Here are some of the most effective and free analytics tools we recommend for keeping track of user experiences on your website.

Understanding Web Analytics

Optimizely's optimization glossary defines web analytics as "the measurement and analysis of data to inform an understanding of user behavior across web pages."  

There are many forms of analytical data that can be collected. Some tools only collect one or two types of data. Other tools collect a multitude of data categories. The data collected can be information about site usage, such as page views, bounce rate, session length, conversions, etc. It can also be data about the users themselves, such as demographics, interests, in-market categories, and more.

The data collected can be used to analyze the performance of your website and advertisements. It helps you understand what works and what doesn't, where users are dropping off, and more. These metrics help you optimize your website and improve performance.

If you aren't using analytics, you're basically flying blind and hoping for the best. That will result in a lot of your marketing budget being wasted on ineffective efforts. Analytical data will give you a roadmap to improve your online performance and advertise more efficiently.

Powerful Free Analytics Tools

There are lots of analytics tools available to choose from. Some can be very expensive and out of the budget range of most small businesses. There are several powerful tools that you can use to gather various forms of analytical data for free though. Here are our recommendations for the top free website analytics tools.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most powerful free tools available. It allows you to easily monitor all the standard site performance data, such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, page views, etc. That's just the tip of the iceberg though. Google Analytics provides highly detailed insights on your website's traffic, allowing you to build a greater understanding of who uses your site and how they use it.

There is a wide range of tools and features Google Analytics offers to make it an even more versatile tool. You can view real-time traffic analytics to see how many visitors are on your site right now. You can define custom goals to track how many visitors complete a specific action on your site. Google Analytics also offers a tool to build your own custom tracking links which you can then monitor in the campaigns tab.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a great tool for understanding how users see and interact with your website. It's also very useful for collecting user feedback about their experience with your website and specific features on it.

You can use Hotjar with a single website if you just want to use it on your business's site in-house. If you are an agency or have multiple sites, you can add multiple sites under your account. Each site will get its own dashboard and unique tracking code to help keep data organized. You can switch between sites easily from a selection menu.

Hotjar offers several powerful tools in their free plan. The free plan is limited to a set number of views per month for each tool. If you need more than that, you'll have to upgrade or manually delete old data. The tools they provide you with offer very valuable insights into your site visitors' journeys.

Heatmaps

Hotjar lets you collect heatmap data to see what elements site visitors click most and how far down the page they scroll. You can record heatmaps for a specific page or capture data from a group of similar pages which get combined into one heatmap.

The data from your heatmaps can help you understand if you need to move elements higher on the page. You can also see if your users are getting confused about where to click. If you see a high number of clicks on an element that isn't linked to anything, you'll know it is likely confusing your users.

Session Recordings

Session recordings are one of Hotjar's most powerful tools. This tool lets you capture a video of users' sessions on your site. Don't worry, it doesn't record anything except the viewport for your website. It will automatically censor any sensitive data in the recording as well. Session recordings will log user actions on the video player timeline so you can skip between the actions you want to watch.

Polls and Surveys

You can set up polls to be shown to site visitors based on specific conditions. This is great for collecting feedback on your conversion pages visitors are redirected to after completing a desired action, such as a checkout complete page, sign-up confirmation page, etc. You can also define conditions to collect feedback from visitors who haven't completed these actions. This will help you understand what you can do to improve your conversion rates.

Facebook Pixel

Facebook pixel allows you to gather data from your website visitors which can then be used to create custom audiences for Facebook advertising campaigns. You can use Pixel data for two different types of advertising audiences- remarketing and look-alikes.

Remarketing

Remarketing is the process of advertising to people who have previously interacted with your website. Facebook pixel data can be used to create general remarketing campaigns targeting all users who previously interacted with your site or a very precise group of users who took certain actions on your website. You could target people who purchased a specific product with an ad for the latest accessory or newest version of that product.

Event Tagging

Facebook Pixel has an easy-to-use event tagging tool available on the control dashboard. You can use it to setup specific events to be triggered on pages of your site based on a visitor's actions. This lets you segment your data and track the true ROI of your advertising campaigns. It also helps when setting up remarketing groups because you can target users who triggered a specific event on your site.

