At HubSpot, we don’t just build the tools that marketers use for lead nurturing—we do quite a bit of lead nurturing ourselves. We’re constantly working to figure out how to drive the best results and how we can help our customers do it easily and effectively.

Here, we take a step back to look at some of the best practices we’ve developed for effective lead nurturing. Execute on these fundamentals, and you’ll be well on your way to an effective lead nurturing program.

Sufficient Inbound Lead Volume Is the Most Important Factor in Lead Nurturing Success

In order to practice effective lead nurturing, it’s critical that you first have a steady stream of inbound leads to nurture. While this seems obvious, the gravity of what this entails is something many marketers overlook. Ironically, it’s also the hardest part of the equation to put in place.

Now, you might be thinking, “But I have a database of 50,000 names I’m sitting on!” While an existing database can be a valuable asset to leverage, there are two main reasons why an existing database will only take you so far.

First, industry research has shown that the average marketing database expires at the rate of 25 percent per year as people switch jobs, email addresses, unsubscribe, etc. Although this may not sound like a lot, at this rate a database of 50,000 leads will be reduced to just 21,000 after three years, meaning you’ll need to generate a significant number of new leads per year just to fight against natural attrition. The more often you hit your list with nurturing emails, the faster it expires, and any growth must come above and beyond that 25 percent loss.

While database expiration affects every list regardless of whether you’re doing lead nurturing, it becomes more apparent when you actually start marketing to your list. Junk addresses (previously valid addresses that have expired) and people who don’t want to hear from you are immediately removed every time you attempt a send. Expect to take a big hit right off the bat if you haven’t marketed to or maintained your list over time.

Second, inbound leads—people who have actively expressed interest in your product or service on your website—are more likely to evolve into customers over time. Contrast the value of a lead who actively expressed interest in your content versus a member of a list you bought. Establishing a pipeline of quality inbound leads will take you further in the long run.

Generating a steady stream of inbound leads isn’t out of reach for most marketers. At HubSpot, we’re big believers in inbound marketing, which is a larger set of practices that encompasses lead nurturing and other activities like SEO, blogging and social media. It’s a winning strategy for organizations of every size, and it’s what we use to generate 70,000 leads in an average month.

A Look at an Effective Campaign

Below is a screenshot of what we call a Workflow Recipe—one of several nurturing strategies that has worked exceptionally well for us. (We’ve packaged up many different “recipes” we know to be effective, giving our customers the ability to install these campaigns into their own HubSpot account and start using them.)

We consider a subscriber to be someone who has expressed an interest in our content by signing up for a regular email digest of our blog, for example. They aren’t necessarily a lead, but we know they’re at least connected to our space. That’s the trigger for this nurturing campaign—all new subscribers get added to it.

We nurture these folks by sending them a steady stream of some of our most popular offers. Each of the offers is something they’re likely to find useful. It includes a brief reminder of our product and what we do, along with an opportunity to learn more about our software.

If a subscriber expresses an interest in our software, they’re converted into a lead—the goal of this campaign. Once this happens, the campaign stops for them and they’re added to a new, more product-focused campaign.

If they get use out of our content but never express an interest in our product, they remain in the subscriber nurturing campaign. When this happens, it’s still a victory for us, because we’ve established goodwill with the subscriber, helped them learn something they can use and maintained a line of communication. When we provide useful content, it’s always a win-win.

Create Useful, Valuable, “Lovable” Content

Thanks to information gleaned from the Internet, buyers now come to the table much more informed than they were before. They can also easily tune out messages that seem interruptive or out of touch.

As a marketer, if you really want your efforts to move the needle, you need to shift away from self-centered marketing and towards more informative, useful content that people actually want to see in their inbox. It requires more time and better creative skills to develop, but the return is far greater than yet another ad buy or product-focused whitepaper.

