It may be easier than ever before to get involved with web design and development. There are a myriad of software tools and hosting companies which make it very easy, even for someone with almost no background in the field, to put together a decent-looking website today.

But – should you? There are some ways that poor web design can really detract from your site, and send visitors running for the hills. If you have a business and you’re putting up a new website, you should be aware of and avoid the pitfalls listed below. It’s still a good idea to leave design and development to the professionals, especially if you’re also incorporating content marketing, copywriting, brand strategy, and other elements.

Forget splash pages

About the only thing a splash page accomplishes these days is to increase your bounce rate, because visitors can’t immediately locate what they came for, so they leave in frustration. It’s much better for visitors to see your home page first, so the menu can quickly direct them to the category of information they came for in the first place.

Non-uniform presentation

When visitors to your site are confronted by several different font sizes, clashing color palettes, and non-traditional locations for expected information like the Home, About, Services, and Contact pages, they quickly form a negative impression. They won’t waste time trying to figure out what makes them uncomfortable – they’ll just leave.

Logo navigation

Not surprisingly, a majority of visitors to web pages have the impression that by clicking on the company logo, they will be navigated directly to the Home page. It’s a very simple thing to ensure that this expectation is met, and that you don’t give someone a reason to move off your site.

Excess or oversized images

Having numerous graphics and images may be appealing to users, but there is a cost for including all those images – it slows down the display. The last thing you want is for a site visitor to be sitting there, staring at a screen which is ‘loading’. Studies show that about 40% of all users will skip town when confronted with this slow-loading scenario.

Overlooking the value of whitespace

This may sound like a curious ‘mistake’ to make, but there is no doubt about the truth of it. Over-crowded screens that have too much text and too many images make the screen just plain busy, and hard to interpret at a glance. Sometimes a glance is all you might get from a trigger-fingered user who’s just a mouse-click away from the next site. By strategically incorporating significant whitespace, the overall presentation remains clear and uncluttered, far more palatable to the nervous visitor.

If it’s time to focus on great web design, using best practices, then contact Linda Fanaras, President/Strategist of Millennium Integrated Marketing www.mill-im.com at [email protected] or 877-873-7445.

About Millennium Agency

Millennium Agency is a national, award-winning, digital, creative, content/PR, and video marketing firm. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, our team unites creative branding and data analytics to accelerate our clients’ growth, while combining our clients’ vision with our marketing expertise to increase sales opportunities and drive brand success. From video advertising and web design to social media and PR, Millennium can guide your marketing efforts every step of the way. Contact the professionals at Millennium Agency to learn more!

Linda Fanaras is the President and Founder of Millennium Agency (www.mill.agency) located in Manchester, NH, and Boston. She can be reached at 877-873-7445 or [email protected].

With over 1 billion active accounts, it’s no surprise that businesses want to integrate Facebook into their inbound website strategy. However, Facebook has become more than just a social media platform; the site has evolved into a powerful marketing machine through which any business, group, or figure has the ability to extend their reach in exciting and rewarding ways. The benefits of retargeting through Facebook — specifically aiming ads at audiences based on their previous activities in order to steer them back to your content—are numerous.

So why has retargeting through Facebook become a focal point for advertising campaigns?

(1) You Can Reach your Target When They Are Available

Users typically consume Facebook during their downtime. Unlike LinkedIn, which focuses on business-oriented, professional networking, Facebook was designed to be a more recreational platform where people share pictures, videos, and other content with family and friends. An important benefit of using Facebook is that you are able to reach people when they are free to engage. Casual scrolling through social media platforms has become a conventional pastime in the 21st century, and it provides companies with an attractive opportunity to reach potential leads.

(2) Your Brand Looks More Substantial

When included as part of a comprehensive advertising campaign, targeting ads on Facebook makes your brand look bigger than it is. When you advertise your personal brand and make it available on multiple platforms, it creates the notion that your business is ubiquitous — seemingly everywhere! As stated above, there are over 1 billion active accounts on Facebook. It only makes good business sense to include leveraging such a massive pool of potential customers as part of your marketing approach.

