APRIL 2009 NEWSLETTER

5 Top Tips for Engaging Your Site Visitors

Small businesses have something large businesses often don't have – a personal touch. If you put effort into making your customer experience something worth remembering, you'll never have trouble building a base of loyal clients.

Here are some of the best ways to create a positive customer experience online:

1. Keep It Simple
Does your website have a straightforward design, with easy to use navigation? Your customers should be able to find what they're looking for with ease (in 3 clicks or less ideally) and should know where each link is taking them.

Some essential pieces of information your customers need to be able to find with little effort are:

• Your product pages – made easy by providing a product search function
• Information about you, including a little company history
• Customer service information including complete contact details
• Easy ways to find and connect to you via social media sites

Other information which will help your site's visitors feel comfortable and trust your purchasing process are:

• Clearly stating your shipping terms and returns policy
• Publishing your privacy policy, including how you intend to use their data

2. Create Great Content
Quality website content will always engage customers. Consider what information a customer might want to know about when visiting your website. Use audio or – better still – use video to demonstrate your products and services.

In addition to well-crafted sales copy, you may also want to include a simple product features list, user reviews, related product recommendations and product support options.

If there are common questions that your customers ask all the time, make sure to include a Frequently Asked Questions section that it is easy to find and intuitive to use.

3. Archive Your Content
Publishing a back catalogue of your content has many benefits: it presents a history of your expertise, it provides a catalogue of great content to engage new site visitors, it helps increase your exposure via the search engines and gives other sites a great reason to link to you.

A blog is an excellent resource for publishing new content, and just as importantly, for archiving previous content in an organised way. A blog will usually come with in-built content management and Internet marketing tools, which allow you to add to and share your content with ease.

4. Consider Incorporating Live Chat into Your Website
Many customers get frustrated if they are unable to find answers to their questions but aren't necessarily ready to call you on the phone. A live chat function is a good alternative. A live chat function allows customers to correspond with you in real time.

5. Continue the Dialogue with Email
Permission based email is a great way to engage customers – it's non-invasive and still one of the most cost effective online marketing methods available. Emails can be used to:

• Present new content
• Launch promotions
• Highlight industry news
• Publish case studies
• Send notifications of your latest blog posts
• Send order confirmations and thank you emails
• Correspond regarding support tickets
• ...and more (be creative)

Remember, your advantage is in creating a human interaction. Always follow through on your promises and try to deliver even more than your customers expect. If you would like to review how effectively you engage with your customers online, call us on 01488 674191.

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The Power of Pull Marketing

Advertisements that 'push' a sales or promotional message onto a consumer have been the leading marketing technique for a long time.

The Internet, however, has introduced a powerful new marketing technique called 'pull' marketing.

What is pull marketing?
Pull marketing is a more long term marketing strategy. It aims to gather interest in your company through marketing vehicles that do not overtly use push techniques, but rather present a helpful solution or a concept that show the consumer that there might be a better way.

With 'pull' marketing, the idea is to create content that people will seek out for themselves through search engines and informational websites. These customers usually know what they're looking for and are more ready to make a purchase.

Why is pull marketing popular?
Marketing that focuses on helping brands and organizations be more easily discovered is the next wave of marketing. Customers are more inclined to trust the result of their own 'pull' searches.

Pull marketing means that customers get exactly the information they are seeking to find, at the exact time they are looking for it. They no longer feel 'pushed' toward a sale. The customer feels, in fact, as though the pull marketing technique they have participated in has helped them find what they needed right when they needed it – which is a smarter way to market.

How do I use pull marketing in my business?
There are a few strategies recommended for pull marketing:

• Talk to Searchers: Push marketing always spoke to the customer, but pull marketing speaks to the searcher. Push marketing would have put up an ad that said "Shampoo", but a searcher is actually looking for "how to get rid of dandruff." Searchers are looking for information, not just a product. They respond better to a conversational tone rather than a sales-y one.
• Join the Conversation: If you become known as an expert in your area of business, customers will be inclined to trust your judgment and view you as the obvious solution to their problem. You can inform online communities by offering well-researched information on your site. One widely used strategy for informing the conversation is blogging.
• Adopt Established Channels: It's difficult to come up with the next big wave of innovation, but it's easy to adopt a trend that is already very popular with your customers. One big trend that's very popular right now is social media, and it may be worth using that trend to connect with your customers.

