I am planning a vacation for later this year. And, for the first time I am booking the rooms online.
We are flying to London and there are a HUGE number of hotels to choose from. So, I started looking at the review on TripAdvisor. One hotel in particular had a four star rating, was reasonably price, for London, and was near where we wanted to stay. It had a great website looked like exactly what I wanted in a hotel. But was getting hammered in TripAdvisor.
There were a lot of possible reasons for the bad reviews. Most noted that the hotel was undergoing renovations. This was a legitimate reason for some bad reviews. I was looking for some comment by the management explaining the problems and what they were doing to improve the situation.
NADA!
I was tempted to email them and see what the problem was – but, in the end, decided if they were not interested in their reputation, why should I be. I booked in another hotel. Only a three star – but with good reviews.
Sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp can’t be ignored. If you are providing a service you need to be aware of your online reputation. There might be reasons for bad comments. You need to explain your position. If there was a problem – you need to tell people what you are doing to fix it.
Tracking your online reputation isn’t hard. Google “your business name” plus “reviews” will get you all theinformation you need.
Don’t ignore bad reviews. Someone was so disappointed with your service that they took the time to post their comments. Think of all the people who didn’t post a comment but will never deal with you again.
Even if you think the comment was unfounded – take the time to write a reply.
]]>Laying out the design of a page or a flyer so it looks like a pro did it takes about ten times as much work as merely using the template Microsoft builds in for free, and the message is almost the same…
To many small businesses are taking the "Quick and Dirty" road to website design. Hiring "Template Hackers" in place of more expensive web designers. While the initail cost is low – the ultiamte cost in lost sales is too high to even consider.
For businesses, getting closer to “Web Design Nirvana” is important. Not only must your web design reflect your business it must support your business. Everything on the page, from the colours to placement of buttons and images, must not only work as part of your website, but it must also be consistent with your other marketing material.
But that is the easy part.
To reach “Nirvana” you need to answer Yes to these questions:
The time and effort put into the website design will payoff in higher sales conversions.
]]>Is it just me – or is the concept of a ‘Home Page’ becoming passé?
Back in the old days, the last century for those of us using Linux, browsers only had one window. And, when you started your browser it opened up your ‘Home Page’. Fast forward to 2010 and even Internet Explorer has tabs and can restore a session.
With Yahoo spending a reported $75 million to convince you to make their ‘Home Page’ your ‘Home Page’ I couldn’t help but wonder how we use ‘Home Pages’.
I must confess I do have a home page set. It is there incase I accidentally close my first tab. I have that tab set to my gMail account. Other than that I just go back to my last session.
Yahoo is trying to position itself as a portal that will show a number of services. In this, it is moving away from the idea of a search engine. Yet its ads target its main search competitor, Google. But, do we use a Home Page for search.
I know I don’t.
There is a search box in my browser tool bar which I use almost exlusively for search. All I care about is the results page. And, in this area Google gets the nod due in part to better results and, recently, more features.
The question remains – do I need a home page? And, if I do, do I want one that, like iGoogle and Yahoo, do a number of things, or a specialty channel like the BBC?
]]>The post is a simple decision matrix Product Value vs Market Size. Something I do, almost instinctively apply when assessing a client’s needs. It should be one of the first things you do in making a decision on where and how much to spend on any form of advertising. It should certainly be applied when looking at investing in Search Engine Optimization.
First is the product value. I like to consider the Lifetime Value. With some items the Life Time value is the sale price. These are products you only sell once and have limited brand value.
Easy – Peasy!
Many products and services are not that simple. Do you have repeat customers? What is their average annual purchase? Do your customers recommend your product? On average, how many referrals do you get from a customer? These are the types of things you need to consider in evaluating your product’s Lifetime Value.
Next consider the market size.
This is a lot easier – but there are still a few things to consider. The biggest being, if you successfully increase your website visibility, will you increase your market. For example doing SEO to increase the placement of a local restaurant to the top of the page on a national search for ‘restaurant’ would not increase the potential market.
Your product is going to fall into one of four quadrants on the matrix:
For all positions you should already have ‘Picked The Low Hanging Fruit‘. This means things like the title tag and description tag are filled in according to SEO guidelines. Proper use of
,
, and
headings and key words in your text.
This is usually for a local market. (If it is not a local market – consider what changes you can make to your product to give it a wider apeal.) Keep you online marketing strategy cheap and simple.
Examples: Plumber, Hair Dresser
Consider:
Regional, national or international markets. The key to web marketing to this quadrant is the handling charges. Show them upfront, let the customer know the handling charges before they go to checkout. Hidden handling charges are the biggest factor in abandoned sales.
Examples: Books, Fishing Tackle
Consider:
A niche market. Strategies will depend on the amount of competition and number of repeat sales. For B-to-C products, social marketing should be a big part of your strategy. For B-to-B marketing, create a client area. Personalize posts within that area.