Retargeting through Facebook makes your brand, products and services hard to ignore or forget. It also helps you connect with potential customers in influential ways. To be specific, this means that by integrating a Facebook Pixel into your website, you have control over your campaigns: you can collect valuable information about the identity and behavior of your site’s visitors, and use that information to be very precise in how you target your advertisements. Having the authority to control who will see your ads and who won’t allows you to optimize the use of your marketing dollar and overcome a variety of challenges. For example, even if people unsubscribe from your email or texting chains, you still have the ability to access them, thanks to retargeting through Facebook. Today, more than 60% of social media consumption is done via mobile devices. Being mobile friendly via Facebook allows you to retarget in a way that taps into that vast population of mobile Facebook users. In short, if you are consistently present on people’s Facebook feeds, you have given yourself additional chances to win them over.

(3) You Gain People’s Trust

Whether you are targeting new leads or retargeting missed conversions, gaining people’s trust in your brand is one of the most important goals you must achieve. Because social media platforms, especially Facebook, allow for easy back-and-forth conversing between multiple accounts, you have the opportunity to build trust with potential leads by simply being present on their timelines and giving them the ability to reach you easily.

Integrating a Facebook Pixel into your website to create an audience and retargeting through Facebook can be incredibly simple, effective and lucrative marketing tools. Not only is it cost effective, but the nature of Facebook advertising capitalizes on what Facebook is all about: scrolling, liking, and sharing content — at your leisure.

So, if your target customers are scrolling through Facebook, shouldn’t you be there too?

Want to learn more about social media best practices? Download our eBook Be Social on Social Media, or contact Linda Fanaras at Millennium Integrated Marketing.

About Millennium Agency

Millennium Agency is a national, award-winning, digital, creative, content/PR, and video marketing firm. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, our team unites creative branding and data analytics to accelerate our clients’ growth, while combining our clients’ vision with our marketing expertise to increase sales opportunities and drive brand success. From video advertising and web design to social media and PR, Millennium can guide your marketing efforts every step of the way. Contact the professionals at Millennium Agency to learn more!

Linda Fanaras is the President and Founder of Millennium Agency (www.mill.agency) located in Manchester, NH, and Boston. She can be reached at 877-873-7445 or [email protected].

If your company doesn’t have a strong digital marketing strategy in place, chances are you’re losing market share to some of your competitors who do. There is simply no better approach to modern marketing efforts than those embodied by digital lead generation, social media participation, analytics and all the other individual components that can help build your brand and establish trust in your company.

Provides a Strategy for Customer Acquisition and Retention

All your company’s strategic goals should be clearly outlined in your digital marketing strategy, along with a plan for execution of the strategy. Analytics tools can accurately measure the success of your strategy, and show you what’s working, and what needs to be tweaked. All this provides a solid foundation for your approach to marketing that can build your brand.

Promotes Customer Face Time

Digital marketing embraces interaction with customers and truly getting to know them, which is very different from yesteryear, when customers had no idea who was behind the curtain. This kind of personal touch can build your brand and establish trust, because you become an accessible person to users, someone to whom they can relate and be loyal.

Levels the Playing Field

Digital marketing makes it possible for even the smallest of the small to compete with corporate giants. In some cases, it’s even easier for micros to compete, because the face of the organization is so easy to reach. Branding does not require enormous corporate assets or marketing campaigns, it merely requires that an image or a symbol of the company become generally recognizable and memorable. Even startups can join in on the fun, if they focus on the right strategies.

Makes You Proactive, Not Reactive

Rather than reacting to consumer trends and patterns, well after their identification, the information gathered from your digital sources can help you become more proactive. Knowing user wants, needs, and pain points can help your company predict what kinds of products and services might fill those needs, and help you get ahead of the game once in a while. When all you can do is react to observed trends, you won’t often catch the crest of the wave, but will instead be caught waiting at the shoreline, when it’s already petering out.

Companies which can consistently be proactive like this, will eventually come to be seen as leaders in their markets, and that reflects positively on branding. This kind of obvious savvy and ability to stay in tune with consumers can draw consumers like a magnet, and cause them to look up to your company.

A well thought out and well executed digital marketing strategy can have continuing ripple effects, drawing in more and more followers, and gaining brand awareness, which adds even more to your company’s recognition factor and contributes to customer loyalty.

