There is no spoon
Hi All, as promised a link to the very useful document that will help new members discover the important points about each other’s business and requirements. There are many others, but if this form is the least you use, you will be in good shape.
Recently providing some website marketing advice to a contact who designs and installs kitchens, I had the opportunity to review their current website and suggest some simple alterations and additions that will add a great deal of value for search engines and also the general visitor experience.
The name of the company and the website have been removed to protect the innocent…
The current … …….. website features a simple website template design containing 9 individual pages. There is currently no additional information targeted at Search Engines, and no location specific information to assist in generating visitors and customers.
The website is simple and clean, in general the copy text and images are presented well. The site is limited by a fixed size template which does mean layer scrolling in frames on some pages.
Suggestions following website review – minor design updates
In general the website can be modernised without very much effort or expense. We see the key to the success of online marketing being two fold; firstly enabling the website to work more effectively by promoting services and gathering data.
Secondly, the website should be promoted to search engines, with an effort made to generate high ranking back-links. The website and business in general would benefit greatly from optimisation through Google places – the target to appear at the top of the local searches on Google.co.uk
In addition to website promotion and digital marketing, a general update to the print advertising would help to generate a joined up campaign. When used in conjunction; telephone, email marketing, website, direct mail and print marketing can be extremely effective.
They must be considered as a route to a sale, where the print advertising may encourage readers to go to the website, and order their free catalogue. Then a piece of direct mail advertising is sent with the printed catalogues. This is followed by a phone call a few days later to ensure that the catalogue was delivered correctly. Which is followed in turn by an email suggesting an appointment with a design specialist.
At all of these points of contact there is an opportunity to impress the customer, with a professional manner, well designed literature and a concise and timely follow up. By following a strategized sales process, the number of phone calls is very limited and only made to the ‘hot’ leads.
Where the value of an individual sale can be very high, it is important not to follow a random approach to sales and marketing. Measuring the success of every part of the process is equally important, and each process adds up to successful sales.
I just want to take this opportunity to say how thoroughly delighted I am to be working with ‘Print 2 Please’. We are embarking on a digital marketing campaign, where I will be working on a retainer basis, able to commit to a set number of hours per month and really get to know how the company ticks.
Working closely with an organisation and becoming their ‘in house’ marketing department, has so many advantages over simply project by project work. I will be able to measure the success of every email campaign we send out, every bit of search engine optimisation we do for their website. As well as seeing the challenges that face theat type of business on a daily basis, rather than just the meeting room.
Print 2 Please have a wonderful work ethic, and they really do please their customers, in what can be a very competitive market place. As margins get tighter and some of the competition fall by the wayside, building a relationship and constantly providing a really high quality of work and service, are the most important aspects of the business.
Growing the Print 2 Please website, and managing some effective advertising and email campaigns will be critical in the development of new business. It’s a challenge I enjoy greatly and one I will be around to see the effects of first hand.
Print 2 Please offer a virtually unlimited range of printed products from their base in Coventry at the heart of the UK. Very competitively priced and such a joy to work with. You can contact them through their soon to be evolving website www.print2please.co.uk
www.3ofme.net
Spending a lot of time advising my clients and building websites that work for them, always leaves me with so little time to explore the possibilities for marketing my own business. As nearly all my business comes through recommendation and referral, I don’t have to worry too much about my own website and my exposure on search engines. In fact this blog is simply so I can keep up to speed with how the systems work and best advise my clients.
But finally I have managed to focus for long enough to put something new – and quite simple – together. Not meant as a showcase of work, although there is some design on show. And not meant to be very visible on Google, because if I’m too visible I just get swamped with enquiries. (I like to be selective) But it is good to have a professional face online, and to ensure that I’m presenting myself and my business in the right light.
Having developed the website to new specifications on three separate occasions over the past eight years or so. We’ve been through most iterations, starting with the obligatory Flash site, that looked fantastic, but was a nightmare to update and did nothing for the search engines. Followed by quite a dark and powerful site, that was at least visible on Google, and was mostly a graphic design and video showcase.
The third 3ofme site was very much an exercise in SEO and positioning the services we provide. Which worked to a degree, but perhaps diluted the enquiries we received as a result. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to get enquiries for Time Lapse photography, I love to do it, and I know a great deal about it. But the key for the business is our consultancy practice, making sure we are giving our clients the best advice and creating successful online marketing campaigns.
