Thanks to the highly predictable online ad network provided by Google and other players in the industry, getting traffic is now a fully scalable process. But what do you do with those visitors once they land on your website? This is the most persistent challenge most professionals working in the online media space are faced with today. Luckily for us, a few good Samaritans have taken it upon themselves to provide us with the tools and means to accomplish just that.
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Automattic – Open source meets flawless coding
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“Code is poetry,” they proclaim. Automattic is the company that brought to us the beautiful CMS we now know as WordPress. But if you thought that WordPress was all that Automattic ever created, think again. Over the years, Automattic has done more than its fair share in reinventing the web and making it a more lively and interactive place. They’ve built PollDaddy, one of the most robust and widely used survey platforms on the web. They’ve also built BuddyPress, a community oriented CMS which features user profiles and micro-blogging integration.
The most interesting facet of their work philosophy is their strong support of Open Source technology – since most of their products are built around it, Automattic has fostered a global culture of contributing developers – enthusiasts all across the world doing their bit to improve existing products free of cost. Aside from design and development, Automattic also organizes open events all across the globe to facilitate networking among people working in the field of digital and online media.
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Gigya – The science of user engagement
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Who wouldn’t want to make their site more social? From large enterprises to online magazines, everyone wants a piece of the social pie – to not just draw visitors to websites, but also engage them in ways that establish and maintain a sustained partnership. This is exactly what Gigya promises to do. With clients like USA Today, Verizon, Universal, PCmag, CBS and TBS, Gigya has proved that when it comes to online social engagement – their platform is second to none.
Gigya’s interaction with your visitors begins right after they land on your website, social logins help to make the process of signing-up a breeze and the identities thus created are centrally managed – giving you valuable insight into your readers. Beyond the basics, Gigya provides tools to analyze and increase your traffic, build and sustain communities and increase reader loyalty by employing a user reward system based on the principles of game mechanics. Gigya is probably the best thing that can ever happen to your web strategy.
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NorthSocial – Redefine your Facebook business page
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The people at NorthSocial do one thing and they do it really well – they make simple yet powerful applications to increase the social capabilities of your Facebook business page. Since their launch in 2006, they have helped some of the biggest brands in the world raise their levels of visitor (and customer) engagement. They’ve made it possible to convert a plain Facebook business page into a traffic hook and branding tool.
Once you sign up with NorthSocial, you get a bouquet of applications to pick and choose from – each serving their own well-defined purpose. These applications are backed by helpful D.I.Y videos and written guides. From there on, you can use what apps you want to create an experience for your Facebook page users. What’s effectively happening here is these apps taking away the custom design and development overhead that goes into creating such an experience – while still retaining all the functionality that you may need. One caveat though, in the end, it is your design that will make or break your campaign, NorthSocial provides you with valuable tools, not creative resources. Oh wait…
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Hubspot – Stop marketing and be found instead
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Right from the health of your website to the effectiveness of your social media efforts, Hubspot provides you will tools to monitor and manage it all. If you’re worried about the high bounce rate of your websites or if your lead conversion rate has become the veritable Achilles heel – Hubspot has the solution for you. The first place you may want to start with is by testing the current status of your online properties, for this purpose specifically – Hubspot runs a website called Grader which is essentially a suite of benchmarking tools for your website, blog, Twitter account, and even press releases.
The core principle around which the all-in-one marketing platform of Hubspot works is that instead of spending money on paid traffic, a fundamental shift in thinking is needed so as to improve the structure, experience and interface of the website in ways to make it searchable to the intended users. So now when a user reaches you, it translates into a higher conversion rate because this constitutes what is called a “hot lead”. Based on these principles of inbound marketing, you can improve the search engine visibility, social engagement and visitor conversion of your website. So before marketing your online properties, make your online properties marketable. Hubspot also runs this great blog and has a repository of marketing guides and practices for online marketers.
About Vishveshwar Jatain
VJ is the associate editor of wireframe. He loves writing, cooking, technology, life hacks, weird people, strange things, and his alone time. When not creating a ruckus about the rampant misuse of apostrophes, he can be found writing stories about startups, entrepreneurship and social web.
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