When was the last time you went to the doctor, told them what was wrong with you, and prescribed your own medicine? Unfortunately the web has created a bad reputation as having plenty of dodgy providers, and the simplest form of the industry has absolutely become commoditised.  You’d be amazed at how often clients come to us with what they think their problem is, and tell us exactly what to build (to solve it). They have little faith in an agencies ability to define and solve a problem for them.

I’d like to think however, that there are a bunch of real, professional digital agencies that can help identify and solve your problems – not just grind out the work to solve a problem you think you’ve already identified.

A podcast I listened to recently (from an ad agency) mentioned that ad agencies started a trend – offering the same old solutions to any problem the customer threw at them – “You need a TV ad”.  Their customers became unsatisfied with the same solution to every problem.  The ROI of TV ads compared to online is another discussion all together, however we’re now seeing the really good agencies creating really effective campaigns that do really solve problems, and that are about more than TV ads.  Some of the banks are doing an amazing job of this.  I think this is what is now separating the big players from the jokers in the agency world – the ability to really identify the problem in the market, find out how the company can solve it, and then execute a genius plan to capture the heart of the consumers.

Companies are now starting to put more faith in really good ad agencies to help them identify and solve their problems.  Instead of banks saying “the competition is tough, we need to be in front of consumers more than everyone else, spend a zillion dollars on TV”, they’re now creating campaigns like the recent nab campaign which firstly identified the real problem (high interest rates, bad relationship with their bank, high cost/effort to exit), realised they have a solution (lower interest rates, payout exit fees, simple transition process) to the problem, then connected with their audience by executing a genius plan (humorous campaigns around portraying a human relationship breakup – with a bank).

We’re now seeing a lot more customers with real marketing problems coming to us with an open mind.  They tell us about their business, we try to understand the problems they can solve for their customers based on their strengths, then execute a web design and online marketing campaign to help solve the problems.

Every website should be created with the same perspective from the outset – what problems are we trying to solve, and how can a website do that?  Gone are the days of just creating a website because you have to – people want to engage with you online, they want to have their problems solved.

I had a discussion about this with a client last week – he’s a marketing manager for a large IT services mob in Melbourne.

We spoke about whether the basics of marketing have really changed.  BRW said in an article recently “the underlying theme for good marketing is knowledge: know your business, know your products and services, know your customers and know what your objectives are.” Amen.

Here is the definition of marketing from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing:

“Marketing is the process by which companies create customer interest in products or services. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business development. It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves.”

It also goes on to explain the trends in marketing over recent history – and suggests the marketing orientation from “1970 to present day” is still the same!

If I was to read this 6 months ago, I’d have thought it was ridiculous – with the introduction of the Internet (on a side note – ever wondered what we did with our time before the internet? Anyway…), surely marketing fundamentals are now completely different compared to 40 years ago?  I’m certainly no marketing expert (far from it), but have learnt something about it over the years of helping run & grow Salsa – I sometimes wondered whether the fundamentals of marketing have changed at all?  I recently decided they haven’t. Even though the tools are different, all marketers are still trying to achieve the same result.

Here’s why:

If you’re a marketing manager, for example, don’t you need to still adhere to the same rules? Here are some simplistic examples of how the principles haven’t really changed.

Communicate clearly – the same goal applies today as it has in recent history.  If you can’t clearly communicate what you do, you’ll quickly turn prospects away to someone who can.  We used to use radio, tv & newspapers.  We now also use websites.

Build relationships - a marketers goal is often to get a sales person in front of a prospect to start to build rapport.  The call to action of most marketing media (whether it’s radio, tv, websites, or whatever) is to have someone call, or visit a showroom, or a website (which often then sends them to a phone call!!).  Get in front of someone, build a relationship, sell them something – still the same.

Create value for customers – facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Websites, whatever – the most successful are designed to actually serve a purpose.  Educate the prospect, allow them to gain value from reading what you have to say.

The list goes on – the fundamentals of marketing haven’t changed.  There are a load more tools to use to drive traffic to your marketing material (Google Adwords is a revolutionary tool for generating traffic), but the basics haven’t changed.  Marketers don’t need to intimately understand how Google Analytics works – they need to pay an Adwords professional to run a campaign for them that gets them loads of relevant traffic.

The marketer then needs to worry about what happens when the client finds their website, and makes the phone call – how well is the prospect communicated to, how good is the person on the phone at building instant rapport, and what value can they add right away?

So don’t obsess on learning every detail on how online marketing works.  I say leave that to “online marketers” and worry about the marketing basics of your own business – for a maximising outcome.

