The chilly winds of economic change might be blowing a gale right now, but that’s no reason to get all conservative with your marketing – it’s time to get smarter. In fact, we reckon the best bit of advice we’ve heard lately is ‘keep on advancing’.

And we can’t think of a better way to advance your business than by utilising the web more, though of course as a web firm we may be just a tad biased. However, the smart cookies out there will know that web marketing is extremely measurable thanks to all of the visitor and click-through metrics you can track – you will know within hours if something is working or not and respond accordingly.

As more businesses feel the squeeze, competition for the consumer and B2B dollar is going to be fierce. So you’re going to need all of the exposure you can get. The goal then is get your message in front of more of the right people – with the right people being those that are the most likely to be interested in your offering. 

So let’s put to one side all the talk about doom and gloom and focus on the actions you can take to spread the word online about your business (and have others spreading the word for you).

To get you started we’ve put together an online strategy with the following objectives:

1. Craft the right message
2. Get your message in front of the right groups of people online
3.  Package the message so it is enticing and gets people to act
4.  Impress the heck out of and convert the leads you get 
5.  Keep them coming back for more

1. Crafting the right message(s)

If you’re scratching your head and wondering just what your message is, you are not alone. Many businesses focus so much on their product or service offerings (or those of the competition) that they can’t condense what they do into one short sentence that communicates a lot about their business.

To help you develop or refine your message you can use a popular method called the ‘lift speech’. Picture this: you step into a lift, and the person next to you asks you what your business does. You’ve got just a few floors or thirty seconds to impress them. Try it sometime – you’ll be surprised at how many questions this will bring up. When developing your lift speech, think about where your business has come from, the type of clients you work with, your competitive advantages, and the final outcomes your products or services deliver.

In addition to the one core message that you want to communicate, you’ll have lots of other messages that are more specifically related to your products or services. To make your messages compelling, focus on the specific problems you can solve. Make sure there is no ambiguity or vagueness in your messages – this can be achieved by using plain language.

2. Getting your message(s) in front of the right people

The right people are obviously the ones that will be interested in your offer – it’s as simple as that. What is not so simple is finding out just who these people are online. Sometimes it is an age thing (swishy bars that mostly appeal to the 20 – 35 crowd), but some products and services transcend age groups and are more needs based (gyms attract anyone looking to get fit/lose weight). Targeting your message online to a specific age group can be achieved quite easily using social media websites like Facebook. With Facebook everyone with a profile has to enter in their demographic information (sex, age, education, etc). Advertisers on Facebook can therefore target market very effectively, for example, to all ‘females born in 1969 who have a university level education’.

With needs or ‘interests’ based targeting, ranking highly in Google for your keywords is one of the best ways to get your message in front of people. When someone searches for ‘Christchurch gyms’ in Google, they have a very distinct purpose in mind (‘find a gym I can join’). If you show up for this phrase then the chances of getting them to your website are quite high. Ideally, you really need to be on the first page of Google for your specific keyword phrases (you might like to brainstorm with your team as to what these are or check your website statistics for this information). You can get a top position in Google through buying your way in with Google AdWords (the ads in the right column or at the very top of the page), or you can rank for free in what is called the ‘organic results’ – these are the main results that most searchers focus on. Getting higher rankings in Google equals more clicks and more eyeballs on your website with a genuine interest in what you are offering, which ultimately means more sales.

Some other ways to get your message out there online include:

1. Links from other peoples websites (paid web directories, reciprocal links)
2. Buy some advertising on an email list
3. Be discovered on social media sites for free (via Facebook pages and groups)
4. Have people find your blog RSS feed through their RSS reader
5. Have people find your podcast through Itunes
6. Have people find your videos through YouTube (either on YouTube or embedded within a social media site or someone else’s site)
7. Have an online forum that has lots of people contributing to it

The methods you use will largely depend on the content you have. ‘Content is king’ is a popular saying online, and with good reason. Good content draws people to your site through search, links, and viral marketing. Make sure you are making the most of your content and have a strategy in place to generate more of it. For example, if you are a fitness studio, you could develop videos on proper exercise techniques that can be published to YouTube, embedded into your website as part of a ‘blog’, published to your Facebook page and syndicated to other websites for even more exposure.