The Marketer’s Field Guide to Salesforce

Above is one of the dozens of content offers we use to fuel our lead nurturing campaigns. It’s an example of both a useful piece of content and effective segmentation (which we’ll cover in the next section).

This particular offer was an idea derived from both data and the experience of our own marketing team. On the data side, past analysis of our customer base revealed that organizations who use Salesforce are often also a good fit for HubSpot, so it’s a logical audience for us to speak to. From the past experience of our own team, we knew that Salesforce can be daunting for a marketer to wrap their head around if they’re new to the system. And thus, The Marketer’s Field Guide to Salesforce was born.

This particular offer spans 49 pages and serves as an introduction to everything a marketer needs to know about using Salesforce—terminology, an explanation of objects (e.g. account, campaign, event), how a typical Salesforce environment works, etc. It also covers the methodology and best practices behind topics like lead scoring, sales and marketing alignment and ROI tracking.

The Marketer’s Field Guide to Salesforce was designed to be a useful resource to an important slice of potential HubSpot customers. Aside from a call-to-action at the end, HubSpot’s software is rarely mentioned throughout the guide, because it doesn’t have to be. If someone downloads the guide, finds it useful and has an interest or need for a product like ours, we know they’ll follow up to learn more. The goodwill built in the process is the real value to us.

So far, this offer has proven very effective—it’s been downloaded close to 8,000 times and has helped us close a number of new customers. Not bad for a targeted, niche piece of content.

Segment, Segment, Segment

When it comes to lead nurturing, there’s one piece of advice that often holds true for every industry and every organization: a more granular segmentation of your database and campaigns can generate better returns. The tricky thing for many marketers is that they either don’t know where to start, or believe that an ideal segmentation strategy would be too complicated and require too many resources to actually build.

At HubSpot, we’ve created a segmentation formula that’s both easy to get started with and scales nicely over time. If you were to look at our lead nurturing campaigns, we divide them according to two characteristics: persona and lifecycle stage.

Persona refers to one of our several buyer personas—individuals we’ve identified who typically represent good fit customers for HubSpot. These personas are from companies of different sizes that have different interests and needs, so our marketing content must be customized in terms of tone and topic to cater to these distinct audiences.

We use a number of means to bucket our contacts into different personas, including the content they download on our website and details they’ve filled out on our forms, i.e. the “What’s your company size?” question we’ve all been asked. By categorizing leads in this way, we can more easily market to different leads using content, language and other nuances that are most likely to resonate with them.

Here are a few examples of key personas that we’ve identified, along with details on how we approach them differently:

Lifecycle stage refers to where we judge each contact to be in the customer lifecycle. Are they someone who represents a good fit for our product, but aren’t considering a purchase right now? Or are they actively considering a software purchase in the next month? What if they’re an existing or past customer of ours? Marketing to a contact without knowing where they are in the lifecycle stage is the easiest way to come off as tone-deaf.

The intersection of these two characteristics generates a relevant, targeted marketing approach that resonates with our leads. Over time, we’ve built out dozens of campaigns, each of which addresses a different persona-lifecycle stage combination.

Below is an example of a campaign designed for Marketing Mary leads. Since we know this lead is actively considering a purchase, the content is mostly product-focused.

By pursuing this strategy at HubSpot, we’ve scaled up from just a handful of campaigns to dozens of targeted lead nurturing tracks that we’re constantly refining and improving over time.

Take Your Lead Nurturing Beyond Email

Marketers are getting better and better at personalizing their prospects’ experience through email by using context and information they have about each prospect to target the messages they receive. But what about every other touch point with your prospects? What if a prospect clicks on a social media link, or performs a Google search that takes them to another deep page on your blog or website? What about your homepage?

The truth is that in these scenarios, most websites show the same static, generic message that may or may not apply to any one contact, which makes for a crummy prospect experience.