Examples: Custom software, Personal jets
Consider:
The prime real estate for any marketer. High value usually mean a high barrier to entry, fewer competitors, and high marginal rate of substitution, few substitutes.
Examples: Diamonds, Luxuary automobiles
Consider:
As with any SEO or web marketing strategy, make changes slowly and watch the results.
]]>Michael Regan – TIMR Web Services
Please Note:
The date has been changed to April 23rd
Event: Web Wisdom: A panel discussion on Marketing, SEO & Social Media
Courtenay BC
Space is limited so please pre-register. Contact Carolyn Touhey at (250) 335-2342 or email Michael Regan [email protected] to register or for more information.
Carolyn Touhey of SmartBiz and Pieter Vorster from Continual Palingenesis—Social Media Solutions will be joining me for this workshop.
The focus will continue to be on marketing, with an even stronger focus on adding Social Marketing to your marketing strategy.
Carolyn will be explaining how to integrate your web marketing into your overall marketing stragey. She will cover the basics that MUST be in place before you even start to think of a website.
In addition to covering the basics of SEO and website marketing, I will be discussing how to measure the results of your SEO. We will look at getting actionable measurements, ones that will let you improve your ROI, rather than a lot of data, from your analytics tools. As before the focus will be on Google Analytics, however, the ideas can be applied to any analytic tool.
In addition, I will be showing some of the new features of Google Analytics and some of the new tools Google has been developing to help the small business owner.
Pieter will be covering the role of Social Media in your marketing. Facebook. Twitter and other social network sites all have their own written and unwritten rules. Getting noticed takes more than starting your own account or even buying a few ads. Social Media takes a lot of time – is the ROI worth the time you will invest.
I belong to a local business support group. At our last meeting the topic of iPhone apps came up. iPhone apps are getting to be like blogs – everyone thinks they need one, they just don’t know why. I mentioned that a webpage for mobile devices would be more appropriate.
After the meeting I was asked how they work – so here are the basics.
Unfortunately, mobile devices come with a wide variety of features, so targeting one device may exclude others. The best advice is use the old “Keep It Simple Stupid” (KISS) rule. This means simple graphics and text and using CSS instead of tables (Your web designer will know about that.) Even simple things like forms may need to be changed to work on all the devices out there.
Your site layout may need to change as well. While we recommend that the product be the feature for your websites home page, you should make the contact information the main item on your mobile website.
Next you will need to decide on where to host the mobile website.
There are two options. The first is to use the .mobi domain extension – for example www.mysite.mobi. This extension is reserved for websites targeting mobile devices.The other option is to automatically redirect mobile devices accessing your website to a section setup to handle them – for example www.mysite.com/mobile.
Each has its advantages and disadvantages. The first requires the user to type in different domain name but is universally recognized as for mobile devices. The second allows you to target specific types of mobile devices – for example www.mysite.com/iphone, to target iPhones. However, the code that does the redirect need to be brought up to date as new devices become available.
I prefer the second method. Updating the code is not as hard as it sounds and having everything automated around one domain name makes thing simpiler for users. Which is a good thing.
With mobile devices out numbering computers, having a website dedicated to mobile devices is just good business.
]]>Michael Regan – TIMR Web Services
Event: Web Marketing Workshop
Presentors:Carolyn Touey and Michael Regan
Time: 10:00am to 12:00am
Date: Feb. 26th, 2010
Place:6409 Old Island Highway, Union Bay
Please contact Carolyn Touey at (250) 335-2342 to register.
Last December I held a workshop with Carolyn Touey of SmartBiz on “What Every Business Owner Should Know To Maximize Investment In A Website”. It was such a success that we will be doing it again on February 26th.
While the title remains the same, some of the content, especially on website ROI, will be different.
Carolyn Touhey – Smart Biz
I will be focusing more on getting actionable measurements, rather than a lot of data, from your analytics tools. As before the focus will be on Google Analytics, however, the ideas can be applied to any analytic tool.
In addition, I will be showing some of the new features of Google Analytics and some of the new tools Google has been developing to help the small business owner.
There will also be more information on Social Media Marketing.
Facebook. Twitter and other social network sites all have their own written and unwritten rules. Getting noticed takes more than starting your own account or even buying a few ads. Social Media takes a lot of time – is the ROI worth the time you will invest.
You are probably right!
This video from SEOmoz (where SEO consultants go for help) will shed some light on how to first assess your needs and second give some insight into what to look for in hiring a consultant or outsourcing your SEO work.
View post and comments here
For most small and medium size businesses, outsourcing is the best solution. Since a number of factors such as copy writting, and web design need to be co-ordinated with the SEO plan, it is often easier to hire a full service company. However, if you find a SEO consultant that you trust, you may want to have her (or him) sub contract the design and copy writing.
