As we step into Black History Month, more brands than ever will be voicing their support for the Black community—but unless that support is followed by consistent, meaningful action, it’s more about marketing than making an impact. We’ve gathered some of our favorite local and national organizations working to make racial justice an everyday effort, and you can support them all year-round in different ways!
Created by Aurora James, Founder and Creative Director of Brother Vellies, the 15 Percent Pledge is calling on major retailers to commit at least 15% of their shelf space to Black-owned businesses — a critical step toward economic equality. Support the movement by taking the pledge yourself!
Immediate action brings immediate impact. Cameron Whitten and Salomé Chimuku started the Black Resilience Fund as a way to bring financial relief and resources directly to Black Portlanders, helping families and individuals cover expenses and maintain stability during tough times.
In the past year, this Minneapolis grassroots initiative has earned tons of well-deserved recognition. Now, they’re using their platform to lift up other local non-profits who share their mission to make streets safe for the BIPOC community.
The rate of violence against Black transgender and gender-nonconforming people is unacceptable, and it’s well past time to do something about it. You can make a difference in so many ways — check out BTLM’s list of queer-focused organizations that deserve your support.
Did you know annual sales for Black women business owners are five times smaller than the average for all women-owned businesses? Before you make your next purchase, explore BFBW’s business directory (or click here if you belong on the list!).
So, how will you and your business commit to change long-term? Share your ideas with us on Linkedin or Twitter and help inspire others to do the same.
In the five years since 2020 began, we've navigated a rollercoaster of emotions—most of them on the spectrum between challenging and devastating. Rather than take you on a tour of those dark journeys, we thought we'd share some of the bright spots of 2020—the stuff that got us through, made us laugh, or provided just the distraction we needed.
(We've also collected our most-played music for our annual Spotify playlist, and we've compiled our poems of the month...which provide a strange and fascinating window into the collective consciousness of our small team.)
Without further ado...the silver linings:
Copywriting with SEO in mind can feel like speaking two languages at once. You’re trying to successfully communicate with readers, which often requires being friendly, helpful, and entirely approachable. At the same time, you’re aiming to satisfy ever-changing search algorithms, which can be overwhelmingly technical and—in this marketer’s opinion—a little stiff. So, how do you write great copy that follows SEO best practices and appeals to readers?
Search engines are designed to show people the most helpful, relevant information available. With the very same goal in mind, strong website copy is clear, concise, and easy to read. It delivers valuable information with a hint of your brand’s personality. Write with the reader in mind and your keywords will fall into place naturally. Resist the temptation to stuff each sentence with search terms.
Create a list of keywords and phrases people might search to find your website or content. Not sure where to start? Answer the Public and Google Trends can help guide you in the right direction. The trick is to think like a customer; what would you search if you were looking for your own product or service?
Your list should include keywords and phrases with a mix of search intent, meaning the purpose of someone’s search. Are they looking for information? Are they ready to make a transaction? Are they looking for a specific type of page, such as a blog or a clearance section?
Complete your list by looking for possible combinations and alternatives. This will help ensure that you have plenty of options to choose from while writing, so you can find what flows best without wondering whether you’re on the right track.
In both short-form and long-form copy, place your main topic or keyword toward the beginning of the sentence, paragraph, or title. This helps search engines easily recognize what your web page is about. It also ensures that any snippets shown in search results will include your primary subject, sending a clear message to users and helping them spot your helpful content.
Stories keep people engaged. As Yoast explains, “Storytelling is good for SEO because it will make your post nice to read. And, creating content that people like is exactly what Google wants.” Plus, the benefits go beyond pleasing readers. “If people like your content, you’ll also have a higher chance that people will remain on your website. Your time on page increases and your bounce rate will decrease. These factors will help tremendously with the ranking of your post.”
This may feel silly at first, but it works! Reading your copy out loud is easily the best way to identify phrases and sentences that feel forced, jargony, dry, or inhuman. It’s also a great way to understand whether you’ve stuffed too many keywords in one place: if it sounds like overkill to you, a customer will probably feel the same way. On the other hand, if you find yourself reading aloud and wondering “Wait, what am I talking about?” then it’s time to use more keywords from your list.
Today marks five years since we’ve been in 2020...amirite? Oof, what a year! At Good & Gold, it’s hard not to look at the year through the lens of digital marketing, and what it’s meant for our clients and the larger online landscape. There’s plenty to chew on, and we are constantly having conversations with both clients and colleagues about the e-commerce landscape and its surprising trends, twists, and turns.
As we step into November, we thought we’d compile some interesting facts as well as our best advice for taking advantage of what will no doubt be the most digital holiday season ever. Spoiler alert: There is plenty of opportunity ahead.
Let’s face it: Most households will be staying put this holiday season to keep themselves and their loved-ones safe. This is bad news for families hoping to gather with their nearest and dearest, but good news for retailers—that’s quite a bit of household budget freed up for online spending.
In a survey from the National Retail Federation, 78% of respondents indicated they would be shopping earlier than usual this year. Meanwhile major brands are pushing their holiday sales to earlier and earlier start dates. In other words, expect the floodgates of digital sales and promotions to open by mid-November.
Indeed, one in three U.S. consumers reported shopping online at least daily (34%) and one in five (19%) said they shop online multiple times per day, according to Vertebrae’s consumer survey. For e-commerce brands, this dramatic shift online presents huge opportunities to build and maintain market share.
Holiday Retail Sales Numbers (Source: Deloitte)
2017: $948 billion / 2018: $971 billion / 2019: $1007 billion / 2020: $1150 billion
67% of shoppers said they plan to confirm online that an item is in stock before going to buy it, which underscores the importance of accurate inventory information. Plus, searches for “available near me” have grown globally by more than 100% since last year (Source: Think With Google)
It won’t just be your traditional online shopping pros taking advantage of e-commerce this year—9% of all online holiday shoppers will be brand-new online shoppers. (Source: Adobe)
Recent studies have shown the following: A one-second delay in a site’s load time can have a negative 20% impact on conversion rates. Slow-loading sites cost businesses up to $1.4 trillion annually. And 21% of people abandon their shopping cart because checkout took too long. (Source: Facebook)
How to prepare for the approaching onslaught of digital holiday shoppers? We have no shortage of ideas…
Get a jump on your email campaigns and promotions now! “Mega-sale day” shoppers (think Black Friday) are 73% more likely to be high spenders, but this year, you can assume that spending will be spread over a longer period of time. Create your own mega-sales days and share them with your audience.
Consumers expect their shopping experience to be fast, seamless, and hassle-free. So review your website performance and accessibility and make the improvements necessary to guarantee that experience. Additionally, if you haven't either rolled shipping costs into your sales price or started using free shipping as leverage to boost order values, consider this your hot tip. According to Shopify, 50% of abandoned carts are due to taxes and shipping costs. Don’t let that be you.
According to Adobe, 42% of all online sales in 2020 were made on mobile devices—a 55% increase from 2019. While traffic, average order value, and total sales from mobile are rising, e-commerce conversion rates on mobile are still about half what they are on desktop. Making sure your site is mobile-friendly, with a streamlined checkout process, is an excellent way to give yourself a competitive advantage over your competitors.
Now is a great time to invest in both branded and non-branded terms on paid search channels like Google. A solid paid search strategy will ensure that your business is easily discoverable by people shopping for presents online, whether they are already brand loyalists or they’re just searching for specific products.
This is a big one, so we’re bulleting it out for you:
Surprisingly, Baby Boomers have been adopting mobile online shopping at a faster rate than any other group—that’s right, faster than skeptical Millennials or Gen Z! However, reaching Boomers will require a broader approach to targeting.
We suggest taking advantage of both Facebook and Google Ads’ advanced targeting options and segment messaging to different age groups. Older users tend to prefer more information up front, such as assurance a product is in stock, as well as a clear understanding of delivery options before clicking through to purchase.
Now is also a great time to launch a loyalty and referral program, which will give your holiday-season customers (and their networks) great reasons to buy again. Though Q1 is historically snubbed by the economy, a great rewards program will help keep customers in your sales pipeline in early 2021.
While many businesses have been lucky enough to weather the financial storm of 2020, a strong 4th quarter is essential. Luckily, many of the factors making life feel downright difficult right now are also the ones encouraging online shopping, especially over the holidays. And you can rest assured that the giants of online retail (Google, Facebook, Shopify, Amazon, etc.) are doing everything they can to connect you with your customers this season.
