I recently stumbled across an article which easily confirmed that my online search habits are just like everyone else. I just don’t click online advertising. I know, many of you online marketers may find this shocking and appalling, but, the harsh reality is that the likelihood of clicking a banner ad is pretty slim.
Clicking banner ads considered a rarity
According to Business Insider, a firm called Solve Media has compiled some interesting data on how infrequently people actually do click those carefully crafted banner ads. Did you know that you’re more likely to survive a plane crash than click online display advertising? Now that’s the real amazing factoid.
Things you’re more likely to do
As it turns out, you’re more likely to do a lot things than click a banner ad. Here’s a quick sample of things you’re more likely to do instead:
- To get a full house in poker (2.13 times more likely)
- To win a prize in Mega Millions (31.25 times more likely)
- To birth twins (40.17 times more likely)
- To apply to Harvard and get accepted (87.8 times more likely)
- To watch American Idol (111.4 times more likely)
- To sign up for and complete Navy Seal training (112.5 times more likely)
- To climb Mt. Everest and reach the summit (279.64 times more likely)
- To survive a plane crash (475.28 times more likely)
Business trends indicate high interest in online marketing
Although these likelihoods emphasize that consumers just don’t click, the true significance is the ineffectual use of click through rates as a measurement of success. This practice makes light of the financial impact of this industry has on business’ online marketing strategies and the money they put behind it. Take some time to mull over these statistics about online marketing…
The North American search marketing industry is estimated to grow by 16%
in 2011 to a value of $19.3 billion, according to SEMPO’s 2011 State of
Search Survey Report.
Google’s advertising revenues totaled $28 million in 2010.
While many small businesses rely on their website as their primary online
marketing technique, 21% of small businesses are utilizing some form
of search advertising, according to a recent American Express OPEN
Small Business Search Marketing Survey.
U.S. search marketing spending is expected to grow 15% this year,
according to a study released by Efficient Frontier.
Only 12% SMBs consider online advertising & marketing to be very effective,
according to a SMB survey conducted by Affinity Express, Inc.
The challenge of showing the ROI of online advertsing
Given the large amounts of money invested in search engine marketing (SEM), it’s critical that companies understand and accurately measure their ROI for their marketing spending. Many businesses are banking on search marketing to be effective and to improve their sales.With online marketing spending projected grow significantly, it’s imperative that we solve this conundrum and learn how to report on the real impact of our advertising dollars.
Not clicking doesn’t imply consumers ignoring ads
Since people aren’t clicking, the real impact of online ads becomes a struggle to gain top-of-mind awareness. When ads are rarely clicked, why are we continuing to measure success based on click through rates (CTR). It seems counter intuitive to approach search advertising already expecting a low CTR? There must be a better way to drill down and identify the real effectiveness of search marketing.
Tell me: When is the last time you clicked a banner ad? Is online display advertising working for your company?
Thank you for the press coverage!
PC World gave Phonebooth a nice shout out last week in one of their Business Center posts. The article covers all things how to “Stay in Touch at Work.” So out of our generosity for passing along all things business communication related, we’re sharing the tips over here. The very first business tip was to make sure phone calls find you. How appropriate is that?
Best use of your phone system features to stay in touch
Phonebooth’s business features were designed to keep you within reach. Between our intelligent call routing (otherwise called Find-Me-Follow-Me) and our savvy virtual receptionists (a.k.a. auto-attendant menus) to help callers reach the appropriate department, Phonebooth’s business phone system has got you covered. Rick was also kind enough to mention our built-in click-to-call widget Contact Us Plus.
Other business tips mentioned in the article included:
- Using email instead of the phone.
- Using instant messaging instead of email.
- Using texts instead of instant messaging.
Overall, another great, easy-to-read article by Rick Broida. Thank you!
How do you stay in touch with your business contacts?
So tell us what’s your favorite business tip to stay within reach? Mine is using an email client on my smartphone so I can easily check email on the go, because I’m just your regular jet setter.
You’ve undoubtedly come across some online expert or social media media guru proclaiming that your business needs to be social and should, therefore, spew your goods and service on every social network available.
