ADEPT Marketing

Unfortunately as well all know, crisis situations and emergency events do happen – we tend to think it won’t happen to us, but I have recently gone through an experience while at work that I doubt anyone can be 100% prepared for – certainly in my case it was a shocking situation that resulted in the loss of life of a fellow employee with intense media interest from TV, radio and print.

I hope this never happens to you or your business…but if it does you need to have a plan on how to deal with the media interest. As a small business it wasn’t something we had discussed and didn’t have a plan for but fortunately a media expert, who happened to be a regular customer of our business, was in touch with us as soon as he heard the news to see if his help would be needed – and by god yes it was needed, very much appreciated and ultimately the best thing we could have done on the day.

Media are of course very apologetic about contacting you during a tragic situation but they are certainly like a dog with a bone – they don’t tend to give up easily until they get what the need from you, and because news reporting is a very competitive environment if they don’t get the information from you then they will look to other sources that you may or may not be happy with and may or may not be accurate…so…I learnt some very valuable lessons on the few days that followed this event which I want to share.

Have a media/PR consultant with you as soon as possible

Here are some reasons why:

• Unlike you, they will be unemotional and offer clear strategic thinking
• They will have valuable experience of dealing with media and knowledge of individual media personalities
• They can advise on what you should or shouldn’t say and who is best to deal with
• They can prepare media statements and control media liaison
• They can filter the media and act as the first point of contact to reduce what the key company spokesperson has to manage

Media will publish the news whether you like it or not so  “No comment” won’t necessarily cut it

It was certainly our first instinct not to comment to media as the event unfolded but it became apparent pretty quickly that wasn’t necessarily a good strategy…we certainly had nothing to hide and wanted to ensure inaccurate or irrelevant information wasn’t published.  So it’s better to be as open as possible with media offering prepared media statements so they publish information that is accurate and from you as the source. This can make a significant difference on how the event impacts your business reputation in the long run.

Social Media Tools Are a Vital Communication Tool

Communicating via your social media tools such as your business Blog, Facebook and Twitter pages will be a key part of your strategy during this time as an effective and instant method to get media statements and information out there easily. We also found it a great way for others to communicate with us in an unobtrusive way as a form of support.

Who to Contact?

Overall, you may not need to employ a regular media/PR consultant for your business but at least have knowledge of who you might contact if you need to and get in touch to form that relationship. From experience, I can confidently recommend Peter Heath from Text Write as an expert is Crisis Management – Many Thanks Peter for your valuable support of Salt Air.

You may have noticed sometime in the past 12 months that for “local searches” your website that used to appear on page 1 of google results has slipped back to page 2 (or gone from page 2 to page 3 etc). This is because Google now lists “Google Places” results first on page 1, with organic results following that -  often starting on page 2. “Google Places” is the google map based listings of businesses.

When I say “local searches” I mean searches that include a town or city name in the search for a business type e.g “Taupo Motels”. The impact of this has both positive and negative effects on small businesses. For businesses that fit the location and business type criteria it may mean you now consistently appear on page 1 of the results now. For others that had put a lot of effort into having a well optimised website with strong online marketing it may mean you have slipped down the list onto a lower ranked page.

So if this is now the case, what can you do now to influence your rankings? Here are some tips to get the most out of “local searches” and Google Places:

• Make sure you have a Google Places business listing AND you have claimed it as the business owner so you can edit the content.
• Once you have access to edit your google places listing, make sure you complete all aspects of the content – including an accurate location on the map and choose all 5 category types (e.g for a motel the categories may be: motel, accommodation, motor inn, family accommodation, conference venue). The categories you enter will determine what results your business will appear in so it’s important to make the most of these and pick them wisely. You should have a 100% completed listing, so add your own business photos and YouTube videos too.
• Google Places pulls in content from other websites too – like business content from finda.co.nz or reviews from Tripadvisor, even pricing and booking links from accommodation booking websites. So having a comprehensive online marketing strategy will pay off here too.
• Use the additional free tools on Google Places like the Offer Coupons to help your listing stand out more and provide a mechanism for deals.

You’re probably also wondering, why bother with SEO on my own website now if Google Places results come up first anyway? Well, don’t give up on SEO! It’s still vitally important to rank as highly as possible in organic results and local searches aren’t the only way people will find your website through google (not to mention Google isn’t the only search engine).

For those new to Google Places, this video below is a useful reference for the key areas to cover in the content.

If there’s one thing in a marketing sense that has risen out of the recession it’s the rapid development of websites that promote heavily discounted deals for just one day of sales. These one day deal sites are simple and pitched to businesses as being effective in getting large volumes of sales in a short period.

New sites of this nature seem to be popping up on a regular basis with dozens that are New Zealand based. Some of the big online media companies feature strongly in the line up including APN Media’s GrabOne and Trade Me’s Treat Me. There are so many that there are now websites that aggregate all of the one day deals as a quick way to see them all.

It’s unlikely all of them will survive successfully and you have to wonder how willing businesses will be to continue to discount by such large degrees (typically 49-50%) as the economy improves. It’s likely the deals will get less attractive over time and therefore lose their high traffic volumes or perhaps they will just evolve with less focus on heavy discounting.

There’s no doubt they offer an attractive short term marketing tactic for businesses, but are they really a good strategy to undertake?
Let’s analyze the pro’s and con’s from a business perspective…

Pro’s

• Great exposure to a mass audience
• Little or no upfront cost (typically they take a cut of sales made off their site)
• Can create sales and demand that the business otherwise wouldn’t get
• Provides instant cash flow
• If a service provider delivering the service may well be spread out over a long time so low stress on meeting demand

Con’s

• Could deter sales at the normal price and so may cause slower sales after the deal is no longer available
• To achieve big volumes of sales you generally need to offer a considerable discount which will drop yields and profitability
• Selling at discounted prices doesn’t guarantee ongoing business
• Demand may well be significant and hard to meet if you are a small business

Each business thinking of actively offering these deals needs to consider the pro’s and the con’s – does discounting help or hinder your brand image? Do you really want to be flat out busy at very low margins? How will this affect your regular loyal customer relationships? Can you afford such large discounting?