At HubSpot, we use our own tools to do this on many different parts of our website. When a known lead or customer comes to our website, we serve them the next most relevant call to action (CTA). For example, we wouldn’t prompt a lead to sign up for a newsletter they’re already subscribed to, or show them an opportunity to learn more about our software when we could instead invite them to attend an upcoming user group.

The technology to customize CTAs does exist today, and has the power to supercharge your lead nurturing efforts. At HubSpot, our Smart CTA tool allows marketers to easily create CTAs and embed them in their website without design or IT help. They can then control which segments see which CTAs from the HubSpot back-end simply by assigning different CTAs to different segments. A number of third party tools offer similar functionality.

Below you can see a simple example of how we show leads and customers different CTAs on our site that are logical next steps for them to take.

An example of Hubspot’s Smart CTA tool

Map Out Your Lead Nurturing Campaigns to Accomplish Narrowly Defined Goals
Last but not least, it’s easy to get lost in a maze of lead nurturing campaigns and not know exactly what the purpose or goal of a given campaign is, much less how well it’s working to help you meet your overall business goals.

For that reason, it’s critically important to first map out your campaigns (as with the Subscriber Nurturing campaign example) and understand how they work together. If there are three possible campaigns a lead can flow through, do all three aim toward getting your leads to complete the same goal, or do they work in a step-by-step fashion to move leads through multiple stages?

When you start with the end in mind—meaning you have a goal for each campaign before you start building it—creating the campaign and selecting the content it will contain is much easier. This goal might be as simple and obvious as turning leads into customers, or it may be more nuanced, e.g. raising the lead score of leads in a campaign to a certain threshold, or getting leads to demonstrate product interest by signing up for a product-centric webinar. The complexity and structure of your goals will depend on your sales cycle and process.

Don’t Get Overwhelmed!

We’ve covered a few strategic best practices for creating effective lead nurturing campaigns. If you’re just getting started with lead nurturing, the key is not to get overwhelmed. Start with the end in mind, address the biggest groups of your leads first and scale your program as you learn what works and what doesn’t. Once you figure out how to make lead nurturing work for your organization, there’s no end to the level of learning and optimization you can do to improve your campaigns

One of the tools we use, like many other socially engaged businesses, is Hootsuite. This service is great solution for us. Hootsuite’s bulk message scheduling feature is something our core team of content creators and posters use on a daily basis.

The Problem

In order to keep our team organised, mobile and in the loop, we use google drive to draft our content, this includes our spreadsheets with tweets and facebook posts (times, message body, link). These tweetsheets have one minor flaw…

How do we character count in a spreadsheet to avoid wasting time?

When we’re creating tweets, there’s a character limit. In our spreadsheet, we have no way of knowing if we’re exceeding that limit. If we’ve exceeded the limit, we find out when upload the document to Hootsuite. This results in repeated submission and wastes time.

One of the features within Google spreadsheets is ‘Scripts’.  We can set up a script to tell us when our character count is above the limit set by sites like Twitter and Facebook.

The good news for all of you is that its really simple!

The Solution

Step 1

Create a Spreadsheet

Step 2

Navigate to:
Tools > Script editor… (This will open a new tab)

Step 3

Select spreadsheet

Step 4

You’ll see  this example script,
Highlight the text, and replace it with this:

function onEdit(e)
{
  var activeCell = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getActiveCell();
  var activeCellValue = activeCell.getValue();
  var length = String(activeCellValue).length;
  if(length>115)
    {
      activeCell.setComment("Length is greater than 115 characters, Length is: " + length );
      Browser.msgBox("Length is greater than 115 characters, Length is: " + length );
    }
    else
    {
      activeCell.clearComment()
    }
}

Step 5

Navigate to: File > Save
Name your script eg: ‘115 Character limit’

Step 6

Job done!

So… What did we just do?

For Twitter, when you include a link, the main body of your tweet (when scheduling though hootsuite) has a limit of 115 characters.  Knowing this, we implemented the above script within our scheduling template.

