Question 1. How important is it for companies to have a good website?

To a certain extent it depends on the company and their objectives. However generally most companies can benefit from having a website as a way to generate new business and as a place to share information and updates with their clients.

Done properly a good website can be an automated way to capture leads and convert them to sales – with a return on investment hard to beat with other media

Question 2. What can they do to draw customers to their site?

Write high quality informative articles with links back the the website in a resource box which are then distributed to 3rd party websites.

Optimise the content of the site to make it attractive to search engines

Create video content on youtube which has links back to the website

Include details of website in all marketing collatoral – offering incentive to visit the site (claim a free coupon, get a white paper etc)

Have a regularly updated blog on their website and link to it from social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Google +)

Build an email newsletter list and send regular communications to this list driving them back to new offers on the website

Question 3. What tips would you have for businesses looking to improve their site?

Have a clear goal for the website – decide is it to generate sales, capture leads, provide information and then build the site around that

Build the site with what visitors are actually searching for in mind – if there is no search traffic for the search terms relevant to your site then it probably isn’t worth the time invested to build it

Get your website built and designed by someone who understands the concepts of direct response marketing rather than just whether or not it looks ‘pretty’

A website is only one piece in the online marketing jigsaw and will be much more effective when combined with other online marketing strategies.

No longer are Facebook and twitter just for old school friends who want to catch up, savvy business owners have found that these platforms have the potential to reach thousands of new customers every day. Better still, it’s relatively free, yet, there’s more to social networking than just setting up a page and hoping for the best.

Here are some tips to help you get the most out of your business public profiles:

Keep Your Pages Updated:

Not with personal information though, your customers don’t need to know about your family gatherings or your weekend away. They do, however, want to know about any special offers you may have on, new products, reviews of your services, and links to your website.

Fill with Information:

Just like you would your website, Facebook is a great tool for uploading your blogs, newsletters or articles. These don’t have to be recent, once a customer shows an interest in your services, they will be keen to learn more about the company’s history, so bring all your copy out of the archive.

Keep Your Profile Business-like:

If you have a fan page on Facebook, your profile page should hold all the information that your website does. Its great if your social networking site encourages customers to your website, but greater still is if they have all the information they need to hand right away. Make sure you have an address, telephone number, and website URL on your profile.

Secure a Good Facebook/Twitter URL:

By securing a Facebook URL early, you will optimize the amount of customers you will reach. People don’t want to have to remember facebook.com/your14579235business, instead if possible, try to keep it to your business name. With an original business name you should be in with a chance of this URL being available.

Keep Tweets Short and Sweet

There is a character limit on tweets, so be wary of linking your Facebook page to your twitter account. Posts on Facebook will show up as links on your twitter account, giving just a list of garbled numbers for a customer to click on. Instead use variety. Use twitter to advertise special promotions, short and sweet such as, “Sale on Now – Here!” Or amusing rich content then use Facebook to be a little more in depth when you have the space to do so. Most twitter account owners hold a Facebook account too.

Encourage Customer Interaction

In the world of internet marketing, the personal touch is lost. Customers and clients understand this; however you can stand out from the crowd by bringing that personal touch back. Everyone is craving the good old days when buying a cucumber we’d chat about the weather or the latest instalment of Coronation Street, however, now that we’re all too busy to chat, we do like to have a little personal service. Businesses that stand out seem to care about their clients. Although you won’t have personal information in your social media platforms, your clients will, and by returning the follow on twitter, occasionally re-tweeting their tweets or liking their status on Facebook, you can make sure that when the computer is turned off, they are still talking about your excellent service and customer care.

Follow, Join, Belong!

It may seem like a waste of time to follow celebrities on twitter, or join groups on Facebook, however, these are untapped resources just waiting for your advertising. For example, if your business is shoe sales, and you join the Facebook group, “I love shoes”, when you have a special offer to announce, you can share it on the groups wall potentially reaching thousands, sometimes millions of members. Make groups relevant to your business not your personal life. Also following celebrities on twitter, you can reply with a witty comment to their tweets, which will reach all of their followers and you only need one per cent to be curious and click on your profile!

Katheria the owner of a new cleaning company aksed the following “please advise me on the best was to go about generating new leads”

Hi Katheria,

1. Your website is a free low grade website and this will reflect on the service that you provide. You need to present a professional image if you want to service commercial clients. Consider investing in a professional website.
2. Get yourself listed in Google Local to achieve a quick page 1 listing for Cleaning Services Swindon (see sc.betterbusinessresults.com for a free guide to help you do this quickly)
3. You should also consider using a better domain name like swindoncleaningservices.co.uk or officecleaningswindon.co.uk
4. Look at some of your competition to see how they present themselves eg http://www.swindoncleaning.biz/ This is what you are competing against in the eyes of your customer.
5. Is there a niche within the cleaning business that you can specialise in and become known as the local expert for that type of cleaning. This would then differentiate you and make it easier for you to target your potential customers. eg Do you specialise in cleaning Nursing Homes or Commercial Units – Just two extremes to get you thinking.
6. Do you make any offers for first time customers? In order to land a new client you may have to offer a first clean free or at least 100% money back guarantee if not completely satisfied. Or offer 3 cleans for the price of 2 if paid in advance.
7. Do you have a top 100 list of businesses you would like to target in your area. (this information can be purchased from a good marketing company like ours) You may want to set up a multi-part mail out campaign where you send a sequence of multiple direct response mail shots to your target list.
8. Are you using social media, ie Do you have a Facebook Business Page and Twitter account. You would probably also want a good linked-in profile for your line of work.
9. You could consider running Google Adwords (PPC) ads for a select number of geolocal keyword phrases to catch the people that are actively looking for your services right now. Also consider Facebook Ads as well.
10. Do you have a good list of testimonials from past clients or could you get them.
11. Are there complimentary service providers to yours that you may be able to do a joint venture with? ie Use the relationship they already have with the customer that you want to get to. Pay a formal commission for all introductions that lead to new business.

