A website is a key part of any business in today’s online society and should form an important part of your marketing strategy.
Consider just a few key points and use this checklist when planning a website to ensure it gets the end result you are aiming for.
Who is the website for?
Who is your chosen audience? Who do you want to attract? Don’t fall into the trap of trying to make your website attractive to everyone. It just won’t work. Think of your ideal customer and plan everything to attract just them. They are the ones who are most likely to become your future customers and spend money with you.
Aims and objectives
What is your USP? – Why will people use your site and not that of your competitor? What is it offering that others don’t? If there isn’t a clear differential then you really need to narrow down your niche target market and give them exactly what they want. It could simply come down to the ease of use and navigation or that the checkout process is easier.
Decide on content
What type of information will you be using and how will it be structured in terms of navigating through the site? Will you be using white papers, videos or infographics? Think about the different types of content that will be used and how they may link together.
Lead capture
Most small business when planning a website want to create more business and one of the best ways of doing this is to create a database from visitors. To turn your website visitors into contacts and future clients you need to capture their details by use of a sign up form. Make it clear and easy for them to sign up and offer an incentive in exchange for their details.
Comply with the law
When you collect information and data from visitors to your website, you need to comply with the law. Even if you don’t have a sign up form but use Google analytics or any other type of tracking, you need to comply with data protection laws and meet the criteria on the use of cookies.
Email accounts
How many email accounts are you going to need for your site? You may wish to have a generic info@ along with separate ones for existing clients or order queries. Check with your hosting company how many your plan includes to ensure you are able to have the ones you want.
Integrate social media
Think of your website and your social media accounts as a spider’s web all linking back to each other. Make sure people can link to your social media accounts from your website and vice versa.
Branding
Make sure your website ties in with the branding on all your other marketing material. The colouring and logo should be consistent across all your marketing mediums whether printed or online.
Personality
Make your site stand out with its own personality. This will depend upon your business aims and your target market but consider if you want your site to fun and funky or whether it should be more formal and serious.
Taking the time to think about the checklist above when planning a website can make the difference between it achieving what you want it to do or not.
Have you thought lately about how your business is packaged and how that packaging affects the first impressions people have of your business? Oh, but I don’t need to I hear you say, I don’t sell products, only services.
Well, this is where you might be going wrong. Everything that represents your business needs to have thought and consideration put into how it is packaged or presented and what impression it gives to your potential customers.
[Tweet “Everything that represents your business needs to have thought & consideration put into what impression it gives to potential clients”]
This can be in the form of marketing material, your website and you personally.
What first impressions do you get from packaging?
Take luxury products in a department store. What stands out about the packaging? It is usually of a higher quality and both looks and feels good. So if you are in the luxury product or a professional industry such as a solicitor, consultant or interior designer, all your business presentation needs to represent this.
Your business cards should be of a higher grade paper and feel good to the touch. This can have a subtle subconscious effect on the user that will help them with how they perceive your company. If you have inferior, cheap, flimsy business cards, the user may subconsciously think you offer an inferior business also.
Your website should also be considered as packaging for your business. If it is a quick cobbled together effort with poor layout, you may well lose out to your competitor who has spent a bit more time, effort and money in getting theirs right. If you go to the newsstand and see a magazine that looks cheap and poorly done, you don’t expect the quality of the content to be as good or professional as one if the top magazines. Your website has the same effect visually. If yours looks poor quality and cheap, people will be deterred from reading further no matter how good your offering is.
How do you package yourself?
And think about you. You need to package yourself to represent your business. a lady selling wedding dresses who wears a stained badly fitting tee shirt and too tight jeans with her stomach hanging out over the top is unlikely to inspire confidence in a bride who wants to be advised how to look her best on her special day (unfortunately this is a real life example I came across).
Don’t let your branding deter your ideal client
We have spoken about luxury branding here and you need to make sure if you are not looking for top end clients that you don’t create a brand that makes you look out of the price range of your target market.
