Category Archives: Marketing Plans
Improve your website using science!
Dave here from Redcow.
It’s March already – how is your year shaping up? Is it starting to look
like “same old, same old?”
When I started off in 2012, I was determined to better the business model,
build on my knowledge, share some learning experiences and gain more sales!
As an owner of a company I don’t like the feeling of standing still. I
always want and need to feel that I am moving forward and growing
customers.
The feeling that I have when the sales and business is coming through the
door makes it all worth while. Along the way we also get to build up some
amazing relationships with clients and see the impact that comes from
helping them grow their business.
Last month I sent you an article all about trying to think outside the
square in regards to generating more conversions from your website. In fact,
my focus was on trying new things and how making changes can turn your
business upside down in regards to more leads!
The biggest lesson for me was that doing something that may be considered
radical, led to a client’s website generating 300% more leads…and that
to this very day is still an unreal outcome. So where does that leave ” best
practices”? It leaves best pracitices to those that are unwilling to test
their market place, those who don’t want more and more sales, those who want
to be the same as everyone else – which means you may never get the most out
of your website. If you think about where we have come from in regards to
advertising …from Yellow pages, shared hosting, dedicated websites, best
practice landing pages to now, landing page testing I feel we have only just
touched on the fringes of where websites and business growth can be.
This month I want to look into ways you can improve your website by
watching how visitors use your website. Watching, you say? Yes, watching!
We use software that allows us to track every activity a visitor makes on
your website. Armed with information you can see:
* Where visitors are clicking, and not clicking, on your website
* Where confusion is happening on your pages
* What friction points stop people from making contact with you
* The amount of reading people do on each page
* Where visitors are bouncing back and forth within your site
With this type of information you can study and look at ways to improve
your website by analysing and improving sticking points, catching errors and
fixing places on your site that are causing people to stop and not engage
with you.
The trick to making the most of this software is within the analysis area.
This is where having a team of analysts who study websites for improvement
purposes for a living can take your website to new levels
of satisfaction not only for the end user but also for your business sales.
Yes, once you have this information on hand you are then able to correct and
fix areas on your site that may be stopping people for making contact with
you, making a sale with you, or just engaging with your site at any level.
If you have a site now and feel that you should be getting more leads or
sales from it, maybe, just maybe there are issues with it that are stopping
the number of people coming through the site to talk with you.
This month, with my focus on watching traffic, the Redcow team are offering
a March Special Deal that allows you and your site to improve its ability
to sell. Our March deal includes a dedicated resource to watch your website
for an entire month, after the month is up my team will then analyse and
provide a report that will help your website convert more visitors into
buyers of your products and services.
We are offering this amazing service just to you because you are on my mailing list.
This one time deal will expire at the end of this month so be quick, act now! Normally $1000, yours for only $749*!
This is what you will receive with our March deal:
1. A consultation with me to discuss your website
2. Your website will be analysed for for 30 days
3. You will then be provided with a comprehensive report detailing the
areas of where your website is failing to help visitors turn into
customers
4. Along with this report will will recieve another consultation with me to
dicuss the findings and any opportunties for improvement
That’s it for me…
Have fun and don’t ever stop wanting to improve your website!
Cheers,
Dave.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
How do you get more sales from your website?
Yeah a pretty good question, one we hear from most of our clients that come to us for help.
More and more these days, people are taking notice of what their websites are doing (or not doing) for them, 90% of business owners now see that and want their websites to generate sales for them. Where it began…?
Many sites are designed by creative teams of people whose job, as they saw it was to build websites that looked pretty, acted in some order fashion and/or mimicked client brochures. And to some degree, for the most part, followed a traditional look and feel that others had on their websites. Ok, so where to from here.
Well just lately, well in fact for the past five or so years, people have been looking at ways that they can have some business generated from their website – and this is where the whole design first and sell later comes into the forefront.
As I mentioned above, people went to website designers, the designer come up with a beautiful website which promised so much, but in reality has delivered nothing or very little in the way of business sales.
Lets review a typical website – lovely home page with pretty colours, a big “Welcome to” on the centre of the page, followed by content and links to other areas of their website…traditionally, there is an about us, what we do, our location, contact us, our services, our products…blah blah.. – sounds like a winning combination right…well…not really…lets consider a few things here…what do I want from my website, what is it that I want to achieve, and why have I gone out and spent hard earned money on my website? Do I just want a brochure but in electronic format….hmm maybe not…OK..stay with me, here I am getting to the meat and drink of what I trying to tell you…
What if I was to tell you this… if your best sales rep went to a meeting and all they talked about was what was inside your company brochure do you think that this sales rep would be successful..? – People that come to visit your website are effectively people that you are selling to…OK..we are getting closer..