If you go over the 115 character limit, a comment box pops up saying:

“Length is greater than 115 characters, Length is: <number of characters within the cell>”

This can be used with any service hootsuite supports, the only edit you need to make is to replace all occurrences of ‘115’ with the desired limit (facebook is ‘440’).

Do you have some time saving tips? Let us know – we are always looking for ways to improve!

Interested in learning more?
http://canopymedia.ca/respond-to-your-customers-automate-your-social-media-solutions
http://canopymedia.ca/dont-spread-yourself-thin-focus-on-success-you-can-manage

In this day and age, many unsolicited business calls go unanswered. Modern sales and marketing professionals are up against savvy buyers that are more empowered than ever by easy access to detailed product information on the Web.

Everyone is connected to the latest information. And if buyers don’t want to hear from marketers, they have a variety of technologies (e.g. Caller ID, email spam filters, etc.) to block out marketing attempts to get in touch. But surely some people are able to get through all these defense mechanisms and land that one magical deal. Or are they?

That was the subject of the Software Advice site’s latest Google+ Debate, “Does Cold Calling Still Work?” The panel, moderated by Derek Singleton, brought together inbound marketing and inside sales experts to debate three questions:

• Given how the Web has empowered B2B buyers, is cold calling still relevant in the Internet Age — and are companies still generating a return on investment (ROI) on it?
• With other lead generation activities on the rise, like paid search and content marketing, can cold calling help marketers stand out from the noise?
• Can inbound marketing and analytics help us better decide who to cold call and when?

Here are the takeaways from the debate:

1) Cold Calling is Shifting to Warm Calling

Understandably, every panelist agreed that cold calling (in it’s original form) is decreasing significantly in effectiveness. Furthermore, there is no excuse for business calls to be random and unsolicited anymore. In the words of Anneke Seley, Founder and CEO of Reality Works Group, “in this day and age, there’s no excuse for a call to be cold anymore.”

That is, with so many options for connecting with people on the Web (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook) it’s very easy to find out information about your prospect before you pick up a phone. And they, in turn, can learn a little about you before you commit to a call. The group called this “warm calling.”

2) Only Call the People that Come to You

But Mike Volpe, CMO of HubSpot, thinks that marketers can take it one step further and not even waste time reaching out in this manner. Volpe believes that the world is shifting away from any type of outbound marketing and that your inside sales team should only reply to inbound inquiries because you already they’re interested in your product or service.

Meanwhile, Volpe explains that inbound marketing tactics like SEO and PPC that are significantly cheaper that doing things like employing a great sales rep to make outbound calls. And he says it’s also a much less invasive approach to contacting buyers.

3) Find a Happy Medium by Employing Both Tactics

Of course, there’s usually room for middle ground. And that’s where Ken Krogue, President of InsideSales.com, sided on the debate. According to Krogue, InsideSales.com relies very heavily on inbound marketing tactics but the leads they generate by purely inbound means just aren’t high enough value. So he turns to very targeted outbound calling after warming up contacts. To quote Krogue:

“If we [at InsideSales.com] just rely on the Internet to bring us leads, it’s like a fish sitting in a pond waiting for the river to bring whatever it brings them. What we’ve found is that if you look at a typical bell curve, 70 percent of all the leads that come in are small. For example, we’re moving up to enterprise class companies and we have to forget about the Web bringing us those leads and have to reach out to initialize the conversation (usually through calling), then we move to a Web-based type of nurturing.”

4) In any Case, Marketing is Becoming Permission-Based

One point each panelist could agree on was that lead generation is shifting toward a permission-based model of marketing. This means marketing will need to evolve into being about showing buyers how valuable you are, and ultimately getting them to come to you. If you aren’t demonstrating your value in a tangible way, then buyers will increasingly look over your company and not engage with your marketing efforts.

What are your thoughts on the evolution of outbound and inbound marketing? Share your thoughts in the comments below. To read the full article, visit the B2B Marketing Mentor.

