Insights

The 8 second rule refers to average time spent on a website before someone determines if they are going to stick around or leave. Bad website design, outdated aesthetics and cluttered content can quickly undermine your credibility. Some things to keep in mind when it comes to your website experience:

• Simplicity: Eliminate unnecessary or non value added design elements and keep your site easy to understand.

• Prioritization: Arrange your site so your audience naturally experiences the most important elements first.

• Navigation: Make your site’s navigation simple with call to action buttons and clear ways to engage.

• Consistency: The look and feel of your site should be uniform in terms of layout, images, color, font, and style.

• Clarity: be sure to include a clear statement of value in addition to a way for people to easily contact you or purchase your product/service.

• Accessibility: Your site should be compatible with all devices (mobile, tablet, etc.) in addition to adhering to general website accessibility best practices.

A content calendar is a map that charts out your marketing activities, and keeps your messaging organized and ensures that it aligns to a bigger picture. Your content marketing calendar demonstrates the full scope of your marketing activities while giving visibility to how all of the pieces of content work together. When you see how individual marketing efforts work together, it helps you realize the bigger picture of your content stories... which connect back to your north star marketing strategy.

With a content calendar, you can easily and proactively map out events, holidays, and times of year that are important to your business. This means you won’t miss out on opportunities to leverage these events and get in front of potential customers with timely content. This helps ensure that you have relevant content that speaks to what’s happening in their world, building your credibility.

Content is the foundation of your brand. Really good content connects you with customers and can create a deeper relationship. Since there are more content types and opportunities than ever, it can quickly become overwhelming to think about all of the content that needs to be created for all of your marketing channels. The good news is that the “quality over quantity” rule applies to content. So unless what you are publishing is remarkable and valuable to your audience, don’t put it out.

By creating less but more compelling content, you will help your audience trust that what you put out is worth consuming. It also helps you spend as much time promoting your content as it takes to create it (which is significant!). When it comes to content more is not better… better is better.

Many organizations overlook the importance of their email list for a variety of reasons. And while a bright and shiny new social channel or feature may be all the rage, it's important to remember who actually owns your followers (and it's not you!). While growing your social media audience is important, the power of email cannot be underestimated. Organizations actually own their email lists, and can communicate directly to that list without worrying if an algorithm will actually make their content available.

Email marketing is a crucial way to build relationships with your customers. It's also the thing most people look at first thing in the morning. Emails wait in an inbox until read, and when you write emails with useful content people might refer to them more than once, since emails are easily saved and searchable. People consume email differently than other media, and it still converts to higher click through rates and sales versus social media. The more people you have on your email list, the more potential buyers see your marketing messages, and the data will back that up as well... anytime you send an email, track how the hits to your website and sales react.