If you need help executing on any of the ideas up above, give us a shout. We are here to make your holiday season merry and bright.
Google’s algorithms change all the time, but the basics remain the same. A strong structural foundation, a sense of trustworthiness of a site, and solid, compelling content are always core elements of an SEO strategy. Some websites need help with the fundamentals ,while others have been in spaces for years where winning can and will happen at the edges of advanced SEO tactics. We aim to always be flexible, but also disciplined enough, to serve those purposes and any in between.
At the top of our mind whenever we take on a new SEO project technical soundness. To that end, we always begin with an audit to identify and fix anything that may be suppressing search results, including:
We’re also continuing to monitor for these sorts of technical issues on a regular basis.
We’ve dedicated ourselves to taking a fully customized, strategic approach to search engine optimization. A client selling coffee nationally online is likely to have different needs than a winemaker with a strong local presence. Our approach to SEO strategy development reflects that and aims to:
Ultimately, it’s the same as everything we do: drive traffic and revenue to your website. But in many ways, organic traffic is your most valuable traffic—the users who are most urgently seeking your brand and products are generally arriving through organic search. Furthermore, SEO provides and gains uplift for and from all of your other marketing efforts. For instance, customers who learn about your brand on social media often come back through organic search to purchase, while customers who find you via organic search can be added to retargeting lists for your other advertising efforts. At the end of the day, SEO sits at the very center of all your marketing efforts, and we want to make sure its working for your business.
Retargeting is the common practice of placing ads in front of someone who has previously shown interest in your brand. Depending on who you speak to and what platform you’re running ads on, retargeting can also be called remarketing, but it’s all mostly the same process of defining a category of users based on website activity or engagement on social media, and reintroducing your brand to those users with targeted advertising.
Would you prefer to market to someone you know has previously interacted with your brand, or someone who might be interested in your brand? Your answer should highlight the value of retargeting. It’s fairly easy to understand why people who engage with your brand on social media or view products on your website are more likely to be interested in your advertising—they have already demonstrated their interest, and they just need some final motivation to cross the finish line. In fact, retargeted users are found to be 70% more likely to convert.
Retargeting is also incredibly useful in keeping users in your purchase cycle. Regardless of how users are getting to your website, they are unlikely to be ready to make a purchase. Only around 4% of people visiting a website for the first time, on average, are ready to make a purchase. Without leveraging retargeting, any traffic that comes to your site becomes, essentially, a gamble. They might purchase, or they might leave. And if they leave without purchasing anything, or without providing their email address, they’re ultimately a lost user—all you can do is hope that they decide to come back some day. With retargeting campaigns, those users remain in your orbit, and you can continue to nurture them until they’re ready to make that purchase.
With proper tracking and data collection, there are plenty of options for retargeting your consumers in just the right way at the right time. Instagram and Facebook in particular have powerful options, allowing you to retarget users who have…
While there are plenty of platforms that allow for retargeting ads, including Google Display, Pinterest, and Facebook, we’ve seen particularly impressive performance with retargeting ads on Instagram in particular. Instagram allows you to take advantage of the well-defined and powerful Facebook Pixel to keep your brand top of mind, announce promotions, and showcase products to cart abandoners. However, its ability to effectively target users on mobile devices is what truly sets it apart, particularly important given that today 67% of consumers partake in “digital window shopping,” and by 2021 we expect 54% of all online sales to come from mobile devices.
On Instagram, Carousel, Shopping, and Collection ads are excellent ways to promote specific products, while Stories, Photo, and Explore ad units can help effectively keep your brand top of mind. (Read about all of the placements and formats available on Facebook and Instagram here.)
Just like any other advertising campaign, tailoring your advertising to your audience is imperative. For example, presenting users that have viewed specific products with retargeting ads featuring those specific products will have a great impact on your ad conversion rates. Likewise, advertising new or supplemental products to past purchasers will be much more effective than advertising the same products you showcase when introducing new customers to your brand.
All too often, we see companies invest in paid media and SEO without taking full advantage of non-converting visitors to their site. Given that showing ads of products that users have previously researched means they are 60% more likely to even notice your ads, this is the lowest hanging fruit in the digital marketing forest, and often the first place we focus when building a successful strategy.
Let's get right down to it: If you’re wondering if you should be on Shopify...it’s a good indication that you should probably be on Shopify. Born in Canada, loved by 1.2 million people, there are few platforms quite like this one. Known for its robust e-commerce experience that’s baked into the core codebase, it truly is a powerhouse that allows for efficient product fulfillment and management, as well as a finely tailored user experience.
Think of it as your command center, where you have an overabundance of key product data at your fingertips that combines seamlessly with site development, and Shopify’s laboriously optimized checkout flow. Wholly customizable, businesses have the ability to deliver a premium experience that reflects their brand—all with a streamlined backend. When it comes to e-commerce simplicity, nothing really compares. Here’s an overview of the platform’s standout features:
With Shopify, the details that can make e-commerce a real headache to manage—shipping, fulfillment, payment processing, discounts, point of sale, integrations—are all built into the platform, so that you have access to everything you need from your dashboard.
The platform is built to integrate with existing shipping, fulfillment, and payment processing systems, but it also offers its own solutions. Shopify Shipping offers discounted rates with USPS, UPS, and DHL while providing simplified tools for printing labels, fulfilling, and tracking orders from the same place you manage products, customers, and inventory. Meanwhile, Shopify Payments allows you to accept credit cards and other online payment methods (Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc.), with fraud prevention features and multiple currencies available.
Regardless of the store in question, Shopify’s checkout flow is always the same: A series of digestible checkout steps with a consistent layout and design that’s proven to maximize conversions. Because while customized pages, features, and interactions to match your brand and wow customers may increase engagement throughout the rest of your website, data has proven that this rigid, rapid, recognizable approach to the transactional pages of your website is ideal for conversions.
Within Shopify’s checkout, customers navigate through four mobile-friendly steps—Information, Shipping, Payment, and Review—with helpful auto-fill features along the way to speed things along. What’s more, customers can opt to save their information with Shop Pay, an accelerated checkout system that lets them save their email address, credit card, and shipping and billing information for the next time they are directed to the Shopify checkout on any website.
Shopify’s Theme Store provides a solid head start on the design and development of your website. You can browse more than 100 Shopify-approved website templates by industry, layout style, and product volume to home in on the features that will support your brand and business goals, using your selected theme as a springboard for development.
When we work with clients to design and develop Shopify websites, we start with a deep dive into the theme store to gather a sampling of themes to leverage. We look at navigation styles, homepage layouts, collection page layouts, product page layouts, module types, and animations to get a clear sense of how each theme will accelerate our workflow, and then we begin customizing. Whether you’re building your own website or partnering with an agency or contractor, Shopify themes allow for efficient and cost-effective projects.
Shopify’s expansive App Store puts limitless integrations and features at your fingertips. Referral programs, loyalty programs, shoppable Instagram galleries, product bundling, product wishlists, customer profiles, subscription programs...if you can imagine it, it’s likely in the app store.
One benefit of powering more than 500,000 businesses in 175 countries is a seriously robust Help Center. Shopify’s existing documentation includes extensive guides to getting your business set up, migrating from other platforms, setting up products, payments, and shipping, and more. Additionally, the platform offers live support via chat, phone, and email that’s always surprisingly helpful.
You may have noticed that the future is a little unclear. What we know, essentially, is that we don’t know much—about outcomes, about timelines, about how things will look after COVID-19. (And...is after even a thing?) Given that uncertainty, one thing has become crystal clear: This is a moment that requires brands and businesses to take a close look at their business models and ensure that they are flexible enough to meet this moment. While third-party retailers and wholesalers are essential pieces of the equation, they can’t make up 100% of your business any longer.
Indeed, the greater proportion of your overall revenue that comes from e-commerce, the better position you will be in to ride out this uncertain time, as long as it lasts. Our research suggests that businesses should aim for e-commerce to account for at least 20-40% of total revenue.
With that in mind, marketing directly to your customers, driving traffic to your website, and effectively converting sales is paramount. Over the last few months, we’ve been working with brands to make this shift, and we’ve gathered helpful insights and important information along the way.
