Google Take a Leaf Out of Our Book

If any of you have a Google analytics account then you should have receieved an email from them today sending you seasons greetings. Well we did anyway.

We were suprised to see that Google had taken a leaf out of our book.

Here's the holiday greeting image that came embedded into the email:

The reason this made us laugh was because anyone who knows the history of Upright Solutions will also know that the name came from the fact that our services make your sales graphs go up and to the right.

I doubt Google took this from us but it's a nice little coincidence we wanted to share during the holiday season.

Business at Upright Solutions is booming so we've neglected the blog lately, you can blame than on our International clients who've been experiencing a rapid increase in demand as the economy picks up so we've been working flat out to help them capture the maximum amount of market share.

I've got a feeling 2010 is going to be the best year yet.

Video Version of Marketing Hub Article

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25FX2GZPd1U

Leveraging Your Website as the Hub of Your Marketing (Not Marketing in the Dark)

This article demonstrates that no matter what marketing medium you use, all road lead back to the web.

I’m still staggered at the numbers of companies who don’t have any tracking on their website.

The one’s that do don’t review it.

The one’s that do review it, don’t know how the information can help them make decisions.

Bottom line, your website is absolutely the hub of all your marketing. I don’t care what you do exhibitions, leaflet drops, networking, direct mail, telemarketing, advertising it doesn’t matter, guaranteed the place every prospective customer will turn next is to your website.

It’s your living connection to your prospective customers. It’s dynamic, changeable and interactive (or it should be).

If you want to maximise that marketing expenditure, don’t let people fall through the cracks.

Website visitors are GOAL DRIVEN. Once they have read your leaflet or seen your company at a trade show they go to your website FOR A SPECIFIC PURPOSE.

If your website doesn’t serve that purpose you may as well not have bothered spending the time and money going to the trade show, because you’ll have dropped the ball.

Back to the idea of website tracking.

‘Web analytics’ as it’s called isn’t just a means of segmenting website visitors into categories according to where they came from (search engine, online directory etc) but with professional help it can also track your offline marketing.

The holy grail of business has always been knowing what activity most influences or generates new business. If we could get a better idea about that we’d make a lot more money at the end of the year.

Web analytics can go a long way to helping us with this.

By default analytics systems categorise your website visitors into three major categories (visitors from search engines, visitors from other websites, visitors who knew your website address).



But there’s nothing to stop you from creating as many categories as you like, allowing you to see exactly how many people where compelled by whatever piece of marketing material they came across.

So the next time you go and exhibit at a trade show or put out an advertisement, spend £10 on a new domain name that relates to what you are advertising such as ChristmasChocolatesOffer.co.uk and then forward visitors to that address to your real website.

Because the only place people could have found out that website address is from that particular advert or trade show, later when you review your website tracking you’ll see exactly how many people wanted to know more about your offer.

You can even track how many of those people ended up making an enquiry after getting more information.

We mentioned a couple of articles ago that we do this with our email footers so even if we don’t get through to decision makers when we call them up, we at least know if people are reading our introductory letters and emails and then wanting to find out more by visiting our website.

So stop shooting in the dark with your marketing money and turn the lights on by embracing web analytics.

For more information on anything discussed in this article please contact us directly and we’ll be glad to help.

Until next time keep that Profit Up.

An Example of How Marketing Can Sell Almost Anything to Almost Anyone

Marketing is supposed to present a product, service or company to it's target market in such a way as to be appealing right?

The basic specifications of a product or service are boring and undesirable, so it's the job of marketing to tell the story of how those features become benefits and ultimate what positive difference the product or service will make.

I came across a pearl of an advert recently and had to share it.

Here it is:

The 'Axe' brand is what we call Lynx in the UK, the men's personal hygiene and deodorant lines. 'The Lynx Effect' in the UK is 'The Axe Affect' in the USA.

I came across this advert in XXL magazine, an American hip hop magazine, the perfect place to promote a product that sells itself as helping you attract women the more you use it.

