The staff at A List Apart (quite honestly the best web design zine I know of) just recently released the results from their massive annual survey conducted amongst new media professionals (web designers, developers, webmasters, etc). There is a lot of data, and you can view their analysis here (pdf file, 1.6mb). I'll write a few posts about things that surprised me.
Gender demographics
83% of web professionals are men. Despite the fact that most computer related occupations share a similar statistic, I thought that it would be a little different in this field.
First off, a good number of the respondents' job titles were: web designer (19.9%), designer (10.4%), or creative director (5.4%). Unlike other responses, such as developer, webmaster, information architect, these titles suggest a "left brain" approach to the web. Typically, women are well represented in other artistic or creative fields.
Second, this industry has a very high rate of self-employed/freelance individuals (23.4%). Again, this is the type of employment that is well suited to those who crave a positive work-life balance: a factor that is often more important to women than men.
Typically, the barriers to entry in this industry are quite low. Higher education can often provide a great starting point for a career, but I suppose a prerequisite that overshadows that is an active interest and familiarity with computers.
Even more than an interest though is the approach. To use an example: the hard core gaming industry (a very male focused business) encourages not just participation amongst customers, but also modifications to the games themselves. Boys and young men learn how to script AI, create electronic models, and design experiences through these games. They are empowered and rewarded for it.
Games targeted at women are still few and far between, but those that lend themselves well to broader audiences prefer to offer intuitive interfaces that hide the mechanics so as not to confuse or scare away the audience. While this may make them more attractive to casual users, it may also be doing a disservice to them as then the customers are taught to become receptive and not active participants. They are reliant on the developers to incorporate things they'd like to see and are taught to wait patiently for that to happen rather than being given the tools to do it themselves.
Friday, December 14, 2007
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Web Promotion Campaigns
In this post, I'll go through some of the common elements of an online promotion campaign for a typical small/medium business website. First off though, let's talk about the goals of a campaign:
Search Engine Ranking
Search engines are enigmatic beasts. Sometimes it's hard to tell why one site is listed before another. That being said, there are some factors that will your affect business' ranking on the major engines:
Another important element of your campaign is to be strategic. All of the content on your page should be reviewed to emphasize the words you want people to find you by (ex. web design and search engine optimization are words you'll see all over my site). Try to think of unique words as well to get an edge on your competitors. For example, and this was accidental, my site is ranked on the first page of google when you type in "the invisible movie saskatoon", likely because that phrase doesn't appear all that often online. Now, you'll probably want more relevant keywords as I doubt the guy looking for the invisible movie found it on my site.
Website Traffic
Improving your search engine ranking is a great first step towards your final goals and will increase the traffic coming to your website. There are other more targeted ways to increase that traffic.
One is of course advertising, both online and off. There are millions of other webmasters that will gladly take your money in return for showing one of your ads on their page. The tricky part again is to pick those that will ultimately provide a return on the investment.
Email marketing is another method. If you have an email list and are coming out with a new product or promotion, then letting your past customers know about it while directing them to your website for more detailed information is a very affordable way to increase traffic from the best kind of visitor: ones that have already been loyal to your business.
Interactivity is of course a strength of the internet, and having a site that allows it can keep visitors coming back to your website. Blogs with comment fields, forums, discussion boards are examples. Unfortunately, you do need a critical mass of visitors for this to be effective, otherwise you risk looking a little silly if your only discussion board item is a welcome message.
Sales, leads, business
Ultimately, the point of the above is to capture business (some campaigns may be focused solely on brand building or value adding, but I would posit that these activities as well have the end goal of providing a product or service). If you aren't operating an e-commerce site, and even if you are, it is important to query your customers in a non-intrusive way to find out how they discovered your business. Keep track of that information!
The really annoying thing about any type of marketing is trying to figure out when it's working. Some things can be measured (pagerank, search engine position, website traffic, emails, etc) but others can't (goodwill, billboard exposure, reputation). The factors that you can pin down, should be, and analyzed so that you have an idea as to what the effect of the money and time you spend on your marketing is. Some businesses spend the money and hope it works out, others choose not to make the investments in the first place, the sweet spot of course is somewhere in the middle.
- Increase search engine ranking (ex. PageRank in Google): some people view this as the end goal of a campaign, but in reality, it's the starting point. Because being number one on Google doesn't make you any money on its own.
- Increased website traffic: goal number one will help this, but there are other ways to increase traffic than just through search engines. Again though, visitors alone don't pay for your time, unless if you're selling your traffic (to advertisers of your own), but most small businesses don't fall into that category.
- Increase leads, inquiries, or sales. Here lies the true reason for starting a promotion campaign, to increase the number of people interesting in purchasing your goods and services.
Search Engine Ranking
Search engines are enigmatic beasts. Sometimes it's hard to tell why one site is listed before another. That being said, there are some factors that will your affect business' ranking on the major engines:
- Backlinks (links from other sites to yours), links are rating according to their reputation (think Harvard vs. Lakeland College), relevancy to your site, and quantity.
- Content: search engines want their users to find useful information. If you don't have any on your site, they'll give their users someone else's site instead.
- Size and age of your site, older, larger sites are better.
Another important element of your campaign is to be strategic. All of the content on your page should be reviewed to emphasize the words you want people to find you by (ex. web design and search engine optimization are words you'll see all over my site). Try to think of unique words as well to get an edge on your competitors. For example, and this was accidental, my site is ranked on the first page of google when you type in "the invisible movie saskatoon", likely because that phrase doesn't appear all that often online. Now, you'll probably want more relevant keywords as I doubt the guy looking for the invisible movie found it on my site.
Website Traffic
Improving your search engine ranking is a great first step towards your final goals and will increase the traffic coming to your website. There are other more targeted ways to increase that traffic.
One is of course advertising, both online and off. There are millions of other webmasters that will gladly take your money in return for showing one of your ads on their page. The tricky part again is to pick those that will ultimately provide a return on the investment.
Email marketing is another method. If you have an email list and are coming out with a new product or promotion, then letting your past customers know about it while directing them to your website for more detailed information is a very affordable way to increase traffic from the best kind of visitor: ones that have already been loyal to your business.
Interactivity is of course a strength of the internet, and having a site that allows it can keep visitors coming back to your website. Blogs with comment fields, forums, discussion boards are examples. Unfortunately, you do need a critical mass of visitors for this to be effective, otherwise you risk looking a little silly if your only discussion board item is a welcome message.
Sales, leads, business
Ultimately, the point of the above is to capture business (some campaigns may be focused solely on brand building or value adding, but I would posit that these activities as well have the end goal of providing a product or service). If you aren't operating an e-commerce site, and even if you are, it is important to query your customers in a non-intrusive way to find out how they discovered your business. Keep track of that information!
The really annoying thing about any type of marketing is trying to figure out when it's working. Some things can be measured (pagerank, search engine position, website traffic, emails, etc) but others can't (goodwill, billboard exposure, reputation). The factors that you can pin down, should be, and analyzed so that you have an idea as to what the effect of the money and time you spend on your marketing is. Some businesses spend the money and hope it works out, others choose not to make the investments in the first place, the sweet spot of course is somewhere in the middle.
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