Contrary to the proliferation of large companies with global brands and unbelievable budgets readily establishing themselves across all the social media channels, your business doesn’t have to have a presence everywhere. However, successful social media marketing doesn’t depend on your brand having a presence on every social media channel.
Think about it: Do you really need to be on that picture sharing site? You have no plans to incorporate video, why are you insisting on a corporate YouTube channel? But here’s the kicker….
According to a study by BtoB Magazine, 93% of all B2B marketers are engaged in some form of social media marketing. Now, that is a percentage to be reckoned with.
While most social marketing efforts are focused on the three most popular channels (LinkedIn, Facebok and Twitter), achieving socially savviness doesn’t mean you have to sow your social oats everywhere.
This is not the time where you must “keep up with the Joneses.” Use these business social media tips that will help you find out what works for your company.
1. Start small to figure out what works.
We all know the saying…what works for one does not necessarily work for all. The main point here is that you’ve got to do what’s right for your business. While YouTube may turn out not to be the best fit, perhaps the sharing and the commenting capabilities of Facebook are better suited to your business priorities.
2. Be selective & always measure your ROI.
Use metrics meaningful to your business to determine whether a particular channel is right for you. Then, make decisions based on the data you gather. If you’re just starting out, be selective in your social media efforts and determine what is the best fit for your business.
Consider your available resources as you scale your social media management. Do you have the time and the people-power to execute your plans? Evalute whether your social media efforts align with your company or brand’s values and priorities. If it doesn’t feel right, it may come across as disingenuous and inauthentic to customers as well as potential leads.
3. Use what you know.
Demonstrate your knowledge, rather than claiming to be an expert. Offering helpful tips and expertise will help substantiate your business as a reputable resource. Social media provides a valuable opportunity to show why people use the goods and services your business provides.
4. Actively engage your audience.
The best advice I’ve ever gotten was to be myself. Successful social marketing efforts demonstrate expertise as well as incorporate personality. Regularly updating your networks with a variety of content, including videos, pictures and information helps elicit response from people. Asking questions is a great way to open the dialogue.
And probably most importantly, don’t be afraid. You don’t need to be everywhere, but you should probably be somewhere – preferably where your customers are. When sustained over time, these tips should help your business be successful social media marketing.
Tell us: What has been your experience incorporating social media into your business marketing plan?
Look at your shiny, new company website
You can’t own a business, restaurant, or service company without a website. Most companies have figured out the necessity of having an online presence but some fail when it comes to the content and structure. Laying down the information architecture is your foundation for your business website that should be in place before you start building.
Can your customers find the important information online?
Collaboratively decide what the mission, goals, and audience are for your business website. Each sentence on your site should support your goal.
Creating an information architecture structure:
- Gather a list of all the content pages you’ll need. This includes login pages, copyright documents and the meat of your website.
- Pick out the most important pages and the ones you want to be most visible.
- Ask a few people to group the content each page and name the group. Talk to your coworkers and go through the logic of why they grouped them that way. Once you come to a consensus, these will be the major sections of your site.
- Map out paths that customers will frequently take when they visit your website.
- Once you have put in your time organizing the information architecture of your site, then you are ready to build and design.
My favorite usability test:
Give your mom 3 tasks to do on your site. Watch how she tries to complete them, and you aren’t allowed to say a word! This will let you know more about your site’s usability than a fancy consultant.
For an extensive article on information architecture, go through this tutorial.
Business VoIP Products Reviewed
Business VoIP Product Reviews Make Life Easier
We’re happy to share that Phonebooth was recently reviewed by Ars Technica. When I came across this article, I was excited to share it with our online community. Not because Matthew Braga favorably reviewed our hosted VoIP product, but because he gave an honest assessment of several different business VoIP products. Please take a chance to read the helpful information when you’re researching your business phone system.
Full Disclosure: A couple items of note
Phonebooth is featured as one of the business VoIP products reviewed and was provided free of charge to ArsTechnica. It was a generally favorable assessment. The only two criticisms presented were in regards to the accuracy our voicemail transcriptions and the breadth of supported hardware and equipment.