Pro Rank Tracker

Pro Rank Tracker monitors your ranking for the keywords and search terms that matter most to you. You define the keywords that you want to rank for, then Pro Rank Tracker keeps you updated on where your website stands in search results for those terms. This is a scaleable tool that will fit any size of business. It can track results locally and internationally so you can monitor your global performance. They also offer multiple languages which is a great feature for international businesses. They provide you with daily updates on your keyword rankings so you can stay on top of your SEO. Pro Rank Tracker also includes tools for researching competitors and seeing how your business compares to their rankings.

Pro Rank Tracker offers a free-forever plan which includes access to premium tools for the first 30 days, You are not required to input any payment info to access the free plan, so there are no worries about sneaky charges.

Pick What Works Best for You

You don't have to employ all of these tools on your site. In fact, adding too many analytical tools to your site can actually slow down your webpage loading times, which can hurt your SEO rankings. Choose two or three tools that you feel are best suited to your business and marketing needs. Give those a try and see what you think of them. If they don't work well for your needs, try something different until you find the right fit.

Website analytics and data can be complicated to understand. If you need help implementing and understanding your analytical tools, we are here to help! Feel free to request a free marketing consultation from us to see how we can help you!

The key is standing out from the other marketing material in the mailbox. Your postcards need to grab the reader's attention so that they'll stop and read your offer.

Tactics for Direct Mail Marketing

One of the most common mistakes in direct mail marketing is treating your postcards like a display ad banner. Some people even take one of their banner ad designs and paste it straight onto the postcard as-is.

This simply isn't a successful approach to direct mail marketing and these postcards usually get tossed in the trash without a second glance. You probably know this to be true just from the experience of sorting your own mail. There's nothing that makes you stop and say "Wait, what's this?"

This is what makes the design of your mailers so important. You need to design your postcards specifically for their intended use- direct mail marketing. The design should be something relevant to the audience receiving it. So how can you achieve this?

Designing for Direct Mail

The problem is marketing postcards look like exactly that- marketing postcards. If you want your direct mail marketing to be successful, you have to change that.

Most marketing postcards come across as irrelevant, mass-distributed junk that's been blasted out to thousands of random people. There's nothing that grabs the reader's attention or gives any hint that it might interest them. People are going to spend, at best, about one second deciding whether a piece of mail is junk or not. Your design has to get their attention in that short, decisive moment. The reader needs to feel like your postcard was made especially for them. Otherwise, it's going straight into the junk mail pile, never to be seen again.

And before you start getting any ideas, making your mailers look like something they aren't, or attempting to trick the recipient in any way is absolutely NOT the answer!

We've all seen the financial loan advertisements in the mail which try to look like a check at first. Sure, it might cause people to read it for a moment, but as soon as they see through the trickery, they will immediately distrust your brand. The same goes for the old "final notice" trick and any other such deceptive methods. Those tactics will ruin your credibility.

So how can you get your reader's attention without resorting to shady, black-hat methods?

Personalization

Ads are everywhere and people have learned to tune out the generic, irrelevant ads automatically. This is why personalization has become a key part of marketing. If you want to cut through all the noise and get your audience's attention, your marketing material has to feel like it was made for them. It needs to have an element of familiarity about it which clearly shows that it's not just some generic spam.

Nowhere is this more true than in direct mail marketing. Mail is a very personal thing and it must be a highly personalized marketing channel in order to achieve success. When you look through your mail, you are subconsciously looking for anything familiar to you, for example, a friend's name, your bank's logo, and other things that relate to you personally. This is what we must leverage in our direct mail campaigns in order to get results.

Personalizing Your Postcards

Fortunately, there are direct mail marketing platforms that allow you to precisely target your campaigns. This makes it fairly simple to create a highly personalized postcard design. Being able to target highly specific areas is important to personalizing your postcard designs because you can choose exactly what neighborhoods are going to receive your mailers. This means you can incorporate something in the postcard design that will be familiar to all of the people receiving them.

Let's take a look at the example postcard design above. This is a design we did for Real Turf Solutions. It targets a specific subdivision in the local area where Real Turf Solutions was looking to pick up some more work for their lawn treatment department.

The subdivision has an entryway with a sign that all of the residents are used to seeing on a day-to-day basis on their way home. We took a picture of this entryway sign to include on the postcard. The recipients will easily recognize this landmark and it shows them that Real Turf is familiar with their area. Seeing this familiar sight on a piece of mail grabs their attention and makes it more likely that they'll stop to read the postcard rather than toss it in the junk pile without a second thought.

