(The third article in a four-part series) Okay, so you’ve been successfully found, and your visitors are sticking around long enough to see what you’re all about. It’s too bad that passing the two-second test doesn’t necessarily mean your visitors are sticking around and digging deeper into your content. A core measure of how engaging [...]
(The second article in a four-part series) If you’re doing well in the search arena, congratulations. You’re definitely headed in the right direction. Moving forward, the second level of engagement requires passing the two-second test with your visitors. In my rather un-scientific experience, if a searcher finds your website, they will give you approximately two [...]
(The first article in a four-part series) Professional services websites primarily exist to serve two purposes: to further legitimize the firm and to generate leads for their professional service. There are added benefits if your website elevates someone in your firm as a thought leader or sells books, apps, or other services online. However, most [...]
Like most of our professional services clients, our business is heavily driven by referrals. Most of these referrals come from current clients, past clients, strategic referral partners, friends, and family. So naturally, when I heard that Exact Target was hosting a lecture by John Jantsch, author of “The Referral Engine,” I was intrigued to attend. [...]
The Top 10 Mistakes Professional Services Firms Make Online and How to Avoid Them. I was honored to lead a breakout session at SMPS Heartland last week on website design best practices. Building upon our previous entry entitled Website Emergency, we pulled out the top ten website design issues we see in the AEC (architecture, [...]
What does your tradeshow booth say about your brand? Our branding firm had the honor of sponsoring the opening reception of a regional conference this past week for an association of professional architecture, engineering and construction marketers called SMPS Heartland. While we enjoyed the fact that as sponsors, we were allowed to have “a booth,” [...]
Our design firm sees its fair share of branding and marketing emergencies. The running joke is that our conference room becomes a make-shift triage for marketing patients. And for a variety of reasons, websites seem to be the most common marketing emergency that our design firm encounters. In fact, if I asked 100 professional services [...]
What’s the number one branding question we’ve been hearing from our professional services clients these days? “Should our firm be using Social Media?” Any guesses what my answer is? “Nope.” That’s right, nope. Not unless you have a strategy for how to make it work. In reality, Social Media can greatly support your efforts to [...]
This past weekend I was reading an article in Fast Company that reminded me of a speaking engagement I had a few years ago. I was asked to discuss corporate website basics–what websites need and where most go astray. If I remember correctly, the first words out of my mouth were, “Take your mission statement [...]
Is your company considering a website redesign in the coming months? If you’re like most companies, you’re trying to figure out how to get the most out of every dollar spent. Marketing budgets are no exception. Because it’s usually the first place potential customers will go to learn more about your service, even relatively strapped [...]