If your website is not currently set up for e-commerce, now is the time to address it. Likewise, if your website has user experience (UX) issues that may be suppressing conversions, it’s time to make those fixes a priority. While the future is uncertain for brick and mortar retail, your website needs to stand in as a reliable alternative, offering a user-friendly, well-designed interface that clearly communicates the value of your product or service and the mission of your work. While online shoppers are engaged, and they have expanded to include new demographics, they are also discerning. It is essential that your website builds trust and puts new customers at ease with simple, intuitive experiences.
How we can help: To meet this moment, we’ve developed a “rapid build” website package that allows clients to migrate to Shopify quickly and inexpensively. Whether you are launching e-commerce for the first time or your current platform isn’t working for you, we can help.
Email is the perfect way to harness the increased engagement and browsing we’re seeing lately. Now is the time to capture email addresses from potential customers and nurture them with special offers and details about your brand. Industrywide, open rates and click rates are soaring—and with our own clients, we’re seeing numbers like we’ve never seen before. Start from the beginning and make sure you’ve got all phases of the user journey covered:
Overall, this unique situation requires rich, timely content to keep new and existing customers excited about your brand, your products, and your mission.
How we can help: Whether you need a month-long engagement to get your customer segments and automations dialed in, or you need ongoing campaign management to continually drive revenue growth through direct sales, we can help.
Of course, it’s always important to publish relevant and helpful content on your website—but right now, that’s more important than ever for a couple reasons:
With this in mind, it’s important to keep a close eye on your website’s search traffic via Google Search Console. Are users still searching for your brand, or are queries shifting to non-branded terms? Which of your products or services are experiencing the largest changes in search volume and traffic? Based on these details, it’s important to proactively answer any potential questions new website users may have within primary content areas and put them at ease as they explore your offerings. Likewise, and as always with SEO, it’s important to ensure that the information you’re providing is timely, accurate, authoritative, and contextual.
Remember that your website is a welcome mat to new customers, and right now, those customers may not be accustomed to shopping online. In order to establish trust in your website, which is important not just to consumers, but also to Google as it indexes your website, be sure that the following elements are in place:
How we can help: We offer multiple tiers of SEO management, from monitoring and maintenance all the way up to a comprehensive approach that includes keyword strategy, copywriting, metadata optimization, and more.
First and foremost, it’s important to build campaigns that align with the current state of things. Don’t show ads of people in crowds or traveling—show images and content that customers can relate to in this moment.
In terms of campaign strategy, we recommend taking advantage of the surges we’ve seen in social media engagement and overall screen time by running strong retargeting campaigns. These campaigns, geared toward capturing conversions from potential customers who have already visited your website, have been extremely effective for our clients.
Remember that although many customers might be hesitant to complete purchases right now, they are more likely to engage with your brand, which will help you to build retargeting lists and create lasting relationships. For this reason, we recommend running campaigns geared around “engagement” (likes, shares, reactions), and then following up with retargeting ads starting to push those users toward a purchase. This sort of incremental strategy will not only expand brand awareness and recognition, but will ensure higher success and lower cost per acquisition with your retargeting efforts.
How we can help: Whether you need to run a single campaign to achieve a narrow objective or need our help developing a robust, cross-channel strategy, we can tailor a paid media approach to fit your business goals.
People are expecting deals right now, so don’t fight it. If you have any older or limited inventory to push out, now is the time. With many apparel brands working with China on manufacturing and experiencing supply-chain issues, now is a great time to source locally; not only does this support your local economy, but your customers will appreciate the shift in strategy.
In terms of your overall brand, be sure to reflect this moment with content. Show your costumers that you’re with them, give them ideas for what to do, and show how you can help them right now: Fashion tips for working at home, skin-care regimens, family entertainment, rekindling romance with partners, dealing with stress, tips for home cooking, drinking, gardening, gaming, and the rest.
In short, don’t try to rise above this moment; be a part of it.
Undertaking a website project of any kind is often a challenge, a journey, and importantly a gauntlet of validation for brand values and lofty philosophical concepts. It’s a complex puzzle that requires a significant amount of thought, iteration, and management—of opinions, feedback, and the ever-present strategy pivot consideration. Often, it unfolds into a web (very bad pun, apologies) of even more questions.
So, you may ask, why take on this project for ourselves? There was no getting around it: It was time.
Our Creative Services department identified some needs in conjunction with the rest of our G&G crew, and some casual conversations were had over time. Understanding that while our previous site was functional, it fell short of showcasing our full talents and abilities. Eventually those conversations snowballed into a concrete starting line, and the team got excited to run the race with a G&G pinnie on our backs.
We initiated the project by outlining goals, pulling in key internal stakeholders to align on a focused set of things we wanted to accomplish. Those were:
Feeling good about this, we moved into a few brand exercises as an entire company to pin down some choices about brand voice and to narrow the mood of our website. This largely came in a series of polls—”Good & Gold is informed and accessible and is not pretentious or complicated”—that we then distilled to some throughlines. For some additional conceptual thought (and maybe a little fun), we also asked everyone to choose a building that represented the brand.
All of these exercises helped us confidently approach a consensus tonally, and we next needed to extend that feeling visually.
Pulling all of the information on emotional cues and strategic planning we had on hand, our next move was to begin our standard process for website projects, beginning with moodboards. Here, our research yielded a lot of observations about where we wanted to take things: minimal with an infusion of color, current via typeface and size choices, no flagrantly loud illustrations but definitely some excitement through scale relationships.
Moodboarding is a highly valued part of our process. It allows us to minimize dissonance and creates the beginnings of a clear roadmap. We’re able to make some firm decisions up front that saves us time later.
Naturally, the step after is to begin wireframing to further lock in specifics. “How will this content be delineated across this flow?” “Where are we focusing a user’s attention?” and “What does this look like scaled to different screens?” are all questions we ask during this period. It’s incredibly important to us to land with a layout framework that’s well-defined so we can move into development with clear specifications.
After iterating through several wireframe versions, and with more granular details like element states and interaction notes documented, we tackled the build.
Our team makes a serious point to keep an eye on emerging platforms and new tools to help improve efficiency and our ability to generate MVPs quickly (we just switched everyone to Figma, for instance). What unveiled itself during our discovery phase was the desire to rapidly iterate in something closer to a live environment, with the added need of control over technical bells and whistles for animations and layouts. Serendipitously, Webflow reminded us of its existence at the perfect time and, having toyed with the idea previously, we knew it was ideal for taking our site to launch.
Webflow allowed us to implement the different responsive variations needed for our design without needing to extend ourselves into by-hand development. As a lean team and organization, the ability to leverage a no-code platform greatly sped up the pen-to-paper parts of the build and we could validate sections on the fly. Personally, the previously mentioned control proved to be incredibly empowering.
On the management side, it has a fantastic CMS that let us model and reference different datasets, all of which can be edited by other team members in an easy-to-use editor interface, meaning we can truly work in a distributed way.
With all stakeholders on board, all team members providing their final feedback, and having finally stepped away from our own design microscopes, we’ve officially shipped the very website you’re reading this on. We had a profoundly productive time working on this new website and are incredibly proud of the work. We hope you enjoy it!
Note: This overall experience has pushed Webflow to the near top of our recommended platforms (Shopify still holds the e-commerce crown…for now), and since we’ve run the gauntlet ourselves, we’d love to take you on that journey as well.
At Good & Gold, we take pride in tracking the front edges of the industry, but we also aim to simplify things for our clients, and pay attention to what’s truly important. In other words, we separate the wheat from the chaff to develop strategies and benchmarks for ourselves and our clients that are built to deliver concrete results—not bells and whistles. We’re here to help you make sense of the chaos so that you can focus on what matters most: your business.
When it comes to web design and development, things can get pretty confusing. For that reason, we find it really helpful to develop a shared language, so that we can be sure we're talking about the same things when describing ideas, issues, requests, and goals. Below, you’ll find the terms we talk about most when building websites for our clients. Whether you’re new to web design or a seasoned pro, this little glossary should provide a helpful shared language.
Basically, this is the ability of a website to be used by people with disabilities, including visually impaired visitors using screen readers, hearing impaired visitors using no sound, color blind people, or those with other disabilities. A website with low accessibility is basically going to be impossible for those with disabilities to use. Accessibility is particularly important for sites providing information to those with disabilities (healthcare sites, government sites, etc.), though it is an important aspect to consider when designing any site.
The term "agile" refers to an iterative, incremental method of managing design and development. In an agile workflow, requirements evolve from sprint to sprint, and teams work in a collaborative structure. In an agile project, code is shipped and features are released continually, unlike in a fixed-bid, fixed-timeline, single release waterfall project.
