Rapid Business Growth’s Blog

These are tough times, no doubt, the Celtic Tiger is dead and we need to pick up the pieces Every business knows it has to cut unnecessary costs and improve efficiency. Lots of businesses that were getting by are now in danger of closing their doors.

Marketing is usually one of the first items on to be chopped (though it shouldn’t be done blindly). You’ve got to cut costs, and you certainly don’t want to make employees redundant if you can help it, so you start looking a bit more closely at your marketing budget to see where you can trim fat.

Most business owners know the value of marketing, you need to let people know that you exist. Yes, word of mouth is great - there’s nothing like a referral from a happy client to instil trust in a prospect - but that leave you with a very small pool. To get enough clients you still need to be active in getting the word out.

The trouble with buying ads in the traditional media (billboards, Goldenpages etc) is that it is difficult to know whether your efforts are working and what is generating the best value for your euro. Are you just throwing muck at a wall and hoping that some sticks? The uncertainty makes it hard to keep throwing money into your ad spend. When your budget tightens it is even harder to justify the cost when the benefits are fuzzy at best. (See this blog)

But marketing on the web is different. The costs are from a euro a day, and traffic data allows you to figure out what works very quickly and optimize your budget. Search engines are the primary driver of traffic on the web. Search engine optimization (SEO), as a result, has received an increasing amount of well-deserved attention.

For most Irish small businesses, SEO is new. Some have considered it, perhaps even done a bit of research on the topic, but haven’t yet invested in it. Others have invested in it in the past and found themselves disappointed with the results. A few have found real success like vazumo.com.

• In this economy, why should a company consider a new marketing vehicle when they’re already looking to cut their budget?
• What about the risks involved in such a new endeavour?
• What if it doesn’t work?

These are all valid questions. Business owners spend most of their time running their businesses, finding time to read up the last in what makes search engines tick is unlikely. Understanding SEO enough to truly benefit can seem an impossible task.

So why bother with SEO, and why now?

Targeted Traffic
Traditional marketing/advertising options often have you publishing an advertisement in a place where you’re hoping it will be seen. That’s great, but:

• Who sees your message?
• Are they the right people?
• Do they want what you’re offering?
• Can they afford it?

With SEO, you can tell you a lot about your market and what kind of language they’re using. When you choose your keywords and optimize for them, you’re addressing an existing need or desire - and you know that at least a good portion of visitors referred from search engines through your target keywords are looking for exactly what you’re offering. In short, SEO helps to drive high quality traffic to your website and gets your message in front of the right people at the right time.

Precise Tracking
Web analytics allow you to track your users with a great deal of granularity. Web Analytics will tell you where visitors are coming from including

• What search engines and keywords bring in viewers.
• What pages viewers start on.
• What keywords have the lowest and highest bounce rates.
• What keywords drive the most pages per visit
• Average time on site and a lot more.

With basic conversion tracking you can even tie keywords to conversion rates – an incredibly valuable way to identify the most valuable
keywords and focus on them.

Bottom line: with web analytics

you can identify the dead wood in your campaign and focus on better opportunities to optimize your marketing budget in real time.

Unparalleled ROI

By knowing what who finds you website, how they find it and what they do, gives you a fantastic insight into your clients behaviour. You can use this to target your online marketing but also your offline marketing. Whatever your clients are interested in online is the exact same as what they are interested in offline. So instead of guessing what will work you will know what words to use in your Goldenpages ad!

How should you approach SEO?

If you’re considering investing in SEO as a marketing channel there are two basic options:

1. Take the SEO work on in-house
2. Hire an agency or consultant and outsource SEO

The In-House Option

Employing an in-house SEO guru is often far too expensive for SMEs - in especially in a recession. But existing employees can be redeployed to play a more active role. You need to research the “Whats and the Hows”, planning work schedules and oversee execution. In that way (and with the right training) much of the work required can be handled in-house.

Trying to understand search engines algorithms is a mugs game, they are closely guarded trade secrets and they probably change constantly. If any alleged guru guarantees you the front page on Google, they’re being either dishonest or foolish, or both. In the end the websites they reward with high rankings are those that get the simple things right: they feature interesting content on a regular basis, they stick around with the same domain name and with the same topic for years and they build links over time and from other relevant and trusted websites.

The Outsourcing Option

Full disclosure: I am biased. I run a marketing service. But I hope you’ll hear me out anyway.