I’d suggest you try being creative with your offers rather than just straight discounting and include terms and conditions that suit you so you don’t find your business losing out in the long run.

These websites will suit some types of businesses more than others – before you go into it make sure you can deliver good service on what you offer.

Have you tried this for your business already? Got any good tips or stories of success/failure to share? Feel free to leave a comment.

[business:Adept Marketing]

I don’t usually go out of my way to blog about particular brands or businesses, but I like using Mailchimp as an effective email marketing tool so much that I think it’s worth sharing with business owners or marketing specialists.

The main reason being that is really is EASY to use. Mailchimp have gone out to their way to design an interface and online tools that make it simple to set up and manage your own email marketing campaigns – from the design right through to the reporting of the campaign statistics. You don’t have to be a designer or marketing whizz to use this tool.

And to top it all off for most small business owners use of this tool will be completely FREE. Cost only kicks in as your email marketing needs and database gets bigger – for example it will only start costing you once have 2,000 email subscribers on your list and you wish to send emails to more than 12,000 email addresses per month. Even then it’s reasonable cost and the pricing is flexible to suit too – you can opt for set monthly fees or pay as you go credits.

Here are some of the things I especially like about Mailchimp:

• It’s very easy to upload email addresses to Mailchimp – you can simply copy and paste a list from excel for example or upload a spreadsheet or file
• There are many design template options and it’s fairly easy to customise any design to include your own colours, logo and images
• Every task is easy to go through and complete with clear step by step processes and it’s easy to go back and make any changes
• Once you have set up a design template and a campaign you can easily replicate these for future campaigns making it quick to send our new emails to your database
• Once an email has been sent out to your database you can view and track detailed results and statistics straight away. This information is so useful to understand how successful your email marketing efforts are and what works better (or worse)
• They offer online training and webinars for beginners to get you started
• Mailchimp offers an iPhone app for tracking your email campaigns from your phone
• There are some nice social media integration tools to help make it easy for your email marketing efforts to be shared online

Overall the functionality offered by Mailchimp is matched by any other high profile email marketing tools available but I think this one is particularly useful for the small businesses who can’t afford to pay professional designers or agencies to manage their email marketing for them but still gives them a professional and cost effective way to do it themselves.

So give it a go yourself, it’s so easy a monkey could use it!

[business:Adept Marketing]

I originally wrote this article in August 2009 on my business website, but thought it would be a good topic to bring up again as online advertising is a regular concern for clients.

Time and time again businesses get emailed with some sort of offer to list on a website to promote their themselves with promises of better search engine rankings and increased website traffic.

My mantra when it comes to this decision is to only pay upfront for a listing which meets the following criteria:

• It is a well known and quality website relevant to your industry or target market.
• It provides a link back to your website.
• It can provide you with it’s monthly web statistics (unique browser visits and page visits) to measure it’s effectiveness.
• It ranks highly in search engine results for your business categories.
• It provides good value for money i.e. the upfront cost is not over the top and realistic for the profile it has and the content it allows you to add.

Know Your Stats!

For any listings you already pay for make sure you can track the traffic sources for your website through tools like Google Analytics, that way when it comes to decide whether to renew any listing you can find out how much traffic you’ve received and work out stats like the cost per click.

There’s a lot of value in checking and knowing your web statistics and traffic sources regularly. Free listings are the way to go for the bulk of your online listings, but there will be a selection of sites that are worth the money if they can give you quality website traffic.

Being the detailed and fairly pedantic person that I am, I constantly track, monitor and ensure I understand what’s happening with my website and for my client sites. I find this analysis an integral part of understanding what visitors are interested in and improve content accordingly. It’s also reassuring to know where the traffic is coming from, and when. What actions have I taken to encourage well targeted traffic? When’s the best time to send out marketing emails, post a new blog or announce something on Twitter?

Without analysis of these details I would be blind to the affects of all my online activity – and there’s no fun in that – it’s quite a satisfying thing to post a new blog, tweet about it and then watch the traffic activity and blog comments start coming in. You then know that what you do is not just of interest to you – it is adding value to your customers and target market.

So here are a list of some key things any website owner should know about their website:

• unique visits to the site for any given period
• your top traffic sources and search key words used
• when peaks in traffic have occurred and why (correlated with marketing activity)
• what pages (or blog posts) are the most popular
• average time spent on the site and on each page
• trends for all of the above

These are the main things I always look at using Google Analytics but there are many more metrics available through this tool. It’s also good to know the “bounce rate” (what % of people leave the site after just viewing 1 page), and for the sake of understanding how people use your website check out the “site overlay” function to see the percentage of clicks on any link for each page.

Another key area is “Conversions”. You can set goals on the behaviour you want people to take and track the conversion % achieved.  For example if you have a booking system within your site you could have a goal to have 5% of the traffic convert to bookings. Some booking systems will let you add your google analytics user code so you can effectively track the usage of the booking process (The Siteminder Booking button is one example of this).

It’s amazing how many businesses barely look at their website statistics, which is a shame because online marketing is one of the few marketing activities where you can accurately track activity from marketing campaigns – you can and should use this knowledge to monitor and improve you marketing strategy.

Interested to hear about what other metrics people typically monitor for their websites too, share your thoughts!

Sometimes videos communicate better than words….make your own video to promote your business and publish it online with a You Tube Channel or on your website.