The text a link uses to refer to your site. This can make a big difference in your site’s search engine results. See also: Backlink.
An API (Application Programming Interface) is a mechanism that allows different systems to communicate. It provides a method of accessing or manipulating data from a system, usually provided by the system's implementors. A "system" could be anything. Examples include applications like PayPal, Shopify, and Salesforce, but it could also be a custom application that stores shipping rules, product inventory and prices. Developers create APIs so that data that exists in their system can be made available in other places. For example, if you want data that exists in your CRM to display on your website, your website developer would check to see if there is an API that would allow the information to be accessed. If the API exists, the website developer can write code that will display it on the site. They could potentially also use the API to push information from the website into the other system.
The back end of a website is the part hidden from view of regular website visitors. The back end generally includes the information structure, applications, and the CMS controlling content on the site.
Back-end developers are engineers who take working proofs of concepts (prototypes) and write all the code that makes them fully functional and populated with real data. For websites, a back-end developer will connect your website to some sort of content management system that lets content owners manage and update website content themselves. They will also build in any integrations that pull or push data to and from other sources, such as a database or a third-party system. A back end-developer will specialize in one or more programming languages.
A website’s bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave the site from the same page they entered the site, without clicking through to any other pages. This can be a good indicator of how good a website’s navigation is, as well as an indicator of the quality of the site’s content (a very high bounce rate doesn’t bode well for either of those things).
Breadcrumbs are the bit of navigation elements that generally appear near the top of a give web page that show you the pages and subpages the appear before the page you’re on. For examples, on a blog, the breadcrumbs might look something like: Home > Category > Year > Month > Post (or they might be a lot simpler that that). The breadcrumbs term comes from the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel.”
Cached files are those that are saved or copied (downloaded) by a web browser so that the next time that user visits the site, the page loads faster.
Also referred to simply as CSS, Cascading Style Sheets are used to define the look and feel of a web site outside of the actual HTML file(s) of the site. In recent years, CSS has replaced tables and other HTML-based methods for formatting and laying out websites. The benefits to using CSS are many, but some of the most important are the simplification of a site’s HTML files (which can actually increase search engine rankings) and the ability to completely change the style of a site by changing just one file, without having to make changes to content.
The Content Management System is a backend tool for managing a site’s content that separates said content from the design and functionality of the site. Using a CMS generally makes it easier to change the design or function of a site independent of the site’s content. It also (usually) makes it easier for content to be added to the site for people who aren’t designers.
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is a tool used to manage customer information. It will typically store things like customer contact information, customer status (lead, prospect, active customer), sales or service history, etc. Popular CRMs include Salesforce, Zoho and HubSpot.
Deprecated code is code that is no longer included in the language specifications. Generally this happens because it is replaced with more accessible or efficient alternatives.
Discovery is a focused period where teams are dedicated to developing a deeper understanding of: a client, their business, their users, and all the context and restraints that surround current and future projects. In discovery, learning goes both ways. It's an opportunity for a web team to learn more about a client and their business, and for the client to learn more about the design and development process. The amount of time spent in discovery can vary depending on the activities planned and outcomes desired. A typical discovery might consist of 2-4 sequential full days of interviews, workshops and presentations onsite with a client. Or, in other scenarios, discovery might be an entire "learning" phase of a project.
In GIF and certain other image formats, there is a limited color palette used for each image. Because of this, not all colors in an image are presented. Dither is used to approximate these colors by combining pixels of different colors side by side.
Stands for Domain Name Service (alternately Domain Name System or Domain Name Server). Basically, it’s the thing that converts IP addresses into domain names. DNS servers are provided with the IP address of your web server when you assign your domain name to those servers. In turn, when someone types your domain name into their web browser, those DNS servers translate the domain name to the IP address and point the browser to the correct web server.
Stands for Document Object Model. It’s a language-indpendent, cross-platform convention for representing objects in XML, XHTML, and HTML documents. Rules for interacting with and programming the DOM are specified in the DOM API.
Em is a unit of measurement for sizing fonts and other elements within a web page relative to the item’s parent element. A 1em font is equal to the point size for the font already defined in the parent element (2em would be twice the current size; .5em would be half the current size).
Favicons are tiny (generally 16x16 pixels, though some are 32x32 pixels), customizable icons displayed in the web address bar in most browsers next to the web address. They’re either 8-bit or 24-bit in color depth and are saved in either .ico, .gif or .png file formats.
Font family is a group designation for defining the typefaces used in CSS documents. The font family tag generally lists multiple fonts to be used, and usually ends with the generic font category (such as “serif” or “sans-serif’).
In CSS, the font style refers solely to whether a font is italic or not.
The font weight refers to how thick or thin (bold or light) a font looks.
The front-end is basically the opposite of the back-end. It’s all the components of a website that a visitor to the site can see (pages, images, content, etc.) Specifically, it’s the interface that visitors use to access the site’s content. It’s also sometimes referred to as the User Interface.
Front-end developers write the code that controls how a website looks and interacts when it's displayed in a browser. The primary tools of a front-end developer include HTML (code that makes content render on a page), CSS (coded stylesheets that apply color, typography, style and layout to the HTML) and JavaScript (code that handles advanced interactivity). A front-end developer will also work with a handful of other frameworks that help expedite, enhance, and organize the coding process.
Also referred to as an HTML element, an HTML tag is the bit of code that describes how that particular piece of the web page it’s on is formatted. Typical tags specify things like headings, paragraphs, links, and a variety of other items.
A landing page is the page where a visitor first enters a website. Oftentimes, a special landing page is created to elicit a specific action from the new visitor (usually in connection with an advertising or marketing campaign).
This refers to the coding applied to a text document to change it into an HTML, XML, or other Markup Language document.
Navigation refers to the system that allows visitors to a website to move around that site. Navigation is most often thought of in terms of menus, but links within pages, breadcrumbs, related links, pagination, and any other links that allow a visitor to move from one page to another are included in navigation.
Short for “permanent link.” Generally used only on blogs, a permalink is a link that is the permanent web address of a given blog post. Since most blogs have constantly-changing content, the permalink offers a way for readers to bookmark or link to specific posts even after those posts have moved off the home page or primary category page.
A plug-in is a bit of third party code that extends the capabilities of a website. It’s most often used in conjunction with a CMS or blogging platform. Plug-ins are a way to extend the functionality of a website without having to redo the core coding of the site. Plugins can also refer to bits of third-party software installed within a computer program to increase its functionality.
Property is a CSS term and is roughly equivalent to an HTML tag. Properties are what define how a style should appear on a given web page.
A prototype is a proof of concept used to evaluate a design idea. For example, rather than creating a static mock up of what a web page will look like and then asking stakeholders to "approve the design", a team might create a prototype that everyone can interact within the browser. This gives everyone a more realistic, interactive facsimile of the website to try out. Prototypes help teams test ideas and make necessary changes early on—before committing the effort, time and cost that go into building a fully functional product.
Quantitative data refers to any aggregated, measurable pieces of information. Typically, it refers to data (analytics) that reflects website/application traffic and usage. On its own, quantifiable data will provide information about what is happening on your website, but not why it's happening. Being able to quantify what's happening (or not happening) on your website can help you determine the best place to focus your UX research, design and development efforts.
Qualitative data is information gained through direct observation or interviews with the people who use a product or system. Usability testing is a form of user research that generates qualitative insights. Whereas analytics and metrics may provide quantitative information about what's happening on your website, qualitative research will help you understand why you are seeing those results. Your qualitative insights will help you know what changes might improve things like conversion rate or user experience.
A roadmap is a living document that paints out planned strategic activities across a stretch of time. Roadmaps are used to help teams and stakeholders visualize the timeline of moving pieces that need to be aligned as part of big initiatives. A typical roadmap will display key project deadlines and feature releases, often tracked across months or quarters.
A specification is a document that offers an explicit definition and requirements for a web service or technology and generally includes how the technology is meant to be used, along with the tags, elements, and any dependencies.
A sprint is the determinate window of time a team has to successfully complete a chunk of work. Sprints are used to deliver design work, deploy code, and ship new features incrementally. Sprints help teams organize development tasks into manageable stand-alone pieces. Each team's individual sprint-cycle should reflect a specific interval of time. For example, a team in a 3-week sprint cycle will plan, execute on, complete and deliver work for testing every 3 weeks.
