Total Marketing Solutions

It’s been a while in the making but we are now ready to launch our new website. It’s taken us quite a while to get this far, lots of blood, sweat and tears - but we’re sure it will all be worthwhile now we’re live. To find out what all the fuss is about please visit the site and take a look around:- www.totalmarketingsolutions.co.uk

So how have we gone about it? We’ve literally followed our own advice - the advice we give our customers if a new website is one of the strategic recommendations we make following our usual rigorous review and audit of their business.

Step one, obvious though it seems, was to identify our business objectives for the site. It’s surprising how many companies decide they need a website “because everyone else has one”, without thinking about what they want it to do for them. Your objective might be to increase new customer account registration, it might be to increase the number of sales leads or enquiries generated. Whatever your objective/s, you can use your web analytics to measure any improvements and then tweak your website further if required. As strategic marketing consultants, our objective for our new website was to primarily increase the number of quality leads generated - we needed to make sure we clearly communicated how we work, with the emphasis on strategy development.

The next stage is to look at how customers will use the site and how their experience can be improved. Again, web analytics plays an important role here. You can look for potential problem areas like drop-offs and take steps to solve them. We found that whilst we had a significant number of visitors to our existing site, this didn’t translate into the number of enquiries we would expect. And a large number of enquiries were from companies looking for an advertising agency - our message was not as clear as it should have been. We want our new website to scream “marketing strategy development” from every page, whilst leaving potential customers looking for strategic help convinced we are the right company for them to do business with.

The final - and perhaps the most challenging  - stage, is to go through each page with a fine toothcomb, ensuring each one works as best as it can for you. We’ve taken a close look at each one of our existing pages, re-written or tweaked it, added new pages and content - it’s still a work in progress and the good thing about websites is that they are never cast in stone and are always a work in progress.  So what have we been looking at on each of our pages?

• We’ve stepped up the optimisation of the site, making sure all copy, titles and labels are able to improve our natural search results.
• We’ve also removed content that just wasn’t getting visited and focussed on improving the content on the key pages, making it easier for visitors to the site to get the information they need quickly.
• We’ve also used our web analytics to make sure we cover as many search terms as possible to avoid any “No results” keyword searches - so if you type in “marketing consultants”, you’ll find TMS at the top of the page. You’ll also find us under “marketing strategy consultants,” “marketing consultancy,” etc - you get the point! Don’t just think of the one search - try to think of as many different permutations of what you do and use web analytics to identify the main ones. Then build them into your site.
• We’ve also taken time to improve our home page - making sure we communicate our core messages quickly, whilst making it easier for visitors to find out the information they need in order to progress to an enquiry.
• We’ve also reduced the number of steps visitors have to take from our home page to begin key processes, like looking at case studies, finding our what we do and - of course - making an enquiry.
• We also hope that, having tweaked the layout, design and colours used on each page, this will improve click-thru rates and encourage visitors to visit more pages - in other words, to really get to know us and ultimately, gain a greater understanding of how we can help them.

Time will tell of course and rest assured that, as with any new website, we shall be monitoring our web analytics very closely after launch to see just how our new website is working for us.

Talking to many customers and by just simply looking around at what is going on in the market, it is clear that marketing budgets are under pressure as businesses look to control their costs. Whilst this is a perfectly sensible thing to do, the challenge is make sure that a rational approach to cost management is adopted and this is as true with marketing budgets as it is elsewhere within the organisation. The risk is that many companies simply adopt a ’slash and burn’ approach to cutting their marketing spend and accordingly take investment away from activity that is actually delivering a positive impact on revenues and profitability.

Whilst it may be wise to look to control costs, it is even more wise to do this in a ’scientific’ way and make sure that you keep spending on those areas of marketing activity that are giving you a return on investment.

Organisations that do this will achieve their objective of reducing marketing spend and at the same time reduce the risk of creating a self-inflicted down-turn in sales performance.

Of course a necessity for adopting such a rational approach to controlling costs is actually knowing the return on investment being delivered by the different marketing activities an organisation undertakes. This is particularly true with online marketing activity as this activity is generally very measurable and transparent.

Unfortunately we still find that many organisations do not actively measure the performance of all of their online marketing activity.  As digital marketing strategy consultants, we believe that, if they do not already do so, now is the time that organisations should be auditing their digital marketing activity to ensure they understand what is delivering the biggest impact and that they get the maximum possible return on their investment.

