Atlantic Business Technologies, Inc.

Author: Atlantic BT

  • Section 508: It’s Time to Update Your Site’s Accessibility

    Is your website accessible for all users, even those with disabilities or undergoing rehabilitation?

    If you’re not sure, it’s time to check. As of January 18 of this year, all federal agencies and any business or organization doing business with these agencies must comply with new accessibility standards under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and Section 255 of the Communication Act (intended to align with the global Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 or WCAG). This means all your websites, web apps, video, and other customer-facing content need to follow the updated rules by January 18, 2018. To guide you on this process, here is a list of frequently-asked-questions.

    What do I need to know about the Section 508 updates?

    1. This sounds like a HUGE change. What specifically do I need to change or update?

    Because the 508 changes are based on WCAG 2.0, you can use this checklist to ensure your site meets their standards. This list is extensive, so here are some summary guidelines to help you meet WCAG standards before you dive into the detailed checklist:

    • Ensure your video content has appropriate subtitles and captions so a hearing-impaired person would be able to consume it.
    • Ensure your images and video content have audio options so a visually-impaired person would be able to consume it.
    • Ensure your site is navigable via a keyboard interface so a movement-impaired user would be able to access your content.
    • Use Semantic Markup and proper Heading Tags so assistive devices will be able to interpret your content for users with special needs.
    • Provide clear text descriptions of where links will redirect users, especially if a link will open a new browser window.

    2. What if I don’t do business with the government?

    Even if your business doesn’t work directly with federal agencies, you need to consider these changes and make a plan to follow them. Section 508’s changes are going to have a lasting impact across the internet landscape, so your customers are going to expect the same service from your technology that they get from websites who must comply. There’s also an excellent chance these requirements could be extended to other organizations after the 2018 deadline.

    3. What’s the penalty for non-compliance?

    The worst-case scenario is you could face a class-action lawsuit, some of which have cost more than a million dollars (after which those organizations still needed to fix their accessibility problems). Even if a complaint doesn’t go to court or result in fines, your reputation could suffer as affected users take to social media to air their grievances. In short, your business is definitely better off making a plan to comply rather than rolling the dice.

    4. If this rule just became official, why is January 2018 the compliance date?

    Though this change just became official, the federal government will not enforce compliance until next year. This gives organizations and businesses like yours time to learn about and implement the needed changes.

    If you’d like a partner to help adapt your website and applications to comply with the Section 508 update, ABT is here to help. Contact us today to schedule a whiteboard session to plan how you will update your content.

  • The CIO Evolution in 2017

    Whether technology is your company’s core business or not, your customers have made tech  front and center. Your customers are empowered with tech and they are taking their expectations from one place to the next. Thanks to innovators like Amazon, we can order detergent at the push of a button and command a pizza delivery from our personal concierge bot. Customers who are accustomed to these conveniences do not have patience for disconnected companies. If you want your company to compete, you need to become technology-centered—and there’s no more important role for this than your CIO.

    Bridging the Tech Gap

    There used to be a separation between the CIO, the business, and the customer. Today, the accessibility of sophisticated research tools coupled with the exponential expansion of data that consumers have access to has bridged that gap. Customers now have enough intel to fill the Library of Congress 100 times over at their fingertips. They are even building their own tech stacks. A tech stack used to only refer to the arsenal of databases, programming languages and frameworks that companies use to build their applications. Nowadays, any organization related to Marketing, Sales, Support Services, or Customer Engagement will have its own specialized tech stack. Extend that even further, to list the myriad of personal productivity, messaging, entertainment, and information sharing technologies that your customers have to choose from, and voila, the consumer tech stack is born.

    As a result, the CIO can no longer operate from the inside out — they must meet and interact with their customers in their world. The CIO is now challenged with moving faster to keep up with the broader business because speed is the deciding factor in the new customer success operating model.

    Moving at Your Customer’s Speed

    Why is speed uniquely important to the CIO? There’s no other role in the organization that has operational engagement across multiple levels. The CIO role used to just focus on IT strategy, an area that touches every organization and department. Meeting the company’s objectives and goals for the CIO meant building and maintaining a robust infrastructure of internal IT systems. But this is no longer enough. The technology that customers use to interact with companies changes regularly, and a company’s internal technology must be able to adapt to those changes if they are to stay in touch with their customers.