We have been actively working to improve both of these concerns. And while Yealink and Polycom are the only phone brands we officially support (for now), we are constantly testing new phones and hardware for compatibility with our service.
A recent study published by Business Wire found that 8 out of 10 Americans want to reach you the first time they call.
Are you always at your phone?
For most of us, that answer is no. We’re pulled into meetings. We take vacations. We ignore calls if we’re busy working.
Your potential and existing customers find this unacceptable.
In many cases, not being able to reach someone on the phone leads to a high frustration level. This customer experience frequently leads them to social media (blogs, Twitter or Facebook) where they can share the pain with their network.
How can we be more available and receptive?
Short of hiring a receptionist to field all of your calls, there are several options to help get a person on the phone.
1. Choose a phone provider with call routing technology.
Commonly referred to as Find Me, Follow Me, call routing gives you the ability to have one number ring multiple devices to make sure you don’t miss calls. If you aren’t at your desk, a call will automatically be transferred to your mobile. You can even receive business calls during your round of golf…
2. Use a well-configured auto-attendant to get the right person on the phone.
Many times, calling a business phone number and getting a slew of options can be frustrating. However, having a couple of options to route your call to the right person on the phone can be invaluable. If pressing the 3 button gets someone on the phone immediately, an auto-attendant can make even the most impatient folks happy.
3. Hire a receptionist.
While this may be the most costly of the options, you may need a receptionist if you don’t have a business phone solution that allows you to configure call routing and auto-attendants… There has to be someone answering the phone if you can’t. Risking a negative customer experience for 80% of your callers could have a significant impact on your bottom line.
What are you doing to make sure you don’t miss any business calls? Did we miss anything?
Photo credits: zachklein
How to Avoid Death-by-PowerPoint
After attending Amber Naslund & Jay Bear’s NOW Revolution book tour event, I was struck by how strong their presentation was. Amber and Jay were great on stage, and their slides were amazing. At the end of the presentation they thanked Ethos3 for making their slides. You can imagine my excitement when the CEO of Ethos3, Scott Schwertly, announced a free webinar! Here were my takeaways.
Strong Content
- When you sit down to start a presentation, get out of the habit of opening up a blank PowerPoint. Instead, get out a notepad and get started on the creative process.
- Have a theme that will apply to both the content & the design. Your one-word theme could be something like “grow” or “empower.” Pull out a thesaurus to find related words to use in your presentation.
- Create an outline like you did in grade school. Your presentation should have a thesis with three supporting points.
Simple Design
- Less is more. The best slides I’ve seen have had less than 10 words per slide.
- There is no excuse for using clip art, word art, or a generic PowerPoint template.
- Stretch out your content. Scott had 315 slides for a 45 minute long webinar.
- An image as the background of a slide with a few words written in interesting type is key to a visually pleasing, and simple, slide.
Lovable Delivery
- Steve Jobs speaks at the level of a 5th grader during his presentations. This is no insult to his intelligence; he has a huge ability to connect as a presenter.
- Love your audience. If you love them and want to connect, you will want to practice at least 7 or 8 times.
- Speak slowly. Also, the more you practice, the less likely you are to speed through your presentation.
This is just a bit of the information that Scott has to share.
Watch it Yourself!
Be sure to catch Scott Schwertly’s next webinar on June 23rd, this Thursday, at 1pm (10 am Pacific). Check out his book, How to be a Presentation God.
Laura Schaffer is a Voice Services Consultant for Phonebooth. This post is the second of a two part series about VoIP phone services.
Recap from Part 1
When you make a call on Phonebooth, you have the full reliability and redundancy of our entire nationwide network. If there is a hiccup, we have built in fail over. So you and your business are very well protected.
Voice quality doesn’t just depend on your phone system provider.
However, and this is a big however, there are two very important sides to your voice quality. One is us – we’ve got you covered there – and the other is you, or rather, your bandwidth.
