I’m here to tell you that unless you plan on selling tennis shoes to teenagers or cereal to children, your logo is the least of your concerns.  Just make sure it fits the following criteria:

• It looks equally good in black & white as it does in color
• It is easy to ready (no fancy script fonts)
• It looks professionally designed (no clip art)
• You like it

That it.  Really.  Nobody will choose to buy your services or technology because of your logo.  They will buy from you because they have a need and you have the answer.

Thanks to the internet there are dozens of online logo design services, Logoworks.com and 99designs.com are just two that I’ve recommended in the past.  The quality of the work is excellent.  Sure, you get a few really lousy logo concepts but overall I’ve been very impressed with what I’ve seen.   One colleague used Logoworks to design his logo for an online social networking site for hair stylists.  It cost him $300 and this is what he got – he’s delighted.

As part of a case study I’m conducting I decided to get a logo designed for an online business I’m launching called Peace Happens.  The goal of this project is to get a business up and running on the Internet (including e-commerce) for less than $1,200.  It has to be generating revenue before I can spend more than $1,200.  I’m doing this because I see too many start ups and small businesses spending all their marketing budget on the wrong things — like logos and expensive websites — instead of whats important, like GENERATING LEADS.  There are too many inexpensive or free tools on the market (like WordPress) to use when building a website.  And services like Logoworks and 99Designs are an incredible resource for certain types of design work.

I decided to try using 99Designs because I liked the idea of having an open contest.  Designers from around the world read your design request (called a brief) and then choose to enter the contest with a concept of their own.  I am on a tight budget so I bid $195 for the design.  This is the Design Brief I wrote.

In six days I had 78 submissions.  Yes, some of them were lousy and obviously designed by students.  Others were extremely professional, creative and well thought out.  Here is a compilation of some of the designs that were submitted

I now have to select a winner and award the $195 prize.  I’m not sure yet which logo I’ll select.  I am taking surveys — you’re free to email me with the # of a logo that you like.  Just visit the contest page here.

The next step is to build the website.  I’ve purchased peacehappens.net from GoDaddy for $9.95.  I’ll be posting my progress on this blog.

Imagine if I came to you and said, “I’m going to build you a custom designed house.  It will be beautiful and I’m going to charge you thousands of dollars. However,  I’m going to keep title to the land I’m building the house upon.  I’m going to use building materials that only work on my property.  I’m going to let you live in the house, but if you need any repairs you will always have to call me because nobody else can get on the property.  But don’t worry, you’ll own the house.”

Wouldn’t you think I was crazy?  But this happens every day with websites.

You’re too busy to learn how to buy your own domain name so you let your website company do this for you.  That means they own the title to your house.

Then the website gets built using their proprietary inhouse technology.  You are assured that it is easy to use and you will be able to update your website any time you desire.  But this means you’ve used building material that will only work on their property.  And any future additions to your website (i.e., like a shopping cart, video testimonials, etc.) must be custom developed.  So now you can’t use any other repair men on your house, you can’t negotiate the best deal or find the best offer.  You’re stuck with the builder and what ever price they want to charge you.

Then they tell you that the website will get hosted on their server, which means they now own the land upon which your house was built.

Later on in the relationship, if you get tired of working with this web development company you’re basically hosed.  The website you spent thousands of dollars building can’t be moved to any other hosting company.  They own your domain name (www.yourname.com).  If they are really unscruplous they can hold this hostage or sell it back to you for thousands more than the $9.95 they paid originally.

With today’s open source CMS tools like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and many others; this is a problem that should never even happened in the first place.  There are too many free or inexpensive solutions available for developing your website.  That doesn’t mean you get a website for free. You’ll still have to pay someone to code the site, install it on the server and make sure the design you’ve selected is properly installed. You’ll also pay for good copywriting, hosting and customized graphic design.  But here are some ways to help ensure you won’t find yourself left with a website you can’t use and no more marketing budget:

1.  Buy your own domain name.  We use godaddy.com for all our domain purchases.  Regardless of which service you use, make sure you set up an account and centralize all your domain purchases through the same service.   List yourself as the administrator, you can add other administrators to the account later as required.

2.  Select your own hosting company.  We use inmotionhosting.com.  We like InMotion because every time we call for help, a human being answers the phone.  They know their stuff and have the patience of a saint.

3.  Make sure your web development company is willing to build your website using an open-source tool like one of those listed above.  If they start talking about custom coding, proprietary systems, or using words like “DreamWeaver” then find another firm.

4.  Make sure that your website development company gives you the original photoshop files for your website design.  You won’t be able to do anything with these files yourself (nor should you) unless you are an experienced designer.  However, if you and the web company part ways, you’ll have the design files that the next web development company needs in order to modify or update your website.

As a side note,make sure youhire a good copywriter.  Someone with experience writing for the web.  The web development company may have copywriters on staff.  But don’t assume the price you’ve been quoted for the website includes any copywriting.  That is often the most expensive part of the project, and well worth every penny if done correctly.

