This is a question a lot of small to medium sized businesses ask. Experts say the average person takes less than two seconds to decide whether to read your advertising material or not. The ‘sale’ or ‘no sale’ decision is largely made when a person first looks at it. So, your first impression is absolutely critical to the success or failure of your business.

“If you make a product good enough, even though you live in the depths of the forest, the public will make a path to your door, says the philosopher. But if you want the public in sufficient numbers, you would better construct a highway.”

William Randolph Hearst, Publisher and Newspaper Magnate

We’ve seen many businesses struggle with marketing, making expensive mistakes with ad hoc advertising and promotional efforts, hoping they will provide long term results. Most of this can be easily remedied by taking a planned approach.

But where do you start?

Our ‘No-nonsense Guide to Promotional Marketing’ has been specially written to guide small businesses and organisations through the process of:

• defining your target audience,
• selecting the appropriate tools to communicate with them,
• defining the budget,
• implementing the plan,
• measuring the results
• and reviewing the plan.

Download your free copy of “No-nonsense Guide to Promotional Marketing for SMEs

Fill out the form below to download. All fields are required.

[contact-form-7]

• Site contains mostly images and the menu systems are built in Flash or Javascript

Flash and Javascript are not crawlable. Html text content and links are the ‘food’ of search engine spiders, without these they can not navigate your site. If I’m using Javascript menus, I always make sure I have a plain text html menu on the site as well, maybe in the footer, and/or a site map.

• Broken site links and an unclear hierarchy of site pages.

These not only annoy and confuse website visitors, but also search engine crawlers. On that subject, equally annoying for site visitors is underlined text which is not a link. Never underline text unless you are using it as a link.

• Renaming site pages and not installing a redirect

Often when a site is redesigned, the content gets shifted around and placed on new pages. There is nothing wrong with this if it improves or updates the content, but it can mean that crawlers and regular site visitors can no longer find the content they are looking for. To prevent this loss of traffic, add what is called a 301 redirect from the old page url to the new.

And while you are at it, ensure that you have a redirect from the http:// and the http://www versions of your site (assuming they are both the same site), otherwise search engines like Google see these as two separate sites, and you’ll risk watering down your rankings.

• Errors in the site’s robots.txt file

This file is viewed by crawlers to see what parts of the site are blocked from being indexed. Perhaps it contains some errors preventing crawlers from accessing parts of your site.

• Using frame web design

Frames have long been an issue for search engines and thankfully sites that have used frames have almost disappeared. This method results in every page with the same URL so they are not able to be bookmarked by users or crawled by search engines. If your site still uses frames… shame on you, it is long overdue for a complete rebuild.

• Make sure your site code is clean

Excessive or invalid code can improve the site visitor’ and the search engine crawlers’ experience!

Dymanic URLs were often considered something else that hampered search engines from crawling a site. These are sites where the page URL changes, and happens with sites that are managed through a database. They contain characters like ? = & and can look like this: http://www.sitename.co.nz/product.php?categoryid=1&productid=09 Google has said in the past that they doesn’t see these as a big issue (Dynamic URLs vs Static URLs) , an opinion that caused a lot of controversy amongst website developers. As a website user, I prefer URLs I can understand, as they help me to know I am in the right place and appear more trustworthy. For this reason alone I change all dynamic URLs to something logical.

• To learn more about search engine optimisation (SEO), sign up for a free lesson with Search Engine College.
• I don’t think ‘Search Marketing Standard’ is available in NZ magazine stores, but you can subscribe to Search Marketing Standard

HubSpot have produced a free booklet featuring 11 short case studies on how individuals, businesses and organisations, all operating in different industry sectors, have successfully used various online marketing strategies to increase brand awareness and sales.

The eBook features case studies on how:

• Chicago Museum used a competition to increase their exposure through social media by getting a web-savvy person to live in the museum for 30 days and report on their experience using social media.
• an online e-commerce site selling luggage used existing resources (results from a survey) to create new content for their blog that attracts visitors to download the report, and get picked up by Readers Digest.
• a US agricultural company supplying pumping equipment, used keyword research to identify the phrases potential customers were using in search engines to find their products, enabling them to attract more qualified visitors to their site – those that were interested and ready to buy.
• one company in a highly specialised field, used blogging specifically to increase their presence in search engines.
• a logistics company targeting the truck driving industry discovered that their assumption that truck drivers were not technical or web savvy was untrue, and was able to use this information to better communicate with them.
• a medical billing solutions company used their IT dept to star in an hilarious parody video of the Lady Gaga video ‘Pokerface’, to increase their visibility within the health information technology industry.

