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Here Are 3 Ways You Can Make It Easier For Customers to Find and Contact Your Small Business
Low prices and stellar customer service will not make up for poor marketing. Though each industry is different, these tips are universal for entrepreneurs to make it easy for prospective customers to reach them.
Open Up the Lines of Communication
Even the greatest small business is only as successful as its ability to engage and communicate with prospective customers. Finding the best toll free number for business can be a great place to start. These are time-tested lines that allow for customization, ease of marketing, and a complimentary option for people trying to reach a company. In addition to a dedicated phone number, social media sites and applications are important places for a robust online presence. Many people now communicate almost exclusively through these channels, so being accessible and responsive here could result in new leads and loyal customers in the future.
Understand What Your Customers Demand
Each unique industry comes with its own demands and complexities. Beyond that, different regions have specific challenges impacting the ways in which business can be conducted. Perhaps the most important variable, however, involves what it is a company’s customers actually want. Through feedback, surveys, or some other metric, savvy entrepreneurs are constantly monitoring whether they are providing exactly the experience that their clientele is requesting. If one business falls short, those customers are sure to start shopping around for another option more closely aligned with their desires. Of course, it is impossible for any endeavor to please everyone at all times. Coming as close as possible to checking all the boxes, though, is a great way to remain in an advantageous position for the future.
Identify Key Industry Trends
Since tastes, technology, and much more are constantly evolving, it is vital for any business owner to know precisely what competitors can offer above and beyond the standard fare. Whatever the industry, there are likely multiple factors at play in any given time period. Make sure not to neglect any significant improvements in speed, quality, or cost. Maintaining the best product or service for the fairest price around are the quintessential standards of quality and long-lasting business model.
Much planning and research goes into launching any successful small business. As all entrepreneurs know, however, the hard work does not stop on opening day. Instead, new obstacles arise and must be cleared by those tasked with keeping the operation afloat. Remembering the three tips outlined above can take some of the guesswork out of this nonstop pursuit.
5 Ways to Boost Traffic to your Website
You have a product or service, and create fantastic content, but you’re receiving no engagement. Without clients or consumers, your business will be stagnant. Boosting traffic to your website is the key to building a community and, ultimately, gaining new clients.
Don’t expect conversions overnight. You’ll need a solid and consistent marketing strategy to open the flow of traffic. There’s no single tactic that will be completely effective. Instead, multiple tactics, implemented together, will give you a significant influx of new viewers. These five strategies will increase your website engagement and help you build a loyal community.
1. Link-Building
Google loves links. Implementing quality links through-out your content will help it rank higher on search results. Also, if your website is linked via an external source, it will boost your rank on search and raise your authority as a site. It can take time to reach out to other online sources and convince them to link your website on their page. Consider using a link building service to do it for you and see a massive increase in relevant traffic to your site.
2. Use Social Media
Social Media is one of the most valuable marketing tools you have at your disposal. The best part is, it’s totally free and relatively straightforward to use. Connect with your target audience using social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.
Join Facebook groups in your niche and engage with the community. Don’t be spammy but offer up your website as a resource at appropriate times. You can use hashtags on Instagram to locate people who are interested in your product or service. Engage with them by following and liking their content, which will encourage them to check out yours as well.
3. Advertise
Using ad platforms is a great way to get your website in front of your target audience. Google Ads and Facebook Ads are both comprehensive platforms to launch your advertising from. You can choose which demographic you’d like to target, which will deliver a better return on investment. The ads will only appear to those people who are most likely to engage with your content and brand. Yes, you’ll need to spend a bit of money on advertising, but it’s a surefire way to boost your traffic quickly.
4. Use SEO
Optimizing your website and content for online search is essential to driving traffic your way. Search relevant keywords to determine what your target audience is searching for. Then, integrate them into your content so you’ll rank in search engines.
Use relevant keywords in headlines, subtitles, image descriptions, etc., to see the most benefit. SEO is a bit of a rabbit-hole, but learn the basics to make your content relevant to your niche.