Here is a typical point of difference with websites that sell and convert visitors into contacts and possible sales.
- They focus on telling people where they are
- They tell the user what they can achieve by visitors
- And they then give the visitor reasons to act
- They provide users with a clear channel of where things are located and how to access them
- They focus the content on “what’s in it for them”
- They display their USP, their “unique sales proposition” in the eye-line
- The are often a mirror image of their greatest sales reps
If we compare this list with the one from the brochure…where does your website fit?
Here are some statistics from our website tests..
- Business owners that have many websites doing specific jobs sell more
- Business owners that follow a sales process on their website sell more
- Business owners that have a 1 page website generate more sales than ones with 1 large website
- Sites that focus on lead generation verses lovely brochure sites win more sales
- Sites that are geared around helping others fix problems sell more online
Over the past decade, I have built my very own list of different types of website models (around 10 or so). Where most people go wrong is that they mix and match these different models which causes confusion, and with confusion people don’t act.
Good luck
Till next time, Dave.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
What does Redcow Marketing do for businesses?
It’s interesting to chat to a customer about what we do and why we are different to others out there in the market place.
Some people see us as SEO masters, or pay per click managers, while others think we are website designers. What is our point of difference and what makes us so much different from the others in the market is this critical point…”the end result”
This is what I mean…I try to explain it by starting off talking about what we aren’t, we aren’t just a search engine optimisation company, we are not a pay per click marketing company, we aren’t a web design team..what we are and what we do is utilise these things just mentioned but again…that’s not us either!
We are business analysts for your online business. We design strategies to help businesses grow online – full stop. How we go about doing this depends largely on where the client is in terms of its current website presence. Some clients might have a website already and want to grow, while others have no website and want to discover more customers. So back to how and what we do….
I see ourselves as marketers who are able to improve or build new business for people by designing web based models in business.
Our major offering is in the key skills of improvement. We, in a “nutshell”, design marketing programs around improvement. We design tests and conduct studies online that help us improve our clients online businesses (much like a business analyst does for any business of substance) – we in a sense become the marketing team/business analyst team that companies don’t have for their websites and let alone can generally afford. What we offer our customers is a full marketing team at a fraction of a cost that they would have to fork out if they wanted a team to grow their business.
Let me walk you through a campaign we did for a client just recently, maybe this will explain more about we do…The client wanted more sales from its current visitors.
- The client had a nice website already but was not happy with the level of bookings it generated
- We started this program but designed a strategy to help the client discover how to make its website more effective
- Unlike others who might do an improvement review on a website based on just “best practices”, we start off by finding out exactly what past clients thought of their website as well as discovering what new visitors thought of their online website model
- We then went about discovering how people surfed their online pages, where people clicked, how far people scrolled on pages, what keywords brought them to site pages, we recorded people using the website and also conducted a number of user case studies to help us discover weaknesses within their websites.
- After three months of testing and discovering we were able to increase the sites performance (in regards to sales generated) by an amazing 100%
So there you go, that’s just one way we help clients grow….
So, is it clear now what we offer? Maybe a little clearer??
“We help clients grow their business by designing strategies to suit their end goals”
Can this be packaged and sold in the 1000′s, I’m not so sure… but we are giving it go!
For our clients the ultimate growth can only happen once we understand the NEEDS and because each client is unique each marketing strategy therefore must be as well!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Optimising your website is key!
As I surf around the Internet these days I see a load of sites out there that are built for the masses who all love social networks and signing up for special offers! Follow me here to twitter with me, Click me on Facebook and join me as a friend, Like me a lot and join my social scene etc…
While I don’t discount the value of these social streams for some larger businesses, I have yet to see any real business gains for clients that have a smaller catchment of visitors or small or low membership clients. Some of which are ruining their websites with these.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Usability & search drive 70% more revenue to hotel
How Redcow Marketing helped Museum Hotel improve their conversion rate by 100% and achieve a 70% increase in online sales.
The Museum Hotel’s Challenges:
The owner of Wellington NZ’s Museum Hotel – Chris Parkin – wanted…
- More bookings through his hotel’s website, more brand awareness, and more sales.