I made this mistake myself with a previous business. I had a property staging company that dressed homes for sale at an affordable price that would help attract buyers and secure a sale more easily. I got my branding wrong and my business marketing looked more suited to an interior design business which my target market thought they would not be able to afford.
I have known someone refuse to contact a gardener for a quote as they believed he would out of their price range as he drove a brand new range rover. He wasn’t expensive and would have been better off driving around in a small van on his business travels.
So think carefully about how you package your business and the perception that packaging has on your potential clients. Make sure the first impressions your packaging gives out are the right ones for your business.
There are literally thousands of different directory publications, both print and digital. These include local and national general directories along with specialist trade publications.
With the decline in print advertising, directory advertising has become a relatively low cost method of marketing your business. And most online directories offer a free listing. Research the better ones and get yourself listed.
How to choose which directory to use
One of the best ways to decide which online directories to get listed in is to do an online search for your keywords and see which show up in the results. These are the ones in which you want to have your business listed. Also have a look at where your competitors are advertising and ask your customers which ones they use.
Free or paid?
Thomson Local, Yell.com, BT and 192.com tend to appear frequently in results. Don’t get hooked into paying for these directories. Try them out for free. A word of warning now though, once you sign up for a free listing, you may start to get frequent sales calls.
If you decide to go for a paid for option, negotiate for a good price. The advertising rates shown are rarely set in stone. By finding out the print deadline for a publication and then calling as close to this as possible may get you a considerable discount.
What to include
When placing your advert, you need to try and make your ad stand out from the numerous ones that will be alongside you. Remember that all important company strapline? Include it. Use that one short statement that will grab the reader’s attention and encourage them to find out more about you.
But most importantly ensure your contact details are clear and stand out. There is no point placing an advert and then having the phone number so small that no one can read it.
Measure if it is working
As with any marketing, you need to be able to determine if this type of advertising is working for your business or not. To be able to measure the effectiveness of your efforts include a different email address for customers to contact you or ask them to quote a code when calling.
As with any marketing, it needs to be constantly reviewed, tried and tested and I tried to do that with my newsletter. And what a mistake I made! I tried to set up an RSS feed so that blog posts went out automatically to my subscribers and it failed miserably. It was a mess.
Social media automation can do more harm than good
And it taught me a valuable lesson in trying to automate too much. This lesson reminded me of the article I wrote on ‘The pitfalls of social media automationand the damaging effect it can have on your audience.
This brings me on to another area of automation that many small businesses do. The setting up of automated responses when you follow someone on Twitter. Do you hate these? I most certainly do. It is so obvious that they are automated and are so impersonal and sometimes can border on being offensive. Take the instance of a restaurant that I visit on a regular basis. I followed them and was chatting with the owner on Twitter when suddenly I received a direct message asking me if I ever visited North Devon and if I had ever visited the restaurant!
This had such a negative impact. For a start, just a simple bit of investigation would reveal I was from North Devon. But for a regular client who spends a lot of money with that business, if I wasn’t online with the owner and could tell him what had just happened, I would have been insulted to be messaged in such a way that made my custom feel wholly insignificant.
This is also the danger when outsourcing your social media to companies who don’t know your clientèle and don’t bother to do a few checks and balances before posting. So beware of too much social media automation or using a marketing company to do everything for you. There are some organisations that do get it right and do a great job for their clients. But there are also those that send out a bog-standard message on behalf of all their clients and therefore if you follow more than one of their clients you get the same mundane message over and over again.
A refreshing moment in marketing
So it was very refreshing today that after I had tweeted about a certain subject, I received an email. The business who had read my tweet had taken the time to look at my bio, get my email address and then send me some really good and useful information. They didn’t try to sell to me but just started to build a relationship.
I replied and said thank you and then we got chatting. Yes, this personal approach takes far more time but I can guarantee you it will be far more effective in getting you loyal clients in the long term.
So beware before you think about social media automation for your business. Make sure you know what you are doing and still retain the personal touch.
Anyway, back to the drawing board for me and more manual labour!!
What are your thoughts on social media automation? Leave your comments in the box below.
