Why Your Business Is Missing Out

For a small business, a well-designed web site is a great way of giving potential customers an alternative route to find your company along with crucial information about the services or products on offer. In 2010 if your business does not have a web site you are almost certainly missing out on business opportunity’s that competitors who do have a web site will gladly accept on your behalf.

Why Do You Not Have A Business Website Yet?

We know that running a small business or any business for that matter throws up unexpected tasks on a daily basis, this can leave business owners very little time if any to deal with marketing their business on-line. Other factors to consider are owners misunderstanding the internet’s business potential, Not being good with technology, Concentrating sole on their bricks & mortar business or have heard stories from other business owners about website that cost a fortune and provided very little results ROI wise. These are just some of the many reasons why some are slow to adopt a website as a crucial part of their business marketing and assets.

The Misunderstood Internet?

Many small business owners may also be under the misconception that to make money from a website you are required to sell products on-line through it, this however isn’t always the case. A website should also be used to attract potential customers to your physical business as many potential customers now search the web first via Google etc looking for local businesses to sell them products or offer them services. If your company does not have a web site or web presence it is this internet search traffic offering potential customers that you are missing out on.

The Potential Of Online Sales?

If the products you manufacture or distribute are also of the nature that can be sold on-line you are missing an even larger opportunity to expand your business to a mass of potential customers in your country and further afield. E-commerce websites are in no way outwith the budget of small business owners any more with so many free open-source options like Magento etc now available to all. By having an e-commerce website for your business you are creating an alternative income method to your existing business, and with the right website and a strategy a potential great money earner you otherwise would have been missing out on.

These are just a few loose off the hip ideas about what benefits a website can provide to small business owners, if you can add anything more please feel free to leave a comment below.

There are a few key factors in making promotional products work.
1. Give people something they want!
2. Don’t skimp out!
3. Design them properly!
4. Quality targeting is more important than quantity!

1.) Give people something that they want and need!

When I go to trade-shows, I all to often come away with fifteen lanyards, hundreds of stickers, folders, and other stuff I don’t need and will never use. Not only is the ineffective marketing, but it’s a waste of material.

The best promotional products are going to be ones that people use every day. Sticky pads, note pads, and pens are the most effective promotional products for most businesses. People need them, use them daily, and they are relatively cheap. Unless you have something very unique that people will use very often, or you have a budget that allows you to purchase really cool promo products like USB memory cards, go with pens, notepads, and sticky pads.
Common sense plays a role in promo product selection. If you sell something that requires upkeep or supplies, make sure you send out a sticker or magnet that has your information on it and that supplies can easily be reordered from you.

2.) Don’t skimp out!

When you purchase 20,000 crappy no-name pens that work once before running out of ink or clogging, it doesn’t project your business in a positive manner. Like employees, promotional products are a direct representation of you. Make sure that people associate you with quality and value and not cheapness.

You don’t need to go out and buy $20 Cross pens for every customer (If you sell very high-end products, this may not be a bad idea though), but make sure you get something that your customer wants to use. If someone was to give you a pen and they wanted you to remember them for it, would a plain white bic pen do the trick, or maybe a super smooth gel pen that helps prevent fraud.

Using pens as an example, you should buy and distribute the kind of pens that people will get upset about if they loose them. The kind that write well on most surfaces, that don’t smear, and that feel good in your hand. You want to provide the type of products that are better than what your customer is used to using. This way, when they look for their pen, they look for your pen first.

3.) Design your promotional products properly!

Like a good website, your brand and information on your promotional products should be organized and usable. You can’t possibly fit your entire address on a pen. Sometimes you can’t even fit your logo on them. Make sure your business name or logo is on them clearly, and make even more sure that your website is on there. Chop-up your logo if you need to, but try to get a distinguishing business mark and your website on even the smallest product. On sticky pads and notepads, your information and logo should be on every page, but should still allow the product to be used. An effective way of doing it, is to place your logo in the center of each page, and your website and phone number at the bottom of each page. The logo should be about 80% transparent, and the text about 60%

You need to be absolutely sure that your information is very clear and professional. Use vector based logos for print. Jpeg and other pixel based images are for the web and computers, and should never be used for print. If you need to, hire a graphic designer to convert your logo to a vector format. Make sure that you choose clean fonts that are easily readable.

4.) Quality targeting is more important than quantity!

There are two groups that you should be giving promotional products to. The first is your current customers who are likely to make repeat visits. The second is non-customers who may make a purchase from you in the future. Not everyone is going to shop with you, and you need to minimize your potential loses by not sending your promo material to the wrong people. Unless you brand is very strong, non-targeted promotional product spam is only going to loose money for you.

Actually figuring out who you need to target can be difficult. For repeat customers, you can use web analytics programs to find who your repeat customers are. You can find trends like purchased products, title, location, etc. You can mail out promo and light marketing material to customers who make similar purchases, or send your promo material with orders when they meet certain criteria. Also, just use some common sense. If someone makes a purchase for a product that requires continuing upkeep or additional supplies, make sure you are getting them promo material. If someone makes even a single repeat order make sure you include them as well. If they made a second order, they are even more likely to make a third.