A tag is a set of markup characters that are used around an element to indicate its start and end. Tags can also include HTML or other code to specify how that element should look or behave on the page. See also HTML Tag.
A template is a file used to create a consistent design across a website. Templates are often used in conjunction with a CMS and contain both structural information about how a site should be set up, but also stylistic information about how the site should look.
UI (User Interface) Design is the design of how things on screen look. Color, layout, typography, style, and animation effects all exist within the domain of UI design. UI designers will have a solid understanding of the principles of graphic design and website usability. It's not uncommon for web designers to have multiple areas of expertise, for example a web designer might be versed in both interface design and user experience or front end development.
Usability refers to how easy it is for a visitor to your site to use your site in its intended manner. In other words, are navigation, content, images, and any interactive elements easy to use, functioning the way they were intended, and that your intended target visitor will not need any special training in order to use your site.
Usability testing involves sitting down with a user of a website, product, or application and observing what they do. This can be done in person, or remotely via screen share. A typical usability testing session combines a general interview with guided and unguided walkthroughs of the interface being tested. When guided, the tester will ask the user to complete a series of tasks and identify what things the user can do easily, and where the user encounters friction (has difficulty). When unguided, the user will take the lead in an open walkthrough of their thoughts and the tasks they would most naturally try to complete.
Any of a toolbox of techniques used to gather insights about people, their motivations, and their behavioral patterns—specifically as they pertain to interactions with products, websites or applications. User research can include a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques.
UX stands for user experience. User experience, as a discipline, is the application of design tools and techniques to uncover user goals and needs. This all works toward the goal of crafting products, applications, and systems that are useful, desirable, and easy for people to use. User experience is also used as an umbrella term to reflect the overall degree of satisfaction a person will have interacting with a product or website. Everything that impacts user satisfaction: how quickly a screen loads, how well-written and relevant content is, how easy it is for users to navigate or complete tasks all contribute to the overall user experience.
Standards are specifications recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium for standardizing website design. The main purpose of web standards is to make it easier for both designers and those who create web browsers to make sites that will appear consistent across platforms.
We don’t know much about epidemiology, and we certainly can’t comprehend the speed with which the Coronavirus went from peripheral concern to central, unrelenting reality. We won’t try to explain any of that, because we don’t understand it. We do, however, know a thing or two about marketing, and we have an intimate view of how the virus is affecting our clients, who do incredible work in industries ranging from restaurants to online retail to cleaning products, hospitality, and wine. Given that, we thought we’d share some general insights, specific to this moment. (Yes, those are our pets and pet friends above…just because.)
Now more than ever, what you say as a brand matters. We are in a unique moment, unlike any moment we’ve experienced before—don’t exploit this situation, but don’t ignore it. Think about what your brand and your product mean during this time, and share that with people. They are listening. Be real, be human, and be authentic. Is humor ok? Yes, absolutely. We all need humor, always. (For reference, enjoy this quality content on “Solving Coronavirus” from our client, Prank-O.)
And that means they’re spending plentiful time online, doing a little thing we call window shopping. Sure, folks are anxious about the economy, which means your conversion rates may dip—but you may also see website traffic and overall brand visibility rise at the same time. They’ll be opening your emails more, looking at your products more, and dreaming of carefree times ahead. Remember: That engagement with your brand is extremely valuable. Give those window shoppers some nice things to look at—entertain them, delight them, and make sure they don’t forget you.
If you’re running paid media, now is not the time to shut it off. For health-based, creature comfort, and general consumer goods, we expect continued (and in some cases even stronger) sales during this time.
Now is not the time to reinvent your business model. But it is a good time to think about how your business fits into our current reality. In what way do people need your product and service now that may be different than before? How can you support your community? How can they support you?
If your website needs a redesign, now is a great time to tackle that project. If you’ve been meaning to get your SEO in order, this is your opportunity. If your email templates or automations need some love, lavish them with attention. The groundwork you lay now will put your business in a strong position for growth in the months ahead. Take the time to tackle those projects you’ve been meaning to tackle.
This is brutal. Nobody is unaffected. And lots of people are deeply, unimaginably affected. But we will get through it, because that’s what we do, and we will do it together, because that’s how we get through things. So keep pushing ahead, keep asking for help, keep supporting those who need it, and remember to take care of yourself.
If you need help, let us know. We’re happy to update your website, get an email out the door, run a special campaign, or even get you set up with a quick and easy e-commerce website. Our goal is to support the businesses who need us in any way we can.
The world of social advertising is a complicated and ever-changing place. For instance, advertising through Facebook means advertising on more than Facebook. Because the Facebook family supports multiple advertising types across Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger. And every single ad has three key components: The placement (where it will be displayed), the format (what it looks like), and the objective (how success will be measured).
When we develop social advertising campaign strategies, we recommend a selection of placements, formats, and goals based on a combination of business objectives, historical data, gut instincts, and general channel expertise. But the options and permutations are limitless. Below, you’ll find an overview of these components, so that you can better understand the tools you can use to leverage your brand’s offerings and available assets.
The places where you can run your ads are called Placements. Depending on the objective you choose when you create your campaign, your ads can appear on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network.
Facebook News Feed: Your ads appear in the desktop News Feed when people access the Facebook website on their computers. Your ads appear in the mobile News Feed when people use the Facebook app on mobile devices or access the Facebook website through a mobile browser.
Facebook Marketplace: Your ads appear in the Marketplace home page or when someone browses Marketplace in the Facebook app. Learn more about ads in Marketplace.
Facebook Video Feeds: Your video ads appear between organic videos in video-only environments on Facebook Watch and Facebook News Feed.
Facebook Right Column: Your ads appear in the right columns on Facebook. Right column ads only appear to people browsing Facebook on their computers.
Facebook Stories: Your ads appear in people's stories on Facebook. Learn more about ads in Facebook Stories.
Facebook In-Stream Videos: Your ads appear as short videos in Video on Demand and select Gaming Partner live streams on Facebook (ads in live streams are currently limited to approved Gaming Partners as part of a test). Learn more about in-stream video.
Facebook Instant Articles: Your ads appear in Instant Articles within the Facebook mobile app. Learn more about Instant Articles.
Instagram Feed: Your ads appear in the desktop feed when people access the Instagram website on their computers. They appear in the mobile feed when people use the Instagram app on mobile devices or access the Instagram website through a mobile browser.
Instagram Explore: Your ads appear in the browsing experience when someone clicks on a photo or video. Learn more about ads in Instagram Explore.
Instagram Stories: Your ads appear in people's stories on Instagram. Learn more about ads in Instagram Stories.
Messenger Inbox: Your ads appear in the Home tab of Messenger. Learn more about ads in Messenger.
Messenger Stories: Your ads appear in people's stories on Messenger. Learn more about ads in Messenger Stories.
Messenger Sponsored Messages: Your ads appear as messages to people who have an existing conversation with you in Messenger. Learn more about sponsored messages.
Audience Network Banner, Native, and Interstitial: Your ads appear on apps and websites on Audience Network. Learn more about banner ads, interstitial ads and native ads.
Audience Network Rewarded Video: Your ads appear as videos people can watch in exchange for a reward in an app (such as in-app currency or items). Learn more about rewarded video.
Audience Network In-Stream: Your ads appear as short videos that run before, during or after video content (pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll) in a video player on a website. Learn more about in-stream video.
Whether you want to use video, images or words—or a combination of those elements—there’s an ad format for every business story. Here are the formats available within the Facebook family.
Photo: Photo ads offer a clean, simple format to feature engaging imagery and copy. Convey who you are and what you do through high-quality images or illustrations.
Video: Tell your story with sight, sound and motion. Video ads come in a range of lengths and styles—from short, feed-based ads you watch on the go, to longer videos you watch on the couch.
Collection: Collection ads let people discover, browse and buy what you offer. People can tap an ad to learn more about a specific product, all within a fast-loading experience.
Carousel: Carousel ads let you showcase up to ten images or videos in a single ad, each with its own link. Highlight different products or tell a brand story that develops across each card.
Slideshow: Slideshow ads are video-like ads made of motion, sound and text. These lightweight clips help you tell your story beautifully across devices and connection speeds.
Instant Experience: Instant Experience, formerly called Canvas, provides a full-screen, mobile-optimized experience instantly from your ad.