This advert appears to make the assumption that you are already using Axe products, have experienced the effects and now need this product next.

Looking at it and without reading my analysis or the marketing spin you'll see that the advert has a picture of what I would have previously referred to as a 'bath or shower scrunchy'.

I.e. a delicate sponge type product for ladies to wash themselves with.

The typical representation of a scrunchy is unlikely to appeal to the core market of males Axe targets.

So what did they do? They made the scrunchy into 'The Axe Detailer Shower Tool'.

Absolutely brilliant if you ask me. And just look at it, you can see it's really just a scrunchy but they've put this rough surface on one side and made it in the most manly colour scheme imaginable (red and black).

You'll notice this same colour combination on car interiors designed to target men too.

The fact that they have used the words 'Detailer' and 'Tool' to name the product, conjure up images of polishing metal, a construction site, cranes or a car garage, all very manly.

So using the Axe Shower Tool on your body is like detailing a car or fixing some heavy machinery, again very manly indeed.

Look at the two labels pointing to either side of the product. On the right where it points to the soft scrunchy side it says 'Washes lipstick off your neck' and the other side is labeled as 'Scrubs candle wax off your chest hair'.

The advert promotes the idea that 'Axe' is effective without question and now they have come up with a product to help you deal with the aftermath.

The labels referencing lipstick on the neck and candle wax also suggest a kinky image, which if you've seen the TV adverts, fits in with the dominating sexual theme.

Finally at the bottom they top it off with those two lines of text which I (as a marketing professional) interpreted as shots aimed at personality traits.

The Axe Shower Tool is almost like the perfectly rounded guy that will have the maximum appeal to women.

It has 'a rough side for your tough guy parts', suggesting women like a man who can protect them and 'a soft side for your sensitive guy parts' suggesting that the ideal man has some sensitivity too.

I don't know if you think this is over analysing but this is what we do as marketeers, we help you sell more of your products and services by dressing them up to have the maximum appeal to the market you want to sell them to.

I just thought this was an excellent example of a product which is really just a sponge, which no one has any urgency to go out and buy, into a concept of sex appeal that has a much higher chance of attracting buyers.

Hats off to them.

Turning Google Searches into Paid Invoices

This article serves to show the often unseen connection between a search conducted on Google and that person paying the invoice you issued to them.

A person or company that has a requirement for a product or service will be placing that order with someone but there are some milestones to reach before that happens.

The Internet is nothing new really. When you boil it down, it’s just old concepts on a new medium.

So it is with generating business through the web. This short article aims to help you see the similarities between making a sale before the Internet and making a sale now that we have it.

As a guide we’ll be referring to the following document which you can download and make use of later if you like:

Download Internet Sales Funnel Diagram

You might recognise this as a traditional sales funnel. In the old days the top of the funnel would be the number of cold calls made.

The next stage down in the funnel in the old days would have been number of brochures sent out perhaps.

The next stage in the funnel in the old days would have been number of appointments made or number of quotes sent out and eventually the numbers of sales made.

Then at the end of the sales process you can work out average sale value, total value of sales brought in and then how much gross profit was made.

This is very similar to the new age, except instead of cold calls and paper brochures etc we automate the time consuming part of the process using Internet marketing and our websites.

Take a phrase like ‘internet marketing specialists’ which is one of our most important keywords, which we’re optimising our own website for.

We know this is searched around 4,000 a month overall and about 800 times a month in the UK.
So say we’re optimising our website for 9 other similar keywords with a combined total of 8,000 searches each month.

The more exposure our website has for these 10 keywords the greater share of those 8,000 searches we are going to get as visitors to our website.

If we were in the top 3 on Google for all these keywords (at time of writing we’ve moved up to 12th on Google for ‘internet marketing specialists’), then I would expect our site to attract about 20% of the searches. 20% of 8,000 is 1,600 website visitors per month.

Now we’ve filled in the top two portions of the funnel diagram, the next thing we track is how many of those 1,600 visitors will make an enquiry to us.