Marketing dashboards are a great way of measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing programs. Simply put, a marketing dashboard pulls all the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you are tracking for each marketing initiative and displays this information in a graphical format. It allows you to easily identify those KPIs that are not meeting expectations so that you can move quickly to adjust a poorly performing campaign. Conversely, you can also quickly identify the campaigns that are kicking butt – and put more time, money and effort into expanding the successful programs. In addition to providing both recognition and accountability for the marketing function, it creates a stronger argument for budget dollars and larger campaigns when programs are working successfully.

Done well, a marketing dashboard is a simple to use, easy to understand system. But the simplicity of a good dashboard belies the complexity of the process required to create it. A considerable amount of strategic planning needs to take place before launching anything. The marketing department touches many different parts of an organization – finance, sales, operations, customer service, and IT all play an important part in a successful marketing program. Therefore, consensus needs to be built between all the organization’s stakeholders on what information will be tracked and reported upon. Collectively, this team can define marketing expectations and success.

To begin selecting the appropriate metrics, your organization’s stakeholders must identify what information they need to know, or what questions they need to answer, in order to measure marketing effectiveness. They then prioritize the questions based upon their importance and the ease with which they could be answered. In selecting questions, it is critically important to align marketing activities with business objectives. Your metrics should include leading AND lagging indicators. Some of the questions that your marketing dashboard should be answering include:

• • What % of our revenues come from existing customers versus new customers?
• • What % of our targeted market have we penetrated? How does that compare to last year?
• • Do we have the right marketing mix?
• • For each campaign, how much have we spent, how many leads did it generate, and how does that compare to other campaigns?
• How are each of our product lines and/or business units performing?
• What is our performance by territory/geography?
• How many leads do we have in the pipeline?
• How many proposals are being generated?
• What is the average sale and how long is it taking to close? How does that compare to last year?
• What is our customer satisfaction rating?
• What is the life time value of our customer base? How does that compare to last year?
• What are our conversion rates (click through to close)?
• What sales tools are being used?
• How does the marketing budget compare to actuals?

Finally, when you decide to build your marketing dashboard don’t fall in love with the technology. Focus on your business needs first. Identify the questions you need to have answered. Then start looking at what tools are available to help you develop the simplest solution possible to meet those needs. There are many off-the-shelf solutions available today. One great place to start learning more about dashboards is www.dashboardspy.com. This site provides many different snapshots of both good and bad dashboards.

Just remember – marketing measurement always requires a significant number of assumptions, especially in the beginning of a campaign. Anyone in marketing will tell you that sometimes you simply have to SWAG it (Simple Wild Ass Guess) until hard data is made available to prove (or disprove) your assumptions. Make sure your dashboard is designed for flexibility. As your company becomes more familiar with tracking data, your needs will change. You’ll want to have a dashboard solution that grows with you as you become a more sophisticated user.

You use SEO best practices to make sure that your website appears in the “organic search” results of a Google page. That is the column on the left, and in this image, you can see how popular that column is to our search audience. This is the section that has the most credibility. Appearing on the first page, above the “fold” of a Google results page is the goal of all business marketers. However, the process of improving your organic rankings and moving up the food chain of Google (or Yahoo, or any search engine tool) is a laborious process. It takes a long-term commitment — it can sometimes take 6-8 months before you even start moving up the ranks.

Does this mean you give up and abandon SEO as a marketing strategy? Of course not. But you need to set clear expectations with all of your senior management that this is a long term process. I also recommend you hire an outside firm that specializes in SEO rankings. There are entire teams of people in India that are just dedicated to try and get other sites to link to their clients’ sites (a key SEO strategy). Chances are you don’t have someone on staff willing or able to do this all day long. And links are just one component of a proper SEO strategy. In another article, I’ll cover SEO in more depth. Right now, I really just want to explain the difference between SEO and PPC.

So what’s PPC then? And does it really make sense to use pay-per-click advertising? Absolutely. It is a fantastic way to drive people to your website, generate raw leads and build brand recognition for your company. It would appear that a lot of companies agree with me. A recent report by The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) showed that Internet advertising revenues reached $5.8 billion for the first quarter of 2008. This was an 18.2 percent increase over the same period in 2007, and represent the second highest quarter ever recorded, after Q4 2007’s $5.9 billion.

PPC Advertising offers immediate gratification — something very difficult to achieve with traditional advertising. You create campaigns, launch them online, and you can immediately begin measuring the effectiveness of your ads. What ever the goal (download a paper, watch an online video, request more information, etc.) your marketing team can begin to test, modify, tweak and improve these campaigns until they are running at optimum level. And you can ramp up your spending as you see results — instead of spending a fortune in advance and then praying for success.

PPC Advertising isn’t easy. There are a lot of books, blogs, and resources on the market to help educate your marketing team on how to create, launch and manage a PPC strategy. A great online resource is Marketing Sherpa. Your best approach to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is to adopt a long term strategy for your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) activities, and a shorter — more tactical plan for your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns.