To use an SEO agency to either handle the full scope of work or to consult with makes sense in many situations. SEO agencies usually spend a great deal of time researching strategies and tactics and compiling resources - all of which can help you hit the ground running with your SEO campaign. But you need to find the right agency.

SEO is scalable - you don’t have to throw everything and the kitchen sink into it. Sometimes just taking a few small steps here and there over time adds up to success. Other times you need a one-time overhaul of your site, or maybe a long-term relationship with an expert who can help chart the course. It will depend on the goals you set for your website and how realistic they are given the limits of time and resources. But search engines are going to remain the primary driver of traffic and sales on the web for the forseeable future. SEO, for that reason, shouldn’t be an afterthought to your marketing plan, even in tough economic times - indeed, with such a high potential return on your investment, it should be a priority.

If you want to talk more about research, please give me a call. I’m very happy to discuss how we could help you further.

Best wishes
Mike Spratt
www.rapidbusinessgrowth.ie
Phone: +353 1 491 3328

To develop any business you need to understand how it is currently working. Here you get an easy to follow 4 step process to building a snapshot report.

An unexamined life is not worth living (Socrates) So too, an unexamined business is not worth running! If you don’t know why your customers buy from you then you are going to find it difficult to get them to buy more from you! In these days of economic woe all Irish Businesses are suffering. If the purpose of running your business is to make sizeable profits then you probably need to refocus on why people buy and where the cash is really coming from.   That is why I offer a Market Research phase to my clients and I’m going to share it with your here.

Step 1: Ask your clients. Don’t assume that you know everything. Go and ask your clients the basic questions where did they hear about you, why do they buy from you, what annoys them etc. If they know you too well then get someone else to ask the questions. Make sure you ask current customers and lapsed ones, and from each of your segments.   You can learn a huge amount from those who have left you already. Often there is something small which they are annoyed about and you can win them back.

Step 2: Your staff. This will be tricky for an owner manager, but your staff are the front line - right?    There is no better source than asking your very own staff, who you pay to be loyal to you. Yet a lot of the time we don’t trust their instincts or we assume that we know more than they do.   They are the ones who look into the customers’ eyes at buying time. They know if customers are happy or ecstatic. They know if clients are loyal or just lazy. You need to know this stuff too. So ask them!

Step 3: Your competition. When did you last take a good hard look at your competitors? The chances are one of two of them have been innovating! Some of them will have done stupid things but others will have made clever choices. You may not choose to copy, but at least you need to know what they are using to compete for your customers!

Step 4: The Web. These days every business has an element of web competition. Some people buy on the web others research and others gossip. It does not matter whether you love or loathe the web. You need to look at Key Word Densities, Header tags and a handful if other key indicators. You need to understand how the new Gods (Google and Yahoo) rate you. If they have not found or understood your website correctly, they will not guide paying customers to it.

If you follow the steps outlined above you can make a good platform to build a business strategy from.  With a strategy that you believe in you can make plans that you will execute because you will believe in them. Plus as anybody who has had to deal with the banks lately knows you need a strategy to secure any funding.  

If you want to talk more about research, please give me a call. I’m very happy to discuss how we could help you further.

Best wishes
Mike Spratt
www.rapidbusinessgrowth.ie
Phone: +353 1 491 3328

How to get your website higher up the Google or Yahoo rankings is a relatively new science.  Naturally there are lots of fraudsters offering fantastic results for a very minor fee.  You can normally recognise these as they offer to submit your website to thousands of different search engines.  Since most of us in Ireland (90%) only use Google it should be obvious that these thousand of other search engines are pointless, (if indeed they exist).  Ranking high on Google means having your site appear on the first page when a prospect searches for a keyword that is relative to your business. This is called a “natural” search, as oppose to a “paid” search. 

Paid search is when you pay Google for one of those little text ad that appear at the side of search results. Paid search is the fastest way to get traffic to your website.  You can open a paid search account and have visitors to your site in just a few hours.  Once you get it working you can experiment with keywords and get a good understanding of how the system works.  But once you stop paying it stops working and there is no long term benefit.

Natural search on the other hand, is slower and does not stop when you stop paying.  All you have to do is get Google to believe that your website is interesting.  That sounds easy doesn’t it?  So how do you get a good Natural Search ranking?

The best way to convince Google that your website is interesting is to make it interesting to real users.  The more relevant and useful your site content is to users searching on your keywords, the more traffic you will generate to your site and the lower your bounce rate is.  You need to have interesting content that is regularly updated.  The more traffic you generate, the more popular your content can become, the higher your ranking on Google.  