As you read through each short casestudy, you realise the link that binds them together is creative thinking.

At the end of the e-Book there is an 11 tip ‘action list’ drawn from each short case study, to make it easy for others to apply the lessons learnt.

>> Download “11 Examples of Online Marketing Success” eBook here.

He nails it on the head from the outset with his statement:

“Put simply: if your content isn’t good enough to attract good, natural links, it doesn’t matter how “optimized” that content is.”

What he is referring to is attracting quality links to a site in order to help your search rankings. This can be hard to achieve, and you won’t help anyone if your site is full of advertising hype.

One sure strategy is to write good quality content that people want to read, and will in turn naturally attract links without you having to ask for them. So ditch all the overused meaningless adjectives about being ‘the best’, ‘cutting edge’, ‘truly unique’, and having ‘the best price’, ‘free quotes’, ‘top quality’ … and engage with people in the same way you like to be engaged.

Check out the 100 overused marketing words and phrases and the annual list of banished words put out by Lake Superior University, with one notable omission, my 11 year old daughter’s favourite: “that is so random!”

You can download your copy of the report from the Scribe website.

These codes reflect Government initiatives to reduce the consumption of unhealthy foods.

Recently I saw a bag of marshmallows advertised as ‘fat free’. Of course marshmallows are mostly made of sugar, water and gelatin – there is no fat in them anyway!

Advertising them as ‘fat-free’ seemed like stretching the truth. A bit like marketing a pack of butter as ‘sugar free’.

It seems the Advertising Standards Authority agree.

Principle 2 of a ASA Code: Advertisements should not by implication, omission, ambiguity or exaggerated claim mislead or deceive or be likely to mislead or deceive consumers.

• Advertisements should not mislead the nutritive value of any food.
• Ads for foods high in sugar should not claim to be “low fat” or “fat free” which could mislead the consumer into believing the food is low in energy or beneficial to health.
• The same code, but in reverse, applies for foods high in fat.

If you are planning on running a competition to promote your food product you need to be careful you are not encouraging excessive repeat purchasing of foods that are high in fat, salt and sugar.

This code may well knock on the head some of the promotions popular with confectionery brands. It certainly helped recently to increase my consumption of Bounty Bars in the hope of winning free ones!

“All food advertisements should be prepared with a due sense of social responsibility..”

• Advertisements for nutritious foods important for a healthy diet are encouraged to help increase the consumption of such foods. However, no advertisement should encourage over-consumption of any food.
• The quantity of the food depicted in the advertisement should not exceed serving sizes that would be appropriate for consumption by a person or persons of the age depicted.

There are also strict codes for food ads directed at children, check them out here on the ASA website.

Like most things that sound too good to be true, they generally are – or come with sufficient ‘fish hooks’ that their value ends up being far less than you first think.

Such claims are often directed at unsuspecting clients to try and trick them into a sale. See our blog post “Watch out! Unscrupulous search marketing companies on the hunt for gullible clients”

SEO companies who guarantee top 10 results should be viewed with care. They don’t control the search engines so how is it that they can make such a guarantee?

Make sure you read the small print – you may find the guarantee doesn’t actually amount to anything of value. For instance, the company may actually only:

• guarantee top 10 results in some obscure search engines rather than Google and Bing/Yahoo.
• guarantee a top 10 result for the client’s company or brand name rather than the keywords that people are actually using to search for your product or service.
• seek out keyword phrases that are not popular and no one uses, – that ultimately won’t bring visitors to your site
• use ‘Pay per Click’ ads or Google Adwords to place the site on page 1 of the search engines. This essentially involves buying keywords – or paying for them every time someone clicks on your ‘ad’.

The process to enable your web site to rank well in popular search engines takes time – time to set up and time to maintain.

Be cautious of anyone offering ‘quick fixes’ who isn’t being upfront with their process and the costs. Make sure you are clear about how you can pull out of any agreement if you aren’t happy with what they are doing.

We’ll leave the last word on ranking guarantees to Google:  “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”

Thanks to Search Engine experts, Kalena Jordan and Micky Stuivenberg of the Search Engine College for providing this info.

