Posts Tagged ‘Trends’

Free Marketing Report - 50 Marketing Charts & Graphs

Monday, May 10th, 2010

HubSpot.com has recently published an incredible report of over 50 charts and graphs of original market research.   The report clearly shows a significant shift for many businesses from outbound marketing (print, radio, telemarketing, direct mails) to inbound marketing (SEO, Blogs, Social Media).

The report itself is an interesting read for any marketer or business owner and you can download it free at Hubspot website.

Here are a few key statistics about the state of Inbound Marketing and why it works:

Larger websites perform better.

Businesses who’s website has more than 300 indexed pages in Google generate over 200% more leads than businesses with fewer than 300 indexed pages.

Bottom line: larger websites tend to perform better in search results.

Source: State of Inbound Marketing Lead Generation Report - http://bit.ly/cVMpkn

Bloging more often drives results

Bottom line:  The more often you blog, the more customers you’re likely to get via your blog.

A weekly updated blog generates 20% more leads than monthly updated blog.  Daily updated blog performs 30% better than weekly updated blog.

Source: State of Inbound Marketing Report - http://bit.ly/aewfHr

Blogging adds huge SEO value to websites

Companies that blog have 434% more indexed pages.

Bottom line: Adding a blog (and blogging often) is the easiest way to generate relevant pages and boost your rankings in search engines.

Source: Data from over 1,500 small businesses - http://bit.ly/XDkQV

Inbound marketing works!

According to HubSpot study there are two big reasons for businesses to focus more on inbound marketing.

A - Economy.   92% of businesses cited economy to be the biggest reason for them to increase their inbound marketing budget.  Inbound marketing cost less.

B - Past success with Inbound Marketing.  58% of businesses cited they had a success with inbound marketing in the past (as opposed to 4% of respondents who said they had success with outbound marketing).

51% of surveyed businesses said they increased their inbound marketing budget in 2010 compared to 2009.

Bottom line:    Inbound marketing works!

Source: State of Inbound Marketing Report - http://bit.ly/aewfHr


Inbound marketing is more effective

According to HubSpot, inbound marketing has an incredible 60% lower cost per lead!

Bottom line:  Inbound Marketing is more cost effective.

Source: State of Inbound Marketing Report - http://bit.ly/aewfHr

Inbound Marketing is important for lead generation.

Virtually every aspect of inbound marketing has grown this year compared to the last one.

SEO and organic search has grown in importance by 4%, up to an incredible 59%.

Blogs have gain 2% in importance compared to last year. 48% of businesses view blog as important tool for lead generation.

Social Media has grown the most: up by 14%.  60% of businesses view social media as an important lead generation tool.

Bottom line:   Inbound Marketing is becoming more important to many businesses.

Source: State of Inbound Marketing Report - http://bit.ly/aewfHr

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Posted in Inbound Marketing, SEO, Social Media | No Comments »

Speed Matters: Google Adds Load Time to Algorithm

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Google recently added site load speed into it’s ranking algorhytm.  According to Google, the site speed will only play only a small part in the rankings and the biggest emphasis is still on the content and inbound links.

Although this change may only affect 1% of the search results, having a faster loading website could make the difference between the first and second place in the search results.

There is another, more obvious reason to optimize the load speed of your website. There is a direct correlation between website’s speed and the amount of time visitors spend on it (Source: Internal study by Google, Additional resources at O’Reilly Radar). Faster loading website means more more visitors, more hits and more enquiries.

Please see our post with tips how to make website load faster for more in-depth information.

Although site speed has become integrated into the algorithm, Google still puts tremendous emphasis on relevant content and incoming links. The addition of site speed will only affect a small percentage of search queries performed. Is is therefore still important to create valuable content and build inbound links that will return the best user experience for the visitor.

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Research Shows Websites Influence 97% of Clients’ Purchasing Decisions

Friday, January 22nd, 2010
Influence of websites over purchase decisionYour website may very well be the most powerful marketing tool at your disposal.  Not only it is your point of contact on the web and the place for your clients and prospects to find out information, but your website also has a huge impact on your prospects’ purchase decision.  In fact a whopping 97% of the 200 surveyed buyers—from companies of all sizes—say a provider’s website has an influence on their ultimate purchase decision.
The survey was conducted by RainToday.com and included more than 200 buyers responsible for more than $1.7 billion in professional services purchased, such as accounting and financial consulting; architecture, engineering, and construction services; human resources consulting; IT consulting and services; legal services; management consulting; marketing, advertising, and public relations; and training services.

