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.

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.

At BSA Marketing – We are always advocating the use of Web marketing, but I recently came across a real world example where a company’s approach to marketing on the web directly influenced their business.

Picture the scene:

It 7pm on a Friday night, and you decide to go out for a meal. You know where you want to go, but want to book a table & don’t know the phone number:

Enter Google maps – do a search. Nothing…

Try Google search…

…….It comes up with a number but its an old one, so no joy there either.

At this point you change tack & think “OK, I don’t want to risk it, so where else can I go”;

Back to Google maps, you do a search for Restaurants, and up comes an Italian that you know is pretty good. Two more clicks & you are talking to them & the table is booked.

That restaurant who had got their web marketing right got my business that night!! (and it was a very good meal).

The Italian restaurant was Va Bene in Glossop, Derbyshire if you are interested.

Having worked with clients on the development of their web presence over the last 10 years, one of the key issues we have identified is ensuring that a site is kept up to date. A static site which is updated a couple of times are year is likely to do your image more harm than good, so the question is how do you keep your site fresh & up to date.

In my view the answer is content management in some form or another. In is most basic form, a content management system (CSM) allows a non technical user to update & edit content on a site through (usually) a web interface.

Historically, CMS systems have been very expensive to implement, but this is no longer the case, and there is really nothing to prevent the use of a content management system on any site, but the question is which one.

In my opinion, the answer is “It depends on what you are trying to achieve”, as different solutions offer different benefits. For this reason, we would use a range of tools to meet the clients requirements. Our starting point is always:

“What are your business & marketing objectives, and how can we use the web to help you achieve these?”

With this in mind, we now focus on the use of the following systems:

• CRE Loaded – For E-commerce sites, where the prime objective is direct online trading
• Joomla – For information based sites where dialogue with users is a priority
• WordPress – for blogging functionality
• Slideshow Pro – For image & video gallery functionality

With the exception of the last (Slide show pro) these are all open source, and all have basic versions that can be downloaded for free (you will find links to them on our links page).

What we bring to the party is the experience of working with these tools to ensure that they meet your objectives.

Having developed many sites using these tools, we have the skills to maximise functionality & cut development times (our record is 4 days from agreement of design to the site going live!).

We also have the marketing skills to ensure that your new site will become central to you business development programme.

But ultimately, whether you do it yourself, or use a company like ourselves to develop your site, the benefits of a site that you can manage yourself are extensive, and definitely worth consideration.

If you are looking for help in developing your web marketing, or are after some advice on the best direction to take, feel free to call us for a chat, we are always happy to talk.

I read an article today in WebPro News regarding an experiment Google are running to allow users to specify the sites they want to prioritise in their searches.

Read the full article here.

From an SEO perspective this means that different people will see different results thus making the traditional ranking report obsolete.

From a marketing perspective it simply moves the priorities back to marketing. If you have good content on your site, people will list them as preferred, and a good message will get you onto more mainstream sites & blogs that people are already reading. Thus ultimately, the way to measure success is “Are people visiting your site and buying from you”. Now that is true ROI.

If you are looking for evidence of the power of the blog and on-line marketing, this article that appeared in the Times over the weekend may be of interest.

Currently, there is hardly a week goes by without news of another high street name going to the wall.

However many high street failures can be put down to more than the economic slowdown:

For example:

Max Spielmann – Did not move with the technology
Woolworths – No real identity

Interestingly the one failure that has been rescued is Whittards – a company with a strong brand and a focused approach to the market.

What can we learn from this?

You are best positioned to survive & thrive in harsh economic times if you have a clear, well researched business strategy and are able to communicate this position effectively to your marketplace!

So what should you do in light of this?

Ask your self 3 questions?

1. Do I know why my customers buy from me
2. Do I know what makes my offering stand out from my competitors
3. At a party, If someone asked you “what do you do?” would your answer keep their interest?

If your answer to any of these was no, then maybe you should take some time out to think about your offering and how to differentiate this in the market. In doing this, you may find the SOSTAC planning guide a useful tool.

If you can answer yes to all these then the next thing to think about is how to communicate this to your marketplace.

Now ask yourself 3 more questions

1. Do I know who my customers are, and do I have the relevant information to communicate with them?
2. Can I define my wider marketplace?
3. Do I have an effective and measurable mechanism to communicate with these individuals?

If you can’t answer yes all of these, then you need to take some time out to consider your marketing communications process. In doing this you may find the CLEVQO model a useful tool for understanding the process & identifying where you should apply your resources to best effect.

Although the document focuses on the B2B business development process, it is equally relevant to the on-line retail (B2C) process.

For a while now, it has been the perceived wisdom that you should be targeting the long tail in PPC campaigns, but for SEO it has always been about targeting the few keywords with big search numbers.

However there has been a growing school of thought that you should also be interested in the long tail for SEO too.

A recent look at our Webstats started to make me think there is something in this. Over the last month, almost 50% of the keywords resulting in visits to the site were highly relevant, but not ones we had optimised for!

So how do you respond to this new knowledge, as traditional SEO on page techniques are not practical for the long tail?

The answer is to build high quality, interesting, relevant content that people will want to read, and then to build good quality links into your site from high page range pages (which should be quite possible if the content is good).

In other words deliver what Google want.

Although I am not suggesting that you should forget the on-page optimisation for the key phrases with big search numbers, what I am say is that you should not discount the value of the long tail in natural SEO.