So version four is officially ‘none of the above’. It doesn’t feature any Flash (but I’m sure it will at some point), and it does use some nice JavaScript that has finally started to make sense. It isn’t optimised for search engines, but we will start to work on our satellite sites to do that, where we will promote the hands on services to a greater degree.
All in all it’s a good start, it didn’t take very long, and I don’t cringe (yet) when I show it to people.
When we were in Stratford last Thursday evening, David reminded me of something that I had read a while ago, and it prompted me to look it up again. This is an extract from an article by Jeanie Marshall (a personal development coach)
The ‘Did It’ List
The idea of the Did It List emerged because I work with some clients who feel discouraged about the tasks that they have not completed. Feelings of guilt and frustration lead them to use the not-yet-finished items on the To Do List as a way to show themselves they have procrastinated, wasted time, or been unsuccessful.
If this scenario describes you, write a list at the end of the day of the activities you have accomplished. If you prepare a daily Did It List for three weeks, you will become impressed with your accomplishments. If you and a friend join together to share your Did It Lists with each other, you will be even more deeply empowered. After you feel sufficiently empowered, you might find that the exercise naturally falls away.
The Did It List is not intended to be merely the transfer of the completed items from a To Do List to a new list, although that is a viable way to start a Did It List. However, I think of the Did It List as a new list, started afresh at the end of each day. Perhaps items that did not even make the To Do List appear on the Did It List. Instead of calling it the Did It List, one client calls his an “Accomplishments List” and another calls hers a “Success List.”
This from a site: http://immnow.info/?tag=important-things
S-P-E-L-L them out for success
I was at a business networking meeting a few weeks ago and I met a wonderful lady who wasn’t wearing a nametag. I introduced myself and asked for her name. It was a name I had heard before, and could probably remember, but I just wanted to make sure I locked it in. So I repeated her name and said to her “That’s a wonderful name, how do you spell it?” She replied, “K-A-I-T-L-Y-N”. I smiled and asked, “Kaitlyn, K-A-I-T-L-Y-N , do you put a heart over the ‘I’ or just a dot?” She laughed.
In a few brief seconds, I was able to say her name 3 times (repetition, saying the name over and over to lock it in) and I was also able to “see” the letters in my mind (creating an image). Finally, I was able to make a humorous image with a tiny heart over the ‘I’ (the mind remembers different, strange or humorous images far better than just regular images).
It’s a small technique you can use to remember names. People just LOVE to talk about themselves and their name is one of the most important things to them, so have some fun with it.
Targets
With any marketing and sales campaign, it is important to have targets in the short and long term. A rule of thumb we use when setting out targets with no previous visible results, is to work on a best case scenario of 10% investment of the expected return.
Each organisation is different, and there are many contributing factors that will influence a return on investment. Is the business proposal sound? Is there a market for our proposition? How large is our target market? That is the basis of the suggestions within this report.
If you can work out how much an average landlord or property will make you – over 12 months, then up to 5 years for example – we can start to calculate a worthwhile level of investment to meet those targets.
Sales Methods
Very few of the marketing techniques we employ actually ‘sell’ a product or service directly. The key to marketing success is to encourage the eventual client to make the decision to ‘buy’ on their own. The strongest sale is one where the customer believes it is entirely their decision.
Therefore we don’t ask the customer to buy from us at any point, we use various tools to get in front of them. For example; downloading a free report, having a ‘risk free’ assessment of their property, receiving our regular newsletter of useful information (tailored for their business sector).
These methods allow us to encourage eventual sales, leaving the door open for customers who are ready to make the decision sooner rather than later. But also to recycle the potential customers who are not ready to buy into the sales cycle. They may be ready to buy in a year’s time or more – but they will be very familiar with the good advice you give for free, and have developed a level of trust for your organisation and brand.
Routes to Market
Some forms of marketing may be more successful than others, but to only use one method could miss many opportunities. It is suggested that a campaign featuring different marketing methods, with continuous measurement and assessment, will produce the best results overall. A variety of marketing vehicles should be used, each requiring a structured approach – but each must also be tailored to fit the other, and the ‘message’ must be continuous throughout.
Database development will feed into; telemarketing, website design and promotion, email marketing, direct marketing, print advertising and the creation of presentation and promotional material.
