Question: how do you compete with over 150 billion pages globally? Answer? Not easily, and certainly not without a lot of work and effort – but, with your help and enthusiasm that is what SMART Partnerships does - everything is possible and many UK companies reach their markets nationally and internationally very successfully by building loyalty and trust along the way to develop customer appeal. Search engines look for this too.
SMART Partnerships strives to help get British Business Online by creating successful understanding, research and optimisation services from consultancy through to implementation.
A fundamental difference between conventional marketing and Internet marketing is that of consumer choice. If your brand is well known in the High Street or town centre then you would hope through loyalty and offers that your customers will return to shop with you because they have found the products and quality they wanted and they enjoyed the experience paying prices that they are comfortable with.
To a large extent, we as consumers are creatures of habit.
Conventional High Street shopping means we go out with an idea in mind and instead of comparing prices, we will for example go to the store that has everything we will need, we will choose to go to the local restaurant or coffee house because we have experience of being there and it is only when something happens to change our opinions that we may start to change our buying habits.
It is convenient and without thought - it is habit.
SMART Partnerships can help to empower you to understand these aspects and how to create a working and effective online and website marketing strategy.
It is only through expansion into other towns or other areas of the city that your brand and reputation grows but you still rely on people choosing to visit your business when they are local to you and during your opening hours.
The Internet however presents the shopper with a totally different situation. Apart from the fact that there is no ‘touchy feely’ opportunity, there is the armchair comfort of shopping with endless choices from all of your competitors, home delivery, price comparisons, information, articles on how others rate you etc etc…
Impulse buying is no different online if you research your market and attract the right audience and make the right 'noises' on the site to make the shopping process simple and secure - you can sell what your visitors want to buy. If you confuse them, you'll lose them!
We are in an age of choice and you need to be to the fore if you are to stand a chance of selling online. You must think of getting away from typical and very competitive 1 or 2 word descriptions in your URL tail. Instead you need to keyword load the URL tail to match the relevance of the search term to the page content and the Title tag.
This is something you can very quickly do (if your CMS allows it) to make sure that you are one of the companies getting a better share of the market?
Like your shop or store where you depend on regular footfall and the ability of your sales staff to help the customer, your website needs to be able to do the same thing and you are not limited by staff availability during busy sales periods.
There are of course tips available for helping to convert the anonymous visitors that can come through your website.
Spend time researching (or commission us to help) to understand your typical online customer, what you have that they are looking to buy and most importantly, knowing what they are using as search terms for these products. Many companies have banks of tens of thousands of keywords to use on their pages when they choose and competition for these words can be fierce.
You will not get to this stage quickly and unless you are using tools to help you decide on the right combination of keywords, your ideas may be completely different to those who are searching for your products.
Research your online competitors – remember that just because they have a nice looking website, it may not be performing well even if your competitors have larger companies than yours.
Firstly you need to get the customer to your site and once they are there, think about how to make it easy for them to buy.
Think about product/service categories and where you want the visitor to land on your site. The home page is the last place you should be targeting.
Successful website marketing is not a 1 hour per week job. You can start off small and grow but the magic ingredient is the time it takes to learn what works and what doesn’t. You can do this on your own or discuss your needs with us to see where we can help share the burden.
Whether you are just starting down the e-commerce route or you already have an established website that needs to perform better, our range of services are geared to make this journey easier and more cost effective for you.
Contact us for more information - this is not a job you should take on lightly on your own and inevitably you will need help to get you moving on the right track. Talk to us to understand more of what you need to know.
We also develop and run ICT and Website Marketing workshops and these can either be generic in content or specifically tailored and delivered for your company.