- To increase his website’s presence and make the most of its visitors.
- To reduce the fees he pays to third party travel sites for bookings, and to encourage guests to book from his website, instead.
Dave suggested they…
- Make better use of the hotel’s booking engine.
- Address usability and testing page enhancements to improve sales.
- Add sales elements on the website to improve the sales funnel, and add new content to the homepage and other vital areas that would enhance engagement.
- Work directly with the hotel’s booking engine provider to improve features.
- Work directly with the reservation staff and manager of the hotel to increase bookings.
- Address the site’s SEO content.
- Redesign the online advertising pay-per-click campaign.
First, they accessed the website’s analytical data to determine how much traffic was coming to the site, what levels of contact were made, what and how many bookings were generated, where people went when they visited, how long they were there, and where they left. All of this information helped to paint a picture of the site’s performance.
Dave reviewed the site for usability issues, friction, and confusion points, then looked for gaps in the website where they could enhance value, and studied the site’s flow of information.
Their major challenge was to make the website more interactive and focused – to get people moving into the booking engine as quickly as possible from the website itself; once there, the likelihood that a booking would be made was very high.
Dave proposed a new layout for the home page, then tried and tested different versions to find which one most effectively raised guests’ engagement levels with the site and booking engine.
The next step was to address the pages that were visited the most – providing feedback to the hotel on what those pages were lacking. They also added new tracking systems to monitor visitors and conversions levels, allowing them to track which parts of the pages people were more interested in, what keyword phrases were bringing in sales and customers, and other valuable information.
Finally, they added clearer navigation to aid the user experience, including new contact forms, maps and directions.
They rolled out these changes over the course of a few months, analyzing and tweaking along the way to enhance the overall package.
Results:
In 2009 their revenue increased by 56% from 2008
In 2010 their revenue increased by 11% from 2009
This is a massive revenue increase of 73% over two years
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Why branding isn’t important any more
Is branding your name as important as it once was?
I say no… why? Because you can now use the Internet in some creative ways to generate sales and customers for your business.
Here’s a concept that you may have seen on the telly in marketing documents and maybe even on the radio.
Companies are now branding what they offer, what they do etc., with easy to remember domain names that are catchy and informative to the end user. The National Bank now advertises mortgage services using this methodology as do many other major brands, the brand is important it is not used in the marketing of these services.
So what are the pro’s and con’s.
Pro’s
- Easy to remember domain name, for example www.GetYourMortgage.co.nz is easier to remember and therefore it’s easier for the client to get the information they are after without having to go through the National Bank’s normal home page.
- The content is rich with information about how to get your mortgage. While the brand is tied in with the product offering it is more the fact that that site is all about mortgages that makes it a far more informative site for the end user.
- The content and the keywords in the domain name also helps the site be found in all major search engines as the words in the domain and used in the site help to determine the overall positioning within their rankings.
- It enables smaller businesses to gain a larger market share as they are able to complete against the traditional marketing media that the the major brands depend on.
- This allows smaller operators to compete for business in creative ways to create new sales and customers.
Con’s
- Another site for the bank to administrate and manage moving forward.
- The brand may be lost in the marketing mix to some that depend on that to secure business, so in this form of marketing it is important to ensure the brand is included where possible within the site.
So to summarise, while the brand is important, what the Internet allows you to do is to stand out and be counted by offering unique tailor made service- and product-focused driven websites.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Website content for your homepage
Three things to look at on your home page.
When you review your website consider this… Most people will for the most part, have never seen or know anything about your business. In fact, for the majority of websites most visitors will probably find them by chance in Google, Yahoo, MSN or by a some other form of marketing of their business.
Ok, so when someone arrives at your site what will they see? Look at your own site for about 30 seconds and answer these questions from the visitor’s perspective.
- Where am I?
- What can I do here?
- Why should I act?
While these all seem really simple questions chances are your website and many other small to medium business sites do a poor job at providing the answers to visitors.
One of the favourites you see on websites is the ‘Welcome To…’. Let’s think about this for a second, you have only a matter of seconds to grab a visitors attention before they leave your site and look elsewhere, so instead of ‘Welcome To Jim’s Shop’ why not consider telling people very clearly where they are, what they can do here and why they should act now.