We also added the greeting, "Hey Southfield" in big, bold text to compliment the picture. This serves as a way to open the dialogue as well, rather than leading with a sales pitch directly.

Next, we looked at lawns in the subdivision to see what problems people might be encountering in their yards. This is why we included the tagline mentioning weeds, brown spots, and mushrooms. These were common issues that many of the recipients would notice in their own lawns. This adds yet another layer of personalization and relevancy to our message.

Sure, not everyone is going to have those issues present in their lawn, but that's okay. We're after the ones that do.

Where do we take our message next?

The Pitch and Call-to-Action

So we've gotten the reader's attention, we've related to an issue they have in their yard, they're thinking "Yeah, I am pretty tired of those problems in my lawn..." Now we need to tell them what can be done to fix it.

We make a brief pitch highlighting that Real Turf Solutions can help with the issues. Don't ramble, remember you have limited space and you want your message to be summarized for optimal readability. We want to save space so we can make our call-to-action (CTA) stand out more.

Providing a clear CTA is critical. This is where you tell the reader what the next step is. How can they get these issues solved? By calling to get a free estimate! We make this clear and easy to see by separating it from the other text. This will also help make your postcard's content skimmable for the reader. If they have to hunt for your CTA, you probably aren't going to get many results.

The phone number is conveniently placed directly below our CTA in bold font so that it is immediately clear how they can contact the business.

Tracking Results from Postcard Campaigns

If you aren't tracking the sources of your leads already, you should start right away. Keeping track of where your leads are coming from will help you determine what marketing channels are most effective. This is often done by asking new leads "How'd you hear about us?" You can also include clever methods in your marketing to make sure you know when a lead is responding to a specific campaign.

Promo Codes and Special Offers

We did this in our postcard design by offering 50% off the first application when they mention receiving this postcard. This serves as a fail-safe to ensure results from this campaign are tracked accurately.

Sometimes your office staff may forget to ask how callers heard about your business, especially if it's a very busy day or if they aren't in the habit of doing so. Plus, sometimes people will just give a random answer to the question or get mixed up. But by providing an incentive to mention the postcard, we make sure that all results from this campaign get tracked. Who isn't going to take advantage of a 50% discount after all?

Special Offer Conditions

There are always people out there looking to pull a fast one on you. A significant discount offer such as this needs to include some protection for your business.

We included a qualifying condition for the 50% discount offer, as denoted by the asterisk *. In fine print below the offer, we state that the offer of 50% off the first application is valid when they sign up for a one-year service agreement. Without a conditional qualification, you run the risk of people trying to take the 50% discount and then jump ship after one application service.

Including this qualifying condition isn't being dishonest or manipulative. Real Turf Solutions doesn't offer one-time applications, they only offer yearly service plans. The company's proposals provide a breakdown of the plan's pricing and included service visits, so nobody is leading anyone to believe they are signing up for a one-time service. The conditional qualification just provides an extra layer of protection against people who try to be slick.

Choosing Direct Mail Services

Postcard marketing campaigns are not something you should try to handle entirely in-house, especially when it comes to distribution. It will be much more efficient to let a direct mail service provider take care of that. There are a bunch of direct mail service options out there. You can explore the various options to find what fits your needs.

SendJim

One platform we've used before is called SendJim. It is a powerful platform that provides direct mail marketing services in addition to ringless voicemail, email marketing, and more. They also let you send gifts (brownies, cookies, gift cards, and other goodies), hand-written letters, and more via mail. That's a great way to thank your clients! SendJim makes it easy to target your direct mail campaigns to reach the exact audience you want. You can target specific areas, neighborhoods, houses, subdivisions, etc. SendJim also lets you do 5-arounds, 10-arounds, etc. This means you can select an address, (such as one you recently did, currently do, or will be doing some work at) and SendJim targets the 5, 10, or however many nearest neighbors around it for a postcard campaign.

When you're searching for a direct mail marketing service, check out what SendJim has to offer.

Let's Nail Direct Mail!

Direct mail marketing campaigns often get a bad rap these days, but most companies are simply using the wrong tactics. Your postcards have to get the recipient's attention to be successful. Generic, non-personalized designs get tossed in the junk pile without even being read. All the special offers in the world won't produce results if nobody reads them. If you want your mailers to succeed, you have to create a design that will stand out as something familiar and relevant to the recipient. That's how you will get your message in front of their eyes.

