Author: Fred Schall

Fred Schall is the co-founder of Schall Creative. He has been designing and developing websites since 1997. You can find him on Twitter @mrfredschall.

Website Audit 101: Don’t Skip It

SEO, User Experience, Web Strategy • Posted on July 10, 2023

If you’re interested in using your website to collect leads, sell products or gain customers, you need to understand how it’s working and how you can make improvements. A website audit can help you with that. There is more than one way to audit a website, and this guide will help you get started with a few useful tools.

What is a website audit?

A website audit is a detailed look into how your website is performing. This goes from how it is attracting visitors (SEO) to its usability (UX) and at what rate visitors are converting into contacts (CRO). A website audit will reveal issues that need to be fixed, as well as opportunities for improvement.

Why do you need a website audit?

A website audit helps you build an actionable list of steps to take to increase website traffic, improve engagement and raise conversion rates. Basically, it allows you to understand what’s happening on your website, so you can make a plan to add content and make updates that will help you reach your goals.

Where to start

The best place to start when conducting an audit is to revisit the goals of your website. There is no shortage of data on how your website is performing and it can get overwhelming. Your goals help you decide what data is important to look at. Your goals can include collecting leads, increasing traffic, or having people make purchases on your site.

What is included in an audit?

As mentioned above, there is more than one way to audit a company’s online presence. The tools discussed today lean towards organic, content-driven insights like SEO and User Experience. They focus on both quantitative and qualitative data and can give you the 50,000-foot view as well as the up close and personal. These tools will help you empathize with your users, and look at things from their perspective.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics can give you a very good picture of what is happening on your site. If it’s set up properly and collecting data, it can answer some important questions like how your users are finding you, what devices they are using, and did they get what they were looking for. Here are a few reports that are a good starting point when using google analytics.

To see where users are coming from, go to acquisition.

The acquisition overview will give you an idea of which channel your users came from. If you want to focus on just one channel group, type it into the search bar. The referral channel will show you websites that are linking to your site and bringing traffic. To drill down further into these numbers you can click the blue plus and add another dimension like session source.

To see the device type your users are on, use the Tech report.

This allows you to see not only the device type but also which browsers your users are on. Make sure you are viewing your website in every possible screen resolution and checking for bugs or design flaws. A UX tool like Hotjar will also help with this.

If you want to learn more about using Google Analytics we recommend taking the Google Analytics Skillshop Course or checking out Measure School’s content.

Google Search Console

Search Console gives you a look into how your website is appearing in search results and it also surfaces issues that need to be addressed. In the performance report, you can see queries that users are searching for when they find your website, as well as which pages are ranking. Filter on click-through rate, impressions, and average position to get an idea of where to focus your attention when creating content. For example, if you are ranking 5th for a query with many impressions but a low click-through rate, you may want to figure out how to boost that ranking up a few spots.

Under indexing, you’ll see your pages that are properly indexed and those that are not. It will also show you reasons why pages are not indexed. You can also upload a sitemap and submit page removals in this section. For a free tool, Search Console gives you a whole lot of insight into SEO.

To learn more about Search Console, check out this deep dive.

Paid SEO Tools

There are also plenty of paid SEO tools that can create in-depth reports on your website. Raven Tools has a site auditor report that aggregates all your website’s SEO factors into a comprehensive and actionable report.

It’s the easiest way to find all the things that need attention, and it essentially creates a checklist for you to work your way through those issues. Raven also has tools for competitor research and link building. These reports are incredibly useful when building out an SEO strategy.

UX Tools

During your website audit process, it’s a good idea to look into how people are interacting with your website, and a UX tool like Hotjar will do just that. Hotjar collects recordings, heatmaps, and feedback from users directly from your website.

Watching recordings of users on your website can be time-consuming, so Hotjar organizes these recordings so you can easily filter through the ones that are worth watching. You can add notes for your team about bugs or issues that need to be fixed and flag recordings to share. These recordings allow you to step inside your user’s shoes, and empathize with them as they are looking for value.

Heatmaps give you a broader view of how your site is being used. You can see where people are clicking and scrolling and make sure they are making it to the content that you want them to see. We are still often surprised about what people will click on, and it gives great insight into what people want to know more about, which leads to us creating more content on a specific subject.

A website audit is the best place to start when you are planning website updates, and it’s also a great thing to revisit as you continue to grow your content strategy. This is a sampling of the tools we use at Schall Creative when we complete website audits for our clients. If you have any questions or are interested in having us do an audit for you, feel free to reach out.

Website Launch for Granite YMCA Camps 2.0

Website Design • Posted on January 17, 2019

It’s incredible how time flies. It was the spring of 2013 when we launched an all boys and all girls overnight camp website for the Granite YMCA. In that time their goals and challenges were different.

2013 Website Goals & Challenges

Back then, the camps were focused on upgrading their outdated websites, and creating something that flowed nicely. Some of their goals were to:

• Maintain membership retention
• Generate leads
• Have information accessible for parents and campers
• Make sure the website was manageable in-house by staff
• Have an easy navigation on mobile devices
• Create something unique while keeping the YMCA brand guidelines in mind.

Learn More on Camp Mi-Te-Na 1.0

Learn More on Camp Foss 1.0

The result were 2 websites with a simple sitemap and a more modern design. We were all very happy with the results.

Website & UX Audit

When they came to us ready for an upgrade in 2018, we started with a Website & UX audit. With the audits, we discovered there was much room for improvement in the information architecture and the user experience department.

• Information on pages would overlap, making it confusing for the user
• Both camp website’s experience lacked personality
• Navigation wasn’t as smooth as we’d hoped it would be
• A few important features on the site weren’t easy to update for YMCA staff members
• Interactive PDFs for parents to fill out weren’t cutting it and became challenging

YMCA Camps 2.0

Here are some of the website improvements made for both YMCA Camp websites.

1.) Navigation Menu

In the previous website version, the main menu was hidden for desktop and mobile devices. It would display after the user clicked the hamburger icon menu located at the top right corner.

This time around we wanted to save our desktop users that extra click to view the main menu. In addition, the entire information architecture was reevaluated. New web sections were introduced and page titles were addressed to help visitors find the information they were looking for whether it being a parent, camper or staff member.

2.) Background Video

After visiting both camps in-person, it was apparent how different the experience was at an all girl camp and all boy camp. By including a background video on the home page, we were able to ensure that the first impression for our online visitors delivered that unique culture and personality of each camp.

View Camp Mi-Te-Na Video

View Camp Foss Video

3.) Online Application Forms

After conducting our audit, it was apparent that more and more users were visiting the website on a mobile device. Therefore, this time around we introduced more online forms so that CIT applicants or Financial Assistance didn’t rely solely on a PDF. By providing the option, we save time for our users and avoid any frustrations for those that are in need of assistance or wish to be part of the camp staff.

4.) Manageable Countdown

It’s important to us for assigned YMCA staff members, such as marketing managers, to have the ability to update copy and images at anytime without being concerned of breaking the layout.

The countdown feature keeps everyone on schedule and needed to be updated once a year. Therefore, a custom setup was built and added to their WordPress admin portal so that staff was able to update the countdown date without needing to know code.

5.) Mobile Menu Navigation

Last but not least, the mobile menu navigation experience went through a revamp. Mobile visitors now have an immediate access to call the camp and/or get directions. Main sections were simplified and helpful arrows trigger animated accordions to dropdown and display more information to access subsections.

Research Doesn’t End Here

Even after the new website launch we started discovering new needs by our visitors. As long as we stay in touch with how the website is being used, we can be ahead the game in getting somewhat close to a perfect website.

Stay agile.

The outcome of SNHU Students using Invision

Culture • Posted on June 21, 2017

Fall of 2016 was my first attempt at teaching User Experience at Southern New Hampshire University. I have to admit, I was a bit nervous. I wanted to make sure that students attending the class stayed engaged and excited about the topic. It’s one thing to apply UX at Schall Creative but coming up with exercises and projects that will resonate with college students is very different, and something I’m hoping will evolve and improve with time.

I’d like to give a quick shout out to Austin Knight, Senior UX Designer at HubSpot. He was incredibly gracious to spend time meeting with me and to provide suggestions on the UX course syllabus I put together.

Introducing Invision

The course begins with the students taking a bird’s eye view of their everyday tasks and discovering ways of making their life easier or cost effective. This discovery, or design solution, is then brought to life and becomes a mobile or web app prototype using the prototyping tool Invision. Students perfect their product by gathering feedback through a couple rounds of user testing research. Here are some highlights I noticed students enjoyed the most when using Invision.

They would apply transition effects between screens

Students were able to position overlay menus or pop up windows in specific locations in their prototype

They could share their project with friends and family

They were able to open their final mobile app directly from their smartphone and give it a test drive

Direct prototype mobile app experience on smartphone

The Process

Throughout the semester students went through phases of research, design and testing. Below are screenshots of Marissa Mahr’s final UX research process to complete her app she called Instorage.

: Introduction

: The Problem

: The Solution

: Brand Development

: Interview Insight

: Persona 1

: Persona 2

: Persona 3

: Competitor Analysis 1

: Competitor Analysis

: User Journey

: Sitemap

: Wireframe Part 1

: Wireframe Part 2

: High Fidelity Designs 1

: High Fidelity Designs 2

: High Fidelity Designs 3

: User Testing Outcome 1

: User Testing Outcome 2

: User Testing Outcome Part 3

: Final Prototype

The Outcome

I was really impressed of the different ideas the students came up with using Invision, and it was beautiful to watch how they progressed throughout the semester. As students began looking at their design as a solution rather than one more task, they gradually became researchers perfecting their work with a purpose. Here are a couple GIF animations displaying a quick walkthrough on final UX projects; Instorage and MyTube.

GIF

GIF

3 Quick Wins Uncovered with Growth-Driven Design for a Dental Website

Growth-Driven Design • Posted on September 1, 2016

3 Quick Wins We Uncovered with Growth-Driven Design for a Dental Website

It’s been incredible to see how well our client’s dental website has been performing after applying Growth-Driven Design (GDD) tactics.

Before I share these 3 quick dental website wins, let me give you a quick run down on what GDD is. Growth-Driven Design is methodology that helps company websites be the best they can be by applying monthly website enhancements that are measured on a regular basis. Every month, we collect data and make website changes based on that data with the goal of a better performing website. Here at Schall, we frequently would tell our clients how our goal was to get as close to perfect as we can with our website build. Now with GDD, we can continue to do that every month.

Since we’ve been working on Mann Family’s dental website for several years we didn’t need to build a new launch pad website. Using the existing website, we dove in immediately with user research. What an eye opener this has been. This user research saved us tremendous time and gave us immediate results.

Here are 3 quick dental website insights we learned by using GDD:

1.) Give the people what they want

As we gathered data in the form of recordings, heatmaps, click maps and scroll maps, we could see that a large percentage of users wanted to see the dental team. Not only did they scroll through the pictures of the staff, but they read the bios. Maybe they wanted to make sure they were real and they weren’t scary. Seeing this, we decided to place the staff headshots on the home page. This resulted in quicker conversions. After just 1 or 2 clicks, the user would convert into a lead.

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2. Best practices don’t always work on landing pages

Inbound marketing 101 will tell you to fit all the information you need above the fold on your landing page. Well, when you’re selling a service that involves someone opening their mouth for you, they want a bit more information than you can fit in 1366×768. We developed Dr. Mann’s landing pages to have a lot of information. We kept the form above the fold just in case someone wanted to fill it out without researching, but everything they needed to know was there. From staff bios, to diagrams about the procedure, the potential patient does not have to do any clicking to find out what they need.