Also Google evaluates your site is by counting the number of links to your site.  This is also common sense: once you have interesting content you expect that lots of other sites will link to you.   

If you want to drive traffic to your website, you should quickly get a Paid Search campaign working, only then look at Natural Search.  These are two planks of any attempt to get a good natural search ranking: Interesting content and lots of inbound links.  Both of these require effort and consistency over time. 

A lot of people complain that business is either a feast or a famine.  They are either selling lots or nothing. Yes you can blame external factors, if you want: blame the seasons, the competition or the government.  When I’m invited to look at businesses with that problem I invariably find that there is no Sales Funnel in use.    

Let’s be clear here, a “sales funnel in use” is not the same as “having a sales funnel”.  By “Sales Funnel” I mean a system that tracks prospects from first contact onwards through the  sales cycle.  It does not have to cost millions or involve complex software.  What it must have is be easy to use and comprehend as well as be appropriate to that business.  There are lots of cowboys out there who will sell you over specified rubbish when a pen and ledger will do just as well. 

If you don’t have a sales funnel you can decide on the building blocks over the weekend.  First break down your sales flow into components.  First contact, free samples, site visit, rfp/rfq, Tender, negotiations, contract signing  these are all elements that may be involved.  Grab a pen and sketch out your idea sales flow.  Then add your most common deviations and you have probably covered 90%+ of your sales.  Now jot down all the prospects that you have closed over the past period, from memory try to run these guys through your new sales model.  Did they move smoothly?  Are some sections too long and need to be broken down?  Are some sections too short and could be merged?  Hint: Normally 5 or 6 phases in a sales flow is about right.  Add a few durations, how long does each phase last.

Now as yourself the really obvious question, how do you know when a prospect moves from one phase to the next?  It could be they say “could you customise one for me?”  or money could change hands you will know.  At this stage you can label the end point of each phase with a fairly clear statement that marks it successful conclusion. 

Now you take all your existing prospects and position them across these different sales phases.  Because this is your first time doing this lots of your prospects will be long timers who are stuck for whatever reason.  Don’t worry about those right now.  Just sit back and feel proud, you have a solid list of prospects that you can market too.  Plus having look at this for a few hours you should now know the prospects are getting stuck in the sales cycle.  (ask about your sales barrier demolition workshop)

Congratulations you have now developed a sales funnel (or model) and lots of consultants will charge you 6 figure sums for doing this work alone!!!!

Now that you have this list of prospects at different phases you can see where the peaks and troughs are.  One you can see them coming you are in a position to do something about them, and that is called Sales Management.   

If you need to figure out how to get prospects into your sales funnel or how to move them along, please give me a call. I’m very happy to discuss how we could help you further.

Best wishes
Mike Spratt
www.rapidbusinessgrowth.ie
Phone: +353 1 491 3328

There is no doubt that the business climate in Dublin is tough at the moment. A lot of people are telling me that they are cutting costs to the bone, delaying payments and generally trying to be a lean as possible. As a marketing guy you probably expect me to say “Increase spending on every type of marketing”

Well I hate waste as much as anybody so I won’t say that. I think you should look very carefully at your marketing budget and figure out where your new business comes from. Is there a match? I’m a great believer in the 80/20 rule.

Sometimes businesses spend money on marketing for historical reasons, well there is no room for that anymore. Lots of Advertising people talk about brand awareness but any Advertising that brings in 100s of queries that doesn’t result in a sale are worse than useless. Those queries just get in the way.

Each cent should bring a reward and the best way to measure that is by looking at sales. Compare your sales figures to your marketing campaigns and map the peaks AND the troughs. If your sales cycle is fairly long then the least you should measure is “Qualified Leads”.

Lots of businesses did very well in the boom years without any real marketing systems. The result is that many do not have a way of tracking what impact marketing campaigns have. But times have changed, good leads are harder to find and without good information it is impossible to make valid decisions about what works and what doesn’t.

The good news is you can implement a system for tracking leads quickly and easily. Once you have the system in place you see that you now have a list of unconverted prospects which can be a very useful side effect. You can develop a system in-house or you can out-source, it doesn’t really matter how you do it, just do it!

Once you have that system in place then you can spend each cent in a way that maximises its return to you.

So should you spend money on marketing? My answer: Spend money where you get the biggest result.

For help and assistance with this or for any of your marketing needs, please give me a call. I’m very happy to discuss how we could help you further.

Best wishes
Mike Spratt
www.rapidbusinessgrowth.ie
Phone: +353 1 491 3328