Chapter 5
BECOME NUMBER ONE ONLINE
The internet has not only levelled the playing field, but it has also meant that in the online world smaller businesses now have a real advantage over larger businesses when it comes to speaking to the hearts and minds of their consumers and building a relationship with their market.
While corporations and big businesses are spending up to four weeks to get one Facebook post for their fan page approved by their legal team, smaller businesses are speaking, in a real tone, to their customers and potential customers every single day. Social media and email communication have meant that it is easier and more effective than ever before to achieve recency and frequency with your audience.
In addition, more than ever before, anyone can acquire customers and build relationships relatively easily and quickly by implementing the right online strategies. No longer do you need to run a television commercial or an ad in a newspaper to reach your market: you can now use the online world to build your own audience and speak directly to them in the tone of your brand.
The brand that best harnesses email marketing, social media and effective online strategies will outperform the customer acquisition of any larger business, which probably still has its hands tied behind its back in bureaucracy and legal protocol.
A world-class online strategy will achieve three things:
- Inspire. Make sure you are visible and relevant, releasing content that ‘speaks' to your audience.
- Capture. Give your audience an incentive to opt in to your database on their first visit so that you can start building a relationship with them.
- Nurture. Continue to communicate with your audience and add value for them in a way that strengthens the relationship further.
inspire, capture, nurture
To inspire your audience online you need to regularly release content that educates your audience about what they need to know, entertains your audience or does things that bring your brand to life. Inspire is about amplifying content that will speak to the hearts and minds of your audience through email or social media, be it through releasing lead magnets, posting interesting facts or ideas, or asking questions that will get your audience engaged. Keep it fun, interesting and relevant.
To capture your audience you need to communicate your value proposition in one short sentence and give people a strong reason to opt in to your community, so that you can capture their details for your database and start building a relationship with them — more on this on page 100.
Once a person has opted in to become a part of your community, you need to nurture the relationship by regularly talking to them and adding value for them. This is achieved through recency and frequency — sending them educational or entertaining content that engages the user, whether through weekly updates, blog posts or videos, for example. Remember the process of nurturing is not about sending a newsletter once a month that outlines your new products or markets your new services; it's about adding value and educating your audience on what they want to know, like we discussed in chapter 3 in the section entitled ‘recency and frequency' (see p. 55).
Whether you have a well-established online brand or are starting from scratch, you will find details in this chapter about how to grab your audience's attention and turn that into paying customers.
it's easier than ever before
It is easier than ever before to launch a social media campaign, send emails that really speak to your audience, and build a website that sells.
Let's look at the different components of your web strategy and some of the places you can go to get the job done quickly and effectively.
building or updating your website
You don't need to know how to ‘code' or do any ‘techy' stuff to build a website. Today anybody can quickly browse different themes and different layouts of pre-existing website structures to create a world-class website on a very lean budget.
Two companies in particular, Shopify.com and Wordpress.com, provide the templates and all the help you need to create your own website, without paying a fortune to an ‘expert'.
Shopify is one of the best platforms in the world for any retail business. If you host a lot of products and need to manage stock, display products and whisk customers through an online checkout, then Shopify will do this. You can use Shopify.com to create a fully functional website, with e-commerce, blogging and all the reportability you need to launch an online store and have complete visibility over what's selling and where the money is coming from. It also allows you to choose from existing and customisable templates that look professional and very well designed, while optimising every page for search so that you can be found though search engines.
Shopify also integrates with Google Adwords, a program by Google that allows you to post ads in front of the people who are actively searching for what you're selling. In order to email your customers and remain front of mind, it also integrates with MailChimp, an online system that allows you to easily email your database or segments of your database.
If you're looking to build a website that isn't necessarily geared toward online retail, Wordpress.com will also allow you to create a fully functional and well-designed website using existing templates that work. Wordpress is a great platform for hosting your website blogging and regularly updating your website content.
manage and communicate with your customers
To remember, manage and communicate with every single one of your customers, you need a customer relationship manager (CRM) system that allows you to track the behaviour of your customers and potential customers, and keep notes on each of them. This represents real value to any business trying to speak to its consumers, because it allows you to personalise the different messages you send out, according to each person's past behaviour. Your CRM must include an email marketing system that allows you to email and text your audience regularly. This is where a simple email program like MailChimp will be incredibly useful.