5. Create an Engaging & User-Friendly Website
How many times have you arrived on a website that’s bland, confusing, word-heavy, etc. and left straight away? Design your website with your consumer in mind. It should be visually stimulating, with fonts that are easy to read, and have a balance of written and visual content. It should look attractive, organized, and represent your brand. Make sure it’s user-friendly and easy to navigate around. Confusion will lead your potential customer to click off the site as quickly as they clicked on.
Preparatory work for direct mail lowers costs
Direct mail is a highly effective marketing technique that delivers sales revenue in a short time frame.
Some direct mail is poorly conceived and so does not achieve its potential.
[WARNING – this is not always true].
Printed direct mail promoting a printer
I received three mailers from a printing firm which serve as a great example of a campaign that could have been much more effective with some pre-planning working with an expert in direct mail campaign structure such as us.
Direct Mail campaign structure
Using a mailing list of marketing agencies, three print pieces of DM were posted out.
The copy promoted “digital by nature” and a new world of digital printing.
The positives
- Each card had a number to show where it came in the sequence
- Each one showed different paper colours front and back
- Each card had the print specifications for the front and back detailed which was cute
- All print was beautifully executed
- The 3rd card showed how to set up artwork to work with digital White Toner
- The 4th card showed how to set up artwork to work with digital Clear Toner
The negatives
- I did not receive the first card so the campaign opener was lost
- My agency does not buy print or do graphic design, we are not a good prospect for this service
- No landing page for the campaign on the website
- When I first visited there wasn’t a mention of the campaign on the homepage, there is now.
- This goes to a landing page which has the wrong link in the contact us button.
Wrong link – testing would have showed this up
How I would have improved the campaign
- Combined telephone canvassing with direct mail
- Checked the database by phone first asking one question “Do you design for print?”
- This would have reduced the downstream print and mailing costs, focused the campaign
- Published a landing page URL on the collateral
- Tested all the links so the contact us URL was correct (it currently references the same page it’s on)
- Included a “behind the scenes” video to show the inside track of the skill Valley Print used to create the mailers and the challenges they faced e.g. printing white on black for the envelope
- Used a courier delivery not NZ Post to improve delivery success
- This is particularly important for a posted print direct mail series
- Followed up by phone with
- an invitation to watch the video
- stay in touch
- subscribe to news updates
- further qualify for future work opportunities
- This would have built a mailing list, fully up to date and ready for in-house new business sales team to continue to work in the coming months
- Planned follow up campaigns including more of the excellent tutorials for designers
Ready to talk direct mail with us?
Give us your challenge and let the creative team loose!
January website checks you MUST make
It’s January – we are back from the Christmas break and many firms are still on a skeleton staff. Some are back full time – but we’re all filled with the pressures of a new year – new marketing plans, new services, new products.
For most of us, we’ve already forgotten the marketing we did in December. But we shouldn’t.
Because many websites are now inaccurate, out of date or just plain giving WRONG information.
Here’s a good example I called up today. I got their “out of hours” telephone answering recorded message. It is past the 9th January and nobody’s home…. cooeee…..
Company contact information is wrong
So if you have a holiday closure message on your website – get that fixed up and corrected pronto.
Copyright dates on website footers are another culprit. Some are obviously years out of date and others still say 2016
It doesn’t have to be this way!
Automate publishing
Post Expirator Plugin for WP
Website CMS systems mostly offer automation services which allow you to set future dates to un-publish pages and posts. Take a read of this explanation of how to “expire” a WordPress post using the WP Post Expirator plugin. Set a future date at which the post will stop being visible – you can choose whether to return to draft or to delete the post.
Use code to update dates
Here is the code to insert into your footer to ensure that the copyright year automatically rolls over on January 1st. Get it pasted into your website FAST.
<script type=”text/javascript”>
document.write(new Date().getFullYear());
</script>
Better marketing processes
Of course, fixing up your mistakes now is fine – but wouldn’t it be better to not have made them in the first place?
How about you set up reminders in your calendar to nudge you to manually remove or unpublish information?
Get those plugins and extensions installed so the work is done for you by machines.
Or pay an outsourced marketing consultant like Creative Agency Secrets to do it for you.
Happy new year – and if you’re in need of some marketing and new business year planning, come to our Auckland workshop on 26th January.
Why Whitespace Matters in Web Design
Your website is a valuable marketing asset.
