Getting Noticed Online

In the current financial climate, many businesses are realising the need to up their marketing strategy to ensure they are not left behind. For some businesses, advertising doesn’t work  particularly well and, unless you have significant money to spend on advertising with specialist industry publications, you could be wasting your money. So,  what’s the answer? How can you raise your profile and get your business & brand noticed and recognised effectively without breaking the bank? The internet is littered with ideas and suggestions on how to go about marketing your business and you won’t need a second mortgage to do it. Nowadays, businesses without a presence on the internet are falling way behind their competitors…. 

There are numerous ways to market your brand online; at the very basic level, you need a website that works for your business. When looking for a supplier, people want to know they are choosing one they can trust. They want a professional supplier with a solid reputation, who represents quality, good service and a competitive price. Your website needs to reflect this, be informative and also provide potential customers with the goods or service they are looking for. In addition, it should be easy to navigate, and as an absolute must, put your phone number on every page. It’s amazing the amount of websites that you have to search for a number. Time is of the essence for most people, so make it easy for them to contact you.

Some of the most basic areas to consider with your website will have a big impact on your ability to be picked up by search engines. page titles, descriptions, tags are extremely important areas and should be completed with your keywords in mind. Each page should be completed as a page in it’s own right, and have a title relevant to the page and your targeted keywords.

When putting together copy for your website, think of it as a virtual salesman. Sell the benefits of your product or service, and not just the features. Ensure you include keywords which are relevant to your site and your business. Think about how others would search for a company like yours and use these words and phrases in your copy. There are lots of sites you can look at that will help you choose your  keywords, such as Wordtracker. They operate by looking at your chosen words, and seeing how often they are searched for. They also compare similar phrases or sayings, so you can see what is likely to work best for you.

There are lots of SEO experts out there who will explain to you what a specialised role it is and will gladly take hundreds of pounds from you to ‘optimise’ your website. The truth is, any good web designer will do that for you as part of the build process. That’s not to say that these experts aren’t able to vastly improve your scores on search engines such as Google, they certainly can, but so can you and with very little effort. One of the keys to optimisation is quality link building. That is, putting inbound and outbound links to your website. You can link your site to various online directories, and you can include links within your site to other areas of your site. Some of the directories have excellent SEO ranking themselves, so by default will greatly assist in increasing your visibility.

Search engines also look for updated content. By keeping your website fresh and ensuring it is updated regularly, search engines will look more favourably on it than a static site which hasn’t changed for two years. One of the best ways to ensure your website is regularly updated is to keep a blog. A blog, or web log, is an online equivalent of a diary, which allows your visitors to keep up with what’s happening in your business, and other useful and relevant information. You can write about all sorts of things, obviously the more interesting you can make it the more people are likely to keep coming back to look for updates, or even to subscribe. Don’t be afraid to link to other peoples blogs that you’ve read that appear interesting to your target audience, providing it’s relevant, every link helps! Read other peoples blogs and comment on them where you can. You may also be able to provide a link to your site, but make sure your posts are relevant to the topic and not seen as spam.

The real key to blogging is to share it. When you’ve written your blog post details onto some of the share sites around, such as Technorati, Digg, and Stumbleupon. There are several to choose from, and it is worthwhile putting details of your blog on each of them. This will help to drive traffic to it, and ultimately to your website. Don’t forget, to build links into your blog as you are writing it.

The same can be said of articles. Writing articles about your business, and posting them on sites such as hubpages, or PRWeb will also greatly increase your scores and positioning with search engines. This is highly worthwhile and will also go some way to proving your expertise on your subject. Again, once you have submitted your article, share it. Utilise the sharing sites wherever you can. It all helps with driving traffic to your site, and ultimately winning you new business. 

Another useful resource for proving your expertise and generating more traffic to your website is online forums. You need to be reasonably careful as they can become addictive! Choose your forums wisely, ensure they have relevance to business, and they enable you to put a link to your website in your signature. Some forums are against advertising, in which case it doesn’t really serve the purpose of increasing the visibility of your business.

There are several online business networking sites which combine a whole range of areas where you can raise your profile. Probably the most popular business networking sites in the UK are: Linked In, Ecademy & 4Networking. Each of these sites are optimised to help you achieve a great position with the major search engines such as Google or Yahoo. Of course, these are only as good as the effort you put in to maintain them.

Some of the options with online marketing are no brainers, others a little more obscure.

As with any method of marketing, test and measure. There really is no point spending time or money on a marketing mix that clearly isn’t working for your business. Of course, this may seem rather obvious, but take the time to question where your enquiries are coming from, and whilst you’re there, question why you were chosen, what appealed to them about you. It never hurts to ask, and the worst that can happen is they don’t answer. Everything you do for your business needs to be worthwhile. It needs to have a value attached to it, no matter how small, and the only way to see the value is to ask the right questions!

Yes, this post has been inspired my one of my own experiences. Over the last few months I have been extremely busy putting together the finishing touches for the franchise package, and this has involved contact with several other suppliers to enable me to accurately cost the model. Out of the many businesses I’ve spoken to, one in particular is standing out like a sore thumb, and for all the wrong reasons… 

I contacted this company, (who shall remain nameless), to inquire about data lists. I didn’t call them, I completed their online form to find out prices. Unfortunately there was no other option on their site but to complete your information. I don’t normally have any objection to this, and I’m happy to speak to anybody, but with this firm I received a call the very next day and almost every other day since. Some days they have even left messages for me three times in one day!Not to mention the countless emails I have received. Oh, and in case you are wondering, I did tick the ‘No’ box regarding marketing.

I have spoken to them and explained I am no longer interested, I have emailed and told them I am no longer interested. Sadly, I’ve now had to bar their email address and their number, as this continual harassment is driving me crazy!

So, as a business, where do we draw the line? The example above is an extreme case, I’ve never experienced it before, and hope not to experience it again, (and yes, I will be emailing the director to point him in the direction of this blog!).

As a general rule, we start to recognise brands / names after the third time of hearing / seeing them, but to really alight our subconscious and make us memorable, it’s seven times. So, the question is, when is too much? At what point do we stop the contact?

At what point does ‘No’ definitely mean ‘No’? Certainly every business wants to keep their name in front of prospective clients, especially those that have contacted them; the warm leads.

I guess we’re lucky at Bizpro; most of our business comes from networking, where we meet the clients face to face, so we’ve little need of constantly contacting prospects by telephone. That said, we do have a system for canvassing local businesses, and it does include some calling, however if a business is really not interested in us we won’t continue to canvass them, we don’t believe in wasting our time and theirs.

To our way of thinking, if someone changes their minds and then wants our services, they will already know where we are.

The most ironic thing about the firm that’s been bombarding me, is that out of all the businesses I researched for data, I quite liked their offering, and may have chosen them. As it stands now, I have had such a bad impression of their business I would rather pay more elsewhere than use them…