We knew the page was converting, but what was interesting to see once we started user testing was that a very high percentage of users were scrolling all the way through this long page. We patted ourselves on the back for going against “best practices” and winning.

Not everything on those pages was a win. The testimonial videos weren’t being watched, and some of the information was inaccurate. We fixes these issues and cleaned up the pages and will continue to monitor user behavior.

3.) Mobile compatibility testing is never done

It’s incredible the amount of wacky resolutions we ran into. Resolutions that simply don’t make any sense. Are they old awkward shaped monitors or website visitors that love to view their browser in an odd shape. Who knows? One thing these wacky resolutions that many visitors were using to view the website were causing serious navigation issues. We were able to see how some website visitors were having trouble viewing information on the patient form section on strange resolutions. The main menu would stack and cover form fields which would prevent website visitors from filling them out. Once again, we would have never known how website visitors were spending 3-5 minutes navigating on the website running into these display issues if we didn’t have a close eye on this. Solution: make sure the main menu display correctly for any resolution; wacky or not.

Conclusion

There is no set formula on how to design a website or what content each page should have, but by conducting Growth-Driven Design tactics and user experience testing, the changes we have made in just a few months have been significant.

Awwwards NYC 2016 Conference Photos & Inspiration

Culture • Posted on July 8, 2016

We had an incredible experience at the Awwwards NYC Conference this summer. We’ve been following the Awwwards Conference for several years now, and they have always been hosted in far away countries around the world. When I received an email telling me about Awwwards NYC well, let’s just say I malfunctioned for a couple seconds.

Many of the speakers were inspirational and others shared their experience and the type of work they love to do. These days at Schall, our conversations are more about strategy, milestones and data. It was nice to have two whole days of just design and user experience for a change.

The Awwwards experience was a roller coaster of emotions that went from laughter to sadness to excitement. It was all I expected and more; a couple interesting inspiring days. At one point, I embarrassed myself when I repeated Matias Corea’s (Co-Founder of Behance) joke out loud during his presentation. Somehow my voice managed to travel across this large room in the Fi:af Auditorium, and soon after heads were turned facing me as I continued laughing.

Here are a few Awwwards NYC 2016 photos of this highly recommended two day conference. I hope you enjoy some of the quotes below.

Inspiration was overflowing as we found out they were serving breakfast.

A big thank you to all the speakers for this event. Your words of wisdom were definitely inspiring.

The kick off was with Mike Monteiro. Yes, the F*ck you, pay me guy. The gun was designed to kill. Design can change the world and yes, you do have the choice to make something or not.

Mr. Jon Burgerman doodling while everyone was mingling and eating. Color was added by the conference attendees.

Breaks between speakers were held regularly.

Tom Krcha, Co-Founder of Adobe XD, shared his story behind the software and included a few tidbits on how to use it.

Hannah Donovan, General Manager at Vine, sharing her insight on Designing the Future of Content. This girl rocked!

“Humans are human because they have a perspective: they care about things. One might call it the ability to give a damn. And it is this quality that allows us to determine what matters and where we stand. A computer can’t do that.”

– The Moment of Clarity

“Some people (they are wrong) say design is about solving problems. Obviously designers do solve problems, but then so do dentists. Design is about cultural invention.”

-Jack Schulze

Shaun Tollerton & Jose Manuel with ustwo sharing their journey and challenges developing the android wear.

I had a quick opportunity to capture this photo and I went for it. Mr. Matias Corea on the left and Mr. Tom Krcha to the right. Thanks fellas!

Matias Corea (Co-Founder of Behance) shares his story and experience creating Behance. Here are a couple quotes he shared.

“On your way to greatness you’re going to have to pass through alright.” – Bill Withers

“When I’m asked ‘what do you want in life’ I say I want interesting days.” – Richard Saul Wurman

Olof Schybergson, Founder of FJORD, goes in depth with the Design Rule of 3 or, How to Win with Design. He also shared a quote:

“This disease of our age is boredom…The way to combat this is by invention by surprise. When I say a good picture has surprise value. I mean that it stimulates my thinking and intrigues me.”

– Alexey Brodovitch

Sherine Kazim, Managing Director, Experience Design at Huge, shares her insight on how emotive UI will change the way we design.

The Awwwards NYC 2016 Conference ended with a beautiful view of New York at the 230th Fifth Outdoor Rooftop Club. What more could you ask for? A perfect ending to an amazing few days.

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A Simple Explanation of Growth-Driven Design and How It Differs From Traditional Web Design

Growth-Driven Design • Posted on June 9, 2016

For years we’ve had discussions on discovering ways to build websites that are as close to perfect as possible. Now with the growth-driven design methodology, we have the opportunity to build a website that is above and beyond our initial expectations.

Our inbound marketing agency started off as a web design shop so it was very common for us to build a website and let it go. Like putting an anchor in the grid (web), we would launch a site, let time go by, and hope the website would perform. During the build we would apply all our skills, knowledge, experience, and “best practices” so that we could launch a site we were proud of, and that the client was happy with. Existing website clients would come back after a couple years requesting website updates, or website improvements, which at times would turn into complete website redesigns. This was the cycle we would fall into; website redesign, spend a couple months on production, throw a new anchor on the grid and wait a couple years for clients to come back for improvements.

When a client did come back for website improvements, these requests could be great ones or horrible ones. Is the website request a “want” from the client or is it a need for the online visitor? Above all, how will this website request improve the user’s experience and the client’s bottom line? Yes, we had data to finalize website decisions but at the end, all website requests were assumptions and it wasn’t clear if these updates would help the organization’s goals. Growth-Driven Design changes all this.

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Quick Breakdown on Growth-Driven Design

The objective of Growth-Driven Design is to build a launch pad website in 30-45 days, launch it and test it. Before that initial build, the discussion starts off with understanding the company goals and target personas, and it ends with a website wishlist. At the beginning you’ll have a long list of must-haves and nice to have website requests. The game plan would be to filter out the list with must-haves that would pack a punch and deliver results. The thought process would be, “What are the 20% of list items that will make 80% of the business impact?”. Keep in mind that the 30-45 days benchmark for a website launch can vary depending on the size on the website.

Now with the Launch Pad website complete we can focus on the remaining wishlist items and add to this list based on the data we collect. These items are broken down into high, medium and low impacts.

On a monthly basis the selected list item is tested and goes through a Plan, Develop, Learn and Transfer (PDLT) process. In order to understand if this list item was successful or not, a focused-metric is used to measure the outcome. For example, a focused-metric could be a percentage of increase of email signups.

Let’s Take A Look At The PDLT Process In Action

As an example, I’ll use a website we recently launched for a YMCA. Here’s an example of how this PDLT process starts:

After our initial website launch, we ran into some user experience (UX) issues. Here are a few that just have to do with one feature, the search bar:

1.) Online visitors would type in a class they were looking for in the search bar. The search bar would immediately display a dropdown of suggested links but the visitor’s action was to press enter instead of clicking the suggested links. By pressing enter key, the user was redirected to page that was displaying results that weren’t what the member was looking for.

2.) People would search for events, branch information, and even staff members using the search bar. At the point of launch, the search bar only searched for programs and classes, so a good amount of people would come up with no results.

Tools Used to Discover These User Experience Issues

We used two recording tools, UsabilityTools and Hotjar. I do like how UsabilityTools shares where the user came to site (Organic, PPC, Social, etc.) when a session in being recorded. On the other hand, Hotjar has several features I enjoy such as, block recording from certain IPs and filter your recording sessions. And for some strange reason I really appreciate how the country’s flags are displayed for each recording. We focused on the recordings that had accessed a lot of pages, because usually those were the people who were a tad frustrated. We could easily see what they were trying to access, and came up with a plan to fix it.

For heatmaps, click maps and scroll maps we used Crazyegg and Hotjar. It was interesting to discover how users were or weren’t clicking in the places we had assumed they wouldn’t or would. Everyone’s comfort level with computers and the internet is different, and this particular client had a wide range of users. Seeing these maps meant we could learn that quickly.

Last, we brought in Hubspot’s Leadin to understand in depth what a buyer’s journey was looking like. We took advantage of the chronological history of a converted lead and started to understand specific interests a visitor had on the website. By looking at the search results pages, we could see what was searched for. Now we had an idea of the things the users want to access with this search bar.

After we gathered this info, we created a hypothesis:

For [Gym Member George] visiting the [Home page], we believe improving [the search feature] in the [Main Menu] will [increase gym class online sign ups by 10%].

The changes we made
First, we created a results page for those users that hit enter after a search. This seemed like such a no-brainer after the fact, but no one ever ran into this issue before launch.

Then, we updated the 404 page. Instead of just being a generic page, we inserted a message telling them there weren’t any results, and coupled it with another search bar so they could try again.

Last, we expanded the search function to include the entire website, rather than just programs and classes. This meant more options for searches, and less frustration for users.

The Outcome After using Growth-Driven Design Techniques

The first thing we noticed was a lot less phone calls from Y members, which meant almost no phone calls from our client to our agency. The initial storm was over, and people were getting the hang of the new site. The search bar was a huge part of that. So many users were used to the old (outdated) layout, they didn’t want to even try navigating the new one. So they used the search bar instead.

The website went live on a Friday. Keep in mind the website is used by several main personas; prospective members, current members and staff. We had to make sure the new website was a smooth transition for everyone. Of course it wasn’t completely seamless, but since we had our tools in place, we were able to stop the bleeding in less than a day. By Monday, everything was pretty quiet and website requests weren’t coming in. We found this odd and by the afternoon we had to call in just to make sure that everything was running smooth and sure enough it was. Mission accomplished.

With Growth-Driven Design, a website is constantly evolving. The website is built around the user rather than the organization’s wants or web trends. The guessing game goes out the window. This all makes a lot of sense simply because as time goes by, technology changes, and quickly. As technology changes, so does human behavior and as human behavior changes, so will how people use websites.

What Happens When Graphic Design Majors Learn To Code

Culture • Posted on May 25, 2016

I’m going into my third year teaching Advanced Web Design at SNHU. It’s incredible how time flies. I had my 4 year old say on the drive home, “Hey dad?…when I grow up, I’m going to your school.” (Yeah, that blew my mind.)

I really care about each student that takes my class and once again, I was very proud of many of them. There were several first occasions happen this time around. For the first time I saw custom dropdown CSS menus with subtle hover animations built. We always aim to create a responsive website but due to time, we don’t get that accomplished. But this time around, I had a couple students take it to the next level and they shared a mobile-friendly website for their final website presentation.

: Karin Anderson

: Ashleigh Garland

: Shannon & Solomon

: Paige Lynch

As graphic design majors, many do run into the “I can’t do this professor” barrier and unfortunately those students repeat the course. Those that really try and break through the barrier find the “I can’t believe I did this!” moment. These are moments that I value the most and is why I continue teaching.

: Logan McCarthy

: Kyle Phillips

: Sal Saia

: Megan Smith

This semester’s non-profit client was CTAC. CTAC helps individuals and families own, learn and use computers. The course is designed to go through a four phase process; Discovery, Creative, Development & Debugging. The students learn the purpose of a website design by experiencing a real world scenario.