MailChimp as a program allows you to send emails to your database or sections of it, and keep notes on clients, as well as tracking open rates for emails and click-through rates. It is a great solution for anyone on a tight budget wanting a simple place to start.
A more comprehensive CRM system is provided by officeautopilot.com. It is more sophisticated than mailchimp.com and offers more features. OfficeAutoPilot includes a CRM system, an email marketing system, a web payment processor, an auto-responder marketing system that includes ‘if–then' rules (‘if a prospect does this, then send them that'), affiliate tracking, lead scoring and event management. It also integrates with Wordpress, allowing people to opt in to your community on your website, and their details will automatically be populated into your CRM in Office-AutoPilot. OfficeAutoPilot is cost effective for early-stage businesses and is charged as a monthly subscription.
A fully comprehensive system is provided by Salesforce.com. Considered one of the world's leading CRM systems, Salesforce does everything that OfficeAutoPilot does, plus more. It is generally used by larger businesses that need high-level functionality and customisation that is specific to their business. While you can learn how to use OfficeAuto- Pilot through some training videos, Salesforce is an option that requires a higher investment of both money and time to implement, but that will be worthwhile for larger businesses.
iterate and adapt
Just as we said in chapter 2, ‘Start before you're ready', the online world should be a place of never-ending testing, measuring and improving.
I remember when Ruslan Kogan was speaking at one of our Young Entrepreneur Unconventions for The Entourage, Australia's largest event for entrepreneurs under 40, an audience member asked him to look at their website and say what he thought of it. Ruslan responded with, ‘I don't even look at kogan.com and tell my team what I think. It shouldn't be about anyone's opinion but rather testing and finding out the facts.'
In today's economy, online marketing should be more of a science than an art because we can collect data and metrics so quickly and easily that everything we do and every change we make should be driven by user behaviour.
Marketing your business through an online web presence is useless without web pages that convert visitors into either subscribers or active prospects submitting an enquiry.
Sometimes the problem is that the awesome copy you have written on your site may not be compelling enough to convince your visitors to take action and submit an enquiry. But manually experimenting with different headlines and sales copy is time-consuming and difficult to manage. Instead, you can use A/B testing, a method of rapidly testing different page headlines and content and tracking the conversion rates — how many people who view the page actually opt in to the next step or buy. A/B testing can be used to quickly find what content is working, and where there are opportunities for improvement.
Let's say you have ‘Compelling Headline 1' and ‘Compelling Headline 2' as two variations of your homepage. Once A/B testing has been activated, the first visitor to your website (Visitor A), will be directed to your homepage with ‘Compelling Headline 1', and the second visitor (Visitor B) will see ‘Compelling Headline 2'. The third will see ‘Compelling Headline 1', and so on. You can then track the number of enquiries from each of the two page variations and then direct all the traffic to the better-performing page. At this point you would create another variation of the homepage to start A/B testing it against the better-performing page.
Some content management systems (CMS), such as Wordpress, have A/B testing plugins available, or you may choose to fully host your site on an A/B testing platform, such as unbounce.com. A/B testing is a process of continuous improvement, and once you have ‘split tested' a page and found out how to improve it, you can implement improvements and then test out other page elements, such as images, call-to-action buttons and even colours. If your opt-in rate increases from 3 per cent to 4 per cent, that's a 25 per cent growth in database acquisition — a significant gain from just some simple iterations.
the new SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is about optimising your web presence so that your website appears high, preferably on page one, in the listings of search engines like Google when people search for keywords that match what you do.
Ask yourself, how many customers who are actively searching for what you're offering would you get in front of if you appeared first on Google for your relevant search terms?
Rather than spending money on blanket advertising that gets put in front of anybody regardless of what they might be looking for, an effective SEO strategy means that you appear front and centre to qualified prospective customers who are actively trying to find what you have. This can be hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of people every single month.
To appear on the front page of Google for search terms relevant to your business is the busiest shopfront you will ever have.
SEO has changed dramatically in recent years and it is always being updated and changed as search engines like Google strive to display more relevant results to their customers searching for information, while at the same time cutting down on ways that website owners can ‘game the system' to artificially increase search results.