The following slides will walk you through how we approach this task on behalf of our clients…

Having been bombarded over the last two weeks by a rather intriguing Meerkat purporting to be nothing to do with car insurance, I was interested to see that twittering has now extended to our furry friends. Not content with setting up his own website where you can “Compare the Meerkat” (I finally selected a Yoga practising one from Weston super Mare), for those interested in all things meerkat you can also follow his every move on twitter. He’s creating quite a stir, with over 2000 followers already. It’s a great example of an innovative, integrated approach to marketing car insurance, and other price comparison sites, thank goodness. Choose your type of meerkat here.

Twitter - at first it’s fair to say no-one really got the point of Twitter. Do we really need more information, particularly if it’s only limited to providing a snapshot of what someone’s thinking at any one time? Or to be more precise, 140 characters worth of insight. Not much, you may think, but Twitter is now gaining favour as a unique way for businesses to provide increasingly choosy existing and potential consumers with a means to access information on products and services of interest to them. Businesses are now using Twitter as a marketing communications tactic to not only develop and promote their brand, they are using it to interact with their customer base. What’s more, it can be a powerful way to drive further traffic to your website. Tweet about your recent blog or some interesting resources recently added to your website and, if it’s interesting to your Twitter audience, their visits to your site will not only help boost your SEO rankings but they may also start tweeting about it on their own. We’re still looking at how best to use Twitter ourselves and have found some great information on http://www.hubspot.com/twitter-for-marketing/ - Take a look - you may be tweeting sooner than you think!

I came across this Small Business Year-End Marketing Checklist on Search Engine Land and thought is was worth sharing. Then I had second thoughts, and thought that I could do better, and make the checklist more relevant to the UK. So here goes:

1. Claim your Google Maps listing

Go to Google Maps and search for yourself (such as by business name and city name). If your business is there, click the EDIT link, and then click CLAIM YOUR BUSINESS. If you’re not listed, use the Google Local Business Center and follow the directions to add your business.

2. Do the same at Yahoo Local and Microsoft Live Search Maps

The steps are pretty similar. Search for your business on Yahoo Local and Microsoft Live Search Maps. Yahoo specifically asks, “Own this business?” with a link to claim it. Live Search has a link that says “Change Your Business Listing.”

Extra Credit: Claim or cleanup your local listings on Yell.com; the free listing is generally adequate.

3. Claim your social media name/profiles

You may not be active in social media right now, but chances are good that you will be at some point. When you do, you’ll want to make sure you own your own profile on the important social media sites. With that in mind, create accounts for your business — using your company name — on sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace. Complete the profiles and be sure to link to your primary web site when possible. Even if you never use these social media profiles, at least you’ll know that no one else will be using your name.

4. Do basic online reputation management

What other people say about you online matters a lot. Bad business or product reviews can spread quickly, hurting your bottom line. At minimum, use Google Alerts to keep track of what people are saying. Use it to monitor your company name, your own name, and the names of important people in your company. Choose the “Comprehensive” alerts and get alerts at least once a day.

Extra Credit: Learn how to use RSS, and subscribe to RSS feeds of your company name and important staff names. These make an excellent supplement to what you’ll get from Google Alerts.

5. Get involved with your analytics

Don’t have web analytics? Google Analytics is more than adequate for many small businesses, and it’s free. Once you have analytics installed, pay attention to what the data tells you. Look at what keywords are sending natural search traffic to your site. Look at what other sites are referring traffic to you. There are usually new marketing opportunities to be found in both of those data sets.

6. Make sure that your Sitemap is up to date and registered at Google Webmaster Tools. It’s free and helps search engine spiders to index pages and tell them things that the site doesn’t, like how often the site is updated.

7. If you sell products, make sure you’re registered on Google Base. Formerly know as Froogle, it’s a cross between an online shop and a price comparison site with two features things that set it apart: it’s free, and the results appear on the Google search results page.

Try typing ‘trainers’ into Google and you’ll probably see ‘Shopping results for trainers’ with 3 direct links to trainers. These are selected results from the product search. The results are a little like Google’s search results - you don’t pay to be here and you can’t buy your way in. But if you’re not submitting your product file, you can’t be here. I have a client in a niche market who can get up to 12% of their sales from Product Search - for free.

So if you’ve got an ecommerce web site, you should be on Google Product Search. Register at Google Base and upload your product file. It could be your shortcut to the top of the Google search results page!

8. Review the title tags on all your pages. What is the title tag? It’s a few words of text that probably appear in the top right hand corner of your browser, especially if you’re using Internet Explorer. Look at the BBC home page - the title is “BBC homepage.” Similarly, the title of the Marks and Spencer homepage is just “Marks and Spencer.” For both of these iconic brands, home page titles don’t count for a lot.