3. Packaging your message so it is enticing and gets people to act

Your message might be clear and concise but it also needs to be attractive and compel people to act. Messages are more compelling if they solve a problem, assist people in gaining something, or stop people from losing something they value. Basically, you need to focus on ‘what’s in it for them’.

After spending so much time working on your message, coming up with your competitive advantages and honing your offer, the last thing you want is to have your message delivered in such a way as it gets lost or diminished by some extraneous factor.

One factor that can negatively impact on the delivery of your message is the design standard of your website. A click from Google to your website takes 2 seconds and within 2 seconds those visitors can be back at Google looking for someone else. Web users are highly influenced by the look of your website, and they have a subjective ‘credibility test’ that they measure all websites against, weighing up if they can trust the business behind the site. No matter how compelling your message, if your website is not up to standard the only message you’ll be sending is ‘we don’t really care’.

So here are a few tips to help you package that message nicely:

• Your website needs to be uncluttered with a good use of space
• Content should be presented in a hierarchical order with the most important information at the top (your logo/branding, byline, and opening introduction)
• Your web copy must be free of typos, spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes
• Use simple English and aim for a reading age of about 12 years old
• Make the most of your headings – they must grab attention and draw visitors into the rest of your content
• Use ‘calls to action’ such as asking people to click on a graphic for an offer, sign up to a newsletter, etc
• Integrate your offline marketing with your online marketing so that a cohesive and consistent message is being sent through all of  your marketing channels

4. Impressing your web leads to a conversion

Time is of the essence with web leads. Reacting quickly will impress potential clients. If you are checking your emails every 5 minutes and an enquiry comes through try calling them right then and there as they may still be on your website. Trust us on this – it makes a stunning impression, especially if the other companies they email take a day or even worse a week to get back to them. If you only check your emails every few hours you can still use immediacy to your advantage by setting up an auto responder that emails them back straight away. The auto responder can be as simple as ‘we’ll be in touch with you as soon as possible’ or you can attach a report they might find useful or direct them to a hidden link on your website that has valuable information on it.

Once you reach the point where the prospect is weighing up their alternatives you can pull out all the stops by using attractive and vibrant Outlook emails to ‘touch base’ as it’s an excellent method to use when you need a more passive way to keep selling to them. These emails could be forwarding an article you’ve found, an event that’s on that you think they’d like, or you could attach one of your free guides. 

5. After-sales service and keeping them coming back for more

Once you’ve made the sale make sure you add your new client to your email marketing list (and make sure someone is in charge of writing the content for this list). We know it can be hard to come up with content, but you really don’t need to write a lot and it doesn’t have to be every week or even every month. In fact, every 2 months is probably frequent enough (8 weeks can fly by these days).  The goal is to impart some important information and to be a gentle reminder of the other things that you can do for them.  You’ll be surprised at how long an email newsletter can keep on working for you – so expect to get phone calls months after you send an email out.

Blogging
Blogging is another great way to keep your clients informed about what you are doing or to inform them about topics they need to know about to help them along in their business. If you are an early adopter of web technologies then you’ll have to educate a good number of your clients to a certain extent about the technologies you use. Send out an email campaign introducing your blog, what your intentions are around it, and explain how they can subscribe to your blog and be notified of new blog updates using RSS. Your blog and your email marketing can work in tandem, with your email newsletters mentioning content from your blog with a link through to the full blog post if readers are interested. We recommend you always layer your information like this, unless you know for certain that all of your clients will read a long email. Generally, people skim read emails and if something takes their interest that’s when they look for more information. You can layer the information even more by linking your blog post to an offer on your website or to a PDF download with more detailed information.

 
Use social media to your advantage
Social media is not just for the teens or generation Y anymore.  Facebook is a phenomenon with all ages signing up to connect with friends and family. There are over 400,000 New Zealanders with Facebook profiles, so if you have given it a wide berth before now or put it into the ‘too hard basket’ it is time to give it another look and come up with your Facebook strategy.

Conclusion

Research has shown that the businesses that maintain their marketing spend (or increase it) during a recession recover much faster than those that cut their spending. Economists are predicting that things won’t pick up for at least another 18 months. So use the web during this time to mitigate the effects of the recession as well as helping to put your business in the best possible position when the recovery happens.

Need help?

We can develop a full online strategy for your business; just contact us for a consultation. We’ll start by helping you to refine the messages you want to communicate and show you the best way to get the message out to the right people online.