Image by newbeltane via FlickrEvery business needs to market itself in order to find customers: marketing leads to customers leads to sales leads to profits. That's the theory, but how to make it happen in reality? Now, I have to say a bit about my background here, in order to make a point or two, and I hope it will be relevant.
Having worked in the non-profit sector for many years I have had to engage in marketing, promoting the work of the charities I have been employed by. Our customers were not just the people we provided services for, but also other stake-holders such as supporters, donors, statutory bodies, grant-making Trusts and local businesses. Each one of these expected and required different kinds of information and levels of detail. Some of this we provided in application forms for grants, some in our annual reports and other publicity material, some via our web-site and some in face to face meetings where we pitched for support.
I did once study for my Certificate in Management Studies (and passed!) at the City College in Norwich, but the course wasn't just about marketing.
Now, I wasn't trained as a marketing professional and as with many charities (at least here in the UK), I learnt "on the job" and did the best I could through networking, the odd course and by seeing what worked and what didn't. Sometimes we paid professionals to help us (such as in designing our annual reports) but mostly we did it "in-house". As you can imagine, sometimes it worked, sometimes it failed. Trouble is, we never had the time (or skills) to work out why.
This is perhaps the biggest problem facing the small business or novice entrepreneur - the lack of time. We are so busy trying to get our business off the ground that we lack time to sit back and take a strategic view and look at what works and why. So, you might ask, how do we do it? Well, we could make more time, by not doing things that are not really necessary and which we instinctively know contribute little to the business. We can work more efficiently by streamlining processes in our business and we can make sure our employers (and any contractors we engage) work as efficiently as possible when working for us.
So, what's been happening with marketing as regards our business? Firstly, I decided to start again from scratch. Almost from day one I had used online marketing to try and garner customers and grow sales and it had worked. Very quickly sales went from a handful to around 60 a month of our main product, the hField Wi-Fire High Gain WiFi Adapter. Not a huge number but nevertheless significant. The picture, from a marketing point of view, was complicated however.
I had originally started off with selling via my personal eBay account and a self-designed web-site on my own domain (www.newbeltane.com). The web-site used a shopping cart that was a Rapidweaver plug-in (Cartloom) and there were problems with it. One was the design; basically it didn't work from the customers point of view and secondly the plug-in couldn't cope with discount codes (it was supposed to but the developers didn't seem to understand the problem and didn't resolve it - big problem!).
So, I made the leap to BigCommerce for my online store and also to becoming a business seller on eBay with an eBay store. I also began using Google AdWords and eBay's own version of AdWords - AdCommerce. Both of these brought in significant visitors to both my eBay store and my BigCommerce store and that's how sales increased to around 60 a month of the Wi-Fire and a smaller number of sales of other products. However, it was starting to cost me, around £250 a month and I needed to either get sales up significantly or reduce my online marketing spend. Ideally, both!
So, I took the step of stopping all online campaigns with AdWords and AdCommerce to see what happened. Guess what, sales dropped significantly to around 30 (a 50% fall). However, my marketing spend also dropped to zero so the effects on profits was positive. The exact impact will be something I will look at in more detail at a later date.
So, what next? Well, having read up on online marketing strategies and looked at some detail at SEO and talked to an SEO agency I have come to some conclusions:
- It's important to understand what works and what doesn't when it comes to online ads - you need to test different keywords compare conversion rates
- You need to use negative keywords to improve your click-through and conversion rates
- You need to focus on your most profitable product(s) and market them
- You need to constantly be learning from others - read widely on the web (it's free!) and test, test and test again
- Look at your marketing - does it talk about features rather than benefits? If so, replace text that does so with text that talks about benefits - how will your product or service benefit your customers?
