So, how do you build a continual, reliable consumer insights engine to help you make rock-solid marketing decisions that will fuel your growth? Follow these 13 steps, and you’ll take your relationship with your target audience to another level.

13 Steps to a Consumer Insights Factory for Your Business

1. Ask Your Customers

Talk with your customers on a regular basis. Ask them about their changing needs, and about their vision for the future.

2. Ask Your Prospects

When a new prospect contacts you, ask questions that give you insight into their underlying challenges — the ones that the market has not yet solved. On your website, include polls, surveys and feedback forms.

3. Ask Your Partners

You probably have a great relationship with partner companies. So arrange a regularly scheduled time to brainstorm about your consumers’ needs.

4. Ask Your Employees

Employees often see things on the front lines that are not as apparent to other levels of the organization. Ask your employees for their insights into unmet consumer needs.

5. Ask the Media

The media has a broad view of the market. Leverage your media contacts to provide high-level feedback on any trends they are seeing.

6. Analyze Your Web Analytics

How are people finding your website? Once there, how do they navigate through the site? Study your analytics at least on a monthly basis to understand your website visitors more clearly.

7. Analyze Your Onsite Search Statistics

If you use onsite search on your website, learn what your site visitors are searching for and interested in. Are there any patterns or trends?

8. Analyze Search Trends

You can reference broader Search trends in general as well to discover what your market is interested in, using tools like Google Insights for Search.

9. Analyze the Blogosphere

Discover what people are discussing and the terminology they are using in the blogosphere with tools such as BlogPulse.

10. Analyze Social Spaces

Check out what your consumers are saying in social platforms, whether Yelp, Facebook or forums. BoardTracker is a free tool that helps you monitor conversations based on specific keywords in online forums, for example.

11. Create Product Prototypes

Test inexpensive product prototypes and gauge your customers’ reactions.

12. Create Virtual Prototypes

An even more affordable way to prototyping is to create mock-up drawings and share these with your customers for their reactions.

13. Create Packaging Prototypes

Instead of changing the product, test whether a change in packaging, product name or marketing is what helps you to resonate with consumers more deeply.

These are just a few suggestions to help you collect better consumer insights on a consistent basis. If you need additional help, let me know below or at www.WebsiteMarketingNOW.com. Thanks!

ShareThis

1. Create Sets

Bundle products together into packages or sets. This will help you to increase your average order value. In addition, this is a great way to create easy-to-purchase “gifts.”

2. Offer a Discount or Clearance Section

This is an easy way for you to offer value to your customers while unloading unwanted merchandise.

3. Create a Gifts Section

It might seem obvious, but you’d be shocked how many eCommerce sites forget this very simple tactic.

4. Add a Bow

Touch up your product images with holiday accoutrements.  Add a bow, add snowflakes, etc. Sometimes it’s the small things that make a difference.

5. Offer a Percentage-Off Discount

Tests have shown that offering a percentage-off discount (e.g., 20% off) typically works better than offering a dollar-off discount (e.g., $20 off).

6. Clarify Order Deadlines

Make it very clear when orders need to be made in order to arrive in time for Christmas, the New Year or other holiday date. Drive orders faster by offering special discounts or benefits for ordering early.

7. Offer Free Shipping

This is a proven driver of eCommerce sales. According to ComScore, the average order value for purchases with free shipping is approximately 15% higher than when shipping is paid by the customer.

These are just a few suggestions to help you increase your holiday eCommerce sales during this busy shopping season. If you need additional help, let me know below or at www.WebsiteMarketingNOW.com. Thanks!

ShareThis

So, instead of just listing articles, images, videos, blog postings, etc. in its results, Google is now incorporating a list of rotating items from Twitter and a number of web publishers. (Google has promised to incorporate posts from Facebook and MySpace in the future, as well.)

So far, it appears that the real-time listings are included for various topical searches such as “Tiger Woods” and “Sherlock Holmes,” as well as a host of other random searches. The incorporation of real-time results is not pervasive by any means, but don’t be surprised to see these types of items on Google Page One for your industry, products and services in the coming year.

Essentially, the popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have made it imperative for Google to become more relevant by incorporating more up-to-date (well, up-to-the-minute is more like it…) information.

What does this mean for you and your business?

1. Get Social
   To increase the likelihood that you’ll be included in Google’s real-time results, you need to participate. This means getting involved in social media like Twitter. Your business needs to be current in order to be considered current.
2. Use Keywords
   When you participate in social media, remember to incorporate your target keywords. Don’t overdo it. However, these generic keywords are important for getting Google to understand the topics on which you are an authority.
3. Think Topical & Timely
   When you participate in social media, include some posts about topical and timely events.
4. Paid Search Ads
   Real-time search makes ranking organically that much harder. If you don’t have the resources to devote to real-time social media participation, then consider increasing your investment in paid search advertising for your critical keywords to ensure visibility on Page One of Google.
5. Increase Followers
   Strive to increase your Followers, such as those on Twitter, as much as possible. The more reach you have, the more likely others will share/forward your content, indicating your credibility to Google.