Many of the SEO strategies used to increase rankings that worked in years past are now actually penalised by Google and other search engines because of their overuse. There is, however, a common theme, which has not changed, and that is that Google and the other search engines are always striving to display the most relevant content to their customers. This means that for your website to rank better, you need to be producing original, relevant, engaging content.
The most effective content you can produce and publish on your website is now videos and blog posts. These should be of value to your website visitors and be original content. If Google reads your website content (as its ‘crawlers' browse the web to update its index) and discovers that it has already been published elsewhere, Google will not count it as original content, and may even down-rank your site if it believes the content is spam or of poor quality.
Beware of so-called SEO experts touting increased rankings from any of the following outdated methods, as they will now directly hurt your rankings:
- backlinking — having other companies link to your website purely for the sake of creating more links
- link-farms — a set of web pages created for the sole purpose of linking to a certain web page
- classifieds posting — creating classified ads online for the purpose of SEO.
content is king
As we discussed in chapter 3, ‘Build an attraction model', regular blog posts are the easiest and yet most effective way to regularly produce new content that will boost your Google ranking. Your posts must focus on the customer, not you or your business. They will focus on what your customers need to know, customer testimonials and your thought leadership opinion pieces.
A great source of ideas for your blog posts is customer enquiries. Have you written down a list of the questions your customers typically ask when purchasing your product? Or the objections they raise or reasons they give for not buying your product or service? Inherent in these objections will be your customers' FAQs, concerns and roadblocks, which, once answered, enable them to make a buying decision.
These are great starting blocks for education blog posts and articles, as they deal with customer questions and objections up-front. Your posts may help to reduce buyer resistance if and when a prospect decides to buy from you down the track.
Tackle just one question or objection per blog post. If you're putting forward a new argument and challenging the status quo, make sure your argument is well reasoned, supported by evidence and an expression of your opinion — not a declaration of the truth according to you. Remember your aim is to inspire prospects to do business with you — not scare them away.
Alongside your own posts, you may also include guest posts from a non-competing, complementary business that can help educate your client base in a way that enhances your own brand. Your guest blog posts should be aimed at the same audience, and ‘on message' with what you are educating your clients about and the action you want them to take. Just keep in mind that if guest content is not consistent with your own, you run the risk of diverting your prospects' attention away from your site and your message.
video that works
When you are vying for website traffic from the results of people searching for what you do, a compelling video on your homepage will greatly increase the page view time (viewed positively by the search engines) and increase the engagement of your website visitors.
Videos have been proven to enhance engagement, significantly improve conversion rates from prospect to customer and quickly build trust with your audience.
A video should outline the results or end benefit you provide to your customers, what makes your business unique and even include a call to action to direct viewers to engage with your business. Recording a homepage introduction video can be as simple as using a good-quality smartphone or HD video camera and basic editing software such as iMovie for Mac OS X. If you want a more professional look and feel, you can engage video production companies who will fully manage the whole process for you for a small budget, including script editing, filming and editing.
Posting videos to YouTube and your website will also help with your SEO and rankings, as Google sees video as relevant and unique content. Video helps contribute to your online identity and collection of published content that Google uses to determine how much of an authority you are on your particular area of expertise. The more quality video content you have produced and uploaded to YouTube, and the more views that content receives, the more weight Google will give your business name and online profile when ranking your site.
Google has also updated its search results page to include video results in-line with standard website results. If you are in a niche market or your videos are well targeted to popular keywords relevant to your business, your videos, both on YouTube and on your website, can now show up in standard search results. Sometimes video search results will also show up alongside your website — giving you two spots in Google's top 10 search results!
A simple video content marketing strategy for your business might be to record 10 videos, each two to three minutes long, on the most common questions prospects ask before engaging your services, followed by another 10 videos, of the same length, explaining the core things your audience needs to know about what you do.
Upload all of the videos to YouTube and then once per week embed them into a blog post on your website with a short summary. You can then share those blog posts on social media or link to them in your newsletter to reach a further audience, which also adds to your recency and frequency.
Supplementing your website, blog and SEO strategies with video content will help boost your rankings and credibility with customers, and will result in educated prospects calling your business, excited to do business with you.
