Facebook and Twitter are dead. Of course they’re not really, but for your average small to medium sized business they might as well be.
To be honest it’s less shortage of breath and more shortage of time that leads SME’s to that morbid diagnosis and it’s easy to understand why. You wake up with a great idea – people want your offering, you can supply it to them and make a margin and all of a sudden the house in the country doesn’t look so far away. Unfortunately the inevitable daily detritus then starts to erode your enthusiasm. Accounts, extra staff, more hardware, software upgrades and new marketing efforts are all humps to scale and then….you get your 5th call of the day asking for the name of the person that deals with your website. It’s 10.35am.
“OK great – hi. We can help you with the Google and the Facebook by tweaking the left phalangy and aligning that with position 1 Googles and before you know it you’re in the Caribbean as a multi millionaire. Special offer today only £500 per month. For the next decade. Thank you please.”
I’m no digital pioneer, but I’ve worked in web sales for long enough to know that whilst poetic licence has been used in abundance for my yarn, there’s more than a grain of truth contained therein. Business owners are bombarded with next to useless pitches on “doing the Facebook” when really what’s missing is a sensible understanding of what it takes to get the social media to contribute to the business goals – be that more sales, downloads or whatever.
Loads of businesses are exploiting the web successfully, but many more aren’t – either because they’ve been burnt by the black hatters or in fact have just been encouraged to put their limited resource into inefficient areas – even by well intended firms.
It’s these guys I want to bring back into the fold. I’m so passionate about the revolutionary impact that a well executed digital strategy can have on a business that I urge the cheated / disillusioned / unknowing to embrace as one our #tonecommonsense.
Common Sense Marketing
Now you can call it whatever you like – lead gen, more sales, extra enquiries, uplift in inbound communications – but what I’m selling is getting your phone to ring more and this all starts with building a great website.
Think of your website as the sales generating repository into which you want all your prospects to be placed. So no matter where they’ve seen you, heard you or read you, the website is where they’ll end up.
So #tonecommonsense dictates therefore that your first foot forward is to create an environment capable of converting this footfall into something meaningful – the afore-mentioned phone call is a good example.
This means providing an engaging home page to ensure you hook first time visitors and offering easy access to those all important deeper pages of the site. Along the way, keep reminding people of how you can help – solve problems, understand your customers’ issues and give free advice. Think about your own browsing and buying habits – what works and what doesn’t? Too many companies are constructing their sites with vanity in mind. It’s not about you – it’s about your customer. #tonecommonsense
Let’s imagine then that you’ve got all this nailed. Site looks good – it supports and helps your customers rather than shouts at them. Next is traffic acquisition and this is where the waters muddy as a result of our “doing the Googles for £99 per month” friends.
The customers we’re hypothesising over here are successful businesses that are losing faith with the web because of bad / immoral / downright inaccurate advice so we’re going to keep it real simple – find out where your customers congregate and get in front of them. This is the root of most marketers pitch, but it’s so often wrapped up in tech babble that the message gets diluted.
Are people looking for what you offer on Google et al? If so, how competitive is it and what would it take to get amongst those businesses occupying the loftier positions?
These questions, and more, answered next time in your friendly episode of #tonecommonsense.
Dave.