So it makes sense to invest in its design to make it better for potential prospects. In fact, many of the largest companies pour a tremendous amount of resources into their websites. Because even a single design can have a dramatic impact on conversions and bounce rates.
But it is also important to remember that a simple design is key to driving conversion goals.
Cluttered designs with poorly contrasting colours only serve to confuse visitors. Your website design should be readable and easy to understand so that visitors have an intuitive sense of what to do next.
One way to create a more enjoyable browsing experience is to implement whitespace. The use of whitespace is perhaps one of the most important elements of web design. Yet there are still a countless number of websites that look like an infomercial with elements that bombard new visitors.
Here we look at whitespace in more detail and how this simple design principle can boost engagement on your pages.
What is Whitespace?
Whitespace refers to negative space, or the empty space between elements on a page such as images and text. In other words, whitespace is the portion on page that is not filled up. Although it is called “whitespace”, the empty space can actually be any colour such as black.
Perhaps the best example of whitespace is Google’s homepage:
Other businesses including Dropbox make ample use of whitespace on their sites:
Now contrast those two examples with this website:
It is not immediately clear what the business offers or what actions visitors should take.
Just with a simple comparison, the advantages of a clean design is immediately apparent. Whitespace may seem like a waste. But as we have seen, it can be used to great effect and keep visitors on the page longer. And this can ultimately mean the difference between exceeding sales goals or struggling to meet them.
Why Whitespace Matters
Whitespace is advantageous for the following reasons:
- Improved legibility: Nothing is more frustrating than landing on page with text that is too small or with minimal line spacing. Improved legibility is one obvious benefit of whitespace. Just by adjusting line spacing and adding more space around images can help visitors better understand what they are reading. This is key to boosting engagement and reducing bounce rates.
- Ability to highlight CTAs: Imagine if Google’s homepage was filled with links to other pages or other elements such as banners. Both would likely have a negative impact on the number of search queries, which is the last thing that Google would want. Making use of whitespace then is a great way to highlight call to actions and get visitors to take a single action.
- Creates a lasting impression: There is a reason why some of the largest invest heavily in their website design. Because online users are quick to make impressions based on what they see. Whitespace is especially important as it adds a sense of elegance to your site.
Less is more as whitespace can really make a difference in terms of your website design.
A clean interface makes it easier for visitors to immediately grasp what a page is about and what actions to take next. The goal for any website is to keep visitors engaged and generate more sales or leads. Whitespace helps to achieve those objectives.
The use of ample whitespace is a basic web design principle that can dramatically improve your website performance in terms of conversions. So take a closer look at all the aspects of your website to identify how you can make your design simple and uncluttered.
Do Consumers Need to Know Where Our Business is Located?
Today’s always-on global world could make your business location seem to be an irrelevancy. But the opposite is true. Local marketing is now the fastest-growing part of online marketing specialisms. And it matters. Let me explain.
So here are 3 examples for you to use when considering international website domains.
Feel local but act global
A client asked “We operate in Australia and New Zealand and not sure whether our NZ target market (women 25+) will find our Australian connection appealing or a turn off, given how very passionate and patriotic us Kiwis are! I’m getting mixed messages when I ask around.
We don’t want to hide our Australian connection, as it’s very important and where the business was born, with a fascinating story behind it, just not sure whether to include “Australia” and “New Zealand” optional buttons on the landing page to split off there, or if it should perhaps only appear as an option when you need to click on “events” or “locations” etc. that have information relevant only for each country?”
What should she do?
My advice is to use a single web domain as the master site for both countries and then to have separate pages for the two locations. Here’s why.
Aussies versus Kiwis – Broadly they are correct, New Zealanders want to think they’re seeing local information (and importantly local currency and phone numbers) and of course small differences in language and rugby club orientation may also come through in brand communications over time. Do Australians eat afghan biscuits? Do Kiwis eat chiko rolls?
Your Website Strategy
Ultimately the solution you choose MUST be driven by the strategy for each country. Is the website a place where people find out about you, get news on specials and what’s new, will they email you, will they phone you? If yes, then the website must facilitate separate information for each site.
Set the strategy for the website first, then worry about the technical implementation.