Look instead at the Next site. The title tag here is “Next - Women’s & Men’s Fashion, Children’s Clothes, Homeware & Electricals” telling the search engines exactly what Next does. Type “Women’s Fashion” into Google and Next is on the first page. Where’s Marks & Spencer? Not on the first 10 pages yet it’s probably the UK’s leading retailer of Women’s fashion.

When it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, there are few things as important as the title tag.

So thanks to Search Engine Land for getting me thinking, and here’s hoping that 2009 is a good year for small business and marketing consultants alike!

When was the last time you took a good, long look at your website? It’s a process we’re undertaking ourselves at TMS, having realized that our own site was in need of a little attention. So we recognize that we aren’t perfect, but when did you last visit your own website from the perspective of a potential client?

It really is worth taking the time to walk through each page, following the “persuasion pathways” your customers are following - checking that you are persuading them to do what you want them to do along the way. If you’re website is feeling a little unloved and lacklustre at the moment, it’s time to bite the bullet and get stuck in. Try some of these ideas to get you started:

1. Take your time. It’s not a quick fix. Taking one page at a time will give you time to approach it as your customers do.
2. Does it hold my customers attention and stimulate interest? Don’t bore them with long paragraphs and wordy descriptions. Make sure they can find what they want quickly, without having to click their way to a well-hidden page only the most tenacious of customers can be bothered to find.
3. Does your website talk to your customers? When visitors come to your site, do they get a sense of who you are and what you’re about? Or do you just blend into the background like so many other faceless, bland websites? It’s important for customers to get a feeling for your company, who you are and what you stand for. It builds confidence and forms the basis of developing a relationship.
4. Get to the point. Don’t waffle on about stuff that just isn’t relevant to your customers. Keep it simple - flashy graphics and clutter detract from the message. Keep to the bottom line of what benefits you are able to provide. It’s easier said than done but Occam’s razor is a powerful tool when wielded correctly.
5. Take a look at your site map too, because too many clicks lose customers along the way. Make sure your pathways are clear and well-marked - only the truly bored can be bothered to spend time faffing around dead-ends and are far less likely to be real potential customers anyway.
6. Can your customers actually understand you? Sounds obvious, but even the most technically-minded consumer might struggle with some terminology known only to your inner sanctum. Revisit your site and make sure you have not only spelt out your message to your customers as clearly as possible but also that you hit them over the head with it.
7. Make sure your customers quickly understand what’s in it for them. You know you’re fantastic, but you need to communicate this in benefits for the customer, otherwise you will lose them at the home page.
8. Keep your blog up to date. If your last blog was three months ago, how is a customer going to feel about your company? Not that you should fill it with inane drivel (ahem!) but try to vent your spleen on matters of interest to your customers. It shows a commitment to your website and also provides another opportunity to communicate with your customers.

So pencil in some time to revisit your website - if you can’t be bothered, then why should your customers? A little time spent rekindling your relationship with your site will soon start to pay and you might fall in love with it all over again!

There are still a great many people even within the marketing community who have not yet really grasped why social media should now be an essential and integral part of the way in which they ‘go-to-market’ with their business. In the following ‘colourful’ presentation, Marta Kagan makes the argument quite convincingly that social media is relevant to us all - that is if we want to continue to thrive and survive in our businesses!!!

Take a look & see what you think - please address any comments on the language used directly to Marta!

Back in the old days, that is the 1990’s, when Altavista used to rank web page content solely according to its relevance to the user’s query, bless ‘em, life seemed so much simpler somehow. Since the arrival of Google’s algorithm, content is ranked according to 0ff-the-page elements as much as, if not more than, what is on the page itself. Whilst no-one outside of Google’s hallowed walls knows the exact formula of the algorithm, a whole SEO industry has sprouted up around it and people the world over spend hours a week ensuring that their site is optimised to the hilt. But how can you be sure that a little tweaking here and there will bring results? Here are a few points to bear in mind before you start tinkering with your website:

• How to play the ranking game: There are two types of ranking factor: query dependent or query independent. Query dependent criteria - these assess content acccording to the relevance of content in the original search request. It not only assesses frequency of key words but more importantly where and how they appear. Query independent factors - these are pieces of information a search engine already knows about a page, like Google’s PageRank, which measures a web document’s popularity based on among other things the number of links that point to it. The assessment of inbound links to your webpage is now the most important element of most search engine technologies and should be ignored at your peril.

• Don’t be an online potato: Whilst “Search” has been the main technology for getting your information online since all this SEO fun started, the advent of Web 2.0 - since broadband speeds enabled the internet to become a 2-way medium - has changed this forever. Now, potential customers can upload content rather than just passively receive it and has changed the way people spend their time online. This can encompass everything from keeping your blog up to date in order to interact with your target audience to incorporating Web 2.0 marketing methods into your future marketing strategies.