I had a meeting today with a potential new customer, and they were just getting out of a bad relationship with their previous developer.  They mentioned that he’d “oversold” them on the capabilities of his organisation.  In fact, he didn’t even have an organisation – it was only 1 person.  His website, and the way he presented his business, made it appear as though it was a more substantial business.  Anyway, it turns out he’s going on a long holiday, and their site is supposed to have gone live in 2 weeks, and is not near ready… needless to say, they’re now looking for a new developer!

I  guess the point I’m making in a round about way, is that your site can be used to allow people to see who you are (in the above example he was lying, but let’s assume you won’t do that!).  It’s not only my opinion, but I’ve seen it time and time again – if your website visitors can see who you are, what your team is like, and get a feeling of comfort that they’re dealing with real, honest, people, your enquiries will go through the roof.  Not only that, the quality of the enquiries will be considerably better.

E.g. We run a marketing site using another brand name (email me if you want to know what it is).  This particular site is a brand that only generates leads for Salsa – there is no real business behind it.  The site itself ranks its butt off in the search engines – gets twice as much traffic as the Salsa site, however the leads are generally very bad in comparison.  There are about the same number of leads (in fact maybe even more) but they are much, much lower quality, and equate to about 5% of our sales, while the Salsa site generated about 40%.  I butted my head against the wall for years trying to work out why, and one day a client actually told me – after mentioning they’d actually come across the other site, but decided not to enquire; I asked why they did choose to enquire with us?

Their response was “because I felt like I was dealing with real people.  The other website didn’t look real”.  The site itself is as well designed as the Salsa site, however it does not contain any people – no staff page, no photo’s of clients, not even a stock photo of one of those ladies you see on every 2nd website!  Nothing that gives the user the feeling they’re dealing with real people, and so they don’t have any confidence, and don’t waste their time enquiring.

Get your staff onto your website, and watch your enquiries improve.

Here is our staff page: http://www.salsainternet.com.au/about-salsa-staff.html

Clients often wonder how “Link Building” works, why they need to have it, and how to get the most out of Link Building. There are a few basic guidelines that you need to follow to get positive results from Link Building campaigns and we’ll have a look at them in this post.

There are two main categories to consider when Link Building, On-page factors and Off-page factors.

On-page factors include the following:

The key here is volume of links and links that take advantage of targeted keywords.

Recently Google have placed a strong emphasis on frequency of content updates on a site as well as freshness of links.

When it comes down to the page rank for incoming links you have a number of choices. Typically, you’re able to get lots of links which have varying page rank at an affordable rate OR you’re able to get fewer links which have relatively better page rank at a higher cost.

Typically high pagerank links come via:

• privately negotiated paid links or;
• naturally occurring incentives for other high profile sites to link to you based on the value of your website or its information, or tools, or relevance to their audience or;
• paid links (text-link-ads or similar), or;
• link triangulation deals or reciprocation deals

It is very rare to be able to simply request a link to your site from a very high page rank 3rd party site or page – and get the link with nothing offered in return (who would have thought, there’s always a catch!).  We don’t engage in paid link strategies for clients, as if found out – Google may penalise you.

When you sit back and look at the way Link Building works, it does indeed make sense. Search engines such as google will review all the links coming into your site, along with the content on your site and give you a rank compared to other sites on the web. There are many factors that come into play to determine who should appear first, second, third etc but the main message still holds true…

Build targeted links to your site, do it on a regular basis, with content on your site which is keyword-rich and updated as often as possible. The more links, the better, and the more you can hone in on your keyword niche the better.

Happy Googling!

A couple of years ago, users didn’t want to be “engaged” online – they wanted to go to a website, do something (enquire, sign up), fix something (solve a problem) or buy something (shop!).   We’ve seen an incredible shift in the way people achieve this over the past couple of years with people now spending so much more time online.  Users now want more from their website browsing experience.  The introduction of social media (I still don’t like that term, anyway…) tools means that people have now become used to using the internet as more than just a tool, but as a part of their life. And so, they naturally expect a website to be more than just a tool – it needs to make them feel at home, make them feel like they’re part of something – not just enquiring, problem solving or shopping.

How many times have you checked your web enabled phone today?  How many times a day did you check it 2 years ago? We spend a LOT of time online now.