Lead Generation: Lead ads on Facebook and Instagram help you collect info from people interested in your business. A lead ad is presented using an image, video, or carousel, and followed by a lead form when the user engages with the ad.
Offers: Offers are discounts you can share with your customers on Facebook. You can design your offer ad to appear as a image, video, or carousel.
Post Engagement: Most Page posts on Facebook can be boosted to deliver more likes, comments, shares, and photo views.
Event Responses: Event response ads can be used to promote awareness of your event and drive responses. You can design your event ad to appear as an image or video.
Page Likes: Page likes ads can be used to drive users to like your page. You can design your Page likes ad with a video or an image masked to a ratio of 1.91:1.
Your advertising objective is what you want people to do when they see your ads. As businesses grow, the goals we create for campaigns often change. First, our campaigns may focus on building awareness and acquiring new customers. Later, we will likely encourage people to make a purchase, sign up for an event, or fill out a form. Objectives fall into three buckets, or user journey phases: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.
Brand Awareness: Increase people's awareness of your business, brand or service.
Reach: Show your ad to as many people as possible in your target audience.
Traffic: Send people from Facebook to any URL you choose, such as your website's landing page, a blog post, app etc.
Engagement: Reach people more likely to engage with your post. Engagement includes likes, comments and shares but can also include offers claimed from your page.
App Installs: Send people to the store where they can download your business's app.
Video Views: Share videos of your business with people on Facebook most likely to watch it.
Lead Generation: Collect leads for your business. Create ads that collect info from people interested in your product, such as sign-ups for newsletters.
Messages: Connect with people on Facebook, communicate with potential or existing customers to encourage interest in your business.
Conversions: Encourage people to take a specific action on your business's site, such as having them to add items to a cart, download your app, register for your site, or make a purchase.
Catalog Sales: Show products from your e-commerce store's catalog to generate sales.
Store Traffic: Promote your brick-and-mortar business locations to people that are nearby.
Like we said up top...it's a lot. Some of the most time-intensive work we do is on developing the strategy and campaign architecture for paid media campaigns. Once that's in place, we can start having fun testing copy, images, audiences, and more.
One of the most effective channels of marketing communication, email is likely essential to your business. As we like to say around here, it’s direct, action-oriented, and measurable, and provides a clear window into the preferences and desires of your actual customers.
But if you’re like many businesses, you’ve watched numerous new email platforms come to market, and you’ve wondered if a migration might be worth it. Are there new opportunities you’re missing out on? Essential new technologies or strategies? And if you’re launching a new business, your focus is on making the right decision for your business out of the gate, without any false starts.
It’s a big decision, and your choice really will affect your business. So do your research, schedule your demos, and be sure to choose a platform that supports your business goals. And if you need help with that decision, or migrating to a new platform, setting up your chosen platform, we’d be happy to help.
Simple to use and always reliable, with a robust set (more than 200) of integrations with common marketing tools, there’s a reason so many businesses use Mailchimp. The platform’s interface for campaign and template creation are nice and simple, and standard email automations are a breeze to set up.
The platform is also relatively inexpensive, and has recently expanded its offerings from email marketing to what it calls its customer relationship management (CRM) system, with advanced audience segmentation options, audience insights, and more. As part of these expansions, Mailchimp has added more marketing features like landing pages, Facebook/Instagram/Google Ads, and even printed postcards.
In 2019, Mailchimp’s “breakup” with Shopify over customer privacy shook up the industry, and sent many Mailchimp users running to other platforms with a more targeted focus on e-commerce. Though Mailchimp can still integrate with Shopify via third-party apps, the lack of a direct connection with the e-commerce powerhouse was a signal to many customers to rethink their tech stack.
Best for: Medium-sized businesses sending both content-driven and commerce-driven campaigns and automations.
Why we love it:
Drawbacks:
The big winner in Mailchimp’s breakup with Shopify was Klaviyo, a Boston-based company that launched in 2012. Since then, Klaviyo has lured more than 6,000 Mailchimp customers away with its relentless focus on e-commerce. Klaviyo even claims that customers who have made the switch have seen an average increase of 46% in total store revenue.
Indeed, Klaviyo comes with great out-of-the box tools and features for e-commerce: Unique coupon codes, back-in-stock automations, advanced pop-ups, and multivariate testing. Plus, Klaviyo’s segmentation engine allows you to use advanced conditions like products purchased within specific time frames, or send abandoned cart emails segmented by cart value.
Klaviyo’s biggest appeal, from our perspective, is that it delivers everything you want and nothing more.
Best for: E-commerce businesses that want to use email for a single purpose: to drive direct sales on their website.
Why we love it:
Drawbacks:
If your business is focused on lead generation, or if lead generation is a crucial element of your business, you will likely need a full-fledged customer relationship management (CRM) system. These systems are built to organize, track, and manage a company’s interactions with current and potential customers, and function as a command center for all lead gen efforts.
When paired with its marketing and sales software, HubSpots’s CRM offers powerful lead scoring tools and email nurturing offerings, along with landing pages, pop-ups, email tracking, and robust analytics. Though the CRM is free, the “Marketing Hub” software can become expensive, with multiple tiers and bundles—and to run a comprehensive lead gen program, you’ll need both.
Because HubSpot is a more advanced platform across the board, it will require more expertise to configure its systems properly. Out-of-the box design templates are limited, so you’ll need a digital designer or developer to create your email and landing page templates. Workflows, lead flows, and forms require advanced setup, to make sure information is flowing to all of the right places. Overall, it’s a bigger investment. But if leveraged effectively, a platform like Hubspot can be a game-changer for your business.
Best for: Lead generation businesses that need to set up complicated workflows tailored to multiple customer personas and lead types.
Why we love it:
Drawbacks:
In conclusion, as always, the best platform for you depends on both your needs and your goals. So start by thinking those through, and making sure you have a good sense of your requirements. Once you’ve got that in place, if you need an extra set of eyes, we’re happy to work with you to make the best selection for your business.
The internet is a rapidly shapeshifting place, with new technologies quickly emerging, pivoting, or falling out of favor all the time. With that comes a plethora of options to face when the time comes to build or revamp your web presence. It can be overwhelming.
So, just how do you decide which platform is best for your needs? How do you wade through the new options that pop up seemingly everyday? And most importantly, how do you get off of your outdated and/or bloated platform and onto something that’s easy to manage and designed for performance? At G&G, we’ve honed our own primary toolbelt to focus on a few of our favorites that help us guarantee client success. The key, as with all website projects, is to carefully consider your goals, both long and short-term.
Client Example: Apiary Life
Quite simply, Webflow is a digital designer's dream. The in-browser design tool essentially blends visual design with code, allowing designers to design and develop at the same time. What's more, the platform allows for complex interactions and animated transitions, leveraging the power of CSS and JavaScript in a code-free environment.
Meanwhile, the platform also offers a simple interface for editors, allowing users to update page content and CMS collections without interfering with design elements, layouts, or other settings. Paired with super-simple and reliable hosting plans, Webflow is an appealing option for enhancing design and user experience while simplifying just about everything else.
Best for: Marketing websites that wow users with polished design, animations, and interactions.
Why we love it:
Drawbacks:
Client example: Oak & Oscar
Born in Canada, loved by 1.2 million people, there are few platforms on the block like Shopify. Known for its robust e-commerce experience that’s baked into the core codebase, it truly is a powerhouse that allows for efficient product/fulfillment management and a finely-tailored user experience. Think of it as your command center, where you have an overabundance of key product data at your fingertips that combines seamlessly with site development, and Shopify’s laboriously optimized checkout flow. Wholly customizable, clients have the ability to deliver a premium experience that reflects their brand—all while having a streamlined backend.
We also love that the details that can make e-commerce a real headache to manage—shipping, fulfillment, payment processing, discounts, point of sale—are all built into the platform, so that you have access to everything you need from your dashboard. And much like Squarespace, Shopify’s documentation of features, settings, and how-to’s is expansive, with robust live support to match.
Additionally, Shopify’s expansive app store puts limitless integrations and features at your fingertips. Referral programs, loyalty programs, shoppable Instagram galleries, product bundling...if you can imagine it, it’s likely in the app store.
Best for: Ambitious stores and brands that require deep functionality, fulfillment, and have a wide range of SKUs.