One thing’s for sure, nothing is going to stay the same for very long and the better we are as marketers and online marketing consultants at embracing all new channels at our disposal, the rosier our future - and that of our clients - will look.

Whilst we are not ones to jump on the next marketing guru’s bandwagon, having read Seth Godin’s “Meatball Sundae - Is your marketing out of sync?”, we felt it had some nuggets in there of particular interest and relevance to our clients at Total Marketing Solutions. As marketing strategy consultancy we have regularly helped our clients with their online marketing strategy and it is clear to us that the whole area of Web 2.0 and how to make it effective is still little understood so here we try and learn from the ‘master’ himself.

The title of the book alludes to how companies undertaking traditional marketing activities [the meatballs] can’t just add cream, chocolate flakes, raspberry sauce [web 2.0 marketing techniques] on the top of what they do to make it into a sundae that is going to work and people are going to like - unfortunately it isn’t that simple!

The book tracks the decline and fall of some traditional marketing activities and outlines the need for companies to use new marketing techniques. But the fundamental message is about authenticity and how web 2.0 can quickly and easily find you out if you don’t act with integrity, honesty and try to create genuine products that give people what they want. The key barrier to this in the most part is the nature of the organisations that are trying to make this change from ‘old marketing’ [ie. TV advertising] to ‘new marketing’ [ie. social networks].

Seth goes on to identify some key trends, including:

The need for an authentic story as the number of information sources available increases: Telling true stories is the only way to spread messages on the unforgivable medium of the internet. Those being economical with the truth will be found out and their brand will suffer or be destroyed.

Extremely short attention spans due to clutter: This speaks for itself - organisations have to get over the fact that they can’t engage individuals unless they are totally relevant at a specific moment in time

Outsourcing: The internet has delivered a global supply of resources, skills and talent and enables all companies to outsource the stuff they can’t do or don’t do well enough.

Google and the dicing of everything: Search engines have enabled consumers to buy everything they need in component form, such as holidays, ultimately eliminating whole service sectors.

Infinite channels of communication: With new platforms and web sites being developed almost daily it is key to keep abreast of what is going on, what works and what doesn’t. Internet experiences will need to become entirely tailored to the individual [web 3.0].

Direct communication and commerce between consumers and consumers: Customers now gravitate towards each other via social networks, sharing experiences and creating communities of interest who can exert pressure on organisations.

The shift from “how many” to “who”: One of Seth’s previous work, Flipping the Funnel, covered this subject. The use of technologies like Google Adwords have put individual consumers in touch with companies rather than companies having to find them through uneconomical techniques.

New gatekeepers, no gatekeepers: The rise of the likes of YouTube has broken down the barriers to communicating with audiences and blogging community are becoming influential in the spread of messages.

The book is meant as a warning to organisations expecting the new marketing techniques to just replace traditional communication channels and effectively just ‘plug and play’ into their marketing strategies. As ever with Mr. Godin, there’s a good range of case studies, reference sites and examples to explain and support his argument, including one of his own companies, Squidoo, which features quite heavily.

If you’re already employing web 2.0 marketing techniques, or “new marketing”, with some degree of measurable success then this book may well inspire you to build what you’ve learnt into other aspects of your business. If you haven’t started yet you may well find the premise of the book quite daunting, in terms of how your organisation may have to change before you can exploit these techniques.

Either way, it’s well worth taking the time to explore how best to plot your future route through web 2.0.

What does MSN’s announcement of cashback for users of its live search mean for PPC advertisers and online marketing consultants?
In a previous post, I mentioned advertisers who spend significant amounts with Google Adwords but do not use Yahoo Search Marketing or Microsoft AdCenter. The main reason for this is that, for most companies, neither Yahoo nor MSN deliver enough volume to make the effort worthwhile. (It’s also worth saying that neither has an interface as easy-to-use as Google’s.) And in the volume game, MSN finishes a poor third for UK advertisers.
So hats off to MSN. This is an innovative attempt to shake up a market that is at risk of becoming a monopoly. Anyone who is familiar with Affiliate Marketing will recognise the concept immediately – but instead of the advertiser paying the commission to the affiliate, the search engine will pay commission to the customer. It will only work if searchers like the concept, and more of them defect to MSN – and stay with MSN, increasing their share of the market. And they will only stay with MSN if the search results, and in the case the paid results, deliver relevant results. So it’s back to square one, because most searchers use Google because they believe that the results it delivers are more relevant. For my part, I think this cashback initiative is just the first step in the next phase of the search war, following Microsoft’s failed bid for Yahoo. I believe that Yahoo and Google will fight back, and at this stage my money’s still on Google to keep its lead in the battle.