Your clients and potential customers now want to know who you are, what you look like, what your office looks like, what you did at your last team event, what was the name of your first pet!!  They want to build a relationship with you, and feel that you’re actually interested in telling them about yourself.  It needs to be genuine of course, as any relationship needs to be, so you do need to be careful, because this new world of online transparency means that if you’re not honest, it will easily show.  Marketing hasn’t really changed, it’s still about being able to genuinely connect with the people who care the most; however the tools we used to make us look like someone we weren’t (websites are so good at making small businesses look like big companies) are not enough – there are just so many ways to find out more about a person or company now, that you can’t hide behind a website – so you might as well come out and tell the world about who you really are. If you don’t, someone else probably will.

An interesting side note: the staff page on the Salsa website is one of the most popular (top 2%)

Take the following examples (thanks to Avinash Kaushik from a “6 Pixels of Separation” Podcast I recently listened to).  2 competing companies in Canada, both selling laundry products.

www.vim.ca - not all that engaging, imo

The first example is quite a simple site – shows some products (ok, good start), has a voucher to save $1 (wow!), then the standard marketing spiel (“makes tough cleaning easy”). They have content on the site about how to use their products, cleaning tips,  and home decorating ideas. Yawn. www.vim.ca

seventhgeneration.com - incredibly engaging

This example is not only a much more beautiful site (an enormous part of the ability to engage in my opinion), but also absolutely tells the website visitor all about who and what they’re dealing with.  They become part of something much bigger. “Protecting Planet Home”.   One of the major menu items is “Learn”.  In here you can educate yourself on the bigger ‘green’ issues they’re passionate about, read an active Blog, visit the Forum, watch video’s.  You can also see where people have “Asked Scienceman” a question, and can read his response.  They of course also connect via Facebook, and Twitter – you can actually see in their Twitter account that they’re interacting with their customers, answering questions and solving problems! Oh, they also have some product information on the site of course. www.seventhgeneration.com

I can’t wait to re-design our website.  Keep your eye out for it.

Unfortunately we see it fairly often – clients come to us with visions of grandeur about their website marketing, and their plans to take the world by storm with their enormous marketing budget to drive thousands of people to their website every week, which in turn is going to bring in loads of new business.  I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t give my honest opinion, that unfortunately all that investment in online marketing is not even likely to return real value, unless the site or landing page the campaign is directing them to, is fantastic.  It’s something that some clients (or prospective clients) are pretty sensitive about, but it’s generally accurate – we’ve seen it time and time again.

When we launched a version of our website about 2 years ago, we made some fairly important changes, which increased our enquiries online by about 35%!  The changes were mostly aesthetic, but we knew that our prospects were looking to learn more about our client base, and how we differentiate ourselves, so we created a short flash animation to tell a bit of a story, and also improved the aesthetic.   You can see the difference below between the old site, and the new.

http://old.salsainternet.com.au

www.salsainternet.com.au

Recently we also implemented a new home page design for www.equusconnect.com.au (recruitment website for the horse racing industry), and their online registrations for job seekers went up by about 60% overnight!  Imagine what that could do for your business!

In most cases, the changes are only aesthetic – you don’t need to change the structure of the site, or the layout.  Just give it a ‘refresh’, if you like, and you’ll likely see an improve in results. And it will be much, much cheaper than just about any online marketing campaign.

Then, if you still need more business (let’s face it, who doesn’t), then consider investing in online marketing.

When formulating an online marketing Strategy, it’s important to consider the following points:

1.    How competitive your industry is online

Are you competing against other big brands, with huge budgets, or do you have an opportunity to really create a strong presence in the search engines, with little competition? A few years ago we found a client that sells synthetic turf had an enormous opportunity to rank well in the search engines.  There was little competition, and it was a strong growing industry.  They took advantage of that, are now leading their industry.  You can check how competitive your industry is by doing some keyword research using Googles Keyword Tool.

Google Keyword Tool

This gives you an idea of how many searches there are for the words you enter, and also how much competition there is.  You should also run some Google searches of course, and run your eyes down the listings to see what you’re up against.
2.    What keywords you would like your site to rank for?

Some words will be more popular of course, and will deliver the most traffic, however if your competition is too tough, you’re never likely to rank at the top of the engines.  In industries such as mortgage broking or car loans, you’re up against the big banks, who have fairly significant marketing budgets!! In these cases you can depend on long tail traffic – which is really any other traffic related to mortgage broking but not based on the really high ranking keywords.  Instead of mortgages melbourne, for example, you may end up ranking for “low cost mortgages” or “mortgage broker brunswick”, for example.

