Brendan Tully0 Comments
May 18, 2022
We’ve been overwhelmed by the positive feedback from the Achieve More Online workshops this week. We have a bunch of testimonials up and more to come as well as a few video testimonials which is fantastic.
It was no surprise that a lot of business owners who attended left the workshops feeling a little overloaded and wondering where to actually start. So, we’d thought we put up this post to give start you off in the right direction.
So, here’s a quick guide to get you on your way along with some quick wins that you can implement this week to pick up some momentum.
A lot of people came to the workshops wanting “more hits” or “more traffic”. The reality of the situation is that you actually want more sales, more phone enquiries or more foot traffic to your retail store. It’s important before doing anything to work out specifically what you want and what the purpose of your website actually is. Is it there to make the phone ring? Does it bring more customers to your retail store or is it an ecommerce site that sells products on the internet?
Once we know our destination or end goal, you can build a successful strategy that will get you there. Remember the old saying, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.
Remember the ideal customer exercise that Lisa spoke about at the very start of the workshops? Knowing your ideal customer is the foundation of being successful online. Unless you do this exercise, your message won’t be targetted properly and you’ll find it hard to actually get traffic to your site.
Knowing your ideal customer ensures that you know specifically what they’re looking for, can build content that talks directly to them and their needs and can properly target things like SEO & Adwords to ensure your site actually gets some traffic.
Once you know who your ideal customer is you then need to look at building your USP. What makes you or your business different? Why do you stand out from your competitors? Without a solid USP, your target market or ideal customers will have nothing to differentiate you from the competition and will make purchasing decisions based on price. Remember the FedEx USP, “when you need it there absolutely positively overnight!” – what’s your USP?
If you’ve done step 1 properly, you know where you want to get to. Without analytics tools in place, how are you going to measure your progress along the way and maybe even more importantly, you won’t know how well (or not) your website and online marketing is performing right now.
As we talked about, there’s three focus areas in online marketing, traffic, conversion and trust. Make sure you’re at least using Google Analytics to help you track to traffic & conversion pieces. Remember that Google Analytics is a free tool from Google (although you may need your web developer to help you install the code on your site)
This one can be a really quick and easy win and takes effect almost immediately. Once you’ve done the ideal customer exercise and know your USP, look at the content on the Home Page of your site. Does it talk to your ideal customer? Does it tell the visitor what’s unique about your business, products or services? Does your home page have text content at all?
Many of the ecommerce sites we’ve seen in the last week had no text at all on their home page. Without a paragraph or two explaining who you are, what you do and what makes you different, why is a visitor to your site going to stick around? If you don’t tell your customer that you’re site is an online store then they’re not going to know! Remember that your web content needs to talk to your ideal customers.
Another really quick win here – Yellowpages is dying a slow death. Local Search is one of the quickest, cheapest and most effective ways to boost your website traffic and is extremely effective for businesses with a retail or physical presence. Head over to google.com/local/add and claim your business listing right now!
Another simple step to implement. To recap, search engines provide tools so you can actually manage how your site appears in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Its important that you’re using these tools effectively to ensure there’s no problems with your search engine listing and also to ensure your search listing is properly configured. You can also tell Google to target your listing to particular geographic locations which will help bring more of your ideal customers to your site. Head over to google.com/webmasters/tools to get started (again, you may need your web developer to insert a small piece of code on your site to complete this step)
Possibly the secret to online success is constant, consistent action. Make sure that you set aside time each week to work on your website & online marketing. It’s not a one-off project that is simply set and forget. To be really effective, you need to take consistent action over time.
Its also important to remember that your time isn’t FREE!
Use professionals where required, quite often the time you save could be spent on income generation that will allow you to pay someone to do the work for you. For example, we offer analytics integration & packages from $50-100 per month or a managed Google Maps listing from $97 per month. If it takes you hours and hours to get Google Analytics integrated or to optimise your Google Maps listing then it may be better to hire someone to do it for you instead.
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