You may wish to consider adopting a push/pull marketing strategy, at times pushing information out to your market and at other times implementing strategies to pull consumers to you. If you would like to review the effectiveness of your online marketing, please call us on 01488 674191.

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Is Social Media Marketing for Everyone?

An increasing number of small businesses today are beginning to consider social media marketing even more essential than having a website, convinced that social media sites are the ultimate marketing tool.

It's tempting to jump on that bandwagon but look before you leap. Social media marketing could actually lose your business money if you're not cut out for it.

Will social media marketing work for you?
Ask yourself the following three questions to help identify if social media marketing could work for you:

1) Is your target market using social media sites?
This is perhaps the most essential question. If the answer is no, there's little to no reason for you to be using social media for your own marketing.

Do a little research to find out if your target demographic is using social networking websites, and if so, which ones? You don't want to waste your time on Twitter when most of your customer base is on MySpace.

2) How is your target market using social media?
It's very tempting to simply sign up for an account and begin bombarding your potential customers with information; but beware, that's NOT how social media works. Few of your potential customers will pay attention to you if you haven't put the time into figuring out how to use social media tools the way everyone else does.

If your target audience is on Twitter for instance, you will want to start with building some relationships by doing the following:

• Post interesting comments on topics related to your area of expertise
• Respond to other Tweets with useful, interesting or topical comments
• Link to new sources of content (from your website and other industry sources for instance)
• Share your personality – after all, it is about being sociable

Doing these things before you promote yourself will help establish you as a person who knows his or her stuff and is willing to share expertise.

3) Do you have the time to use social media?
If all of the above sounds exhausting to you, then you may simply not have enough time to use social media. As mentioned, it is, after all, about being social. You'll need to be able to log on regularly and spend a fair amount of time on simply creating relationships, not just promoting yourself.

Invest your online marketing budget wisely
In a recent survey by Ad-ology, small businesses said they planned to increase their spending on social networking, though most did not intend to change the amount of money they spent on online marketing overall.

If your target demographic already responds very well to email marketing, it probably isn't wise to take money away from that to put into social media.

Adopting a strategic approach to social media marketing will give a better return on your investment, rather than hopping on the bandwagon just because everyone else is doing it. Call us on 01488 674191 if you would like help planning your social media marketing strategy.

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Social Media Focus: Technorati

If you have a blog and you aren't using Technorati, you're robbing yourself of one of the easiest ways to promote yourself in the blogosphere.

Technorati is fundamentally a giant index of blogs, cataloguing topics and links so you can find the most popular or most interesting blog on any subject.

What is Technorati?
There are millions of blogs online today, and up until Technorati, there wasn't a way to easily search them. Technorati currently tracks over 100 million blogs. If you were looking for a blog on gluten-free recipes, for example, you'd have a hard time finding one if that blog didn't also happen to be the top Google-ranked website.

With Technorati, blogs are indexed and organised by subject. You can include keyword 'tags' to label your posts by topic so that your blog is easily found when someone goes looking for what you have written. You can also notify Technorati every time you add a new blog post.

How to Improve Your Traffic With Technorati
If you already write a blog, you will want that blog to be included on Technorati. You are probably already doing many of the right things, as many of the rules of good blog content also apply here.

• Keep your content relevant and updated regularly. If you always have solid, relevant content and tag it appropriately, you'll become a reliable source of information, and people on Technorati will "Favourite" you, making your blog more popular.
• Link to other people. Don't link just for the sake of linking, if you consistently link to other blogs that have content of interest to your readers, you'll improve your status on Technorati – and you'll improve the chances that other people will link to you.
• Tag and Ping. Never let a post go up without giving it relevant tags so Technorati can find your content. Then notify (called pinging) Technorati when you put up a new post, so they know that you have new information that's been tagged for search.

Getting Insight from Technorati
Technorati can tell you what the hottest blogs are on a multitude of topics. Studying those blogs can show you what your own blog can do better.

Technorati is an open source community project, so developers often create widgets for bloggers on Technorati to get more insight. One great widget, for example, is called "View Blog Reactions" and allows you to see how many readers link to your post in a certain period of time.

If you would like to start your own business blog, or improve an existing blog, call us on 01488 674191.

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