Welcome to the Escape Blog

A new website has gone live this morning for Impact College.

The site uses The Escape content-management system (CMS), which enables administrators on the campus to update content across the whole website including course information, news and events.

This bespoke build of the CMS also has a specific module for online payments, so students can process their own payments.

The college have seen a massive change in the way that students apply for their courses over the past couple of years as they offer places to international students and have people apply from all over the world.

If you’re a marketer or business owner, the chances are that you have at least one company website that you either played a part in creating or have a role in maintaining.

Website owners are fully justified in seeing their web presence as an unparalleled vehicle for increasing awareness of their business products and services. And many have taken things a stage further by harnessing the power of the Web to drive highly targeted traffic to their website with the aim of doing business directly on-line - such as through a checkout payment system.

Conducting e-business (or e-commerce) has long been touted by all and sundry as ‘the future’ and, indeed there’s a mountain of evidence around to support this. But if it was really that straightforward, how is it that the vast majority of websites that set out to with clear goals, a solid strategy, a terrific website and decent levels of traffic don’t get that all-important metric - conversions?

Ask yourself whether your website content is focused on your customers’ (or prospects’) needs, wants and desires or is it more a case of a page full of words? Or put another way, have you considered how vital it is to build ‘motivated’ traffic by furnishing your site with high-value, benefit-oriented content to focus attention on and maintain interest in your company’s offerings.

Want to read more? See the full article: ‘Why website traffic alone won’t create customers’.

Nice little student spoof video (á la Marks & Sparks) for Bangor University… hope it gets some online exposure because it’s really quite good… although maybe 30 seconds too long:

Danny started his new blog asking the question, “The End Of Blogging?“. Cited, is a reference to a decision by Jason Calacanis to change the way he communicates with his audience. I even thought about giving up blogging myself, but I just love speaking to myself too much.

I also love Loren Feldman’s take on Blogging and why we’ve moved onto Twitter. It comes of sums up for me where we are with this medium.

Blogs are, without doubt, a great way to communicate with your customers and an audience further afield, but I would ask a couple of questions as to whether they had the value they once had.

Firstly, Blogs are easy and cheap to post to so there is a shed load of noise. I now skim read my subscriptions and I am sure I am not alone.

In fact, a Blog post needs to catch my eye in the first place, especially as it would come to my attention through an iGoogle widget (see image). I maybe end up clicking on about 10% of these, and maybe read 1% - That’s small odds.

I also take note of top Bloggers and their move to a more subscription based approach. That said, we are not here to make money from our Blogs.

So…

A company blog should be based around using the tool (it is after all just a tool) in a different way. A Blog for your business should aimed at your existing customer base and what may interest them.

If you set up a business Blog expecting lots of new visitors to sit up and take notice… think again. Your audience have enough to do without being bothered by yet another Blog with the same old stuff being posted.

But, if you can point your customers and sales prospects to your Blog, you can leverage that you do know what you are talking about.

You may create inbound links and get some recognition, but really, don’t hold your breath.

Finally. This Blogging lark. It’s not like a brochure… it’s like buying a puppy. You have to feed it, nurture it, train it and not forget about it for weeks on end.

So yes, your Blog will be one of millions. No, it probably won’t make you famous but yes - it can add value to your online marketing.

Two websites went live this week…

Black Chilli is a PR agency in Hampshire. This website is built on our CMS platform, which allows the client to keep the website content fresh and take control of their website.

Basingstoke Business - This personal project website uses the CMS again, with added modules and additional use of some Javascript coding for added features. We have also used a couple of widgets in there and some syndication of content. The guys have also developed a cool commenting and rating system for the news module, as well as a self submitting business directory. I think it’s one of the best sites we have ever delivered, from a design and feature point of view.

That said, it’s new. So I just need to iron out the edges and add more content.

Holy crap - look at this video from Techcrunch about a Google interface being tested at the moment.

Small, focused websites - sometimes called microsites or feeder sites - have been around for quite a while now, but it seems their importance is becoming realised for online marketing. Brands are actively embracing niche micro sites for products and there is no reason why you can’t do the same for your business.

This article at Livemint (via Bluhalo) focuses on the importance of brand websites for direct customer engagement with the “attitudinal shift from browsing to searching” (Ogilvy and Mather India’s executive director of digital services).

For me this also ties in with a recent report from Google that they say proves that search can have a big impact on branding. The research shows that coming top of an organic listing raised purchase consideration of a brand by 4%, coming top of paid listing, by 20% and combined 22%. (NMA 10.07.08).

So this is all very well but how does it fit your business? The chances of large scale domination of search is very hard and time consuming, but creating niche website offerings allows you to dominate smaller markets.

We have just delivered a feeder website design and build for a client who has seen a remarkable payback in terms of connecting with a specific audience and for them, it happened very quickly.

I’ve bought some niche domain names already for developing feeder sites this year for our business, very much focused on our local market. One for Escape client, TSBeauty, is a product named domain - Zeno Pro. This is driving traffic through to the shop and actually selling product.

Ideas for your micro site

Ideas then. What can you do? I would start with these simple ideas:

1. If you are in the service industry, why not set up a geographically local domain with lots of relevant advice to your business? Basingstoke marketing will do just this for The Escape over the next few months, offering real marketing advice for local companies.
2. Do you have a large amount of clients in one market? Vertical market websites are another great way to create specific market content based on what you sell. Housing Marketing is an example that we created two years ago (it needs some work but it still works well for us).

What may seem like the unnecessary investment of creating and managing additional websites can actually allow you to become noticed as a bigger fish in a smaller pond, by having a relevant message for a relevant audience. Not so much traffic perhaps, but a very engaged visitor when they find you.

Back in June we ran a survey online. We also had a little help from email marketing specialists emedia, who mobilised their audience to participate.

The Escape Email Marketing Survey 2008 results can be found here.

Highlights include:

• The need for companies to make a compelling argument for subscribing to an email marketing list
• Marketing and sales Campaigns are being sent with too much irregularity.
• Correct technology to send email campaigns is being used, but more still needs to be done for better penetration
• Personalisation and testing could produce higher levels of engagement for campaigns.
• Companies need to focus more on goal oriented campaigns rather than generic messaging.
• Confusion from marketers about e-mail marketing regulations.

I love it when you load up a website rebuild and results are instant - like this project for emedia.

The website (and content) is a refined offering for marketing their products and services and already, less than ten days later, we have seen search engine traffic more than double.

It’s early days yet but the client has bought into the need to generate content and they have attended our seminars on web strategy, so we are confident that they should see a rise in sales leads through their new website very soon. Case study to follow.

Due to requests from new clients, we will be presenting our Website Strategy Seminar on 25th September 2008 at our offices in Basingstoke. This is a free seminar open to clients and non-clients alike but spaces are limited.

For current Escape web clients, we are also running a website copywriting workshop on the afternoon of 8th Octobe. This paid event is limited to ten spaces (one has already gone today) and we are also offering an early booking discount.