How often have you been in negotiations with a prospect who then thanks you for your time but decides not to make a purchase? Quite a few I suspect.
But what do you do in this situation? Do you just thank them and ask them to get in touch if they are interested in the future? If so, you may be wasting a valuable opportunity!
Apply this customer research technique to increase future sales
When a prospect declines to buy, ask them why. Now this doesn’t have to be confrontational so they feel as though they have offended you. It can be done in a very gentle customer research type of manner that makes the prospect feel valued and will give you a far greater insight into how to achieve future sales than anything else out there.
Simply ask the prospect what would have prompted them to buy from you today. Ask them what you could have done differently.
Some people may be too embarrassed to tell you the price is too high or the product not good enough so may say something like ‘I just can’t afford it at the moment’ or if you are a service industry, ‘I don’t have time at the moment’.
This is where you can then start to do some gentle drilling down to find out the real reason they haven’t bought from you and what you can do about it.
They can’t afford it
If they say they can’t afford it, ask them if they would buy if you gave a discount or offered flexible payment terms. If they still say no, you know that price isn’t the real reason they didn’t buy and something else is stopping them. Say to them something along the lines of ‘so price doesn’t seem to be the real issue and I feel something else is missing for you in what I am offering. If the price was right, what could I offer that would make you want to purchase today?’
It’s not the right time
If they use the time excuse, ask them when they think the time will be right for them, how much time they think they need etc. Ask them the question ‘so if I call you in two months’ time will you be making a purchase then?’ If they say maybe or they will think about it at that point, again, time is not the real reason and you need to ask the same question as previously of ‘so time doesn’t seem to be the real issue and I feel something else is missing for you in what I am offering. If the timing was right, what could I offer that you would like to purchase today?’
Hopefully, you get my drift and you will find different questions and adapt them to your business and answers given. It can take practice to get this right but if you can do it, this valuable customer research will really help you find out so much more about people’s needs and wants and how your product or service can fulfil those. You can then change your offering to attract more sales in the future.
All through the questioning make sure you keep an easy conversational style rather than conducting an interrogation and make sure the prospect knows that there is no pressure to buy but that they will really be helping you with your future business offering. Maybe you would like to give them a small token of appreciation for co-operating such as a voucher for future use or a small gift or taster session.
Be brave. Give it a go. And let me know how you get on with this style of customer research in the comments box below or over on the Facebook page.
Do you struggle with pricing your product or service?
There is a saying that ‘People look for the cheapest price when there is nothing else on offer’. And that is why I try to get people to not compete on price when starting up their business.
When I talk to people looking to start up their business, or who are in their first couple years of trading, and I ask them why customers will choose them over the competition, so many tell me because they are the cheapest.
And this is when alarms bells start ringing for me. If price is the only thing you can compete on, you will find yourself a busy fool with customers that nobody else wants.
Make sure you charge the right price
If people only bought on price why would we have such a range of cars on the roads at vastly differing prices? A Robin Reliant gets from A to B in exactly the same way as a top of the range BMW. But the BMW has reputation, trust, additional comfort and reliability that people will pay for. Why do some people buy a tee shirt for £9.99 in M&S when they could get an almost identical one in Primark for £1.99? Is it the customer service and better layout of items?
Find something of value to offer in your business and charge the correct rate for your products or services. If you don’t, the competition can quite easily wipe your business out by simply offering a price match or doing a heavy discount for a period of time that you simply can’t match.
Having something of value to make you stand out doesn’t have to be a material item. It can be a small, simple step you have in your business that can make a big difference to the customer that makes them remember you.
Uniqueness and value are perceptions so it could be something as simple as a follow-up phone call to ask if the customer is happy with their purchase. It could be a daily or weekly email (dependent upon what you are selling) as to how their order is progressing. It could be a tiny thing such as including a small length of ribbon and a gift tag if you know your product is being purchased as a present.
Remember, it is the unexpected things that influence us and that we remember. These things will have far more impact on our future buying decisions than having the cheapest price.
So make sure you charge the right price for your products and services and don’t sell yourself short.
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