Here are the top three WordPress websites custom designed and built from the ground up chosen by CTAC. Once again, I’m very proud of all of my students. We’ve added a user experience course for this fall (2016). I’m very excited to teach this course and I’m really looking forward to helping students look at websites from a different perspective.

Kyle Phillips
Website Design & Development

Kyle Phillips - CTAC Website Design & Development

Paige Lynch
Website Design & Development

Paige Lynch - CTAC Website Design and Development

Ryan Barnaby
Website Design & Development

Ryan Barnaby - CTAC Website Design and Development

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Results After 12 Months of Using HubSpot

Inbound Marketing • Posted on April 20, 2016

We renewed our annual contract with HubSpot. It’s been 12 months since we started using HubSpot and I liked to share our results thus far.

Traffic

We hit our traffic goal of 600 visits during month 9, and as we had hoped for, the vast majority of our traffic has been organic. In March of 2015 we had 232 organic visits. In March of 2016 we had 795 organic visits. That is a growth of almost 350%. We are very happy about this.

Contacts

Our monthly contact goals was 15 new contacts. In February of 2016 we generated 13 new contacts. Unfortunately February is shy a few calendar days but I’m confident we’ll reach this goal in the near future.

Out of the 101 contacts, 65 were organic search, 27 were direct traffic and the rest were referrals, social media and email marketing efforts.

Clients

We brought on our second HubSpot Inbound account on month 12. As our sales pipeline continues to grow, the conversation of agency growth is showing up once again.

How Did We Achieve This

The best results came after we started to truly understand what persona was right for our agency. This became more and more apparent to us as time went on.

The biggest change for us during this process has been our network. Before starting using HubSpot we did a lot of face to face networking. By bringing our focus to our own marketing, we started to do a lot less networking. This resulted in a big shift in the types of prospects that were coming in to meet with us.

Our most successful campaigns were hyper focused

We had the opportunity to speak at an event for a very specific vertical. We decided to turn our talk into an offer as well. We followed up with everyone at the event via email and gave them the opportunity to download our free eBook. Out of 106 attendees that were sent the email, 47 opened it and 16 converted into leads. This strategy was a complete success.

We also created a blog topic for this list that shared the outcome of a project we did for a very similar organization. Inside this blog was our own UX research, which gave these contacts real insight around a problem they are most likely having. Basically, we researched their audience for them and gave them the results. Not only did we get great results from this post, but it was really fun to create as well.

Where Are We Going to Make Improvements

The struggle we’re facing is keeping up with our own marketing efforts now. I personally have dedicated most of my time with sales activities rather than marketing activities. We simply need to make the time to share information that brings value to our audience. It’s easy to just write about a topic that’s already out there. But the real time and energy comes when you are creating something that will make an impact–and the reward comes then, too.

Actions do speak louder then words. The commitment to gathering data, researching and writing is what has showed us growth. Mark your calendar and just do it. As I type this, I’m really telling myself this.

Internal Improvements

Since we’re a small hands-on agency we really need to optimize our time in order to hit our goals. When projects start coming in, the team gets hyped up, ideas and inspirations start flowing and the next thing you know, the project goes live. In the meantime, what happens to those leads that are coming in? Have they been attended properly and have they been qualified? Unfortunately, when we’re wrapped up in a project, the ball sometimes stops rolling. This is something we’ll need to solve as clients come on board and we’ll need to have a game plan set in place. The solution to this is managing our team efficiently.

We’re excited to see what we’ve accomplished after 12 months. Inbound marketing does take time and money. And yes, there were many frustrating moments but at the end of the day, using HubSpot for inbound marketing works. Now we know that it’s a perfect fit for how we’d like to do business, and with our experience we can help new clients get results quicker.

7 Significant Conclusions We Learned After a YMCA Website Launch

User Experience • Posted on February 22, 2016

On Superbowl Sunday, 2016 we launched the brand new YMCA Greater Nashua website. After more than four months of research, design, and development, our project was coming to an end. But after launch, we didn’t just celebrate and let the website out into the world. We kept an eye on things to make sure the website was performing as best as it could for their 10,000 – 15,000 unique monthly visitors. Using tactics such as heatmapping and lead generation, we set up some systems that could teach us about the website users post launch.

With the data we collected, we were able to make impactful changes on the fly, and make sure the website users were having a great experience. Here are a few things we learned in the first two weeks post-launch.

1.) 57% of Engaged Users Were on a Mobile Device

When looking at the users that spent more than 10 seconds on the website, 57% of them were on a phone or a tablet. Knowing this, we had to make sure a mobile visitor could perform the same actions as a desktop user. One of the changes we made post-launch was to make sure the search bar was fully functional on a mobile device.

We also noticed that mobile visitors were more likely to stay on the website to register online instead of using their Daxko login to browse programs.

Looking at the scroll heatmaps, we found that mobile visitors were more apt to scroll than a desktop user would.

2.) Most Users Want to See Classes and Programs

The data we collected before the website build showed us that the majority of users were looking for programs or schedules. So we made sure these two menu items were extremely accessible from the homepage. Looking at the heatmaps after launch just reinforced what we already knew. Over 24% of clicks were to a program page, and about 20% went to the schedules page.

3.) People Still Love PDF Schedules

Being tech-minded, this was a little surprising to us. It turns out that a solid amount of people would rather download a full PDF schedule than use the mobile app feed on the website, or download the mobile app on their phone.

We still made sure to encourage members to download the YMCA App for Apple or Android. But sometimes we would even encounter users downloading the app and also the PDF schedule on their way out.

4.) Some YMCA Members Like to Browse Through Daxko

After day one of testing, immediately members would look for a way to log in to register for programs. The old website had a Register button at the top where people could log in directly to Daxko, and they were missing that feature after the new website was launched. Even though the programs were now feeding to the website pages, we saw that we needed to put this option back. With the update, members had the option to choose between logging into Daxko or staying on the new website.

5.) It’s Easy for Daxko Program Tags to Get Out of Control

After we linked the new website to Daxko using Program Connector, hundreds of defunct program tags were fed through. This made it easy for our clients to see that in order for this to work efficiently, they were going to need to do some spring cleaning. Our clients responded quickly and trimmed down the program tags from hundreds to 23 well organized tags for the program connector to pull in.

Now that Daxko information is being fed directly into the website, it’s also easy to discover where class titles, descriptions, times, fees or contact information were missing for each program. If information was missing or outdated, the assigned program director was reached so he or she could log into Daxko and make the right update.

6.) A Properly Functioning Search Bar Can Do Wonders

Accessing the search bar was an immediate behavior. It helped tremendously for new and especially for existing members to find information quickly. The search feature for mobile was brought to the forefront to make sure mobile visitor access to search for anything at all times. Since they didn’t have a search bar before the new website launched, we weren’t able to foresee the impact this feature could have. By testing the website post-launch we were able to understand that this is often the quickest and easiest way for users to find what they’re looking for.

7.) Capturing Leads is Easy

We set up a few forms on the new website to start collecting leads. One is a pop up form for a free 3-day-pass and the other is a form for members interested in scheduling a tour. This is the first time this YMCA has had anything set up for collecting leads, so our goal was a 1.5% conversion rate.

2 weeks later, we’re at a 3.1% conversion rate. That means that out of every 100 people that see a form, 3 of them fill it out. This is double what we had as our goal.

The welcome center directors get an email notification when a lead comes in, and they follow up by phone or email. All the information is fed into a MailChimp account, so if they want to change to a more automated approach in the future they can.

Seeing such a positive response to these forms opens up a lot of opportunities for inbound marketing tactics in the future–a lot of opportunities that we would not know about if we hadn’t kept track of these things post launch. We now know what a YMCA website is capable of and we are so excited to share it.

A website is not complete right after it’s launched. By paying attention to the users, you can make small changes over time that will have a huge impact on how people interact with your website. We never thought we would learn this much in just 2 weeks after launching nmymca.org, but we’re happy we did, and very excited to bring these lessons with us to any projects we have to follow.

What Does a Website Cost? A Full Breakdown by an Agency

Web Strategy • Posted on November 25, 2015

A complete breakdown of what a website cost by an agency.

What will this website cost me? As a digital marketing agency, it’s only natural for this question to appear often in meetings.

Digital agencies each have their own hourly rate. This hourly rate can go anywhere from $150 and up. Ask what the agency’s hourly rate is and you can ballpark what it would cost your company to build a website based on the estimated hours of production provided below.

Digital agencies also have their own website production process. At Schall, a website project is broken down into four main phases:

* Final website investments are determined by the size of website, amount of content, functionality, and client goals. The estimated production of hours shared in this article is a ballpark time investment for each phase, based on our own projects.

1. Discovery Phase ( 30 hours* )

1a. Client Interview

In the client interview we’ll uncover current struggles in an organization, go deep into understanding company goals and get a sense of company culture.

1b. User Research

Listening to the user is vital for a successful website as we discover how to improve flaws within a website. The objective is to find a happy medium between company goals and user website satisfaction.

1c. Site Audit / Audience Trend Analysis / Competitor Analysis

It’s always interesting, and sometimes upsetting, to see where a website stands in a Google search in comparison with the competition. With tools such as Raven and HubSpot, we get a gauge on where a client’s website stands. While Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools will help narrow down user trends to exclude any ignored sections that are taking up real estate. This overall analysis lets us start from the ground up, so we’re not basing our website ideas off of what’s already out there.

1d. Personas

After doing research on the client’s target demographic, personas are created. Personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. This allows us to truly have the user in mind, and not just a mysterious group of people in an age group and location.

I found it funny to discover MailChimp’s ideal user. He had all my characteristics and they even named him Fred.

Example of Persona used by MailChimp

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1e. Content

I’m sure you’ve heard this before and here you’ll read it one more time, “Content is king”. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your website is or how functional it may be if the copy is not speaking the targeted audience’s language. The objective is to obsess over the user to roll out well thought out quality content that brings priceless value to the table always.

1f. Information Architecture / Sitemap

Once all the web content junk has been stripped out, the story of how the user will navigate through the website gets structured. Before even taking this to XMind, a mapping software to graph a website site map, we’ll get the team together, roll out the whiteboard, grab a few stacks of post-its and role play different scenarios on how a user would navigate through this new website to achieve his or her goal.

1g. Wireframes

You can’t build a house without a blueprint. The wireframe stage is the blueprint for building websites. This is typically a barebones display of boxes for how each page of a website will be laid out. Pencil, a prototyping tool, speeds the process in preparing these website blueprints that are later used in the Creative Phase. Invision, another prototyping tool taken to the next level, gives the ability to make wireframes interactive.

2. Creative Phase ( 60 hours* )

2a. Photography / Videography

To create trust through a virtual experience, high quality authentic photography is a must. Compared to stock photography, original photos that are specific to the company, deliver unique emotion and bring more value. A video with great lighting, interesting angles, and a strong story invites the user into a virtual world that’s personalized. Now that technology is improving, we can invite the user into an interactive 360 video and give them a tour of your world from all angles, and they control it from a touch of a mouse to a tilt of a phone.

2b. Moodboard

The moodboard process helps cut through the noise and organize thoughts. Many times this is where the best ideas are born. The beauty about this process is that a team doesn’t have their hands tied and inspiration becomes limitless. In the past, we would cut out pieces of a magazine and physically paste our inspirations onto a large blank poster to share thoughts to a client. A display of different colors and font types would also join the party. Times have changed and this is a process that can be done virtually and collaboratively with Boards by Invision.

