Networking events can be a great source of new business contacts – and potential customers – but a brief conversation over a chicken sandwich (read bacon butty for the early risers) isn’t always enough to establish a common interest – and potential business relationship.

While you might get to meet people at a networking event, relying on future events to meet them again and develop opportunities can be slow – not to say hit and miss – will they even be there next time? 

We are always banging on about effective marketing being a process – not an event, and that your best prospects are people who know you. Keeping in touch regularly with everyone you meet is a sure fire way of maximising business opportunities – but how?

E-mail is a great way of keeping in touch and with a dedicated e-mail marketing system you can get great feedback on just who is reading your mail and following your links. Check out BSA E-mailworks online e-mail tool - it is a great system, simple to use and effective.

If you are using Google Analytics to track your Marketing Activity (and if you aren’t, you should be!). Then you may find this tool useful.

Analytics tracking link creator

The tool will allow you to create links that can be specifically tracked as campaigns in Goggle Analytics. For example, if you are running an email campaign, and you want to track how much site traffic the email generates, simple create a link to the landing page using this tool, and insert this into the email as the link to your site.

You will then be able to track the visitors generated by the email campaign under the “campaigns” section of Google Analytics.

Some email marketing systems (ours included) will generate these links automatically. However if the system you use does not, or you would like to track non email campaigns. this is a very useful tool.

Email marketing is becoming an increasingly important tool in both Business to Business & Business to Consumer marketing.

One key benefit of this channel of communication is the feedback you receive. With most offline marketing, you only get feedback if someone actively gets in touch, either with an enquiry or for some other reason. With email, you can track how people interact with your marketing, even where they don’t go as far as making an enquiry.

Although it is important to protect people’s privacy, and respect the fact that an individual did not choose to contact you directly, you can learn a great deal from email campaigns as to how your target market has engaged with your marketing and use this information to actively steer future campaigns and strategy.

While I was reviewing this topic, I found a white paper on the internet which discussed it in great detail. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I thought it would be worth sharing it with you. You can download the white paper here. (Be warned though, it is quite a big file at almost 6 Mb).

I found the paper at www.smartfocus.com – I certainly don’t want to be accused of plagiarism!!

Stop trying to attract customers, and start focusing on making your offering attractive to your marketplace.

Or so the author of a post I recently found on the web believes. You can read the full post via the link below!

Why you need to forget customers and focus on fans

It’s a subtle difference maybe, but one which can completely change your marketing approach.

Although I whole heartedly agree with the sentiment, I hope he is being a bit extreme in his views to make a point. Customers (people who buy from you) are vital to the success of a business, Apple’s huge fan base would be commercially useless if none of them bought any Apple products!!

But turning people into customers when they are fans is a much easier process. Focus on turning people into fans, and make it easy for them to buy your products or services, and the process of them becoming customers will take care of itself!

Obviously part of this process is communicating your message, but the web offers some great tools through websites, email, social networking, blogging, and if you get the offering & message right, word of mouth (probably the most valuable marketing tool!!).

If you read this & think “That’s it, but where do I go from here” give us a call, we would be happy to talk, and we may be able to secure some grant funding to get the ball rolling.

Many business owners know that they could be doing more with the internet to promote their company but often they are not sure where to start.

Search Engine Optimisation, Sponsored Links, Website Updates, Blogs, Social Networking and E-mail marketing are just some of the options on offer. Which can be most beneficial to me? – or should I be looking at a strategy combining a number of approaches?

As an accredited associate of the Manufacturing Advisory Service – North West, BSA Marketing can undertake a comprehensive review of your web strategy to help clarify your options and show the best way forward.

If your North West based business is an SME* involved with the manufacturing/processing sector then the review could be100% funded** so there would be no cost to you. Get more information on the web reviews here

Even better, if you decide on things you want to do, you may be eligible** for further government subsidised project implementation work. Get more information on subsidised** project work here

NOTES:

*SME definition:

Companies with up to 250 employees and/or up to €50m turnover. In addition, no more than 25% of the company should be owned by a group with more than 250 employees and/or €50m turnover.