Now even though those people came looking for us, they’ll all be at different stages of their decision making process. Some are conducting initial research on one end and people are ready to sign a deal on the other.

Our website is pretty good and converts an average of 4% of its search engine traffic into enquiries, which would mean 64 enquiries a month through the web using the above figures.

As it shows on the diagram, the better your website is the more visitors will convert into enquiries. Contact us for help on improving this.

So now we have 64 enquiries and say only 50% of them are serious, meaning we produce 32 proposals / quotes.

That’s the third stage dealt with.

Finally let’s say our proposals were not particularly persuasive so only 20% of the potential customers decided to go ahead with us. 20% of 32 is 6, so 6 new customers.

So there we have it. We’ve gone right through the process from someone conducting a Google search through to issuing an invoice to a new customer.

The results of this kind of process have many variables. If you are better or worse at any particular stage then that will obviously affect the amount of business that comes out of the bottom of the funnel.

Having tons of searches for your product or services is no good if your Internet marketing is poor because no one will ever find your company.

If your website is poor then the people who do find you won’t bother getting in touch.

And if you don’t present the value of your product or service properly the people that do make the enquiry won’t end up giving you an order.

Imagine what difference it makes when you improve all of these elements at the same time?

I guarantee the result would definitely be ‘Profit Up’.

For more information on anything discussed in this article please contact us directly and we’ll be glad to help.

Until next time keep that Profit Up.

How the activity of your sales force affects traffic to your website

80 to 90% of your prospective customers will visit your website before contacting you.

I would say it's highly probable that at some point during the sales process 100% of your prospective customers are going to visit your website for some reason.

It's like the Eisenberg brothers taught us in 'Waiting for your cat to bark', for organisations with multiple levels of management the decision making process goes in stages.

The procurement of office stationary for example might begin with an office junior conducting research in order to build a list of say 10 prospective suppliers which is then passed up the organisation chart to more and more senior levels.

At each level of seniority and even horizontally across the organisation chart different decision makers and influencers are going to want to pull different bits of information from your organisation, and there's no more effortless way of them getting this than from your website.

That is assuming your site has the relevant information but that's a whole other story.

We all know what prospecting is like, especially if you are a direct sales person and are reading this, there's a lot of contacting that goes on.

Often you don't get hold of the person you want to speak to but sometimes you get an email address with which to send an introduction.

Prospects will read your email and often click through to your company website to see what it's all about. They may decide they are not open to what you are offering but they will be curious enough to check out your website because we all like to make at least semi informed decisions.

This applies especially to more junior members of their team because typically (and yes this is a generalisation) people will find reasons to procrastinate and your email could be just that opportunity.

My advice would be to do what we do and tag the link in your email footer so you know how often prospective customers are checking out your website following an introductory email, rather than them just deleting it.

If I contact a prospect to offer them our search marketing services I'll always send something ahead of the phone call, that's just the way I prefer to do it.

In the footer of the email that introduces Upright Solutions there'll be a link that looks like this:

http://www.simplifyinternetmarketing.co.uk/

The actual URL it links to though is this:
http://www.simplifyinternetmarketing.co.uk/?utm_source=email-footer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email-signature

This is a URL that has a tag that informs Google analytics about the specific source of that website visitor.

So we've created a new segment for the site traffic. The result?

Well in our traffic sources report instead of the standard, direct, referral and search segments we get:



This week 15 people have received our introductory emails and clicked the website link in the footer. On average they visited 2.8 pages, so just a quick look to see what we are about.

This is a good exercise because without the link tagging all the email footer traffic would have been counted as 'direct traffic'.

The same goes for any campaign you are running, you can change the link to to segment off traffic from any source or campaign that you like.

Remember we can't improve that which we do not measure, so get tagging.

Contact us if you need help setting this kind of thing up.

New Upright Solutions website launched

Now the servers have updated the new Upright Solutions website is live. Thanks again to our friends at Eskimosoup for their hard work on this.