2c. User Experience Design

Websites are evolving and UX plays a large role in this evolution. The UX focus is having a deep understanding of how the user thinks, lives and speaks. What type of blog articles does a user read, what type of devices do they use and how they use them. A study on user actions and gestures goes a long way. No longer are the days of creating a pretty button for the sake of it. What is the purpose of that button? What task does this button fulfill and does it bring value to the user? A website today should be a list of tasks that solves problems.

2d. User Interface Design

The fun begins in the user interface design process. Many times it is tempting to jump right into Photoshop or Sketch and have your ideas run free. This process is where the actual website design takes place. All web elements from the Discovery and Creative Phase up to this point gets implemented into this website design. These web elements are building blocks. If any of them are missing, your stack of blocks will fall.

2e. Prototyping

Not too long ago, our Creative Phase presentation with clients was a show and tell of static web design layouts. We would share all versions; desktop, tablet and smartphone layouts in this presentation. Now, our prototyping stage is interactive. All static website layouts are brought to life using Invision. This gives our clients the opportunity to experience and actually see how the website is going to perform with a touch or hover action. The outcome of the presentation is less of an explanation of what’s being accomplished with the new layout, and more of a participation from the client in how to improve the overall website experience.

3. Development Phase ( 60 hours* )

3a. Content Management System

Gone are days of static websites. Once the Creative Phase has been approved, website designs are stripped and built on a content management system. This way the website is manageable in-house by the marketing team. Amongst many, WordPress and HubSpot CMS are two industry leading platforms that standout to be user-friendly with powerful content marketing capabilities.

3b. Functionality

Common website functionalities can be online forms to increase sales, email signups to build a subscriber list or special shipping options for eCommerce websites. Each organization has unique challenges and goals. Web functionalities are built to satisfy the purposes of the website.

3c. 3rd Party Integrations

Newsletter integrations will capture emails into your favorite email platform; MailChimp or Constant Contact. Google Maps Integrations will let your user have easy access to finding you online. Inbound Marketing Software integrations, like HubSpot, will monitor your marketing efforts in one sales tool platform. All necessary integrations are done during this process.

3d. Responsive

A mobile experience is unique from a desktop experience. For this reason, a mobile design is created with unique navigations, menus, and content for optimal conversions when accessed through a mobile device. This responsive design then goes through a testing process and is opened on smartphones and tablets. The number of online visitors accessing a website from a mobile device is increasing rapidly, so mobile user experience is more important than ever.

4. Debugging Phase ( 20 hours* )

4a. Cross-Browser Compatibility

There are several preferences when it comes to web browsers; Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari to name a few. Each have different rules, especially Internet Explorer. The website is tested on the top browsers preferred by current visitors to make sure the website experience is smooth across the board.

4b. User Testing

A group of people are asked to participate to access the website. This last step is performed on both desktop and mobile. This is an opportunity to correct any flaws of the overall website experience and to study how the visitor interacts with the website from start to finish.

4c. Web Server Optimization

The website is optimized to reach it’s maximum efficiency. Code is compressed to improve load performance for desktop and mobile. Content Delivery Networks ensure users can load the website quickly. All images are losslessly compressed to enhance performance.

Client Relationship and Project Management. ( 20 Hours* )

Meetings / Travel

There are a number of meetings that take place during each phase. In some cases there is travel involved, other times it’s a phone or web meeting. This is all time that is taken into account with each project.

Project Management

To keep the client in the loop, a project management software is used called Basecamp. The client is notified when they have homework, and they can dive into the software to learn about where the website is in the process and what work is being put in.

Website Training

When a website is launched, there is also a training session scheduled. Anyone who has a responsibility to update the new website is invited to attend, and they all learn the process from start to finish.

There are many steps to go through when building a website, some of which often go unseen. Each phase needs the other ones in order to shape the best possible product and to generate great results.

6 Awesome Ways WordPress and HubSpot Work Together

Web Strategy • Posted on November 10, 2015

7 Awesome Ways Wordpress and HubSpot Work Together

Yes, WordPress and HubSpot do work well together. No, you don’t have to choose between them.

There are a lot of reasons an organization chooses to have their website on WordPress and, by demand, most of the websites we build here at Schall Creative run on the popular platform. Since it’s so widely used, it’s easy to find support for a WordPress site via a web developer or simply by visiting WordPress forums and searching for a solution. Most importantly, it’s easy for our clients to make simple updates to their website on their own when they use WordPress.

HubSpot is a platform that focuses on inbound marketing and tracking results. When an organization is ready for their website to start doing work, (not just looking pretty) we find that HubSpot is the way to go.

Here are some great ways WordPress and HubSpot work together:

1. Install the HubSpot Tracking Code

The HubSpot Tracking Code will connect your WordPress website and start sending online traffic information to HubSpot. The code collects data from your WordPress site and sends it to your HubSpot account. You’ll be able to view your website traffic and page performance of every page regardless of if it lives in HubSpot or WordPress.

2.) Embed HubSpot CTAs on your WordPress website

Once you have a well thought out copy and creative to use as your Call to Action, bring it into HubSpot to track its performance and embed it into your blog articles and/or web pages.

Every CTA has an embed code so it can live externally.

3.) Generate leads by using custom flyout HubSpot forms

If you have an offer you’d like to share with your website visitors, you have the ability to create and customize a HubSpot form that can live on your WordPress website. Add a little Javascript and your HubSpot form can slide onto your blog article or website page after a certain timeframe or scroll position. All of the form submissions go directly into your HubSpot contacts database so they’re segmented and enrolled in workflows however you’d like them to be.

For those that are not currently using HubSpot but are curious on how inbound could work for your industry, try downloading the HubSpot All-In-One Marketing plugin. This is a free WordPress plugin that helps you generate leads and gives you great insight after a visitor has filled out a form. It’s a great way to get started collecting leads and using a CRM for free. This tool allows you to dip your toe into inbound marketing so you can learn if it’s right for you.

4.) Build your list of subscribers with pop-up HubSpot forms

The more you write great copy, the more you’ll have the opportunity to build your list of readers. You can take advantage of this traffic and have them subscribe to your email list. In our experience what has worked are pop-up messages that speak to your reader has humanly possible.

The way we’ve manipulated this was a custom HubSpot form with just an email request with an engaging one liner. This pop-up message is then integrated into blog posts or pages by using the WordPress Popup plugin that was later customized to our needs. Again, all these form submissions are dumped into our HubSpot contacts, and they’re already segmented by which blog they subscribed to. So there is literally no work involved for us–they’re all set up to receive our next email.

5.) Use HubSpot Contact Forms and embed them in your WordPress site

Another great tactic, if not the best tactic, is creating a HubSpot Contact Form and embedding it in your WordPress Contact Us section. When we get a form submission on this page, we know that the lead is at the bottom of the funnel, and closest to “ready to buy.” By using HubSpot, we are able to have an instant notification sent to us so we can follow up with a phone call right away.

This setup has been our most successful approach thus far as we’re able to gauge immediately where our visitors are at in the buying process.

If you need help customizing your HubSpot forms so they match the look and feel of your website, we can help with that. Click here and shoot us a message!

6.) Optimize your blog articles with Yoast and HubSpot Page Performance

The Yoast WordPress Plugin has been around for quite some and it is extremely helpful. The company is constantly updating the plugin and adding new features to improve search results for your WordPress site. I highly recommend it. It will display a guideline on how to improve your blog post and website pages to help you perform better on search results.

In our case, we do not have our blog posts live in HubSpot. Our blog posts live in WordPress. There are certain features we are not taking advantage of, such as Smart Content, but we still use their Page Performance Tool to make sure all our posts are working to their best ability. Every so often, we’ll check out our blog posts within Page Performance and make the suggested optimization updates. Everything is laid out on one page so we can clearly see which posts need attention.

WordPress and HubSpot compliment each other well. You don’t have to choose between the two.

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A Great Way to Improve Your Medical Practice Productivity

Web Strategy • Posted on September 30, 2015

How to Take Your Medical Practice Administrative Process to the Next Level

In Part 2, Online Patient Forms: How Email Notifications Help Save Time, we went over testing tips when setting up an email and spoke about a few pointers on static and dynamic subject lines.

In this article I’d like to share how we helped our client improve their medical practice productivity and increase their bottom line.

The Problem

At the beginning, it was exciting for the practice to receive email notifications of new patients filling out their online form. With every patient that was going online to complete their forms, precious time in the office was spared. This new patient form email would simply be printed, filed, and then used by the doctor at the time of the appointment.

The problem was the email print out had a different layout and the doctor wasn’t used to it. He would go to the page to find out vital information and he would have trouble finding it. The new online forms were causing different frustrations and time sucks in the office.

The Solution

We took a look at what the printed forms looked like, and replicated it for the populated online form.

We took the information submitted by the new patient form and had the email notification attach a PDF. This PDF was designed with exactly the same layout of what the doctor was accustomed to, and it was then populated with the new patient form information submitted from their website. This entire process is auto-generated every time an online visitor submits the new patient form.

Now when an administrator prints the new patient form email attachment, the doctor can find the information where he’s used to looking for it.

The Outcome

• An efficient online patient conversion from the website
• Patients are attended quicker
• The administrative process at the practice saves time and money
• Most importantly, the practice attends happier patients and more of them

How have you improved your medical practice productivity? Share at the comments!

Adapting After 6 Months of Using HubSpot

Inbound Marketing • Posted on September 21, 2015

It’s been an interesting ride so far using HubSpot and we’ve learned a lot. Since our 3 month reevaluation of our own inbound marketing efforts, the highlight has been the number of organic leads that have come in.

Here’s the breakdown:

Traffic

We’re always looking at how our organic traffic is performing and it’s been a steady growth so far. While our overall traffic dipped in July and August, (as it always tends to do) our organic traffic remained steady. Our organic traffic in August was the highest it has been since before Google’s last big update in April. And September is on track to being our best month since we started using HubSpot.

Contacts

Our contacts started to increase after month 4. Our organic visits to contact rate went from .9% in June to 4.72% in July, and it has stayed up around the 4% mark since. We are very happy about this.

Our leads come from all over the map. Out of 35 total contacts 22 were organic searches and out of those 22, 8 were qualified leads. The remaining 13 contacts came from email marketing, social media channels (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) and face to face networking. 3 of those were qualified leads.

Clients

We brought on our first HubSpot Inbound account on month 5 and we also brought on a large web account in month 6. Just for the record, these new accounts are due to existing contacts and relationships. While our online presence definitely plays a part in closing these leads, we have yet to close an account solely from our new inbound marketing efforts.

How Did We Achieve This

• We really pinned down our strategy and committed to who our target personas are.
• We started rolling out three blogs per week in month 4 and 5. Well thought out blogs take time. By month 6 we made sure to commit to at least two blogs a week and we’ve been really focusing on upping the value of those blogs.
• In regards to email marketing, we started a bit aggressive with this and we were announcing a blog every week. We started losing readers so we’re now announcing blogs biweekly.
• We took a look at our top visited pages and decided we could take advantage of the traffic they were getting. Our contact page was one of those pages. We invested some time into it and it ended up being well worth it. Most of our leads are coming directly from our contact page.

