Is Your Business Easy To Find?

No matter how high the standard of your services and products, if your business is difficult to find, new custom will be hard to come by. The internet has made it easier than ever to find business details; from contact details to product prices, customer testimonials to company history. If your business information is not easy to find, access to your competitor’s material is just one click away.
When you want to improve your organisations visibility, hiring a marketing consultant is one option.

However, there are simple steps you can take yourself to make it easier for your customers to find you online and off:

Improve your website – In the year 2013, there’s little chance you haven’t got a website for your business, but a website is pretty useless if customers have a hard time navigating to find the information they require. Ensure that your website has an easy-to-use and professional design with clear menus and legible font faces. Incorporate sharing functionality so users can easily send page links to other web users via email or social media networks.

Get started with social media  - Not every business has the budget for an in-house social media marketing consultant, but establishing Facebook, Twitter and Google+ profiles for your business has become more important than ever. When a customer wants to keep up-to-date with company news and offers, social media is one of the first places they will turn. Facebook is a brilliant tool for displaying opening hours, product images and testimonials to your customers, old and new.

Utilise business directories – You may consider the Yellow Pages a thing of the past, but with deliveries made to homes across the UK each year, it still remains an essential directory for any business. YP advertising can be costly but today there are thousands of free-to-use business directories online. Both for local and nationwide marketing.

Encourage reviews – Much like business directories, review sites offer a brilliant (and often free) space to detail your company information, as well as encourage positive reviews from your existing clients. For the hospitality sector, TripAdvisor is a must use. Small businesses can maximise on local review websites as well as Google+ business pages.

Signage – Make your business easy to find in the physical world. Consider clear signage or striking shop faces for your small businesses. Add concise directions and an accurate map to your website too. Google Maps have made it easy to provide a detailed map on your website, whilst listing your postcode makes it straightforward for SatNav users.

Improve your SEO – Search engine optimisation is a complex process; with ever changing search engine algorithms it can be hard for a novice internet marketer to keep on-top of what really works. However, SEO is an essential element in making your business easy to find online. When used effectively key phrases in your business content can help your company to appear in online search listing for queries relating to the services and products that you offer.

How To Increase Your Online Sales

One sure fire way to increase your business profitability is to increase your sales, but effective marketing will be wasted if you can’t convert those who visit your website into paying customers. Before hiring the services of a business consultant, for in-depth strategies relating to your organisation, try the following steps to increase sales online:

Make your services clear – One of the biggest barriers between you and your online sales is your website home page. It’s a common mistake to try to be witty or poetic on your landing page, but clear headers that detail exactly what you offer can make a huge difference in securing custom.

Improve your CTA (Calls-to-action) – Effective calls-to-action are essential in triggering your customer to do something, whether that is: adding their name to your mailing list, browsing your products or placing an order. CTA’s should be ‘above the fold’ of your website, meaning there’s no need for viewers to scroll down.
Use concise headlines and phrases that direct action like ‘Sign-Up’, ‘Buy Now’ and ‘Contact Us’ along with colours and images that stand out in a simple and professional manner.

Emphasize the benefits for your customers – Put yourself in the mind-set of your buyers, how do your products and services really benefit them? List these benefits within your content and product descriptions. Use percentiles and statistics were possible; by how much can your software increase productivity? How fast will your new diet plan help people lose weight?

Customise your offers – For some small businesses a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach is not the most successful. Even when you think your audience is a homogenous group, look closer and make sure you have segmented your potential customers properly. Your actual products/services need not change, but the way you market them can.

Make sure you’re easy to do business with – Secret shop your own company. This could mean heading in store and browsing physical products or sitting back and using your business website to place an order. Is it as easy as possible to do business with your organisation? A quick review of the purchasing process can help eliminate inadvertently pushing clients away.

Display testimonials and reviews – Online business is based on trust. When we can’t see and touch products in advance, we rely on reviews, particularly if we’re making a hefty investment. The same applies to online service providers. Testimonials help build a trustworthy reputation when clients won’t have the chance to meet you face-to-face.

Make the most of social media – Today, business consultants will tell you the growing importance of social media for increasing business sales online. The amount of time and money you invest in online marketing will have a direct impact on the results you can achieve but even casual use of social networks for business can see an increase in traffic and lead generation. Facebook, Twitter and now Google+ have become staples in any organisations online presence.

