Archive for the 'Marketing' Category
Online Customer Service-An Oxymoron?
Online customer service is not as hard as you think. It’s not quite as simple as smiling when someone enters a retail store, but you certainly can convey that your business is focused on meeting customer needs.
Websites have been around long enough that it’s easy to compare and see which ones make it easy to do business and which are causing their customers grief. Try it yourself. Go to a few sites you have never visited before and see how easy it is to locate specific information. Then go to a few of the rock star online retailers and see how they do the job.
There are a lot of rules to good online customer service. Here are a couple of my favourites.
- First stop, create a site that is easy to use. And I don’t mean easy for you or your coder. I mean it needs to be dead easy for your site visitors to use. Frankly, even if you’re the one building it, your opinion doesn’t matter nearly as much as your prospective visitors’ needs do.
- Make sure there is a way to contact your company available from the home page and every other page in the site. And don’t bury it in text at the bottom! Make it bright yellow if you have to, but make it stand out. Often this is done somewhere in the top right quadrant of the page and many site visitors look here first.
- If you’re selling online, let people know the price before they input their personal information. Would you pull out your credit card and ring through a purchase before you know the price in a bricks and mortar store? Many site visitors will opt out of the selling process if they have to provide their personal data before seeing the full price of the product, including shipping.
In a nutshell, make it easy and you’re more likely to make the sale.
Put your business on the Google map
Here’s an easy way for bricks and mortar businesses to reach new customers. Use Google Maps to point them to your front door!
When potential customers search Google Maps for information about a business in a specific area (e.g. Flower shop in Vancouver), they will find details like a business description, address, hours of operation, methods of payment, unique services, and even a coupon or a photo of your storefront.
It’s easy, free and takes just a few minutes to set up your business with Google Maps.
Once you’re registered, Google Maps will send you a postcard to confirm your address before adding the listing. This may take a few weeks. When your business is on Google Maps, you can update or edit your listing at any time to improve its effectiveness.
Say A Lot Without Speaking A Word
I may have mentioned this before, but what I like about a website is that it can do a lot of stuff for you. For instance, you don’t actually have to talk to people in order to speak to them.
I’ll never forget the first time it happened to me. I got a call from a woman asking about my entrepreneurs marketing program, wanting to sign up. I’m pretty good with names, but I didn’t recognize hers, so I asked how she’d found me.
Turns out someone had referred her, she checked out my website, and decided to buy. Just like that.
I didn’t have to explain, meet with her first, sell her on the value…none of that. The website did it all for me.
That was easy! Hmmm, I think I’ll give that online sales guy a raise…
Websites: Marketing Without Being There
Have I ever mentioned that what I like about websites is all the stuff they can do for you?
I saw a commercial a while back where a fellow arrived at the office first thing in the morning, put a fake steaming cup of coffee on this desk and then left for the day. All day long that cup sat there steaming. Everyone who stopped by his office to speak with him assumed they had just missed him. They thought he’d be “back in a minute” meanwhile he was out having fun, enjoying the sunshine.
A website is a little like that. You don’t actually have to be there, to be there.
Websites Can Do A Lot of Stuff
With the end of 2007 approaching fast, it’s time to reflect on this years’ ups and downs. Business at Bluelime Media has shifted dramatically (more about that later) and grown exponentially and our blog has evolved to include posts by Tzaddi and Mhairi. Since I’m not an expert in everything, having guest authors allows me to offer you more website tricks. I’ve decided to extend this invitation to a few more colleagues and present to you the first post by marketing maven, Liz Gaige.
–Christine
The thing I like about websites is that they can do a lot of stuff for you—kind of like an assistant.
I chatted recently with a woman who launched a business and is now about to “launch” a family. She spent the past year building her consulting practice and is now stepping away to devote time to her new addition. “So, no need to bother with a website,” was her thought.
Here’s the thing. If she steps away from the marketplace completely, she truly disappears. All the momentum gained by getting out in front of the people and telling her story in the past year will be lost. And when she does come back, it’ll be from scratch. Again.
Everyone knows from science class long ago that the hardest part of rolling a heavy boulder is getting it moving to start. Better to keep it going, even at a slow roll, than stop and try to restart from a state of rest. (Hah, I was listening in class Mr. Carlson!)
The point is, with a minimum of effort your website becomes your agent, representing you in your absence. And when you are ready to come back, it won’t be like you’ve disappeared altogether and are starting from zero.