Where Are We Going to Make Improvements

The trend that we’re seeing so far is that organic searches are coming to our website and are converting on our contact page. This is not necessarily a bad thing since if we look at from a buyer’s journey, these leads are at the bottom of the funnel and are expecting a phone call. Because we have these leads, our sales activities have increased, and our pipeline is filling up more than it ever has before. By sales activities we mean following up with leads, and definitely not cold calling.

The issue we’re noticing is we’re investing quite a bit time in coming up with articles/blogs and we’re not seeing very many conversions that start with a blog post. These blogs are definitely helping with organic search results, we just need to sharpen our conversion tactics to take better advantage of our blog traffic. Here’s what we have in mind:

• Revisit our top viewed blog topics and improve them by adding creatives, statistics, better copy, SEO etc.
• Revisit our CTAs (Call-to-Actions) and start applying some A/B testing to iron out the flaws.
• Last, reevaluate the type of articles we’re rolling out, come up with better topics and find out which ones are working the best for us. We also want to make sure we spend some time on a few posts a month to come up with blogs that can become compounding posts.

Internal Improvements

Internally, the biggest improvement we’ve seen in our organization is how we stay on top of leads and are now implementing an actual sales process. In the past, our sales came from word of mouth and relationships. We met people face to face at networking events and nurtured a relationship with them before they became leads and sales.

Now that we have a steady stream of leads coming in through our site, we can implement a sales strategy that can be taken care of during business hours. We can do more sales activities in less time, and we don’t have to make it to a dozen after hours networking events every month. (Of course we still network quite a bit, but our business no longer depends on it.)

How has your experience been so far with using HubSpot or implementing inbound marketing. Share at the comments!

5 Tested Website Features that People Trust

Web Strategy • Posted on September 8, 2015

In business, when you meet someone in person you can use your judgement to decide if you trust them. When you visit a website, on the other hand, it can be sometimes challenging to feel that same type of trust.

The goal of a website might be to create awareness, be descriptive and to sell a product or service. But what is it exactly that makes an online visitor reach out to you, become a donor or convert into a customer? How do you create a website that people trust?

Here are 5 website features that people trust:

1.) Valuable Quality Content

A well put together article that solves a problem for your audience will always be memorable, especially if that article saved that person time and money. It creates credibility, it makes a person feel attended and can resonate to such a degree that they feel the need to share it. The ultimate power of quality content, especially if it brings value to your audience, is that it remains online until you remove it. 5 years can go by and it will still be helping someone solve a problem. Being a problem-solver makes your website trustworthy.

2.) Personalized Photography That Shares Emotion

Quality commercial photography plays a large role in creating trust in a virtual experience. Choosing between stock photography and commercial photography that is tailored to your business makes a huge difference. Images that share how you do business and how you interact with your clients gives your first time online visitors an idea what to expect. By sharing faces of the staff and images of your facility, creates a peace of mind before setting foot into your place of business. Especially if someone is coming from a distance. But the real magic happens when images share personality, culture and emotion.

3.) Videography with an Exceptional Storyboard

There isn’t a better way to welcome your visitors into your world than through video. Video gives organizations the opportunity to introduce themselves to the public. It also gives the opportunity to take an online experience to the next level by sharing expression, a way of (business) life, and the ability to find out if there’s a good fit or not. A well done video with an exceptional storyboard can become memorable. It can lock your audience’s attention immediately and has the ability to give you a head start with trust.

4.) Social Media that Shares Company Culture and Thought Leadership

Nowadays, many professionals go through company social media channels such as; LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter, to discover a type of mindset. A typical audience behavior would be to check if a business is active on social media and if so, what type of information are they sharing and do they know their stuff? These social media channels give the opportunity for organizations to become thought leaders in their industry. This ability of sharing knowledge or culture creates credibility and adds more trust to the pile.

5.) A Beautiful Website Design

Regardless of all marketing investments, your audience will end up on your website. A well designed website is a tremendous factor in building trust, especially for new business. A website today needs to deliver an effortless user-friendly experience from a desktop to a mobile device. Information needs to be extremely easy to find and the flow of the site has to be welcoming. A structure of quality copy, colors, spacing, typography, icons, photography, and video must live in flawless harmony. Last, in order to stand out from the rest, there needs to be a defined style that’s true to the brand.

A great website goal to aim for is to create trust through a virtual experience. I hope these five features can take you there.

Success Story: Healthcare Website helps bring in 40 New Patients

Website Design • Posted on August 29, 2015

Success Story: Healthcare Website helps to bring in 40 Patients in Five Months

Palliativity Medical Group was starting from scratch. They had no brand recognition, no online traffic, no voice and no preexisting website. They came to Schall Creative and hired us to build their new healthcare website.

15 Patients in less than 2 Months.

40 Patients after 5 Months.

200 Patients after 1 Year.

About Palliativity Medical Group

Palliativity Medical Group is a Palliative Care medical practice, providing specialized medical care for people living with serious and/or chronic illness. They focus heavily on increasing the quality of life for their clients and their families by managing physical and existential pain, as well as many other symptoms of their acute and chronic illness.

Challenges

Before starting with Schall Creative, Palliativity Medical Group had a bad experience with their previous marketing company. When the relationship started to go sour, they decided to start searching for a new web agency. They needed an agency that listened to them to create the online version of their unique practice.

Palliativity Medical Group wanted their website to be exceptional. They needed their online presence to not only fulfill their needs but their patient’s needs as well.

Building a Website That Creates an Impact

Palliative care is a very personal situation where their needs to be trust. We made sure the website delivered that immediately by displaying pictures that captivated genuine human emotion. We wanted to make sure that a future patient was able to experience who Palliativity was, before picking up the phone or visiting their facility.

If it takes too long for an online visitor to find contact information on a website, it becomes frustrating. It’s very easy for visitors nowadays to move on to the next website. Therefore, a phone number and contact form visible at all times was vital.

Last, well structured on-page SEO was key. Healthcare websites can be beautiful and have great usability but they need to bring in new patients. We made sure this healthcare website performed as their online 24/7 sales team and brought results.

As a new medical practice, their initial goal was to have 15 full time patients. We were happy to hear that with the help of their online presence they are very close to hitting that goal only 2 months in. Five months later, they are at 40 patients.

While taking a look at their organic traffic, we noticed that not only is it steadily rising, but the people who find them through Google are spending a lot of time on the website. This means that they are finding what they are looking for, and they are taking the time to read through and learn about the practice.

This was a great project to work on, and seeing these kind of results a few months later is what it’s all about for us.

3 Tips for Increasing Organic Traffic Your Business Should Invest In

Inbound Marketing • Posted on August 21, 2015

Want to bring business to your website? Start by increasing organic traffic

Organic traffic is a proven driver of business for any website.

A key part of our digital strategy for Mann Family Dental was organic SEO and content creation. After a few months of blogging consistently, their organic traffic started to take off and so did their patients.

In the first year, Mann Family Dental’s website visits had increased by 200%.

Here at Schall, we tend to use our organic traffic results as the key indicator for how well we are doing with our website and our content. So how do you grow your organic traffic and get more qualified eyes on your website?

Here are 3 tips on how to start increasing organic traffic.

1.) Review your on-page SEO

If you’re using WordPress, download the Yoast Plugin. It’ll give you great pointers and help you to get started quickly. If you are not running on a WP platform, review your Focus Keyword for each page. Revisit the content and make improvements where you can. Make sure your focus keyword is used properly in the URL, titles, images and copy. Link to both external and internal sources where it’s relevant. Review the images used in each page and check it they all have an alternate text set up. Last, try to have at least 300 words for each page/blog.

2.) Start Blogging

If you don’t blog or haven’t blogged in a while, start doing it. Start by writing a couple a month and work your way up. The sooner you do it, the better. It’s a lot of work at the beginning, but I guarantee you, you won’t regret it. You can’t out-bid your competitor’s marketing dollars, but can always out-think and out-teach them.

Now, if you suck at writing, you can hire an inbound agency to start researching and writing for you. (Shameless plug: We are researchers and writers!) Blogging quality content is the future of your website’s success.

3.) Share Your Knowledge on Social Networks

You can have amazing content that shares an experience that can be life changing for a reader but if you don’t tell anyone about it, no one will know. Promote your knowledge through your networks. Use your social media channels. I personally publish some of my articles on LinkedIn and have had great results. My 500+ connections receive a notification once my article is published. I’m becoming a thought leader within my network and also providing them a link back to more content on my website. Win win.

Websites these days need to act as your 24/7 sales team. Make sure it’s bringing in the leads and business that it should, and most importantly, keep in track of it. Ask your prospects how they found you. This way at the end of the month, quarter or year, you can find out how well your website is performing.

Increasing organic traffic is a marathon and not a sprint. It takes a lot of time and effort to build. But once it’s there, it won’t go away once you stop paying Google.

Share your knowledge and start writing some great stuff. I promise, you won’t regret it.

Online Patient Forms: How Email Notifications Help Save Time

Dental Marketing • Posted on August 13, 2015

In the previous article, Secure Online Patient Forms: Efficiency Without the Risk, we went over why a medical practice should have a secured online patient form and how to make sure it is actually secure.

When someone submits a form on your website, a number of things can happen. The information can be sent to your inbound marketing software, a CRM, or simply to someone’s inbox. In the case of a secure online patient form, we always make sure an email notification is sent to the office manager immediately.

Here, we’ll go over how to setup email notifications the right way.

Let start with the email address.

You want to make sure the sending email address being used in the online form is going to your Administrator. Test the form and make sure the Administrator is receiving the test email. If the Administrator is not receiving them, check for two things. First, check if the Administrator email has any typos. This could be found in the actual code or if you’re using a WordPress form plugin, you would find it in the form’s configuration page. Second, check their Spam box. Sometimes emails end up in your Spam box so it’s always good to check that off your list. If you’re good in both cases and your still not receiving the information from your form, contact your IT or web guy to find out if your form has any coding issues.

Setup a Descriptive Subject Line

With all the emails, including junk mail, we get these days we want to make sure our subject line is descriptive. Let’s just say we have an online patient form. The subject line could read, “Review Online Patient Form for John Doe”. When configuring your online form, it may have the capabilities to add variables like {firstname} or {lastname} to the subject line. (Side note, these variables would only work if the form has a First Name and Last Name field setup.) The end result should look something like this, “Review Online Patient Form for {firstname} {lastname}”. Now, every time a new patient submits the Online Patient form, you know exactly who the patient is before the email is opened.

There’s never enough testing so make sure that online form is running error free. You can always notify more people on staff by adding more than one email. Last, make sure your subject line is well thought out to help everyone save time and improve production at the practice.

Question about online patient forms?

Please feel free to complete the form below and we’ll be in contact with you shortly.

10 Necessary Features of a Successful Lead Generating Website

Lead Generation • Posted on August 11, 2015

Last week we had the opportunity to present at Creative Office Pavillion in Manchester, NH. We had a lively group that were part of a non-profit organization with a great cause called Plan NH. Great people, great food and all around a good time.

We shared a topic that we run into frequently with organizations that struggle with online sales. We notice that organizations do very well with their visibility and brand awareness. Whether it be due to the years the organization has been in business or investing in a sales team, visibility and attracting visitors is not their main challenge. The challenge is setting a measurable inbound marketing goal and converting their online traffic into leads.

The bottom line is, your website can be more than just act as a brochure. Every business should be taking advantage of their online traffic and converting users into leads.