• 1.4 million Kiwis have made a purchase online in the past year.
• 46% of all grocery purchases in NZ are bought on promotion, compared to 30% in Australia.
• 88% of us have chosen a product or service because they perceive it to be ‘green’.
• 42% of Kiwi internet users have interacted with a company on a social network.

The right people

It isn’t acceptable to send the same message to your entire email address book – unless you want to damage your credibility and/or risk breaching the NZ Anti Spam Law.

You must have consent, and under the law, there are three types:

1. Express
2. Inferred
3. Deemed

For an explanation of these see:  The Anti-spam law in NZ – 3 steps to comply

The right message

Even if you have consent, commercial emails are not always received warmly in people’s in-boxes. This is why the ‘right message’ is important – it needs to be relevant and of value to the recipient. The only way to know what is relevant and of value to your recipients is is to put yourself in their shoes when you are crafting your message, and do your research.

Just because you are excited about your new service, machine or staff member, it doesn’t mean your intended recipient will be!

The right time

Even if you have the right message for the right people, if you deliver that message at a time when they are not there to read it, you’ll have wasted all your effort. You wouldn’t want to be sending business emails on the weekend unless you know your intended readers will be online to receive it.

There is a new commercial email metric report out from NZ based email marketing company Jericho’s, with some useful data and benchmarks.

Check it out here: Email Metrics Report 2010

If I was an accountant I’d probably say lack of cashflow – and the business person in me would agree.

As a designer at Hot Pyjama Productions, specialising in marketing communications, I often see this manifest in a lack of budget for relevant and effective communication – of the type that results in sales.

New businesses often spend a significant part of their start-up budget on a shiny new logo, business card, brochure and/or website, without having a plan for how they are going to leverage them.

The business cards end up sitting in a draw, the brochure gets handed out in all the wrong places, and the website is buried amongst millions of others, waiting for someone to stumble across it. The budget is drained, sales are slow, and the client thinks that ‘marketing’ is an expensive and ineffective load of old cobblers.

The ‘build it and they will come’ analogy just doesn’t work
as a core strategy

If you were opening a high street store you would at the very least be putting a sign up on the business ‘advertising’ who you are.

You’d ‘dress’ your window with product so people who walk by know what it is you sell.

You’d put a street sign out front promoting your latest offerings.

You may also decide to mortgage your home and take out a Yellow Pages Ad.

Similar promotions have to be done for all businesses, whether they sell a product, a service, are online or not. This is the ‘advertising’ or ‘promotional’ aspect of the marketing mix. Sometimes (wrongly) called ‘marketing’ – but is one aspect of it.

If you are a start-up with limited budget, spend it on quality targeted communication that you can measure

This way you will know what needs improving, repeating or assigning to the scrap heap. If something doesn’t work, look at the big picture as to “why”.

Not even the best designed website or printed brochure will make up for poor quality content if the target audience doesn’t find your message releveant. That’s assuming you get it in front of the right people to start with.

In a nut shell, it is critical to the success of any marketing communications that you assign time and budget to all aspects of the marketing mix. This needs to include:

• Profiling your target customers
• Putting together a compelling product or service offering
• Identifying relevant methods and channels for communicating your offering. Don’t forget that your sales staff also need to be informed
• Writing, designing and producing the appropriate and measurable tool for communicating your offering
• Preparing your sales staff to respond, and your product or service for delivery
• Launching the campaign
• Measuring the response
• Assessing  overall effectiveness

Don’t get hung up on inconsequentials

Labouring over the right shade of blue for the background colour in your brochure may seem important to you, but ultimately if it isn’t going to sell more product, then focus on something that will.

And if you are a service provider that thinks referrals and reputation alone will pave the way to your success and you ‘don’t need marketing’ – then think again

Referrals and reputation need maintaining and communicating, and that doesn’t happen on its own. You may be riding a wave now but what happens when that wave hits the shore and there’s no longer the same volume of new referrals or work from your existing clients coming through?

Book a free 45 minute Think Tank, to discuss how to improve or ramp up the effectiveness of your marketing communications.

Whether you believe we are coming out of the recession or not, one thing is certain,marketing to your existing customers is still the easiest way to get more business.

Too often businesses plough large sums of money into trying to attract new customers at the expense of their current customers. They forget, or worse don’t realise, that they already have a ready supply of customers who would happily buy again, if only they were asked.

And it’s not hard to do… read the rest of the article on our website