    While the demand for progressive pioneers runs throughout the business operational ladder, the customer-focused outlook is new to the CIO, who has traditionally been removed from the outfacing spotlight. For example, millennials now have tremendous buying power and can injure a company’s P&L if organizational leaders don’t prioritize an understanding of their emotions and motivations (which are now far more complex and span multiple touch points). Customer experience and customer engagement are now tied to all areas of the organization from initial contact, to billing, to order fulfillment, to call center support, and shipping.

    Becoming a Chief Digital Officer

    So how does the CIO influence these touchpoints? By taking a strategic look at what their industry is doing and delivering in a way that continuously adds to the customer experience. This lets the CIO guide initiatives that leverage technology to transform their organization into a well-oiled, customer-obsessed machine. These new initiatives can no longer be planned once on an annual basis. They have to be built, experienced, learned, and tested. To lead the charge, the CIO needs to think like a digital disruptor. In a sense, the CIO’s new title is Chief Digital Officer.

    CIOs need to build a new customer-focused vision and evolve their organizations to a more agile and customer-obsessed operating model. The decisions made at the speed of the customer must be linked to outcomes by measuring and analyzing customer data. Customers might have buying and investing cycles that don’t fit into the fiscal calendar box. Refine what the journey towards customer obsession looks like for your organization and make an honest assessment of where you are today. On the practical side, find the internal organizations that you can partner with to gain quick wins, while you’re getting the strategic layers in place. For example, your marketing department may be open to sharing the results of a new data visualization tool with the product management team that is responsible for new releases. Leverage the technology to build stronger customer loyalty systems and you’ll pave the way for a shift that will direct your company’s future towards the downstream current of the new digital movement.

    What are your thoughts on the CIO’s role? Has it been evolving and will the trend continue? Let me know in the comments section below.

  • Lead Generation: Take a Closer Look

    In the age of Google and other web analytics, gathering data on your website’s performance is easy. In a few clicks, you could find out your company’s website is producing 25 leads every week and converting at a 3% rate. How’s that sound?

    This question is where things get more complicated. Are these website statistics good or bad? Should you take action to improve them? And if so, how do you improve these numbers in ways that actually produce results?

    Website lead generation is typically a two-step process. It involves enticing people to visit your website, and then convincing these visitors to take action towards becoming a customer. But knowing which of these two steps needs improvement always starts with research and data. Here’s how to learn if you’re both attracting and converting visitors to your site.

    First, are you attracting quality users to your website?

    Simply increasing traffic does not help you increase leads. Instead, your traffic must be made of relevant visitors who are likely to need your services. Look into your current traffic and lead sources and evaluate how you can improve your lead quality as well as expand your reach into new channels to develop additional qualified lead sources. For starters, ask yourself these questions:

    • Channel Evaluation – Where are your current visitors coming from? Which traffic sources are producing leads, which are not? Are you in all the right channels to attract quality traffic? Do some channels deserve a higher investment of time and effort?
    • SEO and Content Analysis – Is your site properly developed for search engines to recognize your pages and context? Is your content written to allow search engines to understand your business and consumers to find you naturally?
    • Paid Advertising Evaluations – Are you spending your money wisely and attracting the desired traffic? Are you targeting the right customers in the right places? Are you bidding on the right keywords?
    • Advertising Evaluations (Copy and Design) – How do your current advertisements perform? What is your message? Is that message setting the right expectation for your customers? Can your copy and/or design be improved or updated?
    • Competitor Research – Where are your competitors advertising? What are they saying?
    • Testing of New Ideas and Variations – How often do you test new ad copy, designs, content and landing pages? Are you regularly updating your campaigns based on these findings?

    Second, is your website converting visitors into leads?