Here is a brief recap of the 10 Necessary Features of a Successful Lead Generating Website we discussed with are new friends at Plan NH.

1.) On-Page SEO

Make sure your web developer is adept at Search Engine Optimization. Proper SEO tactics need to be built in to your website from the start. If they aren’t there now, it’s a good idea to hire an SEO professional to do an audit of your site and start making improvements.

2.) Social Media Integration

Having social media integrated into your website is key to getting your content out there. If your content is interesting enough to your target persona, there needs to be a way for them to share it quickly and easily. Also, having an up to date social media presence makes your brand trustworthy and tells your audience that you are up to date.

3.) A Blog

A blog is the gasoline that keeps the inbound marketing machine running. It’s the best way to boost your organic search traffic, and sharing your ideas on a regular basis is a great way to connect with your users. Keeping your blog up to date can be a daunting task, but it is so worth it to build your inbound marketing funnel.

4.) The Right Messaging

Ask yourself these 4 questions when you visit your website.
Will people know what I do within seconds?
Will they understand what page they’re on and what it’s about?
Will they know what to do next?
Why should they buy/subscribe/download from this site instead of from someone else?
It’s important that your messaging is created for the user and based on what they want and need in order to take the next step. It’s not about what you have to say and what you want to tell them.

5.) Great Design

This is a no brainer. In this day and age, online visitors have a certain standard for the design and usability of a website. If it’s not up to those standards, it’s very easy for them to hit the back button and choose the next option.

6.) Responsive Design

Just this summer over 50% of online media was reached through a mobile device. We have reached the tipping point and having a responsive website will only become more important as time goes on. Your website needs to adapt and display differently for a mobile device than it does on a desktop.

7.) Calls to Action

Now we get into some of the functionalities that play a role in converting a visitor into a lead. The first is a CTA or Call to Action. A CTA is designed to prompt a user to take action. It’s a button with a phrase like “Click here for your free eBook,” or “Schedule your free consultation today.”

8.) Landing Pages

Landing pages are the pages that explain what you have to offer your user in exchange for some of their information. After they click on a CTA, they will usually land on a landing page. This is where the conversion will take place.

9.) Forms

A form is the place they leave their information in order to download or receive an offer. An offer can be a free piece of material, case study, webinar, worksheet etc. The length and depth of the form can be based off of what they are getting in return. The more valuable the offer, the more detailed questions the form can potentially have.

10.) Analytics

The analytics of your website is what keeps you on track. Not only do you need them in place but you need someone who can read and understand your analytics and translate it into how you’re doing in regards to accomplishing your online goals.

Goals. That’s the bonus we talked about at the beginning of our talk. Before you start with your inbound marketing strategy, you need to set some goals. How many leads do you want your website to bring in? How many of those should convert to customers? How much revenue do you want those customers to bring in? These are all important and necessary questions to answer when you begin your inbound marketing planning and website strategy.

If your company website is not generating leads and/or sales, reevaluate your website with these 10 features and find out if you’re website needs improvement.

Are their other features you find that has helped your website generate leads? Share in the comments!

How to take advantage of your web traffic with a simple online form.

Inbound Marketing • Posted on July 31, 2015

When we created our first website for our business 8 years ago, we made sure to add an online form to the contact us page and all project pages. It just seemed like a no brainer to have a place convenient for people to get in touch. Three years later we realized that no one had ever really filled out the form. Back then, most of our leads were coming in through word of mouth or picking up the phone and calling us. When we redesigned our website, we decided to get rid of the online forms since the only thing it was bringing in was spam at that point. We replaced all forms for a contact us page with a link to our email address, our physical address and a phone number.

Over the years our traffic has increased and become more qualified. This past year we’ve jumped into inbound marketing and we decided to review our traffic with intentions to get more leads from our website. We took a look at what pages had the most views, and the second most popular page was the contact page. With close to 100 unique page views per month, we knew we could take some serious advantage of that traffic. So we decided to bring back the contact form.

But we didn’t just add a few fields for their name, email and a brief message. We made sure this online form was well thought out. Here’s what we did and how you can take advantage of your web traffic with a simple online form.

1.) First, add the essential fields; name, email, company, phone, etc.

2.) Come up with list of questions that will help you understand your visitor’s needs. We thought about the things we would like to know to figure out if they were the right type of client for us.

3.) From that list of questions, choose your top 5 questions. Extensive forms are a turn off and you don’t want to scare too many people away.

4.) Make sure the questions are as easy to answer as possible. We had a check box or a drop down option wherever possible, and only a text box as an option for any additional details if they have them.

5.) Lastly, create an even shorter online form as another option. This is for the people who might not have a project in mind but want to connect anyway. Or maybe they just have a comment or want to say hello. We wanted to make sure there was a place for this as well.

6.) Make sure to add an option to subscribe to your blog on both online forms. Asking visitors to subscribe is a great way to keep you on their radar.

Within the first month our new online forms were on our contact us page, 60% of our new leads converted using those forms. It turns out, people want things to be easy, and picking up the phone can be hard. So put a well thought out contact form on your contact page and the hard work is done–they don’t have to start a conversation, they just have to answer some questions. Take a look at how our contact page turned out.

How to overcome a bad experience with a marketing agency

Web Strategy • Posted on July 23, 2015

There are lots of different types of marketing agencies out there. And they all have different skill sets. The world of marketing can also be hard to understand for someone outside of it, and a company having a bad experience with a marketing agency is unfortunately not uncommon. But in order to survive in the business world, you can’t sit on the sidelines and never work with another marketing agency. Here’s how to bounce back and find a marketing agency you can trust.

Talk about it

When you are looking into working with a new agency, make sure to talk openly about what went wrong with your previous marketing agency or web development firm. Whatever the situation may have been, make sure the new agency understands where they would need to focus on to avoid the same issues.

Once the new agency understands what went wrong, ask them how they would avoid similar problems. Have them give you examples of how they overcome the same types of issues with their current clients.

Take Baby Steps

Try starting out with smaller project to test the waters. This way both parties get a feel of how each other works. Is the agency attentive? Do they meet deadlines and do they roll out efficient, quality work?

Let’s face it. Even though there is a great connection at the beginning between both parties, you need to understand if everyone can work well together. And, as an agency, we need to understand if the client likes how we work.

As digital marketers, we constantly talk about how there needs to be “the right fit” to do business. The truth is, we don’t know if business relationship is “the right fit” until after the first project.

It’s difficult to build trust with a new digital marketing agency or website development firm but if you do your research, always have clear communication and take baby steps, it’s easier to establish a base without getting disappointed.

Have you had a bad experience with a previous agency or web development shop? What helped you or your company decide to work with the new agency?

What to Do When You See Your Website has “Bandwidth Limit Exceeded.”

Website Development • Posted on July 21, 2015

When we talk about web hosting services, there is no shortage of bandwidth out there. But it’s always hard to predict how much you’ll need for your website. When someone gets a message that says, “Bandwidth Limit Exceeded” they usually call their web development company in a panic — “Help! I’m not sure what’s going on with my website. All I’m seeing is a message saying Exceeded Bandwidth! Can you help me?” We can always help, but read on to be prepared for the future.

How Does Bandwidth Work?

Bandwidth gets consumed by the amount of traffic your website gets from your online visitors. In other words, bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred from your site to the users computer. A high traffic website will require lots of bandwidth. In many cases, and depending on your hosting plan, the hosting company will provide unlimited bandwidth. In other cases, hosting accounts may have a limited amount of bandwidth.

How Does Your Website Exceed Bandwidth?

The only reason that you will receive a white screen Bandwidth Limit Exceeded message is because your bandwidth capacity has reached its limit.

You have been setup with a hosting account that has been assigned a limited amount of bandwidth for a month. This limited amount of bandwidth resets once the current month is over.

How to Fix This

As I mentioned earlier, there is no shortage in bandwidth. Your bandwidth should be increased without any hesitation. The process takes seconds and the website should be back on the air immediately.

If you have access to your cPanel, the left side bar will display how much disk space your website is using and just below that you should see a bandwidth meter displaying how much bandwidth has been consumed so far.

If you have been setup with a limited bandwidth hosting account, your bandwidth capacity should be setup, at least, with double the amount of your website disk storage.

If not, make sure to contact your hosting company or website development company that is supplying you hosting services and have them upgrade it. In the case your hosting provider does not upgrade your bandwidth, your website will not display until the month is over.

I hope this article saves you time and stress. No one likes an embarrassing surprise like a Bandwidth Limit Exceeded message on a website. Especially if you have an important event going on or a recent product launch. So keep a close eye on it if you can, or make sure you have someone who can help you just a phone call away.

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Secure Online Patient Forms: Efficiency Without the Risk

Dental Marketing • Posted on July 17, 2015

In the medical industry it is crucial to make sure any patient information traveling through the web is 100% safe and secure. If you’re asking a new patient for his or her social security number and medical history, you need to make sure you have some top shelf encryption.

Why should I use secure online patient forms?

It increases the efficiency of your practice. As time goes by, more people are comfortable filling out information online. Having patients fill out paper forms at your practice eats into precious appointment time. Also, you will have digital copies of your forms for your records. Less paper and less looking for papers.

It also establishes credibility with your new patients. If you have a secure online patient form on your website, they immediately see that you’re efficient and up to date with technology. These factors become more important every day.

How do you know if a web form is secure?

Secure forms can be setup to display features that turn the browser’s address bar yellow or make a padlock icon appear. This tells the user that their information will be encrypted. With or without these features, the only sure way to tell if a form is secure is to check for the https:// before the web address.

How do I make my online new patient form secure?

Once you have your online new patient form has everything in place, you’ll want to purchase a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate. There are different levels of encryption and several companies where you can purchase an SSL certificate like VeriSign. You can also ask your current hosting company if they can setup an SSL certificate as well.

The cost of an SSL is the same whether it’s for one page on your website, or your entire site. So why not take advantage of this yearly SSL certificate purchase and make your entire medical website secure. In addition, Google rewards secure sites, so a secured website may help with rankings as well.

Where have you purchased your SSL certificate and how has your experience been? Share at the comments below!

Question about online patient forms?

Please feel free to complete the form below and we’ll be in contact with you shortly.

What to Research Before a Website Rebuild

Website Design, Website Development • Posted on July 15, 2015

Rebuilding a website is exciting, but it can also be quite stressful. It’s important to start off the process on the right foot so you can avoid headaches down the road. Here are a few things you should research before a website rebuild.

Get the technical stuff out of the way

You’ll be surprised how many companies do not know their domain or web hosting username and password. Make sure you have these credentials handy as you’ll need them to update your website. If you have an IT department or have someone who does your IT work, he or she would have this information for you. IT can also fill you in on what your email hosting situation looks like. Is the email hosted on a local server or is it a third party service. Emails can get messy and sometimes lost so these are great conversations to have before hand.

Also, let your new web development company know if you’re looking for a new hosting company. Most likely they can supply that service for you as well. I would suggest to ask about the security of the hosting service as spam and malware is a nightmare these days.

Review Your Online Traffic

If you are keeping in track of your website traffic with Google Analytics, take a look at it. Try to find out your top visited website pages and look for pages where visitors spend the most time. This can give you an idea what your online visitors are interested in. You can dig in quite a bit to your online data, but at the very least try to get a high level understanding of what your online visitors are interested in on your website today.

If you are not keeping in track of your website traffic, start tracking immediately. It’s better to have some traffic data than no data.