No customer is too big or small for A1 Toilets. Since 1989, A1 Toilet Rentals have been serving Grey Bruce, and Simcoe County with reliable service, cleanest and most modern units available on the market today. From backyard celebrations to long-term military contracts, A1 toilets offer the same upstanding, reliable customer service.

Here at Canopy Media, we love working with great clients. Businesses that model the same professionalism as Canopy Media are a great fit for us. So when A1 approached us to redesign their website, we were thrilled.

A1 Toilets Offer:

Portable Toilets

• Standard
• Deluxe
• Executive Deluxe
• Handicap – Wheelchair Accessible

Portable Sinks

• Single Handwash Station
• Double Handwash Station
• Sink Trailer – 8 +
• 4 – Person Handwash Station

The A1 Toilet Rentals Guarantee :

“Every unit we deliver has been thoroughly cleaned and inspected to make sure it is in the best possible condition for your event or jobsite.

Our courteous staff will work with you to find the best possible location for the unit when we arrive onsite.

When we are finished setting up for your event the units will be fully stocked with all products. You are not required to do anything.

Our delivery and pick-up times are arranged around your schedule and we also have employees on standby in case of emergency during your event.”

What they needed from Canopy Media

To be honest, A1 simply needed a web presence that reflected their real-world dedication to professionalism – online. Their old website didn’t deliver information about their products. Nor did it deliver what little information there was professionally. But A1 couldn’t edit their site. They couldn’t get it up to date. This is why we built A1 a website they can easily edit and that delivers their information effectively. A quick value proposition, a few calls-to-action and now A1 has a website that not only explains their business, but a website that gets them business too.

How to reach A1 Toilet Rentals

Contact A-1 Toilet Rentals today at 519-599-2859 to learn more about the different kinds of portable toilets they have available, or visit the A1 Toilets website at http://a1toiletrentals.ca/.

Implementing this one strategy – keyword prominence – can mean the difference of whether or not your website is found over the millions of others being searched. It’s not a massive factor in search engine rankings, but it’s vital.

And the concept is one you’re already familiar with; it’s much like reading the newspaper.

Imagine it this way: You get up in the morning and grab your daily newspaper. You sit down to breakfast, coffee in hand, and what’s the first thing you do? You read the headlines. What are you looking for? Simply put, you’re looking for the ones that immediately grab your attention. Out of the numerous articles that you could read, you scan through quickly to decipher what are the most interesting, compelling, and relevant articles to you. And you do it in seconds.

That’s exactly what keyword prominence is to search engines like Google: it’s strategically placing the words or word phrases in your website where search engines will look for them.

Keyword prominence is defined as the location (or placement) of a particular word in the HTML source code of a web page. The rule is: the higher up a given word is on the web page, the more weight is assigned to it by a search engine when a user is searching for that word. Here are some general rules where keywords should be placed:

1. Title
2. Headings
3. Top of paragraph
4. Beginning of a sentence
5. Start of a web page

Let’s look more closely at why keyword prominence is important to your website SEO strategy. Think back to our previous analogy. Imagine you heard about a major fire that just happened in your town and you want to find that article in the local newspaper. Instinctively, you know where to look first – the front page. Apart from photos, you would scan the headlines. If it wasn’t on the front page, you would then turn the page and check on page 2, then 3, and so on. You would never jump from the first page, then the last page, and back to the middle of the newspaper.

Also, you always know that the word “fire” would appear somewhere near the top: in the headline or first few sentences. It’s because you know the rules of how to search through a newspaper that you can find the article you’re looking for. Very similar rules apply to the search engine optimization of your website.

If you typed the word “fire” into a search engine like Google, the rule of keyword prominence will scan the HTML code from the top of the website down, locating the keyword “fire” and place your website page in search engine rankings accordingly. If your website strategy uses keyword prominence, placing keywords in the right locations, you have a greater probability of your website being found.