Sorry there is no quick fix or magic bullet. But marketing is a large subject and you should really look to get someone to either mentor you or do it for you so you can concentrate on building the business.

Best regards,
Steve.

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Now in the past we have advised this client that this kind of untargetted knee jerk reaction to marketing is costly and generally leads to poor results.

She asked what we could do to help turn things around for her, and fast.

9 times out of 10 if you are looking to boost any business the starting point should be with your existing customer base. These are people that know, like and trust you (hopefully) and are usually the easiset to approach with some kind of offer to elicit a new transaction.

So with this is mind we decided the fastest and most cost effective method would be to send out a special offer email to all her past customers.

Here is what we did:

1) We drafted an email – using some carefully crafted copy to tie into a topical subject as a valid ‘reason why’

2) We sent the email to the client for her to review it

3) We sent it out to all of her list using our emarketing system

4) We had a substantial order placed on the site.

So how long did this process take? Well from the time the client first contacted us, to the order being processed it was less than 1 hour.

Based on our previous experience of email marketing campaings we expect this email will generate a further 2 or 3 sales over the weekend.

Now I don’t like to say to clients ‘I told you so’ but when I casually mentioned to this client that perhaps expensive mailshots were not the way to go, and that she should perhaps reconsider our ongoing monthly outsourced marketing services her reply was:

“I hear what you’re saying Matt loud and clear ! – Lesson learnt BIG TIME !!”

It seems to be much easier than using some of the other options out there.

The way it works is you install the Facepage II WordPress plugin and just add the email address given in the Facebook send mobile email feature. Job done.

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Online using pay per click advertising can be much less wasteful as you will only pay for the clicks that you generate and that has been the reason for the success of Google Adwords in particular. There is still however a high degree of waste, albeit with minimal monetary cost, in terms of the amount of ads that need to be displayed to generate a click. Pay per click can be targeted by geographical location and tied to a search term which gives pretty good targeting, but it can be improved on even further.

Facebook advertising and mobile advertising on smartphones allows even more targeting of adverts.

For example imagine if you were selling a specialty dog food and you had identified that 80% of your customers were women it would be possible to target adverts based on location, age, sex and interests.

The screen shot to the left shows how easy it would be to target women aged 18 or over within 10 miles of Dublin who like Dogs.

This would give you a highly targeted list of just over 2000 people. You could now test a number of different advertising approaches to get the attention of these people in a very focused way.

The same can be done using smart phone advertising networks such as Admob.

Want to do this for your own business? Just take the time to draw up a profile of your perfect customer. Then using that profile set up a filter on your Facebook advertising account that best matches who you are targeting.

You can test it very easily without investing much money.  Once you make it work then you can roll out similar campaigns for other customer profiles that would be interested in your products and services.

Pirates Cove is a family entertainment centre based in wexford, in addition they also take some of their mobile units to shopping centres around the country and offer rides. The ride that we saw was their large bungee trampolines and when my son Thomas saw it he just had to have a go (pester power is a strong motivator!). Anyway the trampoline was attracting a good bit of interest and at the same time generated revenue to cover their costs.

They were charging €4 a time to use the trampoline and for that children got to try out the equipment. At the same time leaflets promoting pirates cove were available.

Whilst this was good I think there are a number of ways this campaign could have been made even better.

1. Dedicated prmotion staff member – There were 2 staff working the trampoline but they were too busy helping the children get harnessed and supervising them. Having an additional outgoing staff member to chat to the parents, and proactively hand out leaflets would have been a good idea.
2. Give something back – For all customers that used the trampoline they should have given them €5 voucher off a family pass for Pirates Cove. This would have made parents feel like they were getting their money back and led to more people converting to become visitors to Pirates Cove.
3. Run a competition – they could have ran a competition offering a Free annual family pass to pirates cove that people had to complete their details to enter. This way they could have built up a nice list of potential clients that they coud promote their offers to in the future.
4. Add some pizazz – whilst the trampolines themselves were effective at capturing attention the actual stand was a little bland, with just a static banner on it. They could have made the stand more captivating by including some large tv screens showing some footage of Pirates Cove and encouraging people to enter the free competition to win a free annual family pass.

So what can you learn from this? First of all is there a way you can take your business to a place where your target market are likely to congregate? Then offer them a taste of what you do or a cut down version of your service. Try and make it fun and engaging. Use the opportunity to start a dialogue with your customers – capture their contact details and send them more information and special promotions. So don’t just sit in your office wondering why customers aren’t coming to you – identify ways you can go out and reach them.