Many businesses just see their bandwidth as the speed of their network, but it’s a bit more important than that. It’s not difficult to get it right if you know what you need. Each phone line takes up approximately 85 kbps of space with our service, which is remarkably compact, so your company’s bandwidth requirements can be easily determined with some simple math:
A best practice before implementing a VoIP phone system is to complete an audit of your company’s applications and/or devices that consume bandwidth. Any sort of drain on your bandwidth is subsequently going to drive up your need for it.
VoIP wants to be the center of attention.
Another consideration about your bandwidth is latency or different types of delays that occur when processing of network data. VoIP systems do not tolerate Internet connections with high latency, which you can recognize from long delays and slow processing speeds. Nor does it like to compete for access to the Internet with other applications or devices. VoIP wants and needs to be senior.
Adding extra bandwidth can be cost effective.
For this reason, some of our customers get a separate Internet connection specifically for their voice traffic. For them, it’s an easy solution to access a high bandwidth Internet connection, since it’s increasingly cost effective. Those who don’t go this route are just fine, as long as they are aware of their bandwidth usage in the office.
It’s not difficult to get your bandwidth right, but it is very important – just don’t let your usage run rampant when you have your phone system in place. You can move forward with full confidence knowing that we’ll keep your voice quality clear and your reliability sound on our end. As long as you make sure your bandwidth is sufficient, you’ll be in great shape.
Test it for yourself.
The vast majority of our customers come to us for our top-notch voice quality after trying to work with other VoIP providers. If you’d like to see our voice quality for yourself, go ahead and grab a phone to test it out before ramping up your system. Testing is never a bad way to go, and we’re happy to help along the way.
Laura Schaffer is a Voice Services Consultant for Phonebooth. This is her first contribution to the Phonebooth Blog. This post is the first of a two part series about VoIP phone service for business.
Voice quality and reliability are two of our strongest assets as a business phone system provider. Here’s a bit of a run down explaining what makes (or breaks) voice quality with VoIP, and why your voice on Phonebooth sounds so darn good.
It’s all software to me.
To cut to the point, VoIP hosted PBX systems on the surface are all simply software. The same technology you’d use to play a video game. But here’s the rub: video games, and software alone don’t give you a dial tone and can’t conduct, route or deliver a call. So, a question many people don’t even think to ask when getting a hosted PBX system is: what exactly powers that software?
The answer is sometimes bizarre, other times relatively disastrous. The fact is that a smart tech savvy person can build a VoIP software system from an off the shelf product in a matter of weeks, but dial tone and quality are another thing entirely.
The power is in the network.
Unfortunately, some hosted PBX software companies still eschew networks entirely and try to route calls through a data server. This is when crashes happen and where your calls might have collision with other data packets (causing dropped calls, awkward routing). This tends to be the most problematic kind of “infrastructure.”
Renting a network can cause night terrors.
Another option, which is better, is that the company rents or pays for the use of a part of another company’s network. There are a very limited number of networks in existence, as they are in and of themselves very difficult to create and require a great deal of expansion beyond the hosted product – they are, thus, quite expensive.
Since the company that provides your service has to pay for every call you make on some other network, they will, in some way, pass that cost along to you – their customer. And you are left with the bill and the reliability of whatever part of the network that your provider is paying for. So if that portion of the network goes down, all of the provider’s customers, including you, are out of luck.
Reliability is a business necessity, no matter what business you’re in.
We saw what was going on in the industry and, as a company, we wanted to be better than the rest and provide a stable product offering. We’re unique in the hosted VoIP world because we didn’t start with VoIP – we grew our business by providing SIP trunks and offering wholesale capabilities on the nationwide network that we built.
Along the way, it occurred to us that, hey, a lot of these VoIP companies seek us out (and in fact, still do) to run their service on parts of our network – why don’t we build our own VoIP product?
- We’d be able to make a product with more reliable voice quality since we are directly connected to our network.
- We’d be able to offer it at a fraction of the cost due to owner economics.
- And we’d be able to give our customers access to the whole VoIP network, in over 300 markets around the U.S.
And so we created Phonebooth to make the VoIP industry a better place yet disrupt the status quo.