Getting to First Base
Now if that isn’t a catchy title, I don’t know what is. Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo have just released their eBook Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook. I’ve only read a bit of one sample chapter and already learned a great idea: to make a social media resource page on corporate websites. That would be similar to a press kit, but for the age of citizen journalism. They also include a quote from Dirty Dancing. How apropos.
Web Marketing is about Serving Searchers
If you’ve read our blog for a while you might have noticed we often quote Gerry McGovern. His article Honest Marketing Works on the Web contains not only a good rant about the frustrations of airline ticket pricing, but some words of wisdom as well:
The Web shifts the balance of power away from the organization and towards the customer. It is the customer who searches. It is the customer who compares. It is the customer who evaluates. It is the customer who is highly impatient, with their finger always on the Back button.
Web marketing is not about finding fools. It is rather about serving searchers. We go to the Web because we have a question and we want an answer. Please answer the question, Mr. Marketer.
The importance of the text on your website cannot be overstated. You might be tempted to focus on how pretty or cool-looking it is. But if your text isn’t doing it’s job, there’s less of a chance that people will find the site in the first place or stick around once they get there. Here are some of the things we recommend to make the most of your site’s content:
- Ensure the important text is visible to search engines in the way the site is built. Your site should be built with current web standards and including text alternatives to any images or flash that contain important text.
- Avoid linking to PDF or Word documents, which the search engines can’t scan as well as a web page (if at all).
- Consider using the services of a professional writer who’s experienced with writing for the web and search engine optimization of content.
- Aim for a design that supports the text rather than undermining it. Part of that is making it easy-to-use: clear navigation, standard scrollbars, allowing the text to be resized without breaking the design, etc.
Why Use Alexa Widgets?
I was recently asked for my insights into Alexa widgets and in which situations a company would use these on their web page. I thought this would be a good forum to share the answer……
Alexa is a web information company that provides users with web search, toolbar functionality and services that allow visitors and web developers to track traffic ranking and to compare the results with other pertinent sites. The company has a suite of additional add-ins that developers can use on websites: to facilitate search; add thumbnail images of websites; customise the toolbar, to publicize traffic ranking via widgets and generate reports.
An Alexa widget allows visitors to see how the website ranks:
a) in a graph comparing sites
b) in a button showing simply traffic rank or
c) in a button showing site stats (links in and rank).
To set this up simply enter the website you want to track: the code is automatically generated for you to cut and paste into your website where ever you want it.
The widgets would be put to best use by companies with a loyal following on their site or those that are quickly increasing in rank. Bear in mind that Alexa tracks this data using their toolbar so the search results will only include Alexa traffic - making the results rather skewed.
Have you had any success with Alexa widgets?
The Benefits of Google AdWords
GoogleAdWords is a great way to easily target your niche audience and promote your product to that audience. With hundreds of millions of Google searches performed every day it makes sense to tap into that huge potential market and thats just what GoogleAdwords lets you do.
When you next Google something look at the right hand side and the top few searches of the page: these are ads (usually highlighted) placed and paid for by companies using the GoogleAdWords service.
The major benefits companies find in using this service (increased traffic notwithstanding) include:
- ability to get started on a minimum budget: as little as $5 per month;
- manage your budget effectively with monthly spend limits;
- test the waters, try different keywords and ad wording and make adjustments easily;
- you only pay for actual clicks (people who click through to visit your site);
- advertising with Google, unlike advertising in traditional media, is highly targeted by location and language;
- its relatively simple to get started
- and the service offers advanced reporting options if you are so inclined.
All in all, GoogleAdWords brings great bang for your advertising buck.
Creative Promotional Video
With the popularity of YouTube growing, entrepreneurs are understandably excited by the potential of the medium. I’ve consulted with people who are looking at taking their basic web sites to the next level of web marketing, and heard things like “We’ve got to have video. Video is so popular now.” To which I say: maybe. It depends on the video and how you use it.
Unless the video content on your site is somehow great, nobody cares about that video except you and maybe your Mom.
“Great”, on the web, means meeting a need. That need can be to have a laugh, to learn something, to be inspired.
In other words to truly leverage video on the web, you have to create videos that will draw your customers to view them. At it’s best, the video will help new people discover your website.
A fun example of this is The Human Flipbook by the restaurant chain Ebert & Gerbert. This is so creative & wonderful, it was mentioned on a site that I subscribe to. Because the video was embedded in the page at Do Something Pretty I didn’t even realize I was watching a commercial until the end. By then, I was so impressed I didn’t mind.