If you don’t have all that much heavy competition, then you can just go for the top ranking keywords – knock yourself out.
3.    The design/structure of the site you want to promote online

It’s important to ensure that your site is capable of converting visitors to enquiries or customers – no point sending customers to a poorly designed website!  We often have new customers asking us to optimise a terribly designed site.  We do ourselves out of a job, but will recommend they go back to their designers and get a new site built first… or we try and sell them a new site of course!  Have a read of example 3 on the Online Strategy page of our website for a good example of how this worked for Album Works.

Album Printer new design

4.    Your strategy & budget

There are a multitude of services available; how much you would like to spend will ultimately allow you to choose the most suitable strategy for your online marketing.  Choose what mediums you like (SEO, SEM, Social Media, etc), then get some professional advice on what’s required.

This blog post doesn’t answer the famous question “Should my business be on Facebook”.  In my opinion, there is little disadvantage in having a Facebook page for your business, as long as you give it a little love; but that’s a whole other Blog post!

What this does help you with, is how to go about creating a Facebook page.  It’s actually pretty easy.

First, you need to have your own, personal Facebook account.  Don’t worry, if you’re not a people person, just because you have a Facebook account, doesn’t mean all your high school buddies are going to hunt you down – you can hide your identity if you want to, and even detach your profile from your business page if you need to.

Then, visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php, and follow the instructions.   This page will also contain information on Community Pages, and Groups.  I’ll write separate posts on these topics, but for most businesses, an Official Page is what you want to create.  Take the journey through answering all of the questions, and at the end of it, you have yourself a page.

Create an "Official Page" in Facebook for your business

The first thing you’ll want to do, is update the Info tab – include some detail about your business, so people know a little about the business.

Maybe also load some photo’s of your business – the staff, any products, something that helps your customers and potential customers see who you really are.  After all, people are on your Facebook page because they want to learn more about your business – don’t be shy, tell them.

Then get yourself some fans.  Facebook recently has replace the “Fan” concept with the ability to “Like” a page.  You need to click the “Suggest to Friends” link in the top left, which will allow you to send an annoying note to all of your Facebook friends to all Like your page.

In order to make your Facebook page work for you, you then need to:

- Update it every now and then with useful content.  Don’t post rubbish to your page – you’ll get a low Post Quality.  Facebook is beginning to create some smarts about how effective the page is, similar to what Google Analytics does for websites, but obviously at a more rudimentary level (so far…).  For more on this, see http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/05/facebook-post-quality/

- The sort of things you should post include: new product release, new Blog posts, new staff you may have hired, photo’s about any staff event you may have had, or a successful product install or launch

- Remember to be genuine.  Social Media is a way to create transparency for your business – if you’re not genuine, it will show

- Promote it from your main website, link it into your email footer, and include it on your business cards – if you can link someone to your Facebook page, you can communicate with them incredibly easily, whenever you want to

Checkout our page at www.facebook.com/salsainternet

We see a number of clients that are looking to start a brand new business online, and have come across the same issue many, many times – they have a long list of “wishlist” items, but a budget that doesn’t quite match.

One approach is to seek a low cost developer to help get the site done cheaply; unfortunately this often also results in a low quality application, poor design, and little strategic input into the business once launched (I have another Blog post coming on this topic).

The better alternative, is to stage the functionality; release a version of the site that includes some of the core functionality, the things you can’t live without, including the items that actually make you money, and then release additional functionality later.  What we’ve found is that, almost every time, the second and third round of functionality is different to first anticipated.  Inevitably, once the site goes live, and users start putting it through its paces, they tell the business owner what they like/don’t like, and what they would like to see in the site, which usually dictates future releases.

It often comes as a surprise to the business owner that their clients expectations are different to theirs, but to be honest it’s pretty rare that we see a business owner that knows their audience intimately enough to know exactly what they want and need from their site.  They have some idea, and using best practice, we can build a site that works really well, but until it’s live, we don’t really know exactly what the site needs to function successfully.

The trick often is finding a system to choose what functionality should in fact be included in each release.  We recommend using a structured approach which allows you evaluate the business benefit and technical complexity of each of the items on the “wishlist”, which factors heavily in the decision making process.  So for example, if an item has high business benefit, and low technical complexity, then it is a great candidate for a first phase release.  If the business benefit is low, and technical complexity high, perhaps it’s best to leave it till the next phase.

There are various ways to implement this process, but as a start, just try writing them all down, and score them from 1-5 on business benefit (bb) and technical complexity (tc), then make your decisions from there.  Let me know if you need a more detailed approach.

Or, ask your web developer to help you prioritise them based on their experience on what works.

Bye for now.