Trade-shows are going to be tricky, because it would be rude to deny people products and targeting would be nearly impossible. In this case, you need to target only selective trade-shows. Something that many business owners don’t consider is the size of the trade-show. The larger the event, the less likely it will be that someone remembers you. Small trade-shows can be significantly more valuable than large ones.

The important thing to remember is that getting promo products to everyone is going to loose money. But, getting the promo material to the right people will increase your sales and hopefully for a lot cheaper than any existing marketing.

~J. Step

So how can you promote a restaurant online? Before I begin, you could maybe consider a couple of the following points to convert those web visitors into bookings:

Is there something special you can ‘push’ about your restaurant?

Are you able to offer discounts on orders found from the web?

You will need to decide which keywords you wish to be coming up for in searches. For example, ‘Italian restaurant’ is going to be far too vague if you’ve only got one premises. Maybe ‘Italian restaurant Sussex’ may be more fitting. (The county appended to the end is a commonly used search for local businesses). Of course, if you’re a national business, then you may wish to be appearing at the top for ‘Italian restaurant’. OK, let’s say for arguments sake you chose ‘Italian restaurant’ as your main search term. In reality, you would usually choose two or three keywords. Search Engine Optimizationis a term for collectively carrying out the following tasks, to get to the top for your chosen search term may however require working harder than some other keywords depending on the competition. This next stage is divided into two stages, on-site and off-site optimisation. This is by no means a comprehensive list but should get you off the ground at least.

On-Site Optimisation

OK, I’m going to summarise with bullet points here – in the previous example of ‘Italian restaurant’ on-site optimisation would involve:

Sufficient use of H1 tags – with the keyword ‘italian restaurant’ in there. (Basically you want a relative heading which makes use of H1)

Ensuring the webpages load quickly – even it todays modern era – if it’s taking too long, the Googlebot will leave without indexing any further.

Create a page specifically for the term ‘italian restaurant’ with ‘italian-restaurant’ in the url. It might be index.php?p=Italian-restaurant, it might be Italian-restaurant.html depending on your setup.

Now with some good thinking, fill the Italian-restaurant page with plenty of text about Italian restaurants. Obviously as a business, I expect you don’t want to publicise other businesses – so why not do a page on the history of Italian restaurants?

Off-Site Optimisation

Now comes the tricky part! Google gives each webpage a value, for the purposes of example, let’s say your rank value is 1, your opponents rank value is 4. If you’re both competing for the same keyword, your opponent will rank higher as they’ve got a higher rank value for that keyword. To increase this rank value for your site, you need to build links to your website from relevant websites. Surprisingly, this process has been given the term ‘link building’. So how do you build links? Today, I will just explain the legitimate, what we call ‘White Hat’ techniques for building links to your site.

Setup a signature link on any forums you post on.

Submit yourself to as many web directories (manually – avoid auto submissions).

Find ‘eat out guides’ and submit yourself to as many as possible.

Find review sites, submit yourself for a review.

If you regularly visit blogs always leave a comment with your URL.

One last thing to note – when you’re building links try to always include the term ‘Italian Restaurant’ in your anchor text. For example, this may involve submitting yourself to directories with the name of ‘Angelos Italian Restaurant’ in order for you to get the relevant anchor text. Something irrelevant such as ‘Restaurants in Toronto’ is not going to get your ranked for your chosen keywords. Remember – with blogs, only comment if you feel you can add something of value to the discussion – and at least read the blog – that is somebody’s website so don’t be rude!

So there it is – some site promotion tips, this should be enough to get you started at least. I wish you much luck in the promotion of your business.

-NM

During my time in the marketing department at a design and print company, I discovered that having a unique business card is of immeasurable value. Often after having a business card designed by our design department, a client would call us back a month or two later to inform us that their business had nearly doubled since they started handing out their new unique business cards. We also had several clients tell us they had originally decided to hire us solely because of how impressed by our own company’s unique business cards they were.

What most business owners fail to realize is that a business card may be the only time a customer has the opportunity to judge the quality of their business. If a potential customer receives a business card that is generic and boring, it instantly lowers their subconscious view of that company. However, the opposite is also true- if that same person is handed a unique and eye-catching business card, that card will add value in the mind of the consumer.

In today’s world, image is everything. A small one-person business can be made to appear to be a multi-million dollar Fortune 500 company. Again, the opposite is also true unfortunately. Most business owners understand this concept when it comes to bigger things like websites, advertisements, etc. but most overlook the value of having a unique business card to leave with potential customers. The need for an impressive business card multiplies exponentially when a business is attempting to market in an extremely competitive genre, as consumers are constantly bombarded by similar advertisements from companies all seeming to offer the same product or service.

What will set you apart? When your potential customers compare you to your competitors, what will encourage them to choose you? If your business card does not stand out to them, they may decide to use another company instead of yours- and if you work in a referral-driven market, you can comprehend the possibilities of each customer bringing friends and family to your business.

Can you afford to not have a uniquely designed business card?

- Jordan Mummert

Have we done our job yet?

– J. Wilton.