Check out the new site for yourself: www.uprightsolutions.co.uk

Comment welcome.

New Upright Solutions logo revealed

Here's our newly revised logo to coincide with the overhaul of our website.

Thanks to our friends over at Eskimosoup for the new branding and website style, great work guys.

Implications on search engine optimisation when you launch a new website

Very few companies realise this but it's dangerous to just launch a new website without thinking of how it will impact your standing with the search engines.

Bearing in mind that Google and co only re-index your website periodically, there will be a period between you launching your new site and Google updating its index, where people may be finding your website on the search engine results page, clicking on your site and it going nowhere.

This will be because the search engine's index still refers to the web addresses of all your old pages, not good.

This could go on for a while depending on how often your site gets re-indexed, but it could be months.

Months of missed opportunity where people would have found your website through a search engine, but then ended up looking at a 'page not found' error message.

This will also not score you any points with Google as a trusted site because they'll see your site as unreliable. How are they supposed to know you've launched a new website? To the Google system it just looks like your website has a load of holes in it where pages used to be.

Also there are other knock on effects when launching a new website such as any other sites that have linked to yours.

These links will become broken when the page they were pointing to no longer exists. Those incoming links may have been helping to maintain a particular ranking in Google that you were taking for granted.

There is a correct procedure when launching a new site though. A procedure in which you can be sure none of your old links will be broken and that your positioning within the search engines will not be affected as much.

Normally we SEO professionals don't like web pages that automatically redirect visitors to another site or page. We don't like them because they may look to Google like they are black hat (aka naughty, aka banned) SEO techniques, so as an ethical search marketing company we stay well clear.

There is however a redirect that we use in certain circumstances. The redirect we use is known as a 301 redirect.

Now 301 is just the code for it in computer language but in English it translates into 'this page has been permanently moved'.

This is a much more search engine friendly redirect than say a 401 redirect, but lets not get into the detail of that right now.

So what we need to do when carrying over the kudos from the old site to the new site is to create 301 redirects and name them exactly the same as the pages on the old site. Each of these 301 redirects will redirect the visitors browser to the new page on the site that replaced it.

So say we had a page on our old website that was:

www.uprightsolutions.co.uk/aboutus.asp

... which was the address of our 'About Us' page. Then say we look at our new site and the address of our new about us page is:

www.uprightsolutions.co.uk/About-Us/

The page address will often be different if you've changed the platform your website is based on or if your new website is based on a different technology.

In the above example we would create a very simple file called aboutus.asp and inside that file place the code for a 301 redirect.

All this does is adds a bit in the header of the page to tell whoever is trying to visit the page that it has moved to a new address.

There are other ways of doing this but we're advising the use of 301 redirect for search engine friendly effects.

The result of this exercise is that now if someone searched google for 'upright solutions' and the page www.uprightsolutions.co.uk/aboutus.asp came up in the search results, if someone clicks on it they would be redirected to www.uprightsolutions.co.uk/About-Us/.

This also means that when the search engines revisit the site to check if the aboutus.asp page is still there or has been updated in any way, they will also be redirected to the new About-Us page which they can then use to update the index.

Ultimately after the search engines have found the new version of the page, it will be the new page address that starts coming up in the search results, meaning no potential website visitors will be lost.

One very important thing for me is to do this page by page because what I have seen in the past is that we've given this advice to clients, they've seen a short cut and just redirected all their old page addresses to their new home page.

This saves time because it's easier to implement but I say it's a bad idea. Mainly because when someone searches Google say for 'ping golf clubs', they will see a link to the ping golf clubs page that was on your old site, but when they click on it, they'll be presented with the sites home page with anything and everything on it.

This is likely to create enough friction to make the visitor click back and choose another site from the search results.

When a person searches for 'ping golf clubs' or something specific like that, they are telling you what they are looking for.

If they wanted to be presented with a page offering a whole range of golf items, they would have searched for 'golf equipment' or something generic.

