In marketing, we always stress return on investment, or ROI. But I recently read an article in Forbes that argues traditional ROI is no longer sufficient for evaluating your marketing efforts. To get a more accurate view, you have to move beyond the “hard” metric of money-earned-versus-money-invested, and consider “softer” metrics that aren’t always quantifiable.

The post, “Understanding the New ROI of Marketing” by Susan Gunelius, certainly got me thinking. It’s worth a read, but I’ll summarize its key points here, and add a few of my own observations.

What are these so-called “soft” metrics marketers should be watching? Let’s take a look:

Return on Impression

In its most basic sense, impressions refer to the number of customers or prospects who actually see your marketing. It’s a familiar concept in both internet marketing and traditional advertising. Knowing who’s looking quite simply tells you how far your message is reaching.

But Gunelius points out that there’s another facet to impressions: customer perceptions. After they see your marketing, what do they think and feel about your business? What do they say about it? Social media makes it particularly easy to follow conversations about your business or brand. Market research and surveys can also provide deeper insights into impressions.

Return on Opportunity

This has to do with weighing the “indirect” potential for a marketing piece against the time and resources it requires. Does the effort present an opportunity to create buzz or boost brand awareness? Can it help position your business in a way your competitors haven’t exploited? Or, referring back to impressions, does it have the potential to change the way customers perceive you? None of these can be counted in immediate dollars earned.

Return on Engagement

The term ‘engagement” gets tossed around a lot these days, especially in social media marketing, and some marketers have written it off as so much fluff. The way I see it, engagement is what businesses have been trying to do all along – create and nurture customer relationships. Content marketing, social media, customer service and even sales are just a few examples of efforts that support this.

Will your marketing strengthen your relationship with customers, which in turn encourages loyalty and great word of mouth? How are they responding to it?

Return on Objectives

Gunelius rightly notes that “not all goals are measurable with hard data.” Often you have to evaluate a marketing effort according to its effect on broader, long-term objectives.

For instance, a press release may not have an immediate financial impact. But it can be invaluable if it generates coverage that raises your profile or positions you as an authority. The same goes for web content like blog posts or case studies. You might also consider whether it’s helped reach the right audience, penetrate a new market or strengthened your positioning.

Including these new criteria may give you a clearer picture of your overall marketing effectiveness.

So what do you think? Will these “soft” metrics become commonplace, or will ROI always reign supreme?

Laptop, phone or tablet? Responsive design covers them all.

Try this quick experiment: Open a browser on your smart phone and find your company’s website. What do you see? Can you read the text without resizing? Can you navigate it easily?

Now imagine you’re a customer who’s staring at the same little screen. Can you find what you need quickly? Would you call this a convenient, useful experience – or is it a pain?

Once upon a time, all your business needed was a well-designed site that looked good on any old PC. That’s no longer the case, as mobile technologies change the way people interact with the web. Consider these facts:

• Last year PC sales dropped for the first time since 2000.
• Tablets are predicted to outsell laptops this year.
• Mobile internet usage has more than tripled since 2010, and shows no signs of slowing.

In a nutshell, that means more customers and prospects will be visiting your site through some kind of mobile device. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile, you’re making it harder for those people to do business with you. According to Google, 61% of mobile users said they’d skip to another site if they couldn’t find what they need “right away.” (They also felt “frustrated” and “annoyed” by companies that “wasted their time” with a bad mobile experience!)

So when my clients need a new website or a redesign, we talk about mobile, too. Using new coding techniques, we can build sites that look and work great wherever their customers choose to view them. It’s called responsive web design. Here’s what you need to know.

What is Responsive Web Design?

How our website looks to smartphone users.

With responsive web design, one site fits all. The website your customers see on their desktops is still the same one they see on a tablet or phone – with one important distinction. A responsive site adapts to the environment in which it’s being viewed. Your website detects the device in use and adjusts the layout and resolution to provide an optimal experience.

To see what I mean, visit insightmrktg.com on your smartphone (or resize your desktop browser to the same dimensions). Go ahead … I’ll wait. Now, at first glance you’ll notice a few things: our logo and contact number take center stage; the navigation shifts to a simple drop-down menu – easy to tap with a fingertip; the content is reformatted for easier viewing; and the sidebars drop to the bottom, below the key content we want you to read.

That’s responsive web design in action. Without it, our site would get crunched into an illegible mess, and you’d go blind or mad trying to use it. Not great for nurturing relationships.

Responsive Design vs. Mobile Websites

You may be saying to yourself, “Wait – don’t mobile websites already solve this problem?” In fact, you might have already invested in a mobile site (or sites) for your business. But the benefits of responsive design go beyond what you see on the screen, and in fact solve problems that mobile websites create:

More effective mobile SEO. You’d have to develop several mobile sites to suit all of the available screen sizes, and search engines have to crawl them all. With responsive design, search engines only crawl once, increasing the likelihood your content is indexed faster and search results are up-to-date. You also aren’t splitting valuable traffic between multiple sites. In addition, Google recently updated its search algorithms (Panda Update) to punish websites with lower search rankings if they have duplicate content. Visit Google Webmaster Tools to read more about responsive web design and mobile websites.