If it’s time to focus on digital marketing, using best practices, then contact Linda Fanaras, President/Strategist of Millennium Integrated Marketing.

To view the original article as published in PRiME Women, click here.

About Millennium Agency

Millennium Agency is a national, award-winning, digital, creative, content/PR, and video marketing firm. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, our team unites creative branding and data analytics to accelerate our clients’ growth, while combining our clients’ vision with our marketing expertise to increase sales opportunities and drive brand success. From video advertising and web design to social media and PR, Millennium can guide your marketing efforts every step of the way. Contact the professionals at Millennium Agency to learn more!

Linda Fanaras is the President and Founder of Millennium Agency (www.mill.agency) located in Manchester, NH, and Boston. She can be reached at 877-873-7445 or [email protected].

The evolution of onsite-to-online shopping has forced businesses to change their approach to attracting leads. Landing pages are increasingly replacing sales reps as the catalyst for the conversion process. A landing page is a tool utilized to convert visitors into genuine sales leads. These pages are intended to entice visitors – potential customers — into sharing personal information about themselves by offering them a specific piece of content.

So, what are some key elements you should include to make your landing page as effective as possible? Here are five easy-to-follow tips and techniques to ensure that your landing page converts as many visitors as possible into true sales, leads, and paying customers.

(1) Create a Short-but-Powerful Title

Your landing page must have a compelling title. The title of your landing page is the hook that will intrigue your visitor. Without an eye-catching heading, your visitor will be inclined to hit the exit button.

The title must also reveal exactly what is being offered. In order to entice your visitor to move forward through the conversion process, you must propose a captivating offer that will make the visitor want to divulge their personal information. This will not happen if you don’t immediately grab their attention.

(2) Center Your Landing Page around Obtaining Visitor Information

Although the whole point of a landing page is to attract your visitor by offering them a specific piece of content, your predominant goal should always be to create the ability to contact your visitor, educate them on your business and convert them into a customer. In order to ensure that you obtain the critical information from your lead, you must make certain that there is nothing on your landing page that will distract them. This means that your landing page should be free of website navigation, guide menus, and off-page SEOs. This will increase the chances that the only action taken by the visitor is providing you with their information.

(3) Make your CTAs and Buttons Stand Out

Now that you have the visitor’s attention, how do you get them to take action? Your Call-To-Action (CTA) button is the second most prominent object in your landing page. A CTA essentially tells the visitor what to do. Your CTA is the equivalent of a ‘submit’ button, which sends their information to your database, and subsequently directs the viewer to the content that was promised. Your CTA should use action-oriented verbs that include enticing information about the offer. Example: If your landing page is trying to attract your visitor to try new shaving blades, it may be wise to include the words “FREE” or “FREE TRIAL” to let the visitor know the specifics of the offer. Razor blades are notoriously expensive, so letting the visitor know that the trial is free may be the perfect way to persuade him or her to pursue the offer.

(4) Keep your Information Appealing and Above the Fold

Keeping your information above the fold means that your visitor should not have to scroll down to learn the most critical elements of your offer. If the information is not right in front of them, and they must work to learn what they need to know, they will be much more likely to exit out and be on their way – and your potential lead is lost.

(5) Your ROI for Your Landing Pages Doesn’t Happen Overnight

Yes, there are basic elements that every landing page should have (catchy title, action-oriented CTA, simple but informative information, etc.). But the real power is in the specifics. Every company is different. Every offer is different. So that means every landing page must be unique. What may work for one company might not work for you.

If you find that your landing page is not producing a sufficient amount of leads, make small, incremental changes so that you can track increases and decreases in the response rate. Making too many changes at once won’t allow you to narrow down and deduce what is and isn’t working. Sometimes, something as simple as changing an action verb or increasing the size of your CTA might be enough to increase lead generation among visitors and improve customer engagement.

About Millennium Agency

Millennium Agency is a national, award-winning, digital, creative, content/PR, and video marketing firm. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, our team unites creative branding and data analytics to accelerate our clients’ growth, while combining our clients’ vision with our marketing expertise to increase sales opportunities and drive brand success. From video advertising and web design to social media and PR, Millennium can guide your marketing efforts every step of the way. Contact the professionals at Millennium Agency to learn more!