Take a look at this case study of some work we did for a client who needed his visitors to quickly split up into pages best aligned with their needs.
Driving visitors to the right landing page focuses traffic
A strategic solution
The home page says what the business brand is all about – the owners, your values and passions.
Then you have a “What’s On NZ” and a separate “What’s on AU” button that take visitors to what is effectively a home page for that location……
I would treat the NZ page effectively as your local domain and give it a really simple URL and so all links to the New Zealand business go there first.
An alternative to this location split is to have parallel websites which have slightly different domains e.g. nz.yourwebsite.com and au.yourwebsite.com You often see this device used by international law firms and accountants. This can be set up by your web hosts.
In practice this means few visitors go to the home page…. but that doesn’t really matter as long as local audiences are being served.
A poorly executed country strategy
By contrast, we got approached by a Perth business asking to do some content marketing with us.
They sounded like a good prospect and we fixed a phone call. I rang, answerphone with an English man’s voice…. so I looked him up on LinkedIn and it turns out the business name is BusinessName (Thailand) Co. Which rang a few alarm bells.
And his stated location was Manchester, UK. Clearly a disconnect.
When we spoke he said although their phones were VOIP and used Australian numbers; he was actually based in Thailand and he couldn’t make outbound calls to international numbers like mine in New Zealand. As any Aussie or Kiwi business will tell you, it’s extremely odd not to be able to phone the other country while doing business.
Now let’s look at a third scenario
Nimbus Portal Solutions are a client and they trade in five jurisdictions – Australia, United Kingdom, New Zealand, USA and South Africa plus “Global” to pick up the rest of the world.
Their chosen solution to the website location question is to locally identify the IP address of the visitor and to quietly re-set the website version to the domain best suited. So my default goes to NZ. You can check this top right in their website where a country name displays.
The main goal for Nimbus is to ensure all the currencies are local and bank account / trading entities switch to match. Which is important for their business as jurisdiction for secure document storage matters – borders and locations of server hosting are aligned to the local country to stay within data protection laws.
In summary – set the website goal first and the supporting strategy will then drive the solution which works best for your situation.
This article first appeared in Marketing Online Magazine
SEO Case Study: From Second Page to Second Place in Two Weeks
Google now processes over 3.5 billion searches per day, every single day. No wonder 10 out of 10 businesses want only one thing: to appear on the first results page for keywords related to their industry. This kind of visibility is the promise of a tonne of organic traffic, new leads and sales.
In this case study, you’re going to see how we used SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to push a client’s website from the second page of Google to the second position on the first page, for the desired keyword in the whole of New Zealand.
What’s the real benefit of being on the first page of a Google search?
Well, I’m glad you asked. According to data from the Moz blog, “71.33% of searches result in a page one organic click. Page two and three get only 5.59% of the clicks.”. That means if your website is not ranking on the first page, you lose almost 3/4 of the audience. Imagine you have the opportunity to pitch your business to 10 new clients and, as soon you enter the meeting room, 7 of them just stand up and leave, without you saying even a single word.
Very frustrating. 😞
Have a clear goal in mind
Our client, Baucher Consulting, a specialist tax advisor office in Auckland, wanted to increase the amount of relevant traffic on their website, consequently resulting in more queries for their services. We discussed this necessity and defined the solution to be, primarily, an improved effort on on-page SEO. After researching on the Google Keyword Tool for specific keywords pertinent to the client’s industry and services, we targeted the keyword “nz tax advisor”.
When you buy a desired product, sometimes going local is not a major concern, and ordering from overseas is commonly the case. But services, on the other hand, tend to be a lot more “geographically sensitive” for most of us. If I offered to buy you dinner tonight and asked you to choose a good restaurant, you would Google “best restaurants in [city you live in]“, right? You don’t go just “best restaurants”, because a suggestion in another country, let’s say, is not really helpful. I offered you a meal, not a plane ticket!
Mixing the prominent keyword tax advisor with some localisation as nz just covers the user’s natural behaviour when researching for professional services nearby. Besides, it also gave us a nice long tail keyword to work with.