Lee Erinmez - Cover Beyond Sound Check
Yesterday was one hell of a long day. 7am start on a Sunday, after my team had gone out of the football world cup the evening before (boo!). Was a bit tricky, but at least I wasn’t driving. In fact a nicely converted Mercedes Sprinter van, with storage for equipment and fairly comfy seats around a table in the back, arrived to collect me and my gear. So a pretty good start.
It was perhaps the hottest day of the year so far, and I was along to help a recent client of mine ‘Cover Beyond’ a live karaoke and cover band. www.coverbeyonduk.com They had a booking for a wedding party near Ipswich, which is quite a journey if you’re going straight there – but since we had to collect the rest of the band from London first – it was a journey and a half.
This is certainly a fun client to work with, professional and very talented musicians, who create a great atmosphere. My involvement has been to help them develop a visual style for their marketing material, business card designs, website design and development. And most importantly their overall marketing strategy.
For Cover Beyond, it’s very much a case of narrowing down their target market, to the areas that will make them the most profit from the enterprise. This will generally be large weddings and corporate events, for which there are a number of different people to appeal to.
My advice to the band has been to focus their attentions on the event planners, wedding venues and complimentary services to the industry. They can be a route through to the couples actually getting married, so make a relationship with a venue and they will introduce you to every couple who visits them.
It’s the same with the corporate entertainment circuit, don’t go straight for the end client, build a relationship with event management companies. They have the capacity to bring multiple clients to you.
Getting back to the point in hand, yesterday (Sunday) was spent at a beautiful golf-club/hotel/spa venue in the countryside. Taking photos of the band, shooting video for the website and generally getting some feedback from the audience and the band. Everything went very well indeed, including the rather complicated technology behind the backing tracks and the live karaoke screens.
Most notable was the reaction from the event guests, not just those who performed – who it was easy to see had also dreamed of performing on stage with a live band. But from the audience watching them – to see their family and friends up on stage, made the event something very special. A unique experience for everyone there.
We’re half way through 2010, and it’s as good a time as any to review our goals and targets and see what has happened to our New Year resolutions. Together as a chapter we have started to measure our achievements in financial terms, but there is a deeper level of success and progress that can’t be measured in purely financial terms.
Are we achieving what we want to as business people? Have we learnt and grown more in the last 6 months? What has the group of people round the table done for us? And if we think it could have been more – what are we going to do about it?
We already know that we have at least one thing in common with everyone round the table. And we discover more about each other as time goes by – we accelerate this learning by taking part in one2ones, by paying attention to our ‘sales manager minute’ speeches, and the ten minute presentations.
And there’s another, very specific thing, we can do to give to our fellow members. Besides keeping an ear open for referrals and making introductions – we can invite visitors who our members know they can do business with.
What we do need to remember is that it can be negative to invite visitors and substitutes who do what another member within our chapter does – so please remember to avoid that.
We have done this before, but especially for our new members, this is a good exercise to help remind our fellow members.
I’m going to go round the table and ask each of our members and visitors to tell me a specific ‘sector’ of business or of someone in a specific job role within a business. But most importantly it needs to be specific. And if you could get an introduction to them, you know you would be able to do business. (if it’s difficult to pin down a type of individual – perhaps tell us the last business or individual you did really good business with)
For me there are a couple of really good ones – a marketing or sales manager, in a large organisation, in manufacturing perhaps. Or a client account manager within a marketing agency.
Yesterday evening – apart from a couple of really fantastic football games – our local chapter of BNI all took part in a membership success programme. I’ve experienced many different business networking events and meetings, but one of the things that sets BNI apart is the added value from the structure and training.
Having completed this training when I joined a year ago, it wasn’t compulsory for me to attend, but as a group bonding experience and to show support to our new members, we felt it worthwhile to all join in. It’s refreshing to remind ourselves that we attend these meetings every week to ‘do business’, and this is sometimes forgotten in the mix of good social relationships. It’s certainly nice to get on with everyone in the group, but most importantly they are a group of like minded business people.
I provide Digital Marketing Consultancy to businesses, which means that I help companies do more business online. Through website design and optimisation, strategic email campaigns and communication strategies. Getting to know someone’s business and then helping them to grow and become more successful is a very satisfying way to work.
What BNI provides me with, is the opportunity to run a proving ground for my ideas and campaigns. I get the chance to advise and interact with the members of the chapter, providing my knowledge to help them – and in return I have access to the knowledge and expertise of twenty or so other business professionals on a regular basis.