Why we love it:
Drawbacks:
Client Example: BurnCycle
Squarespace, notable sponsor of just about every other large-audience podcast you’ll listen to these days, prides itself on being two things: accessible and easy-to-use. That holds true, making it one of the major players in the small business and upstart e-commerce arena. It features a WYSIWYG editor with a wide range of content blocks that makes it relatively painless to pick up.
Couple that with an intuitive admin panel that also gives access to a few internal marketing tools (email campaigns, forms) or external add-ons, and you’ve got a strong out-of-the-box option. Even better, you can pop open the hood to take your style and function further with CSS customization or custom code blocks that allow for unique content types.
Best for: Simple, branded websites that need to make an impact with marketing and with limited e-commerce function.
Why we love it:
Drawbacks:
Attempting to look forward in the middle of a web revolution isn’t easy. As we mentioned up top, there is an endless flood of new tools, technologies, and product pivots (GoDaddy landing pages? Mailchimp postcards?) all vying for attention. Despite the analysis paralysis, there’s one new “platform” we’re confident in: None. JAMstack, a newly-coined term that stands for Javascript, APIs, and markup, is more of an approach to building sites than the previously standard all-in-one solution. Essentially, you choose what you like and what you need: a frontend framework like React, a server, different API functions, and a CDN (content delivery network); managed from a plethora of lean CMS options, then delivered to users.
It’s a fast and flexible approach that’s more future-proof as it doesn’t rely on one solution to handle the entirety of your site. Instead of one platform holding the key, you can pull from myriad places to create a bespoke solution. As things come and go, you can retool or pull in extended functions to help build the most efficiently served website. For clients, it means less reliance and management as well as more security. For users, it means speed. Win win!
Best for: Ultimate flexibility and picking the right tools (both front- and back-end) for your specific project
Why we love it:
Drawbacks:
Why don’t you see WordPress on this list? Wix? Well…it’s complicated. These are platforms that we DO work with, and very well may be the best option for many businesses. But the benefits are a little more nuanced, and the use cases a little more narrow.
What’s best for you, of course, depends on what you need. We expend a lot of effort internally to make sure our aforementioned toolbelt is laser-focused on a wide range of platforms that help us deliver the right solutions and results for clients. No two projects are the same, and we take pride in helping everyone find the right fit for their business goals.
If you keep your ear to the ground on financial and business news like we do, you’ve likely been watching the recent flurry of headlines with more than a little dread. What’s going on with the 800-point drop in the Dow? Is a recession coming? What’s up with the “crazy inverted yield curve”?
We’re not experts, but we certainly know enough to know that we have no idea. But that’s quite all right, because we absolutely believe that a smart approach to digital marketing means you don’t need to fret over the inevitable ups and downs of the economy. With fourth-quarter approaching, and the financial landscape feeling volatile as ever, it’s time to buckle up your digital marketing strategy and prepare for the ride.
Here’s why digital marketing is the safest and most strategic investment for your business:
When managed correctly, SEO, SEM, Social Advertising, and Email Marketing are the most cost-effective ways for you to find new customers. In particular, SEO and Email are marketing channels that require a low investment while offering a high and consistent yield. At Good & Gold, we consider these “utility services,” and feel strongly that every business should be nailing these two services before expanding their programs to invest elsewhere. These are your bread and butter—the front door and the telephone of modern marketing.
Some cost benefits of digital marketing include:
Digital marketing allows you to make changes to a campaign in real time. Let’s say you launch your fall campaign with two different creative approaches, because you’re not quite sure what will resonate with your audience. Within a week, you can begin to analyze performance and move your budget into the top performing campaign, maximizing ROI as you go. In this day and age, there is no way to know what will work, and there is no reason to be tethered to a sinking ship.
The ability to shift strategies and tactics quickly via digital marketing allows you to quickly account and adjust for:
If you don’t know which marketing channel is driving the majority of your revenue, you’re not measuring well. If you don’t know what your monthly goals are, or whether you’re on track to meet your goals, you’re not tracking well. The data is all at your fingertips—it’s just a matter of developing a clear window into that data. Take the time to set up robust and easy-to-read dashboards, so that you can make informed decisions about your business.
The measurability afforded by digital marketing allows you to closely track:
The moment a client or customer has made their first purchase, you have the data you need in order to expand the relationship and better serve their needs. Have your customers gone dark on you? Create a re-engagement strategy: Give them a reason to come back and do business with you.
For example, you might engage customers in the following ways:
There are many ways to identify new growth opportunities via digital marketing. Use these patterns to find new opportunities.
The data to be gleaned from email marketing is powerful and practically endless. Your email channel is your direct window into your actual audience of real customers—what do they respond to, what inspires them, what bores them? What do they WANT? (And...do they like emojis?) But where do you start? Whether you’re just dipping your toes in the testing waters, or have been swimming in the deep end for awhile, here are five A/B tests that you should incorporate into your email strategy ASAP. And remember: Keep. On. Testing!
Testing a subject line is one of the easiest ways to improve your open rate and determine what grabs your audience’s attention. There are a variety of ways to test this: do your subscribers respond to short, grabby subject lines or longer, information-rich subject lines? What topics get the most attention? Do your customers respond more to promotions? Does personalization in a subject line make an impact? These are all questions that can be answered by A/B testing those subject lines over and over. (Just be sure you’re testing a true variable, and not just two subtly different ways to say something.)
When scouring the internet for email marketing tips, you’ll find articles aplenty that tell you the best day and time to send an email newsletter. Ignore them! Yes, there are general trends around when people are checking their email. But the more valuable information is when your subscribers are checking their email, and it varies based on business type, industry, customer demographics, content, and so on. The truth is, the best time to send an email is when your customers are most likely to read it. It might be in the evening, or first thing in the morning. It might be on the weekend. And the way to determine that is to A/B test it!
What is email marketing if not content? Testing your content is vital to determining what your subscribers and customers find most engaging. There are many angles to test here, we recommend you start with these:
When it comes to email marketing, design is just as crucial as content. In general, we know that people respond to emails that are clean, concise, and easy to navigate. But we highly recommend testing your color palettes and layout to determine what your customers engage with. Are they enticed by a bold color palette? Or do they click more when emails are light and bright? Is bold typography engaging or overwhelming? Which images perform best, at what size?
Say it with me now: Every email needs a call to action! This is true regardless of your business, industry, or email marketing goals. Why should someone open your email, and what should they do after they open it? If you can’t answer these questions, go back to the drawing board. When you’ve determined your CTA, the next question is how to best communicate it. Test the color of your CTA buttons, word choice, and placement in the email to determine what encourages your audience to take action.
Learn why social proof is so darn powerful—and how it can help your marketing.It’s late Sunday morning—the coffee’s on, the rain is falling, and you’re in search of a good place to catch brunch. You head out the door, walk down the street, and notice that nearly half of the restaurants you pass are borderline empty inside. Something inside you tells you to venture on. You head a bit further down the street and notice that the restaurant on your left is completely packed. You head inside.
Like most people, we’re more likely to head into a heavily crowded restaurant than a quiet one, despite average wait times. In fact, despite what we believe, we’re actually drawn to crowds. But why?
Most psychologists, sociologists, and marketing connoisseurs call this psychological phenomenon “social proof.” The rest of us simply call it “following the crowd.”
Social proof is the psychological phenomenon where people adapt their behavior based on what they see other people doing.
In general, there are six different types of social proof:
Let’s go back to the restaurant example. The reason you chose to visit the restaurant with people in it instead of the empty ones was that you assumed the empty restaurants weren’t as good. After all, if they served good food, they wouldn’t be empty, right?
That’s social proof in action. We don’t know if the quality of food in the less crowded restaurants is worse—yet we assume, based on the number of people, that the more crowded restaurant serves better food. These natural human assumptions are great for businesses (like restaurants!) when trying to find an edge over the competition.
In addition, social proof doesn’t require intensive creative processes or hefty budgets—you simply rely on your own customers to demonstrate the value of your product.
There are numerous ways you can apply the psychology of social proof in your marketing efforts, but the short-and-simple approach revolves around inspiring trust. You want to show people that other people trust what you’re offering—and that they should too.
Some common forms of social proof as it applies to marketing include:
According to Nielsen, 92% of people will trust a recommendation from a peer, while 70% of people will trust a recommendation from someone they don’t even know. Other market research has found that:
Google recently introduced a new campaign type in Google Ads called Smart Shopping. This essentially replaces much of what used to be accomplished in dynamic display campaigns and adds predictive results to Google Shopping, while peppering in the ability for these ads to be shown on YouTube and within Gmail.