Ask For Input

Depending on the size of your company, you may need to have a talk with your sales department and ask them what they would like to see as an improvement in the new website. Reach out to the administrative department and ask them a few questions as well. Most importantly, listen to your audience and find out if your clients are struggling with the current website in any place, shape or form.

Conduct a Website Survey

By putting together a survey with a series of questions can help you to decipher what’s needed. You can use a third party service like SurveyMonkey to put something together. Ask questions like, “Why do you visit our website?” and “How well does our website meet your needs?”.

Now if you have the resources, you can create an online form that could live on your current website. After completed and submitted, the form can then email you the client’s feedback. You can always ask your current web development company to help you put something like this together if things get a bit tricky.

Speak with the CEO

You’ll need to make sure that whoever is managing this project has a clear view of the company’s goals. Find out the goals first, then start thinking about how your new website can help make them happen. Make sure to have a discussion with your CEO and find out their point of view. Their opinion should have less to do with what the website looks like and the content that’s on there, and more to do with bigger picture company goals.

Find the Right Web Agency

To find the right web agency it is never easy. It helps if you have a budget in mind before you start looking. Putting out a generic RFP with no idea of budget can lead to trouble. We recently heard a story of a client getting quotes back that range from $5,000 to $75,000. Three months went by and they still had no idea who to work with.

There are many stories like this one but at the end of the day there needs to be the right fit. The right fit starts at the web company’s portfolio. There’s nothing written on taste but take a look at that portfolio and get a sense of the type of work the web firm has done. Take a look at the type of clients they’ve worked with. I would suggest to review their social media channels such as; Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This can give you a sense of what their culture is like. You never find a bad client testimonial on a web company’s website but if you find recommendations on LinkedIn, I would look at those as brownie points. Last, look for success stories the web firm as shared from their existing clients.

I hope these research tips help you rebuild your website the right way, with the right web company, the first time around.

What research tactics have you used to help rebuild your website? Share your insight at the comments!

What Helps Our Clients Justify Their Digital Marketing Expense

Inbound Marketing • Posted on July 10, 2015

What helps our clients justifiy their digital marketing expense

Time and time again we speak with companies, large and small, about digital marketing. It’s hard for many organizations to understand how digital marketing works and how it is a smart investment. Sometimes, the prospect will want to get their feet wet and request one digital marketing service. Our agency is not setup as an a la carte pricing structure. For example, you wouldn’t be able to just do a blog post with us. The reason is simple. We’ve tried it and it doesn’t work. There is a giant ball that needs to get rolling for success in digital marketing, and a tiny push isn’t going to make it budge. At the end of the day, a client will want to see results (ROI) sooner than later.

For many organizations investing in marketing collateral, trade show displays, direct mailers, newspaper, magazines just to name few, is easier to justify the investment. The client can actually touch their investment. It’s easier to see value in something tangible, even if it’s not bringing results.

By providing clear goals and metrics to our clients we have helped them understand where their digital marketing expense is going, and how it’s working. Soon the mindset for digital marketing is looked at as an investment rather than an expense. By sharing results and achieving their goals we show our clients their marketing dollars are being well spent.

Here are the metrics we discuss with our clients.

Website Traffic

Unless you are a startup, generating some traffic to a website is the easy (easier) part of digital marketing. Depending on the size of your organization, you may have a sales team hitting the pavement, radio ads being rolled out, direct mailers or even a full page ad in a industry specific magazine. What’s interesting is that after all these traditional marketing efforts, the user always ends up at a company website. It’s just today’s human behavior to search online before committing to anything.

Since we keep in track of our client’s website traffic, we are able to talk about patterns and online trends that are developing on their site. After a period of time, we are able to pin point where and how our clients can take the most advantage of their efforts and gain more traffic.

Lead Generation

Once you have all this website traffic, the next question that shows up is, now what? What are you going to do with that traffic? Is it quality traffic or is it just ghost spam that’s gone wild creating mayhem in your traffic report.

Discussing with our clients the amount and type of leads that are generated from the website is very important. For those who struggle with picking up the phone, the concept of cold calling, successful inbound lead generation could leave that in the past. The user made the first move by showing interest in your product and/or service so your communication is no longer “cold.”

Once the user shows interest, we can start to determine how qualified they are as a lead. Maybe it’s a good idea for sales to follow up right away, or maybe the lead needs to be nurtured before they’re ready to make a purchase. Either way, we now have another metric to measure our efforts and to show our clients.

Customers

The ultimate goal for many organizations is to convert those marketing efforts into customers, readers, buyers, members, donors, etc. It is important to distinguish the value of this customer who converted on your website. What is the actual dollar amount behind this customer and what was the path that led them there?

These are crucial metrics we discuss with our clients. This helps us determine how aggressive we would need to be with our digital marketing efforts to help our clients achieve their goals.

We’ve found that these three metrics provide our clients that tangible element and help them understand what they get in return when investing in digital marketing.

If you are just getting started with digital marketing, feel free to download our inbound marketing checklist to help point you in the right direction. You can download it here.

How Dynamic Online Patient Forms Can Save Your Medical Practice Time and Money

Website Development • Posted on July 9, 2015

When you’re feeling sick, achy, or are in pain the last thing you want to do is fill out a long patient form while waiting to be attended. 15 to 30 minutes can go by and that person maybe still waiting in pain.

We have noticed that many medical practices aren’t taking full advantage of their website to improve their administrative process. A well built website can help your office with everything from scheduling appointments to completing new patient forms that integrate with your current system.

Here’s how we helped our client save time and money at their medical practice.

A Secure Online New Patient Form

Online patient forms can be long and extensive. We wanted to make sure the online experience went smooth for new patients, so we created an online new patient form that was dynamic. This means, depending on the new patient’s response to a question, he/she is prompted more options. For example, “Are you allergic to anything?”. If the answer was yes, it would display more options. If the new patient selects no, he/she could just move on to the next question.

For our client, hacking and spamming was a major concern. We wanted to make sure our new patient’s information was submitted safe and secure. Therefore we made sure the online form was secure and followed all guidelines. This created a peace of mind for everyone.

Administrators Notified By Email

Once an online new patient form was completed and securely submitted, all assigned staff members received a notification by email. With all the junk email going on these days, we wanted to make sure the email subject line was descriptive. By adding the new patient’s first name and last, the staff knew who the new patient was before opening the email.

Taking the Practice Productivity to the Next Level

With time we discovered our client receiving an email notification with patient information wasn’t doing all it could do to increase the practice’s productivity. The print out of the email notification became confusing for the doctor to review because it looked different from the forms their patients filled out in person. Therefore finding information for the doctor became challenging and was creating confusion.

Our solution was to include an attached PDF with the notified email. We then match the design of the new patient form print out used at the practice. Now, once a new patient form is securely submitted, the new patient’s information is dynamically laid out in an attached four page PDF matching the practice’s new patient form print outs including HIPAA compliance.

This website feature is now saving time in the administrative process and saving precious appointment time. At the end we have happy patients and an efficient medical practice.

How were you able to increase productivity at your practice? Please feel free to share your experience below.

How Important is Responsive Design for Your Website?

Responsive Design • Posted on June 26, 2015

Responsive Design: How important is it really?

You may have already heard of Google’s Mobile-Friendly update by now. This recent update, which many are calling Mobilegeddon, can hurt your search rankings if your website is not responsive. If you’re curious to see how your website is performing mobile wise, you can find out by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool. The tool will give you a pretty good idea if your company website needs improvements or not. At the end of the day, if you’re company website is not responsive, chances are your visitor will simply leave and find your competitor that is.

The responsive design concept for websites in nothing new. Terms such as; liquid structures, fluid grids, percentages and ems have become an attraction for years now. Here are a few reasons why it’s important to have a responsive design:

1.) Say Goodbye to Creating a Website Per Device

Stop the madness! Do you have any idea how many different types of mobile devices are out there? I can’t even imagine building a website for each one. It’s just crazy to think how much production and expense that would be for our clients. Not to mention when new devices come out, will you need to create a new website for that as well?

2.) Retain Your Mobile Visitors

We can talk about mobile vs desktop stats all day but the fact is if your website is not mobile friendly you are losing business. How long does it take your first time mobile visitors to call you, find your address, or learn your operating hours? If you are selling products, how quickly can your client buy through a mobile device? It’s time to retain that mobile traffic, and gain better qualified leads through inbound marketing, and increase those sales instead of losing them.

3.) Flexible Across the Board

The issue is there’s always going to be a new touch screen device where the screen size varies. The bright side is their shapes do not vary. There are no mobile devices that are circles or triangles… last I checked at least. For now, it’s safe to say they are all rectangle. One less thing to worry about. I have to admit, this is probably one of the features I enjoy the most. The ability for images to enlarge or scale down when they need to, menus disappear and simplify into small boxes and grids morphing and adapting to a portrait or landscape positioned mobile device.

4.) Mobile Experience is Crucial

This is the age where simple, efficiency and ease of navigation is key. Having the ability to scroll through content and being able to call directly without typing in the number is key. A one click (two max) access to more information or to buy is key. Big, finger-friendly buttons and large fonts… is definitely key.

5.) Better Search Results

Last, if one of the main goals for the organization is to be visible on Google or to improve search results, then having a responsive design for your company website is a must. As I mentioned earlier, Google is giving out brownie points if your website is responsive. There are other elements that come to play for achieving a great mobile experience such as; image optimization, download time, and compressing CSS and JS files. Ultimately, if the responsive design talk is on your to-do list, you’re off to a great start.

What other benefits do responsive design websites have? Share your opinion with us in the comments!

If you’re rebuilding your website, please feel free to download our free ebook with helpful tips on how to get started.

Success Story: Mann Family Dental Inbound Marketing Case Study

Inbound Marketing • Posted on June 19, 2015

Local Dentist Success Story: Mann Family Dental Case Study

Mann Family focused on outbound tactics like print and mailers. They were able to manage and edit their site but had no SEO plan. They needed a website redesign and an inbound marketing strategy.

270% – Increase in web traffic

10x – Increase in leads

50% – Increase in new patients generated from website

About Mann Family Dental

Mann Family Dental provides comprehensive dental care in a caring and relaxed environment. Their friendly and knowledgeable team helps their patients achieve optimum dental health while providing a comfortable environment. Mann Family Dental offers comprehensive family care, cosmetic dentistry, sedation dentistry and implant dentistry. They also provide emergency care.

Challenges

Before starting with Schall Creative, Mann Family Dental relied mostly on print advertising and some PPC. Their website wasn’t generating leads and leads that did come in weren’t converting into patients. They knew they had to make a change but they were hesitant to partner with us due to previous bad experiences with other digital marketing firms.

Mann Family Dental wanted their website taken to the next level and implement an inbound marketing plan that would give them clear results.

Developing a solid content strategy to drive traffic and convert leads

A key part of our digital strategy was organic SEO and content creation. The more broad search terms like “Dentist NH” had a lot of competition, so we focused on long tail keywords that prospective patients would be searching for. Our strategy worked, and after a few months of blogging consistently, their organic traffic started to take off.

In the first year, Mann Family Dental’s website visits had increased by 200%.

Website Design and Usability That Converts Visitors into Leads (and patients!).

While we were blogging away, they saw an immediate increase in phone calls from people who found their website. We can attribute this to the design and usability of the new site. People pay attention to how a website looks, and will hit the back button if it doesn’t meet their standards. The new site captured the users’ attention and led them to convert. In the first 12 months, their new patients per month increased by 50%, and all of those new patients found the practice online.

