How Does Your Website Measure Up?

Given our agency’s focus on internet marketing, it is not surprising that we get lots of questions along the lines of “What do you think of my current site” and “What would you change”? One tool we like to use in the preliminary stages of our assessment comes from a company called Hubspot: Website Grader. As the name suggests this site “grades” your site on a series of criteria, including site content, technical aspects (length of domain registration, existence of alt tags on pictures, inbound links) and overall traffic rank. Some of the categories used to derive the rankings are less compelling for B2B customers, but on the whole the site does a good job. 

Let’s face it,  your internet marketing strategy -- as a subset of your marketing strategy -- is closely tied to your competitive position. A nice feature of Website Grader is that it lets you easily compare your site to your main competitors. It only takes a couple of minutes. Metrics for comparison include your site’s “grade”, as well as Google-indexed pages, traffic rank, inbound links and more. Website Grader provides a valuable first step in assessing your website against your competition. It's worth a look.

What Selling a Used Car “Taught” Me About Advertising?

While those of us at Ugroup Marketing are focused on telecoms and software for the better part of our work day, it’s interesting when we get to apply our daytime skills outside office hours. I recently had the opportunity to do one of the most basic sales activities: sell a used car. This wasn’t any used car; it was a 10-year old Honda.

Understanding the need to determine my buyer personas, I wrote advertising copy that targeted the following: 1) Sammy - college student looking for affordable and reliable transportation;  2) Jimmy – driver of a “nice car” in the summer looking for a winter “beater” to get around in the cold Ottawa winter. Why male only personas? The car was a standard transmission and according to my last two mechanics 95% of standard transmission vehicles in Canada are driven by males. Thankfully my wife is part of that other 5%.

Armed with my advertising copy, I picked my mediums: two generalist “for-sale” sites and a site that targeted used automotive vehicles. When I had minimal interest after a couple of weeks, I also placed an ad in the city paper. A slight price reduction and a series of follow ups and test drives, and I am happy to report the car was sold. The whole experience reminded me why I love the Internet: I could quickly determine the car price against market value based on some quick website reviews; I could see how many individuals were looking at my ads; I could determine the success of each respective website as an advertising medium based on the email responses received (which are automatically tagged with the originating website’s domain) or from simply asking the caller “What site did you see the car on?” The newspaper ad?  This exercise in old-school media garnered exactly “0” responses. I’m glad I work with the Internet.

By the way, in case you’re wondering: Sammy (not his real name) bought the car.