A consistent user experience. Whether customers find you on a phone, tablet or PC, the branding and user experience is the same. It’s familiar, and they know where to find the information they need. There’s no need for duplicate content or different URLs, which makes it easier for them to link to and share your content via social media.

It’s less work for you. One site to build, update and maintain. One SEO program to manage, with one comprehensive set of analytics. Which means lower costs and less time invested for you.

That’s not to say you should never invest in a mobile website. It all depends on the action you want visitors to take, and how that dovetails with the behaviors and needs of mobile users. If a mobile user wants to find a location nearby (retail), place a quick order (restaurants, pharmacies), change a reservation (travel) or make a last-minute appointment (healthcare, hair salons), a stripped-down mobile site designed around those tasks might provide a more streamlined experience.

But as responsive web design evolves, I think mobile sites will go the way of dial-up modems. And since we don’t know which direction mobile will go next – Google Glass? the iWatch? – I’d say responsive design is your business’s smartest bet.

How do you manage your customers’ mobile experience? Tell us in the comments below.

Photo courtesy of minyo73.

Custom website development is usually too complicated and costly in the long run.

I often work with clients who are rethinking their current website -some are simply outdated; others need a fresh design to optimize responses and increase traffic. But the ones that cause the biggest headaches – both for my team and the customer – are those built in a complex code language.

Let me give you an example. A new client of mine, which sold diet and weight loss foods, was getting plenty of traffic to his website, but wasn’t converting visitors to customers. We did a website analysis which revealed some reasons why: the homepage didn’t immediately communicate that it was a product driven, e-commerce site (versus informational), the most popular products weren’t featured prominently, the navigation was ineffective and the checkout process was cumbersome and confusing. Overall it didn’t provide a very intuitive or user-friendly experience.

From a marketing perspective, those issues are easy enough to fix. The big issue lurked in the site’s back-end programming. Because of the code language this site was built on, it would cost the client thousands of dollars to correct these otherwise straightforward problems.

Don’t Get Locked Into the Wrong Platform

This site was custom-made using Microsoft’s .NET framework and an older ASP programming language. Over the years, the client had hired several different developers to make changes to the site, and this caused a major problem. Every developer had added their own quirky bits of code, creating a ball of “code spaghetti” in the back-end. It would have be nice if each programmer had left detailed instructions as to what code changes they made, but they didn’t, which meant that when something doesn’t work right it becomes a nightmare to straighten out – even the simplest updates became time-consuming and expensive.

For example, we needed to change the hosting service for the website – a process that should have taken a few hours at most. But code idiosyncratic and workarounds with the shopping cart slowed things down to the point that it actually took more than 20 hours to complete.

That’s the problem with choosing a complex custom systems for your website, if you are dissatisfied with your current web developer, it’s not going to be easy to pick-up your site and move it to another firm – unfortunately its a unethical way to keep you locked-in and limit your options. So unless you’re will to scrap the site and start over, you options are limited and going to be expensive. In reality, only larger companies require those custom programming solutions and have the budget to maintain them.

Choose a well-known and supported CMS Instead

The client was understandably shocked by the cost to update his current site. What would I recommend instead? Well, my team would have built the site using one of the more popular and free Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla; something well-established, widely supported and robust. These platforms are easy to use, enjoy a large user base and are supported by a number of programmers and developers that provide frequent bug and security fixes.

In addition, these CMS’s offer a wide-range of pre-made themes (a website template) for under a hundred bucks. So you can have a professional looking website without spending thousands on website design. Because these CMS platforms are becoming so popular, there are thousands of widgets and plug-ins that provide almost every type of solution, flexibility  or functionality you would need in most websites – from shopping carts to search engine optimization, to polls to blogs.

You don’t have to know a lot about programming languages to select the right developer to build your next website, but you should do a little due diligence before hiring a web development firm. Here are 10 questions to ask a prospective web developer:

1. What programming language or platform are you using to build my site?
2. Why did you choose it?
3. What are its strengths and shortcomings?
4. What problems could it cause in the future?
5. Will it be easy to update, redesign and move my site?
6. Is it scalable?
7. How about reliable?
8. How large is the user base?
9. Is it widely supported?
10. Is there a more cost-effective option you haven’t presented and why?

Web development and design is moving towards implementing simpler CMS platforms and already own the majority marketshare. And designers are coming up with hundreds of new templates for them every month. So don’t pay more to reinvent the wheel – or, more accurately, to reinvent the entire car. Because when it breaks down, you’ll pay through the nose for parts.

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.