Using strategies like this can determine whether or not internet users will find your website in their search. Contact us to implement strategies like this to help optimize your website.

What To Expect

Click-through rates have decreased over time, as Internet users have learned to look past the ads vying for their attention. The average CTR in the 1990s was about 3 percent. Today, click rates can be as low as 0.1 to 0.3 percent. How the viewer arrives at your ad is a consideration when determining the success of your click-through rates. A user is more likely to click on an ad if he or she found it via a search, because they found it while looking for specific information. If a display ad pops up while someone’s browsing a website, they won’t be as likely to click on it.

Why Do Click-through Rates Matter?

The click-through rate can help measure the success of your online advertising or email campaign. It can be an indicator of whether your ad is relevant to the searcher or the audience you present it to. It helps you determine what messages interest your target audience and what resonates with web users. Of course, more clicks mean more potential sales for your business.

When it comes to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, click-through rates affect your quality score, Google’s rating of the quality of your ads and keywords. Raising your quality scores can mean lower costs per click and better positioning for your ads. In turn, a bad click rate can mean higher costs.

5 Tips for Getting A Better CTR: Banner Advertising

1) Have clear goals in mind and find the right audience. Web users will click on ads that are relevant to them.

2) Use top quality graphics and copy. Design creative with your demographic in mind. Select colors, fonts and styles that appeal to your audience.

3) Create an animated or video banner to draw people’s attention. They can perform up to 400 percent better than static ads. That being said, don’t make it tacky. While you want the style, color, size and shape of your ad to stand out, you don’t want to turn people off.

4) Try unusual looking sizes and shapes to get noticed. They are less likely to be associated with typical advertising and so less likely to be overlooked.

5) Run tests on several sites and networks to find out what works and what doesn’t. Some ad content works better with particular sites, while some material works better across an entire network.

Getting A Better CTR: Email Marketing

1) Increase your CTR by first enticing readers to open your emails. Write effective subject lines.

2) Write short emails so that people find your links before they get bored.

3) Include social sharing buttons to encourage readers to send content to friends.

4) Segment your email lists to target the right audience.

5) Write your copy with one purpose in mind (like getting more Twitter followers) rather than confusing your message by making multiple offers.

6) Have a call to action and make it impossible to miss. Create urgency by putting a time limit on your offer.

7) Make sure your emails are optimized for mobile devices.

Check out these posts to boost your online performance:

Choosing the Right Social Media Platform for Your Business
Starting Your First Email Marketing Campaign
Grow Your Web Presence

Website Index Frequency – Why It’s Important

You can spend years putting together an amazing business and then build a stellar website to promote it – but if your site isn’t index-friendly, it won’t get many visitors. If spiders crawl your website frequently, it’s a good sign that it appeals to major search engines like Google. Of course, the more important your site is to Google, the more readers you’re going to get – and the more business you’re going to get!

5 Simple Steps to Improve Website Index Frequency

Make sure your website gets the priority it deserves from major search engines. Use these simple steps to attract more frequent and deeper crawls.

1) Submit your website to the search engines

It can take several weeks for a site to show up in search engine indexes. If your website is new, submit the URL to search engines like Google, Yahoo and AltaVista. To find out whether your site has already been indexed, enter your URL into the various search engines. Register your site with Google Webmaster Tools to get detailed reports about how Google sees your website. You’ll be able to find out your crawl rate, any crawl errors Google has encountered and search query statistics.

2) Update your site regularly

Search engine indexes evolve constantly as content changes on the web, and URLs can switch positions in search results. The more often you update your website, the more often search engines are likely to crawl it. Search engines perform both deep and shallow crawls. On one visit, a search engine might only travel the home page of your site. If it finds new content since its last visit, it might be inclined to crawl deeper into your site next time. Add fresh content to your website as often as possible. Aim for at least three times a week.

