focus, their corporate website which represents the center of the entire strategy. That being said: its about utilizing the social media landscape, but what you have to keep in mind is that the most efficient place you can covert leads to actual business, thus being able to create an ROI calculation, is and will be your corporate website. An important aspect to keep in mind in this context as well is that only your corporate website will consistently remain in your sphere of influence while your social media and other proprietary endeavors may be subjected to third party influence.
Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany
WWW.LARSHILSE.COM
1.2.1 Facebook
Facebook (FB) offers numerous possibilities to increase visibility through engaging your brands fans, for instance by creating a group for your brand. When you update your FB fan-page, your users will be notified on their wall which also offers them to like what you have posted or directly engage with you by commenting on your news.
Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany
WWW.LARSHILSE.COM
1.2.2 LinkedIn
Unlike FB, which can be classified as a social network, LinkedIn (LI) can be referred to as a sole business network, hardly allowing its members to utilize it for anything else than business related engagements. LI is about building and maintaining professional relationships between professionals. The key benefit from an organizations point of view is that your brand will be visible to all your employees connections on LinkedIn and every engagement they make with others will strengthen your brand visibility. Especially key level executives should be encouraged to create and maintain a LinkedIn profile because they will be the people which will be approached first.
Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany
WWW.LARSHILSE.COM
1.2.3 Twitter
Twitter has several success stories of brands interacting with their community. But Twitter is not limited to this aspect. The most important aspect of Twitter is the measurement of your brands reputation and associated tools like HootSuite, CoTweet, and similar allow you to execute a Corporate Online Reputation Management Strategy.
Using Twitter to keep your Brands community on top of things and engagement
When your company has something to say you should make Twitter one of your prioritized channels to convey what you have to say. Twitter is still often misconceived as a kids tool and it is thus still widely believed that the primary audience consists of immature kids. The truth is that the people following your brand will probably consist of industry/business/financial analysts, the press and other entities writing about and regularly engaging with you. Another important aspect is using the same corporate channel to engage with your customers and community keeping them up to date with news on your organization but also offering them a point where they can connect with your brand. The benefit of Twitter in this regard is that the engagement with your brand will consist of no more than 140 characters, keeping the effort for communication brief. Keep in mind that the more you engage with customers and community the higher the spread of your brands visibility on the Twitter platform.
Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany
WWW.LARSHILSE.COM
CREATING THE LEADERS OF THE DIGITAL ECONOMY Twitter as a tool to proactively sell your products or services
Twitter can be used as a bidirectional communication instrument. Above mentioned tools also allow you to search the Twitter Universe for information relevant to your field of business. Once you have identified the users you want to address you can incentivize these users or otherwise engage them in a discussion proactively. Due to the fact that this procedure has not been widely adapted your brand will receive not only recognition by the user you have engaged but this step may also be widely recognized by the blogsphere and associated social media instruments and communication outlets. PROOF OF CONCEPT A domestic tourism marketing corporation hired us to develop a unique social media concept which they would include in their portfolio of services. One of the two dozen ideas we qualified consisted of continuously searching the twitter stream for the keywords vacation and related terms. Twitter users mentioning these words would then receive a discount for their next vacation booked through this tourism marketer. The result was a significant and sustainable spread of the brand in the Twitter Universe and in the trial period generated 25,000 EUR of business.
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Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany
WWW.LARSHILSE.COM
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PROOF OF CONCEPT One of our clients competitors utilized Googles AdWords program to push themselves in front of our organic search results we had achieved. We had no other choice but to initiate a campaign ourselves to push the competitor off their positioning by increasing the campaigns price per click to an astronomical value. The competitor cancelled his campaign shortly after we initiated our countermeasures.
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Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany
WWW.LARSHILSE.COM
2.1.1 Accessibility
Have you ever thought you could get a lawsuit for having an inaccessible website?
It also has a legal background. Several countries have gone as far as to threaten online service providers with legal actions if their web offering is not accessible by certain standards.
Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany US +1 206 203 5212 UK +44 845 5089559 DE +49 1801 5557775788
WWW.LARSHILSE.COM
The truth is that the iPhone globally only has a m arket share of 13%
A majority of the market is scattered among older devices with less computing and graphical power and that is where the problem begins. These devices have a variety of screen resolutions and an even higher variety of compatibility issues. While some support Java others only support Flash. What we like to refer to as a critical patient is the entire Blackberry series of smart-phones because not only their compatibility issues vary from device to device but they can also have regulations in context to content delivery implied by the Blackberry Enterprise Server.
Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany
WWW.LARSHILSE.COM
With 650+ million social media users guess whos influencing UI Design
Over 25% of the worlds internet users have a Facebook account. And regardless of how active they are theyre going to be acquainted that a main-menu is horizontal and on top of the website. Submenus are vertical and on the left. Proprietary information is on the right hand side of the main content in the middle. Thats just the way it is. Now, it may be disputed whether Facebook is right with their design policy. Fact is that all social media portals adapt to this trend, driving this trend forward even further.
Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany
WWW.LARSHILSE.COM
Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany
WWW.LARSHILSE.COM
PROOF OF CONCEPT A client who hired us to reorganize and redistribute their entire web marketing campaign decided to include proactive website visitor engagement to increase lead-conversion off their website. Since the company had offices in only 3 cities they had to determine the value of a visitor based on their geography. Real time analytics let us set triggers to the three cities of operation and prioritize visitors based on their distance to one of these cities. The outcome was the first-ever possibility for the client to engage proactively with their customers and increased their website-lead-conversion by 530%.
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Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany
WWW.LARSHILSE.COM
Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany
WWW.LARSHILSE.COM
Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany
WWW.LARSHILSE.COM
Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany
WWW.LARSHILSE.COM
Risks
Up until now weve primarily talked about the benefits of web strategy and the opportunities associated to the few instruments we have pointed out above. Where there are opportunities, there are risks even though in this case they are for the most part hidden and in some theaters can even entirely be neglected. The most important one to understand is that there will always be other channels you have to pay similar, in some cases even more attention to alternative methods of marketing, lead generation et. al.
Lars Hilse Web Strategy & E-Business Development Eichstr. 10 B | 25767 Bunsoh | Germany
WWW.LARSHILSE.COM