“What about the house?” you ask. “What about the bedrooms, the kitchen, how the structure is built? What about how we’ll use the house, the materials and content we want inside the house? What about all that?”

The architect looks at you and waves his hand. “Oh, we’ll get to all that stuff later, but look at these great bushes I want to plant up your driveway. Are they cool or what!!??” At this point, you are probably going to bean the architect and go find someone else a little more qualified.

Every day I see this scenario played out with business websites. The first concern is always about the look of the site, the graphics, the pictures. All the landscaping. But what about your structure? Your information architecture? What thought have you given to how people will use the site, how you’ll track performance, and give the visitors to your site the experience and information they need to move forward in the buying cycle?

There are many steps that need to take place long before you begin the graphic design for a website. And it requires a lot of hard work, careful thought, and research. But if you don’t build the infrastructure first, and make sure that your site is supporting your business strategy and sales goals, then you’ve wasted your money. I’ve outlined a process below, one that we follow at Zephyr when we’re planning, building and launching a site for a client.

Positioning & Messaging Meeting
We meet with the management team for about half a day. We want to identify the best way to position your company in the market place. What are your differentiators? How can we make you stand out from the crowd? How can we make sure site visitors understand your value proposition? It is essential to understand your brand, your key differentiators, the purpose for your site, and how it will be used BEFORE we start the project. Sometimes this exercise takes several meetings because our client is still a little fuzzy about these points.

Key words, phrases used by customers who need our service
We want to make sure we weave key words and phrases into our website. This will help with our search marketing activities. As part of the meeting above, we will discuss the sales process and environment and visit your competitors’ web sites to review their keyword focus and strategies. Then we will develop a comprehensive keyword SEO report.

Site map and structure of the site
This is the architecture of the website. We strategize the overall organization of the website and create the site map. This is one of the most critical parts of your web design. How will your users engage with you online? What will they be looking for? This site map (sometimes several pages deep) must be clearly defined and well thought out from the perspective of usability.

Technical design spec
Then we develop a more detailed “road map” of the site. It expands upon our agreed-upon sitemap to include our suggested navigation and content areas. We create a wire frame that shows where we will place the “blocks” of information on each page. This enables the designer and copywriter to do their work more efficiently.

This is also where we decide which key words we’re emphasizing. Normally, you devote one key word per page (for SEO). The copywriter uses this as a guideline when she begins writing for the website.

Graphical design spec
We then begin the design stage. We’ll spend quite a bit of time talking about your brand because the design, images selected, color palette, etc. have to support your brand. Normally, we create two concepts for your home page. When the home page concept is approved, we will design the secondary pages. This is also where we’ll start selecting the images and graphics for the website and decide if we need custom photography or illustrations.

Content creation for website
The copy writer started blocking out text as soon as the technical design spec was completed. It is critical that you have someone experienced in writing for the WEB assigned to this project. Do not, under any circumstances, let your engineers tell you that they can do it cheaper. Think about your behavior on the Internet. Do you read those huge blocks of text? Quite frankly, if you’ve gotten this far in my post I’m pretty amazed. Normally, we read online by focusing on Headers, Subheads, and bullet points. And remember, we’ve got to keep our SEO strategy in mind while we’re writing our copy. Don’t try to save money on this part – let an expert do this.

Programming of site and setup of Content Management (CMS) System
Your site should be created using some sort of OPEN SOURCE solution, like WordPress (this site was built in WordPress), Joomla (a really great CMS system) or something equally flexible. Do not allow anyone to develop your website using their “proprietary” software or CMS system. You’ll be chained to the vendor FOREVER or until you pay someone else to create a new website for you. You should have complete control over your website, with the freedom to add pages, change navigation, upload new images, update or change the web copy, etc. Although I would suggest you be very careful about who you give this power to, since the wrong person can seriously mess up your website (intentionally or not!).

Testing and uploading of site onto your server – go live!
This is the last step for the website. We test the site to ensure compatibility with all browsers, make sure the links all work, and upload the site to your server. We work with your IT department to ensure everything is performing properly and the site goes live. Make sure your site is tested with all the common browsers, and all the different versions of browsers. We’ve seen a lot of sites that look great in Internet Explorer 6.0 but fall apart in FireFox.

After the launch – SEO & PPC
The fun doesn’t end with the launch of your website. Today’s audience isn’t interested in a stagnant, brochure-style website. You want to make sure you have a plan to keep your site fresh and interesting. You also need to be committed to ongoing SEO if you ever hope to get ranked highly in Google and Yahoo. We’re becoming a world that is Internet-centric. Your best strategy for lead generation is going to be using a blend of search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search (PPC advertising) to ensure the greatest exposure and to drive traffic to your site. That’s how you make sure your website is working for you, every day, to help you grow your company, keep your customers, and generate new leads.