So take the time to maintain the users experience and redirect them to the right place.

If you need further help with the impact on your search engine ranking when launching a new website, give us a call and we'll give you some advice.

Creating niche social networking sites

Has it occured to anyone else the trend that is emerging in social media?

While mashup sites are typically meant to bring things together, there seems to be another trend.

There seems to be a lot of attention on their idea of 'status' messages like you write on Facebook or myspace.

This is exactly where the idea for Twitter came from. They took the 'status' feature that has been in Facebook for a long time and created a site focusing on just that.

Then FriendFeed is back in the news because Facebook has acquired an interest in the company.
I dont know how much valuable technology is in FriendFeed but I'd expect to see Facebook slowly but surely merging the features of FriendFeed into Facebook as time goes on.

FriendFeed again latched on to the idea of 'status', only instead of Twitter's angle (forcing you to post very short messages), FriendFeed encourages status messages based on what web content you are looking at.

The idea then is for your friends to comment on it, recommend it others etc

I think the web really is coming into it's own with this kind of social media and it's revolutionary.

FriendFeed which is dubbed 'real time search' is a system for filtering out junk web content by democracy.

The amount of revenue we generate for clients from social media marketing doesn't mean that their search marketing results have been affected, it means that social networking sites are helping to fuel the adoption of the Internet amoung the population.

Suddenly instead of being all alone in front of a Google search screen, you can come to the Internet browse it based on recommendations from friends who have been there for years and can point you in the right places.

There's just so many new and innovative concepts and because technology is now so cheap, the cost of testing these ideas out is relatively small.

Which kind of brings us back to the importance of social networking because your peers will help you filter out the junk and point out the pearls.

Save Your Business From The Jaws of Recession with Internet Marketing

There may many different circumstances leading up to it but business failure is typically more money going out then coming in.

Successful business go into administration if they have cash flow problems for example.

Often money is drained from a business because it is spent without the business getting any value, so it's basically a total loss.

Even foolish spending wouldn't be that harmful if the business at least got some value from it.

The particular expenditure I'm talking about is sales and marketing expenses.

Alot of people see them as a necessary evil. Evil in a sense that it's often seen as something that has to be done that's not particularly enjoyable.

In an economic boom you might be able to afford some wasted sales and marketing money here and there because your P&L looks good.

What I have witnessed first hand though since the downturn struck is that we have been literally inundated with enquiries for our services.

I'd say in more than 50% of cases companies are coming to me with the same story;

"We've been spending X on sales and marketing for the last 5 years and now we're feeling the pinch and need to find ways of keeping our sales up while reducing expenditure".

That might sound impossible but it's not.

Early in the year we were invited in to a firm of solicitors in the East Midlands who'd been investing more than £2,500 each week in newspaper advertising.

That made me feel pretty nauseous because I'm sat there thinking that they could have had 6 months worth of website optimisation out of us for that and they were spending that money each week.

It makes no sense to spend £2,500 on 10,000 shotgun cartridges hoping to have enough good luck to hit a pigeon to make a pie, when with a bit of expert advice you could spend £500 on some bait and a trap and end up with a pheasant that will feed 4 people.

Most business owners I've spoken to would like to have a good salesman working for them day after day finding new customers who buy their products or services.

But it's often that the potential rewards are not worth the risks.

So I say why not flip that equation and make your website into your top salesman?

The potential rewards are great while the risks remain comparatively low.

The most important thing though is not to wait too long.

Every month more websites in your industry get optimised, increasing the amount of competition.

This puts up the cost of Internet marketing services as we need to spend more of our time on campaigns to make them work.

It's vital that you start building equity in your site now so that you don't get to the point where your business is so far behind that it would take a miracle to catch your competitors.

And for those who are well positioned when the economy begins to boom again their rewards will multiply exponentially.

And for us, it'll be a joy to witness.

Upright Solutions Website Relaunch

To coincide with the relaunch of your website, we've created a new blog on which to publish our articles, podcasts and video articles.