Let’s consider this, pretend you own a mechanic shop in Waikanae, here is what I would have on my home page…
‘Mechanic Shop in the Waikanae‘ as the main headline on your home page. Followed by a statement such as, ‘where you can have your car, truck and van serviced by our specialised and certified auto mechanics‘. And then something like, ‘Not only do we offer free pickup and delivery of your vehicle, once serviced we offer top quality support and 24 hr assistance just in case you car breaks down in the local area when you become a customer of ours!‘
This not only defines what you do, which tells the visitor ‘where they are’, then moves on and explains ‘what you have to offer’, (specialised and certified mechanics) and then provides them with a solid reason of ‘why they should utilise your services’ (by offering pick up and delivery).
It provides the reader with motivation, clarity of your offer and incentive to take action with you, all of which all help you generate sales from your website.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
PPC vs SEO
There is a debate in the industry around the benefits of using pay-per-click (PPC) adverting instead of search engine optimisation (SEO) as your main source of website traffic. While I feel that there are many benefits of search engine optimisation to me as a business owner PPC can be rewarding in so many ways over SEO.
Here are some interesting points to be aware of;
- PPC traffic converts at 2.03% versus 1.26% for natural traffic
- PPC visitors spend about 10% more money on your site than naturally found visitors
- PPC visitors stay on your site 29% longer than naturally found website visitors
Here are my thoughts on why these stats are as they are
With PPC you control what phrases you want to appear in Google for, with natural search (SEO) you dont have the same control over these search queries. In some strange instances your site might be found for search phrases that are not related to your business at all but the search engines have tagged your website as having content relevant to this.
For example, you can state in PPC that you want to show for a phrase that directly relates to your product, for example “dog collars” and then when someone types in “looking for dog collars” your site comes up at the top of Google ready for that person to click, visit and then buy.
The reason I believe PPC visitors stay longer on your site is that they know what you have is what they have searched for and now want to know more about your website before making a commitment to buy from you. They are just checking you out more before they spend their cash with you…
The reason people spend more from you is an interesting one, is it because the PPC visitor is a more serious purchaser and hence has more to spend than the naturally found website visitor.
My final words, PPC gives you more control on who see’s your business online and where your business shows and doesn’t show. It typically gives your business an instant boost of traffic due to the fact that you can show in google today, tomorrow and the next day as long as you are willing to pay for the traffic you get. PCC also gives you the ability to test product prices, collect feedback and gather really quick information due to the ability to send alot of traffic to your site via PPC advertising. It’s all good food for thought…
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Getting your message right
Your marketing & sales message must effectively answer the following four questions:
1. Why should I read or listen to you?
2. Why should I believe what you have to say?
3. Why should I do anything about what you’re offering?
4. Why should I act now?
These are very basic questions, but few sales people can fire back fast answers to any of them.
There are all kinds of companies in the world that can’t give you a really solid explanation of what they do or why it matters.
Your precise answer to these four questions is your Unique Selling Position. You must have this message clearly defined and focused. It must be written down and you must be able to repeat it in the middle of the night when your spouse wakes you from a deep sleep.
Everything you do should answer those questions in a consistent way, whether directly or indirectly.
This goes hand in hand with the next principle, which is:
If you sell a product or service, you should lead with information about solving problems, not information about the product or service itself.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
A quick and easy guide to help you gain more sales and customers
Here are some points to help you gain more sales from your website.
Your website headline
What you have to offer a visitor on your website should be clearly stated on your home page. More often than not websites having a headline along the lines of ‘Welcome To My Website’. Much more effective is if your headline is based on what you have to offer the visitor – think, ‘what’s in it for them?’. You only have a few seconds to get the visitor’s attention so make sure you really place focus on enticing people into your website pages by having a headline that gets to the point and promotes your offer and services.
Say for example, you are a recruitment company in Wellington, your main headline should be based on your offering of helping people to find a job in Wellington.
Examples you could use might be:
- Wellington Recruitment Company
- A Specialised Recruitment Company That Helps People Who Want A New Job in Wellington
- Recruitment Specialist in Wellington
- Helping People To Find Jobs In Wellington
Not only will a headline like this instantly advise the visitor what your main offering is, it has a secondary benefit in that using words and phrases people will be searching with will help your website turn up in search engine results.
A good way to tell if this works is to test with new headlines to see if your website improves in leads, sales or customers with one headline over another.
Website content
The content within your website is key to creating not only more sales and leads, but what you have on your web pages can and will influence what keywords your website will be found for by search engines. Not only are you writing to entice people to buy or take action on your website, but your content is scanned by search engines so that they can rank you for certain keywords and phrases.