In terms of dynamic display advertising, our answer at current is an unequivocal yes: these campaigns perform the same functions as dynamic display, but with the benefit of adding in Google’s Smart Shopping algorithm, leading to much shorter optimization periods and better results.
On the Google Shopping side, we suggest running these in tandem with your classic campaigns, as Smart Shopping takes a lot of control out of your hands, including:
Additionally, Smart Shopping is most effective for advertising your entire product catalog. If you have different needs for different parts of your catalog (you want to use Shopping campaigns to push certain products over others), that’s something that’s still better served through classic Google Shopping.
It’s best to think of Smart Shopping as automated air coverage and Classic Shopping as allowing you to make tactical strikes.
We’ve seen it countless times: Your designer delivers an impeccable style guide, with an eye-catching logo, a crisp color palette, detailed image guidelines, and pitch-perfect fonts. Then, you pass this work of art along to your web team, only to find that those long-fretted-over fonts are not included in Squarespace’s library of more than 1,500 fonts. Ack!
We have two important pieces of advice for this scenario:
Behold, the three most common ways to upload custom fonts to Squarespace:
@font-face {
font-family: 'FONT NAME';
src: url('FONT URL');
}
Thanks to Squarespace’s integration with Adobe Fonts, you can select from more than 1,000 fonts, or add a custom font project to your website. We recommend consulting Squarespace’s detailed directions for adding Adobe Fonts.
Whether you’re a digital marketing noob or a seasoned pro, you’ve likely noted that tracking the industry’s ceaseless onslaught of terms, phrases, platforms, channels, tools, algorithms, and targeting methods is no small task. Indeed, the digital marketing train chugs along at what can feel like warp speed—when you’re not paying attention, it’s easy to fall behind and find yourself lost in a strange land that speaks a strange language.
At Good & Gold, we take pride in tracking the front edges of the industry, but we also aim to simplify things for our clients, and pay attention to what’s truly important. In other words, we separate the wheat from the chaff to develop strategies and benchmarks for ourselves and our clients that are built to deliver concrete results—not bells and whistles. We’re here to help you make sense of the chaos so that you can focus on what matters most: your business.
Below, you’ll find the terms we talk about most when strategizing and reporting for our clients or for our own marketing efforts. Whether you’re tackling your own digital marketing or working with an agency, this little glossary should give you a good lay of the land.
Sales Funnel: The concept of leading customers through a series of events or actions that can be mapped out in the shape of a funnel. The broadest level at the top of the funnel would involve attracting users to your website, after which they move down the funnel as they download a resource or sign up for your email list, after which they (ideally) move to the bottom of the funnel and become a paying customer.
Brand Personality: A set of human characteristics that are attributed to a brand. An effective brand increases its brand equity by having a consistent set of traits expressed through all of its content and communications that a specific consumer segment enjoys.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of the people who saw a search result, ad, or e-mail who then clicked through to your website. (clicks / impressions=CTR)
Conversion Rate: The percentage of the people who clicked through to your website who then took a positive action, such as purchasing something or signing up for a newsletter.
Cost Per Click (CPC): The amount you pay on an advertising platform for each click.
Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM): The amount you pay on an advertising platform per thousand times people see your ad.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): How much it costs to acquire a new customer—sometimes stated as cost per conversion.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Gross revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. (revenue from ad campaign / cost of ad campaign = ROAS)
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): A prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. (To determine LTV, multiply the average purchase value by the average number of sales in a customer’s lifetime by your comany’s gross margin.)
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The total sales and marketing cost required to earn a new customer over a specific time period.
Chatbot: A computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the Internet.
Impression: A single display of a particular ad or search result on a web page.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of people who visit your website but leave without visiting any other page.
Canonical Tag: A bit of code that tells search engines which page is preferred when two URLs are similar or duplicate. (Most commonly, this tag is used when you have products or content that is accessible by multiple URLs.)
Search Engine Results Page (SERP): The page displayed by a web search engine in response to a query by a searcher. Every time you perform a Google search, you are greeted by a SERP.
Meta Tag: Hidden bits of code on your website that help determine the various ways that your site appears within search engines, from supplying the “title” and “description” that appear in Google to telling search engines what kind of business you are and what products you offer.
Sitemap: This is really just what it sounds like—a map listing the pages on your website that allows search engines like Google and Bing to identify where pages are, what order they come in, their importance, and how to generally navigate your site.
Long Tail Keywords: The specific, three- or four-word phrases that potential customers use when searching for your product or service. These are often easier and quicker to rank for in search engines, and can account for the bulk of a website’s traffic.
4xx Error: This status code indicates that the request for the resource contains bad syntax or cannot be filled for some other reason; the server should provide an explanation of the error situation.
Schema Markup: A piece of code you can add to a page’s HTML to help search engines understand what your website is about and what type of information it contains.
Paid Search: Also referred to as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Paid Placement, or Pay Per Click, paid search allows advertisers to pay to be listed within the Search Engine Results Pages for specific keywords or phrases.
Quality Score: A numerical score Google AdWords assigns to ads and campaigns based on ad quality, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Generally, the higher your quality score, the higher your ads can appear on a search engine results page.
Negative Keywords: Search terms that you actively exclude from a campaign, allowing you focus on more relevant keywords that will increase your return on investment.
Retargeting: Someone visits your website, and then after they exit and continue browsing, your ad appears as a display ad on other websites or social media channels that accept ads from the ad network you use for retargeting. (It’s a little creepy, but it works.)
Dynamic Retargeting: Essentially, next-level retargeting—serving ads to users who have been to your website that contain images and information about the exact item they viewed.
Behavioral Targeting: Serving advertising to people who should be receptive to your message given past web behavior such as purchases or websites visited.
Geo-Targeting & Geo-Fencing: Virtual perimeters for real-world geographic areas. These can be dynamically generated, as in a radius around a point location, or can be a predefined set of boundaries, enabling software to trigger a response (a digital ad or search result) when a mobile device enters or leaves a particular area.
Expanded Text Ads: Google has recently allowed users to include an additional headline (for a total of 3) and an additional description line (for a total of 2) in all text ads, allowing you to take up more space on the Search Engine Results Page and achieve higher click-through rates.
Affiliate Marketing: A strategy where businesses reward individual affiliates (people or organizations outside the business) for bringing in new customers or visitors through ads or content on the affiliate’s website. Affiliates receive payments or product discounts based on the number of customers they generate.
Referral Marketing: The method of promoting products or services to new customers through referrals, usually word of mouth.
Event Tracking: Using Facebook’s pixel implementation, you can track not just revenue and conversions, but a customer’s journey every step of the way, including form fills, cart additions, and newsletter sign-ups, all in one place.
Call to Action (CTA): A word or phrase used to inspire the end user to take a specific action, often via a button or another stylized link.
A/B Testing: An optimization technique that divides a list in two, then sends a different email version to each half to determine which variation converts best.
Bounce Rate: A percentage that measures how many emails have been returned by an email service. A bounce can happen because a subscriber’s email address either no longer exists, their inbox was full, or because a server was unavailable.
E-Mail Automation: A feature that enables you to send out messages to your customers at designated times, such as: When a subscriber signs up for your email list, when they perform an action on your website (like download an e-book), or when they add an item to their shopping cart but don’t complete the purchase (an “abandoned cart” email).
Drip Marketing: A sequence of communication that is written in advance, and then sent to prospective or current customers at pre-determined intervals to advance them through your sales funnel.
HTML: The acronym for Hypertext Markup Language, a standardized system for tagging text files to achieve font, color, graphic, and hyperlink effects on web pages.
CSS: The acronym for Cascading Style Sheets, a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language like HTML, including colors, layout, and fonts.
Javascript: An object-oriented scripting language commonly used to make HTML pages more dynamic and interactive.
HEX Code: A code used in HTML and CSS to designate a specific color, often appearing after the pound sign (#).
User Experience (UX): How a user feels when interfacing with a system such as a website, a web application, or desktop software. UX often determines how well a website converts or how much time users spend on a website or application.
Checkout Flow: The page-by-page experience a user has completing a purchase on an e-commerce website.
Below the Fold: In newspaper terms, “below the fold” refers to content on the bottom half of the page (below the physical fold in the paper). In web design terms, “below the fold” refers to the content that a user would generally have to scroll in order to view.