    Bringing users to your website is only the start of the process. Now your website needs to convince visitors to take action towards becoming customers, such as a filling out a form or calling you on the phone. Everything in your website’s content and design needs to make it easier for your visitors to become leads. Here are questions to help you evaluate your site’s ability to drive visitor action:

    •  Website Usage Monitoring – How do users interact with your website? Is it intuitive or difficult to for the visitor to navigate? Is the conversion point seamless and easy?
    • User Interviews/Surveys – How are you acquiring direct feedback from your real customers? Do you invite users to comment on your site or products? Can you incentivize visitors to complete surveys by offering discounts or promotions?
    • Analytics Reviews – Based on current data, how are visitors interacting with your website? Do you have a conversion funnel that you can track? Is there a common drop-off point?
    • Page Load Evaluation – Do your pages load quickly? Or are slow loading pages causing visitors to leave?
    • Content/Design Evaluation – Is your website visibly appealing and interesting for your visitors to engage with? Is your messaging clear and concise? Do visitors immediately know if you have the service or product that will meet their needs?
    • Mobile-Friendly – Does your website present well on a mobile device? Is the messaging still clear? Is the conversion point easy to access and complete?

    A Living Process of Constant Improvement

    The most important thing to remember about website optimization is it’s a living process. Successful companies constantly work to improve their sites by testing new ad copy, designs, content, landing pages, and strategies. Your site should never stop evolving and progressing to improve the visitor’s experience and reach new audiences.

    What stood out to you in the questions above? Feel free to let me know in the comments section.

  • Pay-Per-Click for Conversions: 6 Ways to Shoot for the Moon

    This year will be known for sweeping changes in pay-per-click advertising. For starters, Google changed our available ad position from eight spaces to three. This increased our competition and the average cost per click. However, even though it now costs more to advertise on Google, the other changes to AdWords give us the chance to produce astounding results.

    Just a warning: Because this article deals with recent changes to Google AdWords, having a familiarity with Google’s PPC platform will help you get the most out of this post.

    Shoot for the Moon with Pay-Per-Click

    If your marketing strategy depends on pay-per-click, I want you to shoot for the moon. The changes this year might seem scary because they were new, but the new features that Google has rolled out give you the ability to make the best campaigns of your life. You can achieve moments of triumph that are the advertising equivalent of scoring the winning touchdown at the end of the second half, or whatever sports-related metaphor gets you going.

    1. Just Rewrite All Your Ads

    Pay-per-click success is easy—just completely rewrite all your ads.

    Seriously though, if you haven’t rewritten your ads since the introduction of expanded text ads, you’re missing out. Expanded text ads increase your options for character counts and take up more space on screen. More space equals more customer attention. Expanded text ads also put a renewed focus on headlines, allowing you to experiment with the headline to drive better ad performance.

    2. Be More Negative

    Campaigns improve the most by cutting the ads that aren’t working. Be relentless in your review of negative keywords and search terms. Eliminate any words that either 1: Have the wrong intent or 2: Prove themselves to be bad keywords.

    Segmented keyword lists are emotionally satisfying.
    Segmented keyword lists are satisfying on a variety of levels.

    3. Get the Best of Both Worlds

    Demographic targeting for search ads gives you the best of both worlds: keyword-focused advertising cross referenced with demographics. You’ll need some quality data about your audience to make this work, but the availability of this option gives you unprecedented precision in targeting your audience.

    4. Identify Audacious Audiences

    AdWords gives you the ability to create audiences based on existing customer data. Some methods could include targeting specific customers for a special offer. Alternatively, you could also exclude audiences from a particular campaign to focus on new customers.

    5. Drive Conversions or Die

    I believe that any pay-per-click campaign should have a conversion action and that tracking is critical to know if your campaigns are producing results. Periodically reviewing your dimensions tab is important to cut historically bad campaigns, ad groups, ads, or keywords. If it doesn’t produce, it dies. Simple as that.

    6. Extend Yourself

    Filling in all those ad extensions is like figuring out every possible deduction on your tax return: it’s tedious work, but it adds up to a bigger return. Here are my picks for great extensions to boost your campaign numbers:

    Location Extensions

    Location extensions allow people to see where your business is located, so these extensions are critical if customers need to physically visit your store to buy something. To set these up, you’ll need to connect your Google My Business account with AdWords.

    Call Extensions

    Call extensions are essential for any service-based business. A lot of people would rather call and talk to a person instead of filling out a form on a website. Make sure you’re tracking these as a conversion and set up number tracking in AdWords.

    Messaging Extensions

    These extensions allow customers to text message you from a mobile ad. This is a good way to tap into younger consumers who would rather text than talk to a sales associate on the phone.