Image credit: Christopher Macsurak
Tips and Tricks for Inbox Zero
I am the kind of person who likes things up to date. Any computer update that pops up I install right away. Naturally, I can’t stand having unread emails on my phone or my computer. I keep my inbox at zero and have been asked how I do this without ignoring important emails. After several people asked, I thought I’d share my secrets with you. Take bits & pieces to make it work for you.
1. Combine email addresses
Chances are, you have many email addresses. Gmail has the ability to import accounts from Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL, or other webmail or POP3 accounts. If all of your accounts are imported into one account, you can have one batch of settings that apply to all accounts. Set all locations of your email to sync up as well. This way, if you read an email in Gmail, it will show as “read” in your Yahoo! account.
2. Filters
This is my all-time favorite email tool. Some email programs call these “rules.” All of my low priority email skips the inbox and is filed in a folder marked by type (shopping, newsletters, etc). This way, my inbox is only important emails. Now, low priority emails never buzz my phone, and I can easily find & read them if I have free time because they are organized in folders. Setting up filters is a one-time task that takes about 30 seconds each. I file by sender, for example, the “shopping” folder filters in emails from Groupon, One Kings Lane, etc. The time spent setting up these filters will be worth it. Once emails are archived, they can still be accessed through search, through the folder they’re put in, or through “All Mail.”
3. Skim and file
Because I get my email sent to my smartphone, I have a chance to skim through new emails. I skim it and then decide what to do with it. If it is something that I can reply to or do quickly, I go ahead and take care of it. If the email requires no action, I archive it. If it needs a lengthy reply or action, I star it so I can go back to it later. With this system, I know what to expect when I log in to my email on my computer. I can easily see the emails that need more of my time by clicking on “Starred.”
How do you stay on top of your emails? Are you able to stay at “inbox zero”?
Michael Hyatt & DJ Waldow are great resources for email management.
Everyone wants a piece of you and your business.
B2B is increasingly similar to B2C. Even though you’re a business, other companies are appealing to your consumer instincts that are dormant during the work day.
There are companies that want to help your business tell your story; to help you get out there; to spread the awesomeness that your company makes, offers and/or provides; to coach you on how to differentiate your company from the pack.
Yeah, all of that’s important, but don’t get distracted from what is really important — a solid, dependable foundation from which your company operates. I like to call this foundation your business needs.
Don’t get stuck in the mud. Build a foundation.
Sure you’ve got a brilliant idea that inspired you to create your business. But, let’s be realistic, starting a business is difficult. About half of new businesses fail within five years, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. Despite that statistic, we’re still dealing with that pesky recession – everything costs more, everyone wants a job and hardly anyone is rolling in enough dough to be a secure financial backer. That’s why learning to make a choice between what your business needs and “nice to haves” is essential for your business making it.
Take care of your needs first.
Once you have what you need, you can devote resources to some fun stuff that would be “nice to have.” Some business needs are easy to determine and others may be a little more difficult to pinpoint. Whether your need is writing a solid business plan, hiring a dedicated workforce or finding a communication tool, like your phone system or Internet, with 99.9% up time, hone down your needs to be what your business has to have to thrive.
Connectivity is the name of the game.
One of the highest priorities for many business owners is the ability to reach their customers and to have their customers reach them. This makes sense on the most elementary level, and it aligns with everything the media tells us about business.
Staying connected is a necessity. When we have witnessed the 24-hour news cycle truncated down to mere minutes (and sometimes seconds) in the dawn of real-time reporting, what makes you think you can run your business communication with only your cell phone and your Google Voice number? So before you start figuring out your strategy for raising awareness of your company, make sure that potential and current customers never have to work to get in touch with you. Make it easy for them, while staying on top of your business and taking control of your response time.
Get connected & stay there.
Your business needs solutions and tools designed for business. Most times, consumer goods just don’t cut it when your business is dependent on a solution working day-in and day-out.
Connectivity is such a simple idea but can be a complex business need to acquire. But word on the street is that you should get it.
What have you determined as your company’s top business need? Is it staying connected? What do you do to ensure connectivity? Let us know in the comments.