With this in mind, make sure the content you write about is relevant for both the end user and the search engines. The visitor to your site needs it to be clear and easy to understand, the search engines need relevant keywords and phrases they can pick up on to produce your website in a search result.
Testimonials / credibility
Testimonials can mean a lot to a small to medium sized business. Having that credibility factor is key to helping you grow your sales and customers. One of the best ways to add credibility is from your very own fan base. If you don’t have any testimonials go out and source some. Send your customers an email and ask them for feedback of your services You may like to offer a small incentive so that they are more inclined to do so.
Once you have sourced a few place them in all of your marketing documents. Get the word out that your services are highly favoured by many and that you actually do walk the talk. There are of course people who doctor up testimonials. To make your testimonials look and feel legitimate add a photo of the fan, a name, or even better the website link to their business along with a video from that fan…whatever the case start of by at least having some included in your website and all other Internet based documents.
Remember to ask your customers for feedback regularly, written if possible. The positive feedback can go on your website and other promotional material, and if there is any constructive criticism, use it to make your business even better.
Usability
Usability is a strange word that came about as websites became large and complex, not only from a managerial point of view but from a users perspective as well. When websites begin they are usually straightforward and simple to use. As time goes on and more products, services, links to third party sites are introduced, usability is critical to have sales and leads successfully generated on your site.
In the early days people believed your site shouldn’t be any deeper than three clicks away from making a sale or lead. Nowadays however after studies conducted it is the process that leads the end result that is more important than the number of clicks. Studies have shown that visitors to websites like to be guided (to have their hand held), and once you have this guidance in place it really doesn’t matter how many clicks.
So first of all make sure your visitors can surf around your site without having to second-guess what the next step is. Keep it simple. Give people a workflow and take them through the sales process step by step.
Website page names
One way to help your website increase its leads, sales and customers is obviously through search engines like Google. One of the biggest killers in this area for websites are page names. Make sure your page names are well formed with rich keyword terms, which will help in your pages being found. For example instead of having a page called /our-services, consider calling it /our-marketing-services. This way you are promoting your product offering as well as increasing the likelihood of being found for ‘marketing services’.
In this same vein, your website meta-description will aid your search engine listing if you place your websites main products and services within this area.
Call to action
Ok, so what is the ‘call to action? A call to action is a mechanism that you can have on your site to encourage visitors to act. Look to create page content that tells the user to take action either by clicking to another page, phoning your office number or contacting you for more information. Making sure your call to action clearly explains what the user will get by taking that next action will improve your response numbers. There are a few things that you can do to increase the response rates to your calls to action. Think about the use of colour to entice people in or use of space to make the next action more visible. Think about the position of where to place to the action request or just having the correct urgency of language like, ‘call now’, ‘buy today’, ’book quickly’, ‘register today’, ‘subscribe now’. Make these calls to action simple for the end user.
Contact from your website
Making contact with businesses these days is overlooked on many websites. While you might think that visitors can contact you from your contact page, think about placing your contact details into your overall website design to ensure you have the contact options throughout the site structure. That way people can chat, email, find your number and locate your business without any major work on their behalf. Look to use chat tools, for example Skype, Google Talk or even a professional chat system if you want to be able to log this chat activity so that you can see the interaction in a weekly report. There are many options available to select from.
Friction
Friction on your website is an area that makes people reconsider moving forward with you. It is either created by poor website design or by some other anxiety that is stimulated along the way. There are many ways to test for friction points on your website. One thing that I do often is to check where most people are leaving my websites. This quickly identifies areas for me to look at in more detail.
Say for example you notice a large percentage of your visitors are leaving your website at the checkout area. Look to see if there are things that need to be moved, removed or added to try to stop this from happening. For example it may be due to the large shipping costs, or due to the form on the checkout being too long, or that maybe the form is broken for some users so that they cannot purchase anything even if they have tried.
The next step would be to test separate elements on this page to see what changes if any make a difference to that area of your website. There are also companies that can offer you advice into friction points. Look at usertesting.com or userfly.com. They do cost money to report back to you but if you are selling your services and products from your website it might just be worth the cost of around $120.00 to get some testing for friction on your website.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Car Rental Marketing Online
Here is a really simple marketing plan for any car rental business to follow.
We have a number of clients who have been growing using this Internet plan.
Step 1
Design your website so that your home page is designed to meet your main objectives. Break your objectives down into main areas and ensure these are placed on your websites home page in a clear, well thought-out layout.