3) Add valuable content

It’s not enough to update your pages several times per week – you have to also provide original, valuable content. Sites that are well trusted will be crawled more often than less reliable sites. Low quality, spammy material and lots of duplicate content can cause a site to be crawled less frequently or even removed from search engine indexes. Create useful, information-packed text. Avoid filling pages with lists of keywords. Use text to identify important names, content or links. Crawlers won’t recognize text contained in images.

4) Submit a sitemap

Create and submit a sitemap to major search engines. It will help crawlers to discover more content on your site. Search engine giant Google recommends sitemaps.org to create a sitemap in a format the can be submitted to most major search engines. Be sure to link to your sitemap on the homepage of your website. We almost always put a link to the sitemap in a footer of any website we design.

5) Increase backlinks

Spiders crawl from site to site using links. The more backlinks, or incoming links from other sites, that you have on your pages, the more likely search engines are to crawl them. Ensure that your site is well-linked from other sites, particularly reliable, frequently crawled sites*. See what your competitors are doing to create backlinks using linkdiagnosis.com. Find a competitor who ranks well in search engines and enter their URL into the tool. This will show you which high profile sites link to your competitor’s website. Be sure to also comment on other blogs in your industry, including your web address in your signature.

*For the record, backlinks are having less impact over time as a factor in search engine rankings. In fact, poor quality backlinks have a negative ranking effect.

Here’s more blog posts that will help…

Page Load Time and Why It Matters
Get Better Page Load Times: Causes and Solutions
High Quality Backlinks: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Enterprise Centre

The Small Business Enterprise Centre, based in Collingwood, Ontario, is a premier resource centre helping local businesses and enterprising people start and grow their businesses. The Centre is one of 57 offices located across Ontario that provides support to new and existing businesses during their start-up, development, retention processes and day-to-day operations.

The Enterprise Centre’s services include:

• Free consultations with a qualified business consultant
• Business permits, licences, registration, regulations and other forms and documents required to start and build a business
• Review of business plans
• Up-to-date, leading-edge information geared to the needs of the entrepreneur
• Access to current resource materials including books, directories and trade indexes
• Informative workshops and seminars specifically designed to meet the needs of small business
• Copyrights, patents and trademark information
• Support for student entrepreneurs through the Summer Company program
• Support for residents of the Town of Collingwood, the Town of The Blue Mountains, Clearview Township, and the Town of Wasaga Beach.

The Canopy Media Solution

The Enterprise Centre already had a website when they approached us to help them get control of their website and increase their reach online. Their existing website didn’t allow for self-editing which made keeping content up-to-date difficult. This also meant that content was lacking. The knowledge was there, but the ability to get it out there was not.

Helping an organization which, in turn, helps small and growing businesses was an exciting challenge for us. We analyzed their existing website and online assets and made an action plan that would work for both The Enterprise Centre and their small business clients.

The plan?

- Get control of their online presence with a custom-designed WordPress Content Management System
- Increase the volume of content and resources available to local business
- Grow that content over time with regular blog posts

By making valuable business information easily available through a new and improved menu structure Canopy Media increased the usability of The Enterprise Centre’s site and increased the reach of the information online so more people could easily find it when surfing the web.

The Enterprise Centre staff can now easily edit existing content and draft new material from scratch without the constant need for an outsourced web developer to update their information for them. With the addition of SEO friendly strategies, The Enterprise Centre is now easier to find through local and specific keyword searches.

The Feedback?

“Canopy Media took the Small Business Enterprise Centre’s vision for a website and made it a reality! The team at Canopy Media is extremely professional, creative and easy to work with. They guided us through the website building process by providing excellent direction and recommendations, and prompt feedback and responses to our questions. The Centre is very satisfied with the quality of the work, organization and customer service. We now have a website that provides our customers with significantly more information and the ability to add and update content as needed. Thank you to Canopy Media for their hard work and attention to detail!”