One Entourage Scalable and Saleable Program Member, Peter Moriarty from IT consultancy firm itGenius, often educates his audience on how to automate their business using Google Apps. As a result of one video, his website now shows up on page one of Google results for anyone searching for exactly that, putting Peter front and centre in front of thousands of people actively searching every month for what he's offering.
increase your ranking even further
In addition to Google putting extra weight on unique and relevant content being generated for your website ranking, it now also heavily weights social interactions when choosing which pages to rank highest in their search results. It uses social interactions as a metric for measuring an article's popularity. The number of times a blog post or online article is shared on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ affects its ranking in Google search results.
This increases the stakes for content creators (of which you are one) to encourage you to produce content that's valuable enough for your audience to share. The more shares, the more authority ranking Google will give your site, and the more potential customers will be visiting.
Google has also introduced Authorship as another way of ranking you online, which allows you to link your online Google+ profile with posts on your website blog. This helps your search engine ranking for your article by assigning a personal validation to it.
When you post an article on your blog and link it to your Google+ profile, your profile photo and number of followers will appear alongside some articles when they are listed in search results. This helps build rapport with your potential customers who have found you through a search, and adds an extra layer of legitimacy to your article or blog post.
Google also measures on-page metrics, which it gathers from its analytics and benchmarking system Google Analytics, such as how long your readers spend reading your article when they land on your site and whether or not someone browses other pages and sections of your site before leaving.
All of this means that it's important to have your content on-message and consistent on your blog and website. If a visitor reads your blog and finds something that doesn't gel with the overall feel of your site, or the link that led them to your article was misleading and wasn't consistent with the content they were expecting, you will be penalised by Google for your content being deemed to be of low quality.
The core principle is that building a compelling online identity is like any other form of communication or marketing — be genuine, sincere and ‘real', and if you are, the right customers will be attracted to you.
Google AdWords — reaching people who are trying to find you
Depending on your customer profile, there are probably tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people searching for your products and services every month through Google.
Google AdWords allows you to target these people specifically with a brief ad and a call to action.
Your ads can be A/B tested, tracked and improved on a weekly basis to ensure you are reaching the people who are trying to find you and are clicking through to your website.
In setting up your Google AdWords you need to put yourself in the shoes of your customer and ask, ‘What are they searching for?' Google AdWords Keyword Planner can help you identify and refine exactly what your customers are searching for, what the search volume is and what the competition level is for each search term.
From there, you need to test and iterate different headlines and ad copy so that you're continually improving the click-throughs to your website, as well as your conversions once the user lands on your site.
AdWords is one of the fastest, cheapest and most effective ways to start building your database and customer base, and making use of it can be implemented immediately.
| To watch a webinar on the step-by-step process of optimising your website using Google AdWords, visit www.unprofessional.com.au/bonuses. |  |
say it world-class fast
Throughout my businesses we have a culture of ‘world-class fast', which dictates that everything we do must be world class, and we need to be able to implement quickly.
This is also pertinent when it comes to engaging visitors to your website. You need to be able to tell them why they should use your product or your services, and you need to be able to do this in one short sentence. This is the first sentence I should see when I visit your website.
Let's look at some world-class websites and the first sentence you see when you land on their site:
- Google Apps — web-based email, calendar and documents that let you work from anywhere
- MailChimp — send better email
- Dropbox — your stuff, anywhere
- Shopify — design a beautiful online store
- Evernote — remember everything
- Bigcommerce — get your own store up and running in no time
- Kogan — best value LCD TV and LED TV deals in Australia
- Facebook — connect with your friends and the world around you
- Twitter — find out what's happening right now with people and organisations you care about
- Wikipedia — the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit
- Paypal — the easy way to pay.
How do you sum up what you do for your customers?
To find your ‘world-class fast' message, ask yourself, ‘What is the outcome and the benefit we give our customers?' Once you have identified this true reason as to why people use you, fight for brevity and put it into a short sentence.
Creating and implementing a first-class web strategy that reaches out to your market with inspiring and impactful content, having mechanisms to allow people to opt in as easily as possible, and achieving recency and frequency in your communication with your audience will put you in a far more visible position than your competitors. While the professionals are still talking in a sterile language that holds them at arm's length from their customer, forward-thinking small businesses are creating real relationships with their market. You no longer have to use ‘corporate speak' in order to appeal to your customer — in fact it's quite the opposite.
Get into the hearts and minds of your consumers, find out what they need to know and speak to that. This is what will differentiate your business in today's business world.