Where's The Tomatoes?

Businesses with a website perform better.

So says the latest MYOB Business Monitor Report and has highlighted the fact that businesses with a website have consistently higher revenue performance, more work in their sales pipeline and are more optimistic about future prospects. A few other highlights that came out in the report include:

· 31% of businesses with a website have experienced a growth in revenue over the past 12 months, compared to 26% of businesses without a website experiencing a growth in revenue.

· 40% of businesses with a website have more work on, while 26% of businesses without a website have more work on.

· 54% of business with a website expect revenue growth in the next 12 months, while only 27% of businesses without a website expect revenue growth.

For the full report click here.

So what is your online strategy and if you have an online presence, especially an e-commerce one, is it effective?

Think of this analogy. You go to the produce super store. It is a flash affair and you can enter the store through a dozen different doors. It sells a HUGE range of fresh food items in all sorts of colours. Beautifully packaged and displayed next to all the awards that the store has won for its design and packaging. But where are the damn tomatoes! All you want is a kg of tomatoes and all you see are Tahitian mangoes, Chilean Red Globes, 15 sorts of lettuce and 10 varieties of potatoes. And to make matters worse the place is crowded. You can hardly move for fear of loosing your place in line, so you give up, don’t buy anything and leave.

Thankfully there is a more simple produce store next door. One door and a limited range of basic items that one needs every day. And guess what. They have tomatoes. They are easy to spot and just behind them are other sorts of tomatoes too. This place is less flashy, but it gives you what, and you buy.

The moral of the story is this. Websites don’t have to be flashy and complicated to work. In fact a basic, well thought out website with the right sort of content that your target buyers want will win out every time. Flashy websites that aim just to attract a big crowd on the off chance it has something that you want and get lucky, don’t tend to have a good return on investment. Focus on what sort of customer you want to attract to your website. Give them a good experience while they visit and make it easy for them to buy.

Of course you don’t need to go the whole way and have e-commerce functionality on your website to begin with. The important thing is to look at the MYOB report and understand how businesses with website are generally ahead of their competitors. The important thing is to “get in the game”. If you don’t have a website for your business, I strongly recommend that you consider talking to a good website company, plan how it fits into your overall marketing strategy and make a start. For help with your marketing strategy development and for a free planning and review session click this link:

Growth For Business

Andy Burrows - Business Advisor

Social Media: Hype or Must Have?

Where is the third most populous place on earth? It is not India or Indonesia, but Facebook. So with over 500million users and people spending a growing amount of time there every day, can you make money there as a small business owner?

I believe the answer is both yes and no. Sounds like I am sitting on the fence, but I am not. My limited experience of social media (SM) networks indicates that if you expect to make sales directly from its use, you are in for disappointment. Where SM works best is as a reputation builder and from there it is possible to leverage it to drive traffic to where you CAN convert interest into sales. Of course where reputations can be build they can also be destroyed and social networks will do this quicker than anything else. By their very nature they spread ideas and opinions very fast and generally have more credibility in the users eyes than traditional media devices.

If you are in the Business-to-Consumer market, I believe you MUST have SM networking in your marketing activity plan. Consumers are paying less and less attention to traditional advertising and more to what their friends are saying on Facebook or Twitter. The ROI is a bit harder to measure in the B2B space. How many overworked, financially stressed business owners spend much time twittering or on Facebook to find out information, or have an extra hour or two per day to update their profiles? I think the jury is still out, but never-the-less ALL business owners should up-skill themselves more in this area and quickly. The pace of change is increasing and who knows where it will lead. If you aren’t on the train now, when you finally can see how to leverage SM networks for your business, it may be too late to jump on. I believe social media networks should primarily be used to strengthen your BRAND in the marketplace and to increase the level of trust that customers and potential customers have in you. Provide interesting and useful content. Aim to help people and educate them. As the level of trust increases, so too should the referrals, inquiries and conversion rates at the pointy end of the sales process. Or so the theory goes.

So how should a business owner implement SM network tactics? The first thing to do is STOP. Take a bit of time to PLAN your activities and make sure you are doing it for the right reasons, know who your target is and how best to engage with them. Some questions to ask yourself:

1. What are the needs of my business?

2. What am I using the site for?

3. Whose attention am I trying to get

4. Which sites do I want to take on?

5. What will be the hub of my SM network and what are the spokes?

6. How can I drive traffic to my website or my place of business?

7. Who’s going to manage my page/blog/twitter/etc?

8. Who’s going to be the personality of my SM posts?

Once you have answered these questions you are a bit better prepared to start monitoring the SM networks you are likely to use and then jump in with your own activities. Then like any marketing activity, monitor, review and improve what you do. Get into it.

For help with your small business marketing needs, contact the Andy Burrows for a FREE no obligation review of your business at Icon Business Solutions