A social strategy to engage current patients and spread word of mouth referrals

A great dental office like Mann Family Dental is bound to receive lots word of mouth referrals from their current patients. We used their social media strategy to strengthen and increase that organic referral web by engaging with their patients on Facebook.

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Inbound Marketing Challenges; Adapting After 3 Months of HubSpot

Inbound Marketing • Posted on June 16, 2015

After we launched our first inbound marketing campaign for the agency, 24 hours went by and our first lead came in. Simply said, it was a rush. 48 hours went by and another came in. I couldn’t believe it. I would literally malfunction each time they came in and would refresh the browser a couple times for some weird reason. At the rate we were going, our online leads for the end of the month had to be good.

Sadly to say, the excitement didn’t last long and a few leads would trickle in for the next couple months. You would think that by your 6th year in business you would have clear answers to; Who are our readers? What is our one laser focused marketing strategy? Who is that top tier persona we’re aiming for? The focus on our own marketing efforts turned out to be more difficult than expected.

As we face these inbound marketing challenges, our traffic has improved but we have yet to close our first client using our HubSpot strategy. Here are a few areas we are reevaluating and focusing on to help improve our own inbound marketing efforts.

Determine That Top Tier Persona

Really digging deep on who exactly you will apply all your online efforts to one persona is key. Our OCD kicked in so of course we created five target personas. Technically we had no strategy and our efforts were all over the place. We are still looking to finalize our niche, but this is something we are just now prioritizing.

Strategic Blogging

Of course we did not eat our broccoli first for this one. We dove in immediately with design and web development. We left writing for last. When we started writing, we had everyone at the agency involved. Our hallway discussions were, “Hey, what’s your topic this week?”. Instead of, “Who are you writing to this week?”. When we looked at all blogs by the end of the month, each blog was speaking to someone different. Now, most of our time is invested on blogging the right content to two targets max. Design and development has become secondary.

Email Marketing

We started sharing our blog post through emails. We were hesitant about this since the emails were our own contacts. These are all businesses we know personally, businesses we see frequently at networking events and companies we do business with. We only started this recently and it’s been interesting to discover we have readers. Now each time we think of a topic, we think about what they would like to read. As simple as this may seem, this list of contacts has helped us tremendously to determine what to write about and most importantly, discover to whom are we writing to. This has been a struggle to uncover for many at the agency and email marketing was a solution.

Take Advantage of Top Visited Pages

For many years we’ve had contact forms on our website. They were never filled out so we removed them about a couple years ago and replaced them with simple contact information. Tuesday mornings we have strategy meetings and we looked at our top visited pages. It turned out that our contact us page was number one. We updated this page with a HubSpot online form and within the week we had conversions. It could be that our previous online form was setup with the wrong questions. We will continue to monitor our top visited pages and determine how we can take advantage of the traffic.

How has your inbound marketing experience been so far? Are you having similar struggles or are they completely different? Feel free to comment them below and maybe we can divide and conquer together faster.

Side note: I’ll make sure to share stats a month or two from now to see how our new efforts are panning out. I’ll make sure to share what has been working for us as we continue to use HubSpot, and any other inbound marketing challenges we may run into.

How to run an Inbound Marketing Campaign

What to discuss with your CEO before hiring a digital marketing agency

Web Strategy • Posted on June 13, 2015

There’s a common situation that tends to happen when organizations are ready to make a change with their marketing efforts. It could be that the year is ending and it’s time to reevaluate those numbers. You’ll want to figure out if your marketing dollars were well spent and what the outcome was. What channels were most productive and which ones failed miserably? How do we exclude the noise and determine a strategy that will give us efficient results? What would it take to achieve those results?

When we first sit down with a VP of Marketing or Marketing Manager, our questions are centered around the organization’s goals. If the person in charge of marketing is not included in company goal discussions and are not prepared to answer these types of questions, we will assign them homework so that we can discover together if their organization is ready to hire a digital marketing agency like us.

If you have been given the task of hiring a digital marketing agency for your company or organization, discuss these things with your CEO first. Marketing is not just arts and crafts, so don’t be afraid to get that CEO involved.

Contractor or Partner

When thinking about hiring a marketing agency, does the organization need a contractor or a partner? Are you explaining your goals and challenges, and counting on an agency to get you there? Or do you know exactly what needs to get done and you just need someone to execute.

CEO Vision

The marketing team needs to have a clear idea of what the CEO envisions for the company. What would their ideal marketing partner do for them? If you don’t know this, you run the risk of allocating a lot of time and effort vetting out a company that the CEO doesn’t want to partner with.

Budget

Some organizations will tell their marketing team to go out and get a bunch of quotes. But you want to make sure you know your ballpark before you contact an agency. Some questions to ask your CEO would be; How much did we allocate to marketing last year and to which channels did that investment go? Are we looking to cut expenses or become more aggressive? What amount of sales are we looking to bring in from our website or inbound marketing campaign? These are key questions that will save everyone time.

Timeline

It is helpful to know what the CEO expects in regards to timeline. For some organizations there is an urgency to go live due to upcoming events or recent changes. Others just want to make sure it’s done right. A clear understanding when a project should start and when it should launch is vital.

Expectations

Last but not least, what are the CEO expectations for the hired marketing efforts. You would be surprised that by the time the meeting takes place, no one in the room has a clear focused answer on what the organization is looking to achieve. You could be aiming for retention, increasing traffic, more leads, higher conversion rates, better qualified leads, brand recognition, more sales, or all of the above. What percentage does the organization want to increase these by? Make sure this discussion takes place with your CEO. This way your future marketing partner gets a gauge on how aggressive they would need to be to meet the demands in the ideal timeframe.

Before you schedule your first meeting with a marketing agency, make sure you have these things ironed out. A qualified agency shouldn’t be giving you a proposal unless they know the answers to these questions.

What file format should your logo be?

Logo Design • Posted on June 9, 2015

When working with a new client, one of the first things I ask for is a copy of their logo in a specific file format (usually a vector file). I’ll get one of the two following responses: “whats a vector?” or “will a JPG work?”. There are many different files types for graphics and they all work for different things.

If you’re a marketer and want to understand when to use which file format, then look no further. Even if you’re not a marketer this information can come in handy when working with a logo.

Raster Graphics

The most common images that people are familiar with are raster images. GIF, PNG and JPEG (JPG) are the most popular. Raster Images are made up of small colored pixels on a grid that create an image. Since raster images are created with an exact amount of pixels, they become grainy and distorted when stretched or scaled to a larger size.

JPEG

The JPEG (or JPG) file format is ideal for the use of photography and images that contain intricate colors. When compressed, JPEG files use an algorithm that creates a smaller file but loses quality at the same time. As the file is compressed the image loses information which can be referred to as “lossy compression”. JPEGs aren’t suitable for logos because they don’t support transparency and lose quality. You can pick out a misused JPEG when you see a logo with a white box behind it.

GIF

Pronunciation opinions aside (I pronounce it GIF, for the record), the GIF file format is best used with graphics that contain flat colors. GIFs use lossless compression that recreate the image using the original data. When a file is compressed to a GIF, the algorithm that’s used reduces the file to 256 colors. This method helps with decreasing the file’s size. If you are creating a flat animation to be used on the web, GIF is the best format to use. The GIF will compress to a small enough size without losing the quality. They also can be animated, so that’s pretty cool.

PNG

Similar to GIFs, PNGs are formatted using lossless compression. Ironically, the PNG format was created to replace the GIF file format. This happened because the GIF method for compression was patented. PNG files are better compressed than GIFs resulting in smaller sized files. PNG files also contain far more colors than GIFs which means they work well with complex graphics. PNGs have transparency options that are useful for web and print. Say goodbye to that annoying colored background that makes your logo look like cheap clip art.

Vector Graphics

Vectors are mathematical expressions created using points, curves, lines and shapes. Vectors are more flexible than raster images. Vectors can be edited and sized infinitely without losing quality. All logos and graphics should be created using vector software, and they should always be used in print if possible, especially large format print. The most common vector formats are AI and EPS. If a vector graphic is unavailable or you’re using a photo, you need to make sure every graphic is 300dpi when it’s being printed. Something that looks great on your screen could look horribly pixelated when it comes off the printer.

AI

An AI file is a vector file that was created using Adobe Illustrator. This file can only be opened and edited using Adobe Illustrator. Adobe Illustrator is the most popular software used to create logos and illustrations.

EPS

An EPS file is a universal file that can be used with vector software such as Adobe Illustrator, GIMP, Sketch, Affinity Designer etc.

When in doubt, talk to your production team before sending over files. And make sure you have your logo in every file version stored in a few different places. You should have, at the very least, the following file types of your logo:

For each version (CMYK, RGB & Black/White)

• EPS
• PNG
• JPEG
• GIF

A digital agency that cares.

What is a website audit?

Why do you need a website audit?

Where to start

What is included in an audit?

Google Analytics

Google Search Console

Paid SEO Tools

UX Tools

2013 Website Goals & Challenges

Website & UX Audit

YMCA Camps 2.0

1.) Navigation Menu

2.) Background Video

3.) Online Application Forms

4.) Manageable Countdown

5.) Mobile Menu Navigation

Research Doesn’t End Here

Introducing Invision

They would apply transition effects between screens

Students were able to position overlay menus or pop up windows in specific locations in their prototype

They could share their project with friends and family

They were able to open their final mobile app directly from their smartphone and give it a test drive

The Process

The Outcome

It’s been incredible to see how well our client’s dental website has been performing after applying Growth-Driven Design (GDD) tactics.

1.) Give the people what they want

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2. Best practices don’t always work on landing pages

3.) Mobile compatibility testing is never done

Conclusion

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For years we’ve had discussions on discovering ways to build websites that are as close to perfect as possible. Now with the growth-driven design methodology, we have the opportunity to build a website that is above and beyond our initial expectations.

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Quick Breakdown on Growth-Driven Design

Let’s Take A Look At The PDLT Process In Action

The Outcome After using Growth-Driven Design Techniques

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Traffic

Contacts

Clients

How Did We Achieve This

Our most successful campaigns were hyper focused

Where Are We Going to Make Improvements

Internal Improvements

1.) 57% of Engaged Users Were on a Mobile Device

2.) Most Users Want to See Classes and Programs

3.) People Still Love PDF Schedules

4.) Some YMCA Members Like to Browse Through Daxko

5.) It’s Easy for Daxko Program Tags to Get Out of Control

6.) A Properly Functioning Search Bar Can Do Wonders

7.) Capturing Leads is Easy

What will this website cost me? As a digital marketing agency, it’s only natural for this question to appear often in meetings.

Shortcuts

1. Discovery Phase ( 30 hours* )

1a. Client Interview

1b. User Research

1c. Site Audit / Audience Trend Analysis / Competitor Analysis

1d. Personas

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1e. Content

1f. Information Architecture / Sitemap

1g. Wireframes

2. Creative Phase ( 60 hours* )

2a. Photography / Videography

2b. Moodboard

2c. User Experience Design

2d. User Interface Design

2e. Prototyping

3. Development Phase ( 60 hours* )

3a. Content Management System

3b. Functionality

3c. 3rd Party Integrations

3d. Responsive

4. Debugging Phase ( 20 hours* )