Hello,
From speaking to people around me they don't like much personalisation at all - even getting creeped out when they visit a website, only to find themselves "re-marketed" when they visit a different website. Additionally, I read consumers are starting to prefer emails without their first name in. In a way, with privacy such a big issue and stories like Google reading all Gmail emails... maybe the trend in future will be one of decreasing personalisation over increasing!

Hello - if you have budget I would go for a new, responsive design as that takes out all the hassle for you. However, one great alternative is dudamobile.com - if you have a simple 5-10 page site you can create your own here (so easy, you don't need to be a developer at all) and pay around $6 per month to host. It's a fantastic service and solves the problem if you're looking for a quick, cheaper fix.

Hope that helps!

Charlotte

Hello – such a big and interesting topic! I work with a number of B2B companies and find often (rather surprisingly) customers are a) simply unable to get in contact because the contact page is so diluted within the site and b) the site is too wordy.

When the services on offer are on the corporate side I’ve found website owners want to stick thousands and thousands of words of copy with complex brochures and other text, this disparity between what works for them offline and what works online seems to create the difficulty for potential online customers.

We actually ran some simple A/B testing for one client and the results spoke for themselves – a simple move of the contact tab, few font changes and a lot of deleted text later the conversions came in. It’s amazing how easy it can be to improve the conversion funnel and customers’ ease of use, but testing is the key I feel.

Be interesting to see what other people reply to this thread.

One great free tool is HootSuite where you can manage all your social media scheduling though it's vital to still handle your interaction in real time. I'm still a big advocate of PPC which is obviously paid but do some research first so you don't lose budget. If you're looking to test some of your converting pages to make the most out of your website I'd recommend Optimizely, this is paid but only costs around £13 per month and their support staff are fantastic. Additionally Rankwatch is a brilliant way of keeping an eye on rankings - you can track 250 words for about £19 per month from memory.

There seem to be a mix of opinions here - some great comments. In my personal opinion I'm with the comments at the top, I believe social media to be a whole different entity, it's fast and things need to be done in real time, including customer service. I think it should be a separate department as it's only growing - particularly with the diversification of platforms such as Vine, Instagram and SnapChat.

I agree that financial indicators are by far the best indicator of success, a company I work for specialises in ROI and has recently implemented a process of business scorecarding to evaluate L&D initiatives when financial gains are hard to measure - it looks to be working well.

Thank you!

I see more and more companies that have an in-house social media person nowadays - it seems as though businesses large and small are taking it very seriously. The ability for damage control in real time is incredibly valuable but for me social media isn't primarily a selling tool, I perceive it as more of a reputation management tool. Financial gains from improving experience in my opinion can be much higher.

Hi there,

SEO is a long term game, PPC is more immediate (a good campaign can take only three months to get really good results) but PPC is obviously more pricey and once you stop it, you stop getting leads. For a startup though, generating organic traffic is going to be an uphill battle for a good few months so I'd recommend doing some PPC initially (look into the ins and outs of this first so you don't lose all your budget!) whilst you look at some SEO in the background.

Hope that helps!

Charlotte