    Price Extensions

    Price extensions allow you to reference products or services in a variety of formats. I like them for two reasons. First, they can act as a filter for value-focused consumers who won’t pay your prices. These people ultimately end up wasting budgets because they participate in the information-gathering phase of how much services or goods costs without actually buying. Second, I believe people who aren’t price-sensitive enjoy the transparency of seeing a real number. This is especially relevant with services where direct comparisons may be difficult.

    Structured Snippet Extensions

    Structured snippets are basically a permutation of callouts. These extensions focus on lists of brands, services, or types of products that a business offers. In my experience, Google is finicky on rejecting these extensions and is often unaware if something is a service or product.

    Structured snippets get into nuanced attributes that you wouldn't mention in a main ad.
    Structured snippets get into nuanced attributes that you wouldn’t mention in a main ad.

    The Future Is Bright

    Make no mistake, it’s tougher environment for pay-per-click advertising. But you can still win big at AdWords if you can adapt to recent changes from Google. The key is taking advantage of every new option available and, above all else, experimenting with every aspect of your campaigns.

    Take the six steps outlined earlier in this post, and you can shoot for the moon with your PPC strategy.

  • ABT to Relaunch Blaze Content Platform

    After years of experience in content strategy and technology leadership, Atlantic BT is proud to add a powerful new tool to our arsenal of expertise. We acquired Blaze’s automated content audit platform after using it to audit and analyze the web content for some of our top clients.

    abtblaze

    What Is Blaze?

    This new content audit platform will be Atlantic BT’s first software-as-a-service, giving us a new and versatile way to empower our clients with digital content strategy. Blaze automates the process of crawling a web domain and sorting its pages into appropriate categories. The platform also makes it easy to share notes, insights, and ideas across a team with universal dashboards and communication tools.

    Here’s a short video created by the Blaze team to explain how the platform works:

    Blaze and Atlantic BT

    Atlantic BT’s employees led the way in ABT acquiring Blaze, having relied on the platform for their content audit work for multiple clients. According to Senior Writer/Content Strategist Allan Maule:

    “It’s a really stellar tool. When I’m reviewing a client’s existing content and webpages, Blaze makes it simple for me to assess everything a client has put out into the world, how well it’s gathering traffic, and share my notes on every relevant detail with the rest of my team. I’m looking forward to seeing how my programming colleagues make this tool even better.”

    Atlantic BT’s developers are already at work adding new features and capabilities to Blaze, as well as improving the interface of the platform. Look for more details about these improvements later this year, with demos to begin in November.

    “We could not be more excited to add Blaze to our digital solutions at Atlantic BT,” said ABT VP of Experience Eileen Allen, “Both current and future Blaze users have a lot to look forward to when we relaunch the platform.”

    For more details on Blaze, visit www.blazecontent.com.

  • How ABT Transformed NC.gov to Bolster Engagement

    How Do You Design a Website for Every Citizen?

    10 million people. Some of them grew up with the Internet. Others were retired when Google became a commonplace verb. But these 10 million—the population of the state of North Carolina—all needed easy digital access to state government services on NC.gov.

    And the existing web interface wasn’t cutting it. The legacy NC.gov site offered an extensive catagory of links rather than mobile- and user-friendly navigation. While some citizens were able to find what they needed on NC.gov, the larger share of the population became frustrated with the legacy website. This led them to call the NC agency office directly rather than searching for the information online—taking up the valuable time of state workers and taxpayers.

    In short, the state of North Carolina needed a complete overhaul of their digital home on NC.gov. And Atlantic BT was the digital partner chosen to do the job.

    Designing and Developing the New NC.gov

    Creating the new NC.gov was a huge undertaking—Atlantic BT needed to analyze 75,000+ webpages across more than 10 different agency sites, then collate this content into a unified structure which was easy for citizens of all backgrounds to consume.

    This took persona workshops. This took content strategy.  This took UX design, iteration, testing, and development. By leading with content strategy and persona-based discovery, Atlantic BT crafted a mobile-optimized experience for NC.gov while empowering state employees to own and update content on their agencies’ sites.

    A New Site Design and a Lasting Partnership

    Thanks to NC.gov’s new Drupal-based content management, stakeholders across NC government can now update site content themselves to serve citizens faster and more effectively. The new NC.gov not only saw a 6% increase in page views across the site, but also improved site bounce rates by 38% for organic traffic.