Too much to handle?

There are few people in business who have enough time to sit twiddling their thumbs. In fact, the reason for the gap between our last blog and this one is that we’ve been extremely busy. So what do you do when new business enquiries go ballistic and there isn’t any time to blog, send out press releases and manage all your other marketing activities?

The worst thing you can do is to stop everything. The most important aspect of all marketing and communications is to do them regularly, even if only in small doses. They really are like great locomotives which require a lot of effort to start from a standstill, but far less to keep rolling at low speed.

The danger of letting your marketing activities stall is that they will take a long time to restart if you find business drops off and you suddenly need to generate new enquiries. By keeping everything ticking over, web sites and blogs will continue to work for you and attract enquiries.

So take this into account when planning your marketing and communications to ensure that, however busy you are, you don’t neglect them. We’re still very busy, but finding time to keep this blog rolling.

After our last blog, have you checked your content? We were alerted to a broken link on one of our web pages and fixed it, as there can never be room for complacency.

z2zine tomorrow: More words are not any easier to understand

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Understanding the numbers game

We seem to be obsessed with numbers and targets, but what actual use are these? And do we really understand them?

With so much effort being put into communications, it’s a sound idea to measure what they actually achieve. Just taking internet activity, there are many statistics that you can monitor, from web site visitor numbers to page views, click-throughs and bounce rates (where a visitor leaves a web page without exploring further), but what do they mean?

For any business that wants to sell or promote itself over the internet, figures are useful. Sites that sell products online can measure success directly through sales figures and profit generated, but brochure sites aiming to attract customers to call or email are not so easy to measure.

The number of visitors or page views alone are not that useful if those visits are not from your target market. Thousands of visits are pointless if nobody ever responds, whereas low numbers of enquiries leading to large amounts of business are valuable.

So we have to be careful when we analyse numbers because they don’t always reveal the quality of performance. Delving deeper to find out if we are attracting our target audience, monitoring how many web visits convert into actual enquiries and calculating the value of business obtained from web site responses give us a real indication of success.

If we do this with all our communications, we’ll have a better idea of how well they are performing.

After our last blog, do you need to find suitable providers?

z2zine on Monday: print or digital?

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email: hello@z2z.com
Telephone: 0333 0444 354