These are just a few suggestions to help you take advantage of real-time search and to improve your Internet Marketing in driving your revenue growth. If you need additional help, let me know below or at www.WebsiteMarketingNOW.com. Thanks!

ShareThis

Effective pricing is critical to your business success. It plays a huge role in your company’s viability and health.

To that end, what can you do to ensure that your pricing is on target? The answer:

Leverage Your Website to Test Your Pricing

The beauty of your website is that you can make adjustments quickly in order to test multiple pricing scenarios, and fully track, measure and analyze the data to see what pricing works most effectively for your business. For example, the following are possible testing elements:

• Primary offer price
• Pricing for bundles and package deals
• Pricing for upsells
• Pricing for cross-sells
• Percentage discount
• Dollar amount discount
• Membership discount
• Membership privileges
• VIP options
• Discounts for large purchases
• Subscription models
• Free shipping offers
• Headline on the pricing page
• Images on the pricing page
• Calls to Action (e.g., “Buy Now” vs. “Add to Shopping Cart”)
• Limited availability offers (e.g., “Offer good until Saturday”)
• Billing options (e.g., “Bill Me Later”)

Remember, the specific product or service price is merely one variable in pricing. Test multiple variables until you achieve the audience demand and the profitability mix that will fuel your business growth. And given the web’s flexibility, you have the advantage of leveraging your website to fine-tune and fine-tune and fine-tune some more.

These are just a few suggestions to help you leverage your website to drive your revenue growth. If you need additional help, let me know below or at www.WebsiteMarketingNOW.com. Thanks!

ShareThis

Online competition is fierce. Consumers and B2B (Business to Business) buyers have many choices. Checking out your competitors is merely a click away. So it’s more critical than ever that your website is remarkable and compels your site visitors to take notice. Either you are going to be different than your competition, or you are going to lose many prospective customers who just can’t seem to remember your company’s name after visiting a number of competing sites.

So, how can your website stand out in the crowd? The next time you’re about to head to the grocery store, instead, order home delivery and try these 3 differentiation techniques. You’ll then witness how “remarkable” can help your business become more profitable.

3 Simple Steps to Make Your Website Stand Out in 30 Minutes or Less

1. Eye Candy

If your website is text-heavy or the images are rather bland, try spicing things up. Spend 15 minutes on stock photography sites and add some images to your site to make the pages really pop!

To set yourself apart from the competition, experiment with images that are not as literal. Search on the stock photography sites under the adjectives and terms that describe the feeling you want to communicate and that set you apart at the core of your identity. For example, “ecstatic,” “relieved,” “awe,” etc.

Or simply try photos with unique angles. For example, instead of the entire face, perhaps you show just the mouth. Or instead of featuring an object through the full height and width of the shot, perhaps you fill the image with a bright color with a minimized object.

Also, many stock photography sites now offer videos as well — this can be a unique method for complementing the content on your page. Popular stock photography sites include iStockPhoto and Fotolia.

2. Tease Them

You’ve got it. They want it.

You’re an expert in your field, and you can help your target audience solve their problems, achieve their goals or simply find enjoyment in your products/services. So the value is already there, inside your head or inherently inside your products.

What can you offer them quickly and easily that would compel them to contact you, drooling over your special offer? It could be a free sample, or a trial offer or even a Top Ten List (e.g., “Top 10 Secrets to Transforming Your Book into a Media Empire”). A friend of mine who is a business coach offers a free 30-minute initial consultation. She’s so impressive that she can typically win a new client with just about every consultation, and so this type of special offer makes total business sense in her case.

Use your imagination. Use the special insights that you have to offer something that would really matter to your specific target audience.

3. Turn Exits into Revolving Doors

Spend 5 minutes in your web analytics program (e.g., Google Analytics, WebTrends, etc.), and identify your highest volume Exit Pages. An “Exit Page” is the web page from which a site visitor leaves your website.

Among your Exit Pages, there may be some that make sense. For example, an order confirmation page, or an online form confirmation page.

However, what about the rest of the Exit Pages? Is it logical that your site visitors did not see any reason to spend more time on your site? Why is it that they did not see value in clicking through to any more of your pages? How can you transform weak web pages into remarkably effective pages that stand out in your site visitors’ minds?

Among your top 10 Exit Pages, identify the number one thorn in your side. Identify a page from which people are scrambling to leave your site preventing you from making a sale.