With the right approach, you can see great results from direct mail marketing. Direct mail can even be the key that gets you into those upscale, non-solicitation neighborhoods. We hope these tips help you succeed in your direct mail marketing. If we can help you with planning or designing your next direct mail campaign, just let us know! 

Get Help with Direct Mail

Small businesses that provide services on-site, like landscapers or painters, are limited to a defined service area. That means all of your competition are battling for the attention of the same audience. Putting your brand in front of people the most often will help you become a "household name" in your local area. You can do this through local saturation marketing and local SEO.

Local Marketing

The are several methods for advertising your business locally. You should consider a combination of these methods to give your brand the best coverage across all channels. Here are some of the local marketing methods we see the best results from. Be sure you are tracking the sources of your leads so you know where people are finding you.

Fleet Branding

Your service trucks are out around town every day. If your trucks aren't branded, you could be missing out on a lot of business. Neighbors see your trucks at a house in their community where you're doing work. They may be looking for someone to do the same type of work at their house, but how can they know who you are? Obviously, they could come over and ask, but most people won't put in that kind of effort.

Clearly displaying your company name, website, and phone number on your service vehicles will allow them to easily contact you. You should also consider listing a few of the services your company provides. If you have room, you might also want to include social media icons to show what social platforms you're on and encourage people to connect with you on your social networks.

People seeing your trucks around town will also increase trust in your brand. They see that you are out doing work every day and you're not just some fly-by-night operation.

How to Brand Your Fleet

If you have the budget for getting a truck wrap, this is the be option. You can also get an airbrush paint job with your logo and information. These options can be a bit expensive though. The cheap option is using vehicle magnets or decals. At the least, you should invest in magnets for all of your trucks with your logo and phone number on them. You can then get them painted or wrapped as your budget allows later.

Key Information to Include with Fleet Branding:

• Company logo/name
• Primary phone number
• Company website
• Primary email address (usually a sales or info email address)
• Brand colors
• Uniform design traits across all company vehicles
• The primary type of services you offer
• Social media icons

Also, you should have your employees branded with a company uniform or t-shirt which has your logo and contact information. This way you are advertising at every job site around town and people know who you are everywhere you do work at.

Yard Signs

Yard signs can be a very effective way to advertise locally. They can be used to quickly saturate a specific local area with your brand, You can place a yard sign out front of a job site while doing work. You can also put signs along highways and at busy intersections, just be sure to check local laws concerning this.

Place signs in the areas where your target audience will be most likely to see them. You may be able to place signs across the street from entryways to subdivisions and neighborhoods where your audience lives. Stop signs are a great place to put signs near too. This way people will have more time to notice and read your sign. You can always move your signs around as needed. Moving them will also help prevent signs from disappearing. They are more likely to get removed if they remain in the same area for an extended time.

Designing Yard Signs

Remember that your yard signs are going to be seen mainly by people in vehicles. Take this into account when designing your yard signs. You should make sure the information is legible for drivers passing by. It should be readable with a brief glance of a few seconds. Don't try to squeeze too much information onto the signs. You should keep it simple.

Information to Include on Yard Signs

Again, yard signs should be simple. Include your logo, a specific service you are advertising, and your phone number. You might include your website as well if there is room. Also, consider what action you want people to take to get a quote or an estimate. If you want them to request an estimate on your website rather than call, it's more important to include your website URL.

Make your phone number bold and be sure that the text stands out from the background well.

Local Social Media Ads

Social media ads can be targeted locally so that only people in selected areas or within a specific radius of your business will see your ads. This can help you build a loyal local following online. The benefit of this is that you can then continue to engage with locals and promote your future offers to them. It gives you the chance to tell them more about your business and show off jobs you've done in the area.

Local social media ads should mention the fact that you are a local business. You can also show this with pictures of jobs you've done at recognizable local locations. Be sure you include a clear call-to-action (CTA) in your ad. The CTA is what you want people to do and can be something like "Request an estimate" or "Get started here."

If you need help with your social media management, we will be glad to take a look at it for you.

Postcard Mailing Campaigns

Postcard marketing isn't dead. It just has to be done properly.