Ensure a sense of urgency – If you want to make quick sales, you need to convince your browsers they need to buy now. Irresistible offers which have a limited time period are a great way to instil a sense of urgency for the buyer.

Five Flaws Of Management and Business Consultancy To Avoid

Management consultants are used by businesses of all sizes and in all areas of industry and commerce. It is true that a good business consultant can be worth his or her weight in gold; developing implementable business strategies, streamlining processes and essentially steering a company towards a more profitable future.

There are, however, certain pitfalls that are essential to avoid if your company is to truly benefit from the services of  business consultants.

1. Pre-Packaged Solutions
Too many businesses settle for ‘one size fits all’ consultancy. Your firm is unique; it has its own unique problems and therefore requires unique solutions. Any consultancy firm that fails to recognise this is ultimately going to provide a substandard level of consultancy and fail to reach the best results for your firm.

Of course, any good consultancy firm will have a set of tried and tested techniques it uses but this is very different to proposing bland, non-bespoke strategies and plans for its clients.

2. Inexperience in Your Field
Small business consultancy firms typically begin targeting a niche area of industry. As they grow, however, they may begin to diversify into other areas that perhaps their consultants do not fully appreciate or understand.

For any consultancy firm to produce real, deliverable results for your company it is essential their consultants are experts in your field. Always ask for evidence of their experience before signing any consultancy contract.

3. Lack Of Sustainability
A common complaint from businesses that have hired consultants in the past is that once the contract has come to an end or a project has finished, the results that they were enjoying suddenly disappear.
Always check a business consultancy firm has a sustainability plan. The best will offer a period of audit following a consultancy project to ensure their work is sustainable.

4. Report Only Based Consultancy
Some consultancy firms offer purely only report based consultancy. This means the consultants spend a period working in a company, auditing their books and processes, before writing an extensive report on what the firm could do better. This is the end of their involvement.

For a company to get the most out of a consultancy project the consultants need to be hands on and work alongside the firm to ensure their plans and proposals are implemented. It is very rare the implementation of a proposal will go exactly to plan and the best consultants will be dynamic and able to adapt to problems as they arise.

5. Non-Relevant Consultancy
Finally, there are so many different types of consultant it is important for a company to enlist the services of one relevant to their needs.

For example, an IT consultant may well be fantastic at setting up technology infrastructure but completely out of his or her depth in terms of website development. Both tasks fall under the category of IT but require very different skill sets and it is important the company fully understands what they require from the consultant.

What Your Business Can Learn From Apple’s Marketing

Ready . . . Fire . . . Aim . . . hey, we just launched a new product!

And so it was with the very first Apple Computer.

Yes, you did read that first bit right. ‘Ready. Fire. Aim.’ – rather than ‘Ready. Aim. Fire. ‘

Which is what the majority of businesses would do.

Many business owners have grand plans for their businesses – but (and it’s a big but) – they never take action on them. Or maybe they take action in small increments, but they don’t take the MASSIVE ACTION that will achieve their goals. In fact, some business owners will spend months poring over every word, every comma of an ad, without ever putting it ‘out there’ to be judged by its public.

That’s mainly because they are waiting for conditions to be exactly right before they do whatever it is they dream of doing. But the key thing is, it’s never going to happen. If you wait for conditions to be ‘exactly right’, you will never get your business to the place you want it to be.

Now I’m not advocating that you throw a bundle of cash at marketing your latest product or service without due diligence, but what I am suggesting is that you get your offering to market in any way you can and then assess customer feedback, modify as necessary and relaunch. There are a number of specialist marketing companies that could help you accelerate your success in this arena.

Here’s the Apple process again:

• Ready (we know it’s not yet perfect)
• Fire (we’re launching it anyway)
• Aim (we’ll get customer feedback, modify our product and relaunch it)

Many software and technology firms do this to great effect. How often do you see Sensational Software V1.0 – and that’s it? No, you’ll get infinite upgrade options every now and again with many modifications and add-ons. (And hopefully, any bugs fixed!)

Procrastination for procrastination’s sake is the enemy of innovation. It can halt your company’s progress – it could even mean you get beaten to market by a main competitor.

So unless you are waiting on a patent application, or are bound by some other legal restriction where disclosing your product design too soon could be a problem, taking massive action could see your business move forward in leaps and bounds.

Why not discover how online marketing consultants can help you get your business to where you want it to be?

Ready . . . Fire . . . Aim . .  . right?