Then, test a new change or two to the page to make it stand out:

• Try changing the heading.
• Add some images.
• Add a Call to Action.
• Change the first line of copy to something thought-provoking.
• Cut out any marketing fluff and try being brutally honest with your site visitors.
• Remind visitors of related products, services or content in which you know they would find value.
• Make a special offer right on the page.
• Try offering a 110% satisfaction guarantee. Etc.

The opportunities are endless. In the time it takes you to select your fruits, vegetables and vitamins at the grocery store, you can easily make one change on your page to assess the future impact.

These are just a few suggestions to help you make your website stand out and improve your website results with relatively little effort. If you need additional help, let me know below or at www.WebsiteMarketingNOW.com. Thanks!

ShareThis

To solve this, to help put a human face on your website, and to make your site visitors feel that they are interacting with REAL people, try the following three techniques:

1. Online Chat

What better way to answer your site visitors’ questions than online chat? The great thing about online chat is that it enables site visitors to ask questions and get the information they need in order to convert, all without leaving the page. Based on the tone of the chat, it can also convey a down-to-earth, helpful, human voice behind your website.

2. Staff Reviews

If you are an online retailer, providing staff reviews is another great way to humanize your website. This technique puts a face on your business, while concurrently driving your site visitors to products of value and interest. Once a site visitor starts trusting the opinion of one of your staff, they are likely to look to that same voice for guidance on additional purchases they should make.

3. Interaction Options

Customer interaction is good for both you and the folks considering your products or services. So, give your site visitors the tools they need to communicate with you, no matter what their personal communication preferences might be. Include a phone number, email address, online form, FAQ, Ask the Expert feature, online forum, Twitter address, customer-supported Q&A (check out Bazaarvoice Ask & Answer), personal advisor (check out how Crutchfield offers this functionality), physical address if applicable, etc.

These are just a few suggestions to help you put a human face on your website in providing a better experience for your site visitors. If you need additional help, let me know below or at www.WebsiteMarketingNOW.com. Thanks!

ShareThis

OK, it’s not always as severe as that, but sometimes innovation truly changes an entire industry and means wealth for one company and bankruptcy for another.

Think about how NetFlix outmaneuvered Blockbuster. Or how Google outmaneuvered Yahoo!. Or how Apple with its iTunes store outmaneuvered Tower Records, Virgin and the entire music industry.

The problem is that companies become fossilized in the way they do things. Certain assumptions become seen as a necessary part of the process. Infrastructure gets built around a specific way of doing things. So, how can you innovate, transform the way you do business, and ensure that your company will thrive for years to come? The answer is:

Leverage your website as an Innovation Platform.

As a small business owner, you have many advantages. You can be nimble. You can be creative. You can test new products, services and solutions without the need for approval from 17 stakeholders. Capitalize on your opportunities by making CHANGE a core part of your business. And leverage your website as the ultimate in flexible innovation solutions.

To that end, here are 5 ways to use your website as an Innovation Platform to propel your business to the next level and to leave your competition in the dust:

1. Empower Customers

Try turning an industry on its head by empowering customers to create their own products. Threadless.com and Zazzle.com are great examples of this.

2. Automate

Try turning a manual, time-consuming process into an automated solution, like BizFilings has done with business incorporation and LLC creation.

3. Become the Thought Leader

Prove to the world that they should look to you for ideas and insights. A great example of this is The Concrete Network. That’s right — CONCRETE. You can become a thought leader in literally ANY field.

4. Offer Something New

The web offers you endless possibilities. Look at Facebook and Twitter, and how quickly they changed online communications. LEGO transformed its sluggish business and its website by building a Star Wars universe to cater to any 10 year-old’s fantasies.

5. Support a Cause

Kiva found a way to make online micro-lending to small businesses in impoverished areas viable. How can you transform your website to rally around a cause and make a huge difference in the world?

These are just a few suggestions to help you leverage your website to fuel your business growth. If you need additional help, let me know below or at www.WebsiteMarketingNOW.com. Thanks!

ShareThis

It’s quite natural, actually. If you are writing on a regular schedule, it can be difficult at times to generate fresh, new ideas for your blog posts.

To help you in such frustrating times when you simply cannot think of what to write about, here is a list of potential blog ideas so you always have something exciting to say.