What we did to improve the client’s website SEO, step by step
After a brief Google search, we discovered the client’s website was ranking in the 12th position for the targeted keyword. It’s not a bad position if you think about raw numbers. However, apart from all sponsored results, a standard Google search shows you only 10 organic results (unless you change this in the options panel). This result was leaving our client on the second page, the internet equivalent of a wasteland. Luckily we’ve been working with this client for quite a while now, so just some fine tuning was needed on the website.
First, we included the long tail keyword as the “title tag” on the homepage, where we could previously see only “Baucher Consulting Limited”.
In other words, “title tag” is what shows on that big blue link beside the name of your website on a search result. It is, in fact, blatantly obvious as a major part of the decision-making process for a person to click on your result or not. Also, we included the keywords in the meta description (the text below the website address on the image), while explaining the services more deeply.
However, working with a single keyword all over your website is not recommended as it can be interpreted as keyword stuffing. In Google’s own words, keyword stuffing can be defined as “repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural”. In the past, this practice was all the rage and several websites used this brute force technique to break through to the top positions. Google’s algorithm learned from it and is heavily penalising websites that still do that owing to the fact that it “results in a negative user experience”.
Having that in mind, we diversify the content all around the website using similar expressions to the “nz tax advisor” search query with the help of Google itself. And how do we know other keywords that are related to our search in the great oracle’s brain? Easy. Google spills the beans right in front of our eyes, just at the bottom of every search:
Noticed how we used the word “specialist” in that meta description I showed before? It came from these insightful suggestions. Also, “personal tax advice” is an amazing keyword to target in our current website copy.
The result of our changes
After only two weeks, we performed the same search on Google for “nz tax advisor” and got this result:
Yeah, baby! Yeah!
A lot more SEO optimising to come
SEO can never be seen as an isolated project but a perpetual work in progress. The competition for the first places in search results is fierce. That’s why we still have more cards up our sleeve and a few optimisations aligned to Baucher’s website are still coming. Now that our client’s website made the jump from the 12th to the 2nd position on the Google search, there’s only one way we can go: straight to the top.
New Year Marketing Planning – resolve to do this!
Ready for next year? No, of course you’re not. This is normal.
But you intend to get ready and to plan your marketing, don’t you?
Make those resolutions happen by booking in to our January 2017 Marketing Year Planning Workshop.
Join us for a Marketing and Business Development Workshop to help you get your year plan sorted!
What Will I Get Out Of It?
We’ll walk you through our 8 Step Business Development Methodology, which will create a detailed plan of activities for the year that will drive new leads into your business and position you to achieve your goals for 2017.
You’ll also learn tips, techniques and marketing tools for your business which are vital to your modern marketing success. These are tried and tested as we do them ourselves and for our clients.
Join our Group Workshop Session on 26th January 2017 in Auckland for $500.00 + GST. This fee is per business and so you can bring 1 colleague with you.
Build your business development plan for the next year and guide your business towards success.
This workshop is for business owners and managers who are responsible for finding new clients and growing revenues. It will show you the practical, tried and tested techniques that the Creative Agency Secrets team uses for its clients.
You will learn:
- How to create a unique company profile.
- A check list of marketing activities .
- New business pipeline analysis and tracking template.
- What you need to do to get better known in your industry.
- Learn relationship building for getting and keeping long term clients.
- How to spot opportunities for new business sales.
- The business process that delivers leads.
- What to measure to track progress.
Each attendee will take home a high level plan for their business – planned through the year with month by month activities.
Testimonials from Nov 2016 attendees
“It was good to be in the group and to feed off Rebecca’s comment and experience. I don’t record leads and whether they were successful and that will definitely be useful in future.” Nicola Manning, Nicola Manning Design
“I enjoyed it. It was definitely worthwhile. I thought it was a good bunch of people and it was very interesting.” Dave Sauvage, Sauvage Design
It was really good and I will do a strategy accountability partner each month. I am going to leave my paid mentor group and do this instead. I have to get into the headspace to actually go back and review everything and set goals for each month. The wide range of people was very good especially the male female diversity. Jo-Anne Hitchcock, H Architecture
“I thought it was useful and when people are at different stages that’s interesting. I could do a few things differently which is partly a time thing. Beneficial – I got out of it as much as I could.” Jeremy Sutton, Jeremy Sutton Lawyers