Let's look at it this way. If you are looking through your mail and see a postcard with a random company logo on it, are you going to stop and read it? Probably not. If you see a postcard showing your street or a house in your neighborhood though, you're probably going to stop and see what it's about.

You need your postcard marketing mailers to be relevant to your audience. It should be something that makes them stop to look at it when they sort their mail. You can do this by targeting specific neighborhoods and tailoring your design and message to the people living there.

Designing Effective Postcards

The example above is a postcard we designed for Real Turf Solutions. It was personalized for and sent to a very specific audience. Let's break down the design of this postcard.

Personalization

This particular postcard targeted a specific subdivision they were looking to pick up more work in. We took a picture of the entry sign at the front of the subdivision, which every resident there passes on their way home. They easily recognize this landmark and it shows them that Real Turf is familiar with their area. It grabs their attention and makes it more likely that they'll stop to read the postcard rather than just tossing it in the junk pile without a second thought.

We looked in the area to see what problems people might be encountering in their yards. This is why we included the tagline mentioning weeds, brown spots, and mushrooms. These were common issues which many of the recipients would notice in their own lawn.

Call to Action

Once you have their attention, you should give a clear CTA to encourage them to take action. "Call us today and get a free estimate" followed by the phone number in bold tells the reader what the next step is. We then set the hook with a special offer of 50% off the first application when they mention they received a postcard. This also serves as a way to track results by getting people to mention the postcard to get this special offer.

To prevent people from trying to pull one over on Real Turf, we included a condition on the offer specified in fine-print. It says that the offer is only valid when they sign up for a 7-round weed control program. This is important to prevent the business from losing money by giving 50% off and then having the person cancel after a single application.

Digital Billboards

Regular billboards are expensive investments. However, a relatively new option has emerged which provides a much cheaper alternative- digital billboards. Digital billboard campaigns are managed online similar to a social media or search ad campaign. You set a daily budget, choose your signs, set times when you want your ad to show, and upload your design. It can be as cheap as one cent per flip.

Each sign has a specific size which your design will need to match. Be sure to include your phone number and a clear CTA in your design.

You can create digital billboard campaigns on a platform called Blip. Use that link to get a free credit to get you started with digital billboard advertising. You'll get a dashboard where you can manage your campaigns and view reports.

If you would like to advertise with digital billboards but don't have the time to manage them or design your ads, we can design, set up, and manage your campaigns for you. Request a consultation to learn more.

Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Optimizing your website's SEO is important, but for businesses providing services within a specific area, you want to be sure you especially focus on ranking locally. It doesn't do you any good to be on the first page results in an area you don't service. This is what makes local SEO important for your type of business.

Local SEO is SEO work that's done to improve your site's rankings in your local areas and for locally relevant searches. Local searches are location-specific search queries where people are searching for a specific service in their local area. An example of a local search query could be something like "lawn care services in Atlanta" or "flooring installation in Nashville" and other similar searches based on location.

Optimizing for Local Searches

Local SEO is achieved by including your target keywords and local locations in your website's text, or copy, as it is called by marketers, as well as in the headers and title of your page. Here are some examples of a few locally optimized landing pages we created for Real Turf Solutions.

Examples of locally optimized pages:

• Optimized for Warner Robins, GA: https://www.realturfsolutions.com/landscaping-warner-robins.html
• Optimized for Macon, GA: https://www.realturfsolutions.com/landscaping-macon.html

You can create landing pages like this for each of your target areas and services. These pages don't have to be linked publicly on your website necessarily, just be sure that you submit them for indexing to search engines through Google Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. This will allow them to appear in search results. You can also use these pages in advertisements for each of the areas you're marketing in.

SEO of any type is a long game. It doesn't happen overnight and can take weeks or months to start seeing results. Stick with it and it will pay off in the end.

If you are interested in optimizing your website for your local area, we can help you with that! Please feel free to request a consultation to learn more.

Keep Building Your Brand!

Local brand awareness is critical to the success of your local business. These tips should help you saturate your local area and make your name come to mind first when people need your services. There are many more ways to promote your business in your local area. These are just some of the methods we've found to be most effective.

Remember that your number one advertisement is going to be your work and your customers. If you provide a poor experience to customers, word will get around. Once you get a bad reputation, no amount of advertising will undo those bad reviews. Make sure you always focus on providing quality work and great customer care on every job.

If you'd like to learn more about local marketing and see how we can help you promote your business locally, please reach out to us.

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