**Eligibility and Availability:

• All MAS services are subject to availability and eligibility criteria.
• Free reviews and subsidised project work are available to North West based small and medium size (SME**) manufacturers or related companies (including research, design, logistics & warehousing etc).
• Large North West manufacturers and related companies can benefit from a free MAS review if they engage their suppliers to benefit from the MAS programme.
• Due to limited availability, MAS North West reserves the right to prioritise its subsidised services.
• Companies not eligible for MAS subsidised support can purchase MAS services at standard rates.

We have just identified a new initiative operating in and around the Peak District national park offering support for start ups, sole traders and small businesses.

The scheme called “Live and Work Rural”, is operated in conjunction with The National Parks Authority & EMDA. The scheme will help you with:

• Developing Ideas
• Marketing
• Networking
• Green Solutions
• Small Scale Equipment

If you would like to learn more about the scheme, you will find further information on their website www.peakdistrict.gov.uk/liveandworkrural.

If you would like to discuss a potential project please contact us, we are always happy to talk.

RSS feeds are a great way of adding dynamic content to your site, but what if the content you are wanting to add does not offer an RSS feed.

The answer lies in free tools that create an RSS feed from any dynamic listing on any website. All you do is sign up for an account, and follow a couple of simple steps to create the feed.

Obviously google offer this service through their feedburner site feedburner.google.com. Alternatively, if you would prefer not to give Google even more information about your activities, there are other tools out there including www.ponyfish.com.

You can see the end result on www.net-recruit.co.uk who use a feed generator to deliver the “Latest Jobs” section of their homepage.

You can also use these sites to create RSS feeds for content on your site. A great way to encourage those all important backlinks!!

The website which supports the Business Family’s events programme, and gives Tameside businesses an opportunity to promote themselves by submitting blog posts or creating an entry in the comprehensive directory on the site, was designed & built through a coloration between BSA Marketing (Who implemented the site) and Asone Design ( Who delivered the design elements of the project).

You can take a look at the new site via this link www.tamesidebusinessfamily.com

The Manufacturing Advisory Service – North West has a new programme offering grants to qualifying North West-based businesses operating in the manufacturing/processing who are looking to develop their presence on the web and make more use of the fantastic marketing and business development opportunities.

BSA Marketing is a fully accredited associate of MAS North West. If you are a manufacturer in the North West of England, and are interested in enhancing you web presence, get in touch.

Through MAS North West, BSA can also offer, at no cost^* to you, a full review of your current web marketing.

For more information, visit our grant information page

*Conditions apply – please Read the rest of this entry »

It now seems to be official that Google are considering adding website speed to their ranking algorithms. This means that they may now use the speed your pages load as one of the factors in determining your page ranking in their index.

You can hear it from the horse’s mouth in this interview with Matt Cutts of Google (The discussion on site speed is about 2:40m into the video).

Before we all start panicking and loosing sleep over this one, we need to consider a few things:

1. You should already be concerned about the speed of your site! – Speed is a significant factor in making your site appealing to visitors. If each page takes 30 seconds to load, visitors will not stay long, and you have a problem irrespective of whether Google list your site.

2. Given point 1 above, Google are not going to put a site with less relevant content that loads in 1 second ahead of a site with great content that loads in 3 seconds. Their mission is to deliver the content people are searching for, so the best way of ensuring a good ranking is still going to be having a site with great content that gives searchers what they are looking for.

3. Google have been using speed as a factor in their adwords quality score for a while now, and I have seen very people commenting that they are being penalised for the speed of their site in this area, so it would seem not to be a key factor. Google use over 200 ranking factors is indexing sites, each with different weightings. I do not believe that speed will be a heavily weighted factor.

Assuming that you do not see the speed of your site as an issue for a visitor experience point of view, I would suggest that you would be better spending resources on improving, enhancing your site content and ensuring it clearly communicates your message in an interesting & informative way, and on building good quality back links to your site. Once this job is done, then by all means spend time “minifying your javascript” to speed up your site.

In other words speed of your site should always be a consideration, but it should not become more important just because it has been added to Google’s agenda!!