Trust is the major factor. Don’t be afraid to interview a number of consultants. And, don’t hire on price alone. Ask for references and an outline of how the work will progress.
Finally, there are no guarantees and good SEO takes time. Run — don’t walk — from anyone who guarantees a position in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) or fast results.
]]>Sometimes support can come from the most unlikely of places. For example, how would you like Steve Jobs to present your business to a global audience?
Sound far fetched.
Maybe – but today I got an email from my daughter. She was excited because her company’s logo had appeared in Steve Jobs’ presentation during the iPad launch.
My daughter is the marketing manager at CKUA and publically funded radio station in Edmonton Alberta, Canada. As with many non profits, the downturn in the economy has hit them hard. But, with a lot of belt tightening, support from their many listeners and, unfortunately, some layoffs, they have managed to keep the high quality of their service.
Which brings us to Steve Jobs.
Well – maybe not Steve Jobs, but at least one of his staffers.
The CKUA logo appeared during the presentation on the launch of the iPad. The logo is for one of their programs that they distributed through iTunes. With tens of thousands of things to choose from, the people putting together the presentation thought the CKUA content worthy of being recognized.
How much is this type of serendipitous advertising worth? A LOT!
The association with an association with a product such as the iPad, however remote, gives a caché that you can’t buy. Nothing in Steve Jobs’ presentations happens by accident. He is the consummate detail person. Everything that appears in the presentation is there for a reason – and everyone of the millions of people watching know that.
Then there are the spin offs. People like me who will write about it or tell their friends.
OK – my daughter works at CKUA – but radio stations are not something I blog about. Getting your message out is.
How do you get this type of recognition?
Serendipity is not something you can rely on. What you can rely on, however, is quality? Have a superior product and don’t let anything — ANYTHING make you lower the quality of your product.
If you follow that simple rule – you will get noticed.
]]>Source Crowsnest Pass Railway Route
The picture is a little before my time (circa 1953).
I started my working career (1966) in Trail BC at Cominco (now Teck Cominco) as a labourer. The work was dirty and dangerous – but not particularly hard and certainly not intellectually challenging. However, looking back, many of things I learnt there are still relevant. One of the most important was in the field of marketing. Which, at that time, was as far from being one of my career goals as a fish trying to fly.
I was working filling bags of fertilizer at Cominco’s Warfield operation.
Fertilizer is a by product of their main operation, changing rock into metal. ( Mainly lead and zinc. ) There was a huge hopper full of fertilizer which fed into a small machine that filled the 50 and 100 pound bags. Most of the process was automatic. My job was to make sure the machine had bags and move the full bags onto a pallet for shipping. Occasionally I would signal the crane operator to load the hopper with more fertilizer from the main storage bins.
Cominco markets its fertilizer under the name ‘Elephant Brand Fertilizer’. It was sold in heavy paper bags at most farming supply centres all over Canada and around the world. I can’t remember seeing it in any ‘Garden Centre’ – matter of fact I can’t remember and ‘Garder Centres’, although I suppose there were some. I do remember every spring the gas station chains would have fertilizer for sale under their own brand name.
I had been on the job for about two weeks when the boss came over and said not to load any more bags – we had a rush order for ‘Texaco’. (One of the fore mentioned gas station chains.)
A few minutes later he comes over with a load of new 20 pound bags – all with the familiar ‘Texaco’ star. As we loaded new bags into the machine and reset it for the lighter weight, I got my first lesson in marketing (Although I didn’t know it at the time.)
I asked if I should clear the fertilizer from the hopper and which bin held the ‘Texaco’ fertilizer? He just smiled and said "Don’t change anything – it is all the same stuff".
I knew the 20 lb bag of ‘Texaco’ fertilizer cost more than the 50 lb bag of ‘Elephant’ brand. But, the only real difference was the bag.
Of course, what I would come to appreciate much later, was the real difference was ‘Perceived Value’. After all, "You Can Trust Your Car To The Man Who Wears The Star", so why not trust him for your other needs. While ‘Texaco’ fertilizer was for growing suburban lawns – ‘Elephant Brand Fertilizer’ was for farmers. And, it cost more – so it MUST be better.
From fertilizer to Tiffany’s blue box (the colour is a registered trademark) packaging is a large part of ‘Perceived Value’. Increase the ‘Perceived Value’ and you can increase the price. Which would cost more – a diamond necklace at Tiffany’s or the same necklace at a pawn shop? Which would your wife or girl friend appreciate more?
Your products ‘Perceived Value’ is what your customer says it is. It has nothing to do with performace – but everything to do with the way you present the product. It is your products ‘story’, the packaging, the target market, and the price. ‘Elephant Brand Fertilizer’ was for farmers who appreciated the lower price as long as it worked. ‘Texaco’ fertilizer was for the suburbanite who wanted a name the could trust. Both got what they wanted.
]]>