The influence of professional services websites on purchasing decisions has increased significantly over the past four years. According to the survey, 74% of buyers report the provider’s website holds at least “some influence” over their ultimate decision to buy services from the provider. This is 23 percentage points higher than in 2005 and represents a significant increase in the importance of websites.

It’s clear that having a good, well established website that delivers results is vital for professional services firms. With more and more of our daily activities conducted online, having a good website could be the key to success for many businesses.
With a well performing website you can:
  • Establish that you are professional: through professional design, writing, and arrangement of content.
  • Establish that you are worthy of consideration: through an overview of your services, your client list, biographies of your professionals, and case studies that show how your helped clients.
  • Establish yourself as an authority: through blog posts, publications, videos, and other resources to help build credibility, reliability, and trust.  All of these are essential elements necessary to win clients and increase your sales.

How important is your website to growing your business?

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Google launched real-time search

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

It was bound to happen someday but now it’s really here: Google just launched a real-time search integrated into search results. It updates as things happen around the web in real-time. Live Twitter updates, news articles, blog posts, Yahoo answers, new web pages, all these now stream in the actual search results on your query.

Here is a demo video from Google:

So what does real-time search mean for your business and your online marketing?

Now it’s more important than ever to be active on the web, making the most of your website and including social media in your online marketing strategy.  You need to consistently produce high quality content that is not only optimized to get found in the top search results, but you also need to produce content that will appear in the real-time stream.

While it may take many months for your website to rank in the top 10 for certain keywords, you now have a chance to grab the attention of your prospects via Google real-time stream results.

If you’re on Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace you really should consistently post new updates.  The benefit is two-fold. Your subscribers and followers on these social networks have the potential to become more deeply engaged with your brand, but now you’ll also have the added benefit of leveraging Google’s massive search audience.

With the arrival of Google’s real-time search, inbound marketing truly is the way to go.  The best you can do with your website is to transform it from a static pages into a small publishing house that produces fresh, interesting content that your prospects are searching for right now, at this very moment, somewhere on the internet.

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Social Media Revolution

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

If you still think social media does not concern you or has no impact on your business, watch this video and think again.  The way we receive information and make decisions about where to spend our money is changing and social media plays a vital role in this change.  While it may take a while for this world-wide trend to have full impact in New Zealand, it is only a question of when will it happen.  The real question is: will you and your business be ready for change or will you be left behind?

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Posted in Advertising, Business, Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »

Goodbye Internet Explorer 6

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

We will no longer support Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in websites we build from January 1st 2010 onwards.

As you may already know, IE6 is a very outdated web browser, originally released in 2001.  It does not support the latest web standards and technologies compared to modern browsers which offer a rich support for HTML5, CSS2 or CSS3. Not to mention all the IE6 quirks and bugs which were sadly never fixed and that require a great deal of extra time web developers have to spend to make websites IE6 compatible.

Microsoft realized that the IE6 was not the greatest piece of software they have ever written and after about 5 years of development they released  Internet Explorer 7. Furthermore in March 2009 they even released todays latest version, Internet Explorer 8. Both successors offer a lot of improvements compared to the old IE6 and most importantly a better support of today’s web standards.

We decided to discontinue IE6 browser support by the end of this year.  This means websites build by us in 2009 will still be IE6 compatible, but starting in January 2010 we will not test IE6 compatibility anymore.

By doing so we follow a current trend of dropping IE6 support, as announced on a lot of popular websites like Youtube, Apple MobileMe, Basecamp or Digg.

Why are we dropping the IE6 support? IE6 is clearly a past-generation browser and cannot deliver a rich user experience that modern browsers can. Also this step allows us to focus on modern web technologies to optimize and enhance our templates without all the IE6 drawbacks.

With the HTML5 standard looming around the corner we´re sure that this will give our future websites an additional boost and we are very excited about things to come.

So on January 1st 2010 we finally say “Goodbye IE6″.

Goodbye IE6

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