Blog Ideas

• Write about a recent customer challenge
• Write an interesting customer case study (with the customer’s permission, or keep it anonymous)
• Google relevant keywords related to your area of focus
• Check out Google News for such keywords
• Check out Google Blog Search for such keywords
• Check out Digg
• Check out Delicious
• Check out StumbleUpon
• Conduct a poll or survey and write about the results
• Interview someone
• Get a guest blogger to write a post for you
• Create a “how-to”
• Write a tutorial
• Write a post for beginners (e.g., Blog Writing 101)
• Simplify a complex topic for your readers
• Review new products
• Review new tools or technology
• Review a book
• Review a conference or trade show
• Head to the bookstore and check out the latest titles
• Create a monthly “Series” on a specific topic
• Capture the latest trends in your industry
• Predict the future
• Take a walk and allow yourself to simply think
• Write about the pros & cons of an issue
• Do an in-depth analysis of an industry challenge
• Create a list (e.g., The Top 101 Ways to Save Money)
• Create a checklist
• Debunk a myth
• Brainstorm with employees
• Brainstorm with customers

These are just a few suggestions to help you keep the content flowing with fresh blog ideas on a consistent basis. If you need additional help, let me know below or at www.WebsiteMarketingNOW.com. Thanks!

ShareThis

1. Target the Weekends

The weekends experience a slowdown in business marketing content. Take advantage of the decreased competition by publishing and promoting new, compelling content on the weekends. Make your voice heard in the social media and social networking sites you participate in.

2. Blog

If your company does not have a blog yet, what are you waiting for? A blog is a perfect platform for you to communicate your unique voice to your prospective customers. Everyone has unique knowledge. Let yours shine by sharing your insights with your site visitors. Don’t hold back. The web is full of information. Try to make your blog content interesting and compelling.

3. Twitter

Twitter gets more than 23 million monthly unique visitors. Needless to say, it’s very popular. Leverage it as one more channel for you to communicate with your audience. If you already produce web and blog content, the incremental effort to use Twitter is minimal.

4. Outreach

Each industry has its own set of leading websites and blogs. Identify the most credible sites and blogs that your target audience visits, and then conduct an outreach program offering to write unique, valuable articles for them.

5. Content Aggregators

If you are already spending the time publishing content on your blog or in your website, then for very little incremental effort you could leverage the online reach of content aggregators such as AllTop.com. To submit your site, go to:  http://alltop.com/submission/. You can also participate in aggregator sites by setting up a profile and posting articles yourself at sites such as BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange and BizSugar.

Special Announcement:

And to blast your way through the down economy by capitalizing on current marketing trends, check out the new, exclusive Marketing Trends Report: Blast through the Recession with Social Media, Mobile Marketing & More!, jointly produced by StartupNation and Website Marketing NOW. I think you’ll learn a lot from the report and encourage you to check it out.

ShareThis

Your website’s conversion rate is the percentage of times that your website visitors take the actions you most highly value on your site. For a retailer, this is typically an online purchase. For a B2B firm, this may be lead generation. For an online publication, this could be a subscription or Page Views or Time-On-Site.

So, here are a few questions for you:

• How often do you analyze your website’s conversion data?
• How often do you make changes to your promotions to test the effects on your conversion rate?
• How often to do you test web page elements to enhance your conversion rate?

What if I were to tell you that you should be continuously taking these steps, exploring different ways to increase your conversion rate every month? What if I were to tell you that you should continuously obsess over your website’s conversion rate?

Why You Need to be Obsessed with Your Conversion Rate

Here are three important reasons to be deliriously obsessed with your conversion rate:

1. Cost-Effective Sales

Think about it. If your fixed costs remain somewhat consistent, then you will be much more profitable by selling more. In effect, the incremental sales are what can take your business to an entirely new level of profitability.

2. Tweaking Can Make All the Difference

If you are investing the energy to run promotions and build web pages anyway, then you’ve already done the hard part. Why not take the time to leverage your time, energy and investment by testing different variations? Certain tweaks can result in exponentially better returns. Even if a tweak results in only a 5% or 10% increase in conversions, well guess what — for little effort you just increased your business results and can leverage the learnings for your future marketing efforts as well.

3. It’s Winner Take All

Who won the Super Bowl earlier this year? The Steelers. After their victory, they had a parade, met the President and kicked off the new NFL season on prime-time TV. The Cardinals? They came within minutes of winning, but that didn’t matter. To the world, the Steelers are Super Bowl champions and no one is really talking about the Cardinals. In other words, the winner tends to take a disproportionate amount of rewards, regardless of how close a competitor may be in 2nd place. In the case of clients and customers, this can mean a disproportionate amount of mindshare. Simply by increasing your conversion rate just a bit beyond your competition can make a difference.

So, be sure to take the time to methodically work on increasing your website’s conversion rate (Get obsessed about it!), and see your business growth accelerate.

Special Announcement:

And to blast your way through the down economy by capitalizing on current marketing trends, check out the new, exclusive Marketing Trends Report: Blast through the Recession with Social Media, Mobile Marketing & More!, jointly produced by StartupNation and Website Marketing NOW. I think you’ll learn a lot from the report and encourage you to check it out.

ShareThis