Linda Fanaras is the President and Founder of Millennium Agency (www.mill.agency) located in Manchester, NH, and Boston. She can be reached at 877-873-7445 or [email protected].

Social media has, no doubt, solidified its place in the marketing communications mix, but knowing and applying that fact are two entirely different things. Within the larger omni-channel marketing mix, social media can seem trivial and even cursory. However, as short-lived as a post, Tweet, or Snapchat may appear, an effective social media branding strategy can leave lasting impressions on brand perceptions, engagement and loyalty. After all, a single bad review today can be a crisis tomorrow. While a happy customer may tell nine people about a positive brand experience, an angry customer is likely to tell 16.

So, how do you effectively utilize and pick the right social media platforms that will enhance your brand image and generate positive customer experiences to grow your business?

Here are three things you should know, do, and consider when building a social media branding strategy for your business:

Set a Foundation

The cornerstone to any good social media branding strategy is your customer. Understanding your customer sets the foundation for your social media branding strategy and helps you establish your objectives for using social media.

So, before you start creating an account for every social media platform out there, ask yourself what your purpose is for being online – do you want to increase sales? Gain exposure? Generate more leads? Whatever your aim, it affects what social media channels are right for you and your business, and will help you ultimately reach that desired result. The demographics of your target market will also impact the makeup of your social media network. Take note of their age, gender, and other defining characteristics, to identify the social sites that have a user-base that matches your buyer personas.

Get to Know the Building Blocks

Now that you’ve set a clear and concrete goal and have a solid understanding of your ideal consumer, it’s finally time to consider your options. Let’s take a look at a few of your choices, and how those platforms can be better suited to certain companies and business objectives. Below, are the top five most popular social media platforms in the United States, and insights into each to consider when designing a your omni-channel social media network.

1) Facebook

  • Remains the most popular and most active social media site with more than twice as many active users than its runner up
  • Predominantly female; 83% female vs. 75% male of online users
  • Over 50 million businesses use Facebook Business Pages
  • 77% of B2C companies have captured a lead through Facebook
  • Most widely used across all age demographics with 64% of Americans 12+ using the social site
  • Best for: B2C/B2B. Building and improving brand awareness by reaching a wide audience of potential brand advocates.

2) Twitter

3) LinkedIn

  • 40% of B2B professionals say LinkedIn is a critical part of their research when considering new technologies and services to purchase
  • 65% of B2B companies say they’ve acquired a customer leveraging LinkedIn
  • 94% B2B organizations utilize LinkedIn in their content marketing strategy
  • Best for: B2B; Establishing thought-leadership and long-form content to increase lead generation and build professional relationships

4) Pinterest

  • 93% of Pinterest users have utilized the platform to plan or make purchases
  • Pinterest drives 5% of all retail website referral traffic
  • Pinterest is five times better at driving in-store sales than any other platform
  • 87% of Pinterest users say that they have made a purchase decision because of Pinterest
  • Best for: B2C. Increasing sales and driving inbound traffic through social discovery and shared content

5) Instagram

  • 90% of Instagram users are younger than 35
  • 53% of Instagram users follow brands
  • Leads all social media channels in per-follower interactions and engagement rates
  • Best for: B2C. Building a brand and establishing a brand image through highly visual and engaging content

Start Small & Build Up

Lastly, be realistic and recognize that finding the right social media mix will a be a process of trial and error. Start small, monitor what’s working and what’s not, and respond accordingly to build a successful online presence that works for your business.

About Millennium Agency

Millennium Agency is a national, award-winning, digital, creative, content/PR, and video marketing firm. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, our team unites creative branding and data analytics to accelerate our clients’ growth, while combining our clients’ vision with our marketing expertise to increase sales opportunities and drive brand success. From video advertising and web design to social media and PR, Millennium can guide your marketing efforts every step of the way. Contact the professionals at Millennium Agency to learn more!

Linda Fanaras is the President and Founder of Millennium Agency (www.mill.agency) located in Manchester, NH, and Boston. She can be reached at 877-873-7445 or [email protected].