Deep Knowledge Prospect Experience Design: A Marketer’s Guide Prospect Experience Design A Marketer’s Guide Begin Your Education on A Marketer’s Guide to a Better Website
Deep Knowledge Email Marketing Strategy: A How to Guide for Expert Firms Email Marketing Strategy A How to Guide for Expert Firms Begin Your Education on A Guide To Outbound Marketing
Deep Knowledge How to Create a Content Strategy: Everything We Know About Content Marketing How to Create a Content Strategy Everything We Know About Content Marketing Begin Your Education on How to Create a Content Strategy
Article Week 747 by Christopher Butler on March 21, 2010 Mark and I took a trip to New England, which of course took me off of my normal schedule such that I did not keep notes for the remainder of the week. This time, I'll have to rely upon my memory, which will probably result in a brief weeknotes entry as the trip was the highlight of an otherwise blurry five days. I've also thrown in some philosophizing... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Do your calls to action give visitors a logical plan B? published on March 17, 2010 Chances are, you know the exact questions potential clients get hung up on before they're ready to commit to a sale. Sharing the information that answers these questions at the right time becomes a standard step in your sales processs because an educated prospect is your best shot at a successful sale. The same rules apply to the prospects viewing your website. By placing well chosen links to additional information to answer these questions, you give visitors the tools to answer these questions for themselves. These 'Plan B' paths for those not ready to take the leap and sign up/buy/register are called "Secondary Calls to Action (CTAs)." Read Now About
Article Week 746 by Christopher Butler on March 14, 2010 I'm sitting at my desk by the window, with the morning sun lighting the room, eating a bowl of that kind of much-too-healthy cereal and reflecting upon the past week. On the desk is a plant, grown just from rooting a small clipping, that has since completely filled the old peanut butter jar it began in. It grows in a fractal pattern, and since I don't know its proper name, I call it the fractal. Since it lives here on my desk, where I tend to leave the things I bring home from work and then retrieve the next morning on my way back, I greet and inspect it at least twice a day. It's growth pattern has become the image my mind retrieves when I think about how ideas progress—one matures and produces three, which then each produce three more, and so on. One becomes many... Read Now About
Article Unfinished by Christopher Butler on March 12, 2010 In my last post about mad scientist bloggers, I was exploring the idea of a way to approach blog writing that is true to form for some people, and also true to the format of a blog. This one continues the idea a bit... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design How the Design Feedback Funnel Actually Worked published on March 11, 2010 It's often hard for clients to respond to design, where the considerations can feel fuzzy compared to more straightforward questions like "Well, what pages do we need?" Because it's hard to know what to say, feedback can easily get too specific—prescribing changes that may not fit in with the design as a whole—or too vague—registering a general sense of satisfaction or dissatisfaction without being able to specify what is or isn't working. One of our recent sites was a great example of how the design process works when this doesn't happen—when client feedback both conveys a clear reaction and leaves latitude for the designer to do his thing. The aim is for the feedback to explain the problem, but let the designer figure out the solution. Here's a round-by-round look at the Quebrada Baking Co. design process as an example of feedback leading toward a final result that clearly expresses the brand. Read Now About
Article The “Mad Scientist” Blogger by Christopher Butler on March 10, 2010 Many of our agency friends have been blogging for a few years now, but it's been about as effective a strategy as attending a networking mixer; most companies know instinctively that they need to be there, but they just don't know exactly why, what they will bring to the conversation, or what they'll do with the experience. As a result, many agency blogs are pretty unfocused. Some are mostly "neat stuff" aggregators, while others are "innovationspeak" engines running on the Taco Bell model Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Information Architecture Planning: The Most Important Step in the Web Development Process by Mark O’Brien on March 9, 2010 Perhaps because they are so excited to start the Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Screencast: How to Measure Keyword Performance with Google Analytics published on March 9, 2010 This is the second in a three-part series about search keywords and how they relate to your website. Today we will discuss how to measure keyword performance on your site.Brian Chiou and Jillian Kuhn will be hosting these collaborative screencasts once every two weeks, focusing on topics that are important to you and your website. Read Now About
Article How to Improve Your Bounce Rate published on March 9, 2010 Bounce rate is one of the most important analytics metrics for your website. When you're looking at specific pages on your site, especially in terms of the search keywords that bring visitors to those pages, bounce rate indicates the number of people who come to one landing page on your website and then leave without viewing any additional pages. You should constantly strive to lower your bounce rate. The lower your bounce rate, the more people are digging deeper into your site's content Read Now About
Article Week 745 by Christopher Butler on March 8, 2010 This week was a special one at Newfangled as we welcomed the guys from our Rhode Island office, who visited for a few days around our annual winter retreat (Jim arrived on Monday morning and worked with us for the entire week; Steve and Justin arrived on Wednesday). Aside from the retreat, we marked Jillian's 1-year anniversary at Newfangled, Bettina's birthday, and Katie's promotion to Director of Client Services... Read Now About