- Gillian Fairley . Collingwood Enterprise Centre

We’ve set The Enterprise Centre up for success so they can worry about helping businesses succeed, and not the condition or usability of their website.

Take a look at The Enterprise Centre website and judge for yourself!

And while this is a loss for our organization, we’re happy to say that Mike will be applying his skill set in a new position with the Parkinson Society of Canada in Toronto, where he will fulfill the role of Communications Co-ordinator.

In the two years that Mike has been in our employ, Mike has represented Canopy Media as a consummate professional. We wish him all the best in his new position.

Enjoy the city and the new job, Mike! Soak it up!

Technical Website Security

Here’s a list of some slightly more technical website security issues and their respective action plans to remedy the situations.

Database vs. No Database

HTML websites might not be the most common anymore but in some ways they are more secure. You don’t need a server to serve your pages to the masses online. Servers are often shared between multiple sites. If one site has a weakness or vulnerability a hacker could conceivably gain access to the database, and in turn your site.

Action Plan: Building yourself a brand new website coded in HTML simply isn’t a reality for everyone. As Mentioned before, the vast majority of sites these days are built on a CMS. The best thing to do, if you can afford it, is to purchase a dedicated server so you aren’t sharing space with other, potentially less secure websites. If using shared hosting, request a dedicated/static IP address to avoid getting blacklisted by search engines, especially if one of the other sites on a shared server gets flagged.

Avoid Using FTP

Often there is a need to move files around, upload new ones and delete old documents from the backend of your website. Everything done in FTP is wide open in terms of lack of encryption. Even login details such as username and passwords are easily located by others looking to use your file transfer protocol transfers as a backdoor into your site. You need to use something more secure.

Action Plan: Use a secure file transfer protocol (SFTP) or a secure shell (SSH) to move files on and off of your server. Using either an SFTP or an SSH to make your transfers keeps your files encrypted and your login details secure. There are many free and premium versions available for download and use online.

Online File Transfer Security

A lot of websites don’t simply deliver information. Many sites these days are active businesses that accept money transactions for their goods and services. Transferring sensitive financial data across an insecure website can be hazardous for your business, your reputation and your purchasing customers. Having a website that is encrypted and secure for online transactions is the way to go.

Action Plan: Buying a secure sockets layer certificate (SSL) will add both a level of trust to your website for online shoppers as well as encrypted security that will allow transactions to be processed online with little to no fear of hacking. Having an SSL installed on your site can even increase your sales due to consumer confidence. If you process online transactions make sure it’s done in a secure manner.

Scanning For Viruses

Sometimes no matter how secure we make our websites a virus or unwanted file will slip through the defenses and make it’s way into your database. If you suspect your site has been infected it doesn’t mean it’s time to scrap it and start from scratch. There are scanning systems, both online and for install, that will allow you to check your website for malware, viruses and suspected corrupted files on your database.

Action Plan: Use one of the scanners linked below and check your site for viruses and malware and put it back to normal with a thorough removal process:

http://www.unmaskparasites.com/security-report/
http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/results/addwrap.com
https://www.avg.com.au/resources/web-page-scanner/

Keep in mind there are more scanners than these listed above. Do a search online and use the scanner that works best for you and your site.

Website Security Wrap-up

Keep in mind that ultimately nothing is completely secure. If a professional hacker really wants to get into your backend they can probably find a way but these online criminals generally look for the low-hanging fruit on the internet tree. They look for weak and vulnerable sites that will provide easy access and move to infiltrate those sites more often than not.

If you go through the protection list above you’ll find yourself closer to the top of the tree and make it that much harder for hackers to access your site. The harder it is the safer you are.

Be vigilant, a secure site makes all the difference.

Here’s more blog posts that will help secure and optimize your website for better results:

Website Security Made Easy
Get Better Page Load Times: Causes and Solutions
Free Inbound Marketing Strategies