Beat the Credit Crunch
Turn your website into a revenue stream
Short-thinking business people cut back on marketing during a recession - incredibly. The fact is that over a 2 year period they stand to lose as much as 59% of their revenue. Can you afford that?
The internet is still experiencing massive growth. Make the most of your website by:
- installing Google Analytics - see what pages are successful, which are not, and where in your sales funnel punters dip out
- improving your website incrementally, comparing current with previous performance
- concentrating on matching expectation - is your website what your punters expect?
- cashing in on the perception that stuff is cheaper on the internet
Don’t let the bah-humbugs grind you down. The internet is booming. Why aren’t you?
Bring in more business with your website.
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Market through the recession
The doom-mongers would have us believe we are heading for a recession. And as long as we all believe them, it’ll happen. Companies look around to see where they can cut costs, stop spending, stop expanding, just in case. Hey presto, a recession.
One of the areas in which some companies cut back, incredibly, is their marketing. Perhaps because marketing appears under the ‘expenses’ column in their accounts ledger some business owners don’t see it for what it is - an investment. Or at least it should be.
Test and measure to understand your customers
It’s important to test and measure your marketing. Have some device that allows you to determine which activity brought you the most leads - which brochure, which advert, which headline, which mailshot. That way you know you’re investing your money somewhere you’ll see a return.
Apart from anything else, if you stop marketing, where will your future business come from? Your smartest competitors will certainly maintain their marketing effort, if not increase it.
The internet has the answer
The smart money is on the internet. This medium gives you more feedback than any other: where your leads came from, what they looked at, for how long, whether they placed an order.
Google Analytics is a free service that allows you to record all of this information and more. All it requires is you sign up and add a small piece of code at the end of every page on your website. You can even copy and paste it from Google. Talk to your web designer about how easy this is to do.
Once your account is set up and Google is receiving data from your website, you can find out how visitors found your website. If they came via a search engine you can see what search phrase they typed in to find you. If you have, for example, a multi-stage sales process on your website you can measure how many people went all the way through, and where the others gave up. You can use this information to analyse those pages and make improvements.
Make a note of what improvements you made and when. Yes, actually write them down. And don’t make too many at once. Compare these notes against your Google Analytics figures. The equation is easy; where sales go up do more of what you did, where they went down reverse the change and think in the opposite direction.
A growth medium
The other important factor about the internet is that while the shops are reporting falls in sales the internet is not just in growth, it’s actually booming. In the first six months of this year £26.5billion was spent in the UK on the internet. That accounts for 17p of every shopping pound in the UK. This is an incredible 38% increase on the same period for last year.*
In the last 3 years online marketing spend has doubled. That’s a good indicator that the big guns have recognised the internet’s potential. And who are we to argue?
Search Engine Optimisation
There are some great tips to make the most of your website. Much is spoken about optimising websites for the search engines (SEO). That’s great - and too big a subject to cover here - but what a lot of people ignore is how punters react to their website once they set eyes on it. All the effort is expended on getting people to the site and not on how they perceive it. Get that wrong and all those hard-earned visitors simply go away again.
Matching expectation
Research suggests that people make a first impression on a website in a fraction of a second, before they’ve read a word. In their mind’s eye they have an idea of what they expect to see. If your website doesn’t match that expectation, they’ll be off. Think colours, images/textures, use of space, fonts. Then agonise over copy.
Feeling safe
Understandably 98% of consumers say they check for security measures before they buy online. But other research indicates up to 80% of online shoppers trust sites that are well designed, accessible and easy to navigate and so will often forego the security checks. In other words, get the design and interactivity right and they’re as good as sold.
Get it here
Make sure they understand that they can buy their desired product or service from you. A prominent button saying ‘Buy online’ or ‘Book online’ will usually do the trick.
Bargain basement
Many people believe they will get a bargain when they buy online. This is not always true, but as ever with sales it’s about what the customers believes. Demonstrate they are getting excellent value for money and the sale is as good as made - as long as you’ve got everything else right along the way.
Last but not least, don’t give up. Whatever your chosen marketing medium, keep testing, keep improving, stay in business.
* Figures from IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index