Step 2
Have a page for each objective, for example if you have trucks to rent then have a page entirely dedicated to trucks. Discuss the benefits and features, include the sizes available, have a video showing how easy it is to drive, park, load furniture, include testimonials on the page to add creditability. Don’t be afraid to include a lot of information about the trucks. People can elect to read it or not. Let people know if you include free kms, trolleys and/or blankets. In this case more information is better.
Step 3
Make sure you have your websites set up for search engine optimisation. This is still key to driving visitors to your front door and into your wallet! Make sure you look at other companies that have worked with rental car companies as this will give you an advantage as these search optimisers will know how to attract more customers to your site having worked in this area in the past. Make sure you ask for evidence that they know what to do for your business to help make it grow.
Look at how we have generated leads for a client over the course of the last three years.
Step 4
Include an advertising campaign – look to use Google, Yahoo and MSN to drive more business your way.
So, there are four steps to get your website working for you. It’s marketing for car rentals 101. Start today and build more customers, sales and leads tomorrow.
If you want a tailor made marketing plan for your car rental business or for any business please give me a bell, I am happy to assist you.
Take care…Cheers.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
The importance of Google Analytics
Many website owners do not make use of the amazing tool that is Google Analytics, either because they don’t know about it, or they find it too daunting. If you are in either of these two categories, it is a good idea to give the job to the professionals and employ someone to do it for you.
With Analytics you can see how many hits your website is getting, which allows you to determine if you are getting any value from your website.
It also gives you information on where visitors are coming from, ie if they are coming directly to it, or from one of your partnership sites or from search engines. This way you can see who is generating the most traffic to your website. For example, you may be paying to advertise in the Yellowpages online. Analytics will show you how many visitors found your site via Yellowpages, and you can determine whether that listing is working for you or not.
You can see what countries the visitors are from. If for example, the greater percentage of your visitors and customers are from Spain or South America, you could look at having a Spanish language translation of your website available.
You can see where people are leaving your site - if people are visiting your ‘price’ page, or your ‘product’ page and then leaving, you know there is probably something that you can improve on these pages.
If you are also using Google Adwords, you can combine the information with Analytics to find out exactly how much each lead is costing you.
Analytics helps you see what you are doing right, and what you can improve – an invaluable tool to increase the effectiveness of your website. If you want to learn more about what is happening on your website, let us know.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Use Google Optimiser to get more sales and customers
Knowing how to use Google Optimiser will guide you to more sales and customers.
I was looking into my Google stats for a client’s website last week and discovered a huge spike in people leaving their website on the products and services page. After further review I discovered that my client had decided to completely revamp their product and service content based on what others were telling them should be on that page. While making changes to your website can help you gain more sales it can also make you lose sales too.
With Google Optimiser you can set up various versions of a web page to see what impact a change has on the performance of your website. It’s a powerful free product that can allow you to test every tweak to your website to ensure you don’t get in the way of sales!
When using Google Optimiser consider these points:
- Don’t make any changes to your website content until you have tested one version over the next (old content versus new content).
- Look at split testing the changes to see what impact this has on your customers and sales generated before making the changed content the final version to go live with.
- Make sure you only make changes after you have reviewed your analytical data. Make changes based on what it is telling you works best.
- Don’t let bullies or the ones with the largest voice in your company make all the decisions on website content without first of all advising the reasons why.
Use Optimiser to help you refine and improve your sales and leads. Your business will grow from doing so!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Marketing for luxury hotels
What luxury hotels may want to consider in 2011…
Mobile Marketing!
Consider this… mobile phones these days come in many shapes and forms, computer systems and designs, with a huge explosion in smart phones (basically mini computers that fit in your pocket). One of the smartest ways to help your business right now is to use this avenue as your path to these users of smart phones.
While smart phones are coming down in price, these tiny, powerful computer-like phones are still mostly for the geeks and or the wealthy. With this in mind you can use this medium to reach out to the rich and advertise your services in this medium.
Look to build a mini website page application for smart phone platforms like Android and the iPhone. Ask your booking engine supplier if they are able to give you a link to their mobile application.
This way these targeted visitors can source information on your hotel and make a safe and secure booking direct from their smart phone.
Make sure you keep using technology to keep ahead of the rest!
Best of luck… until next time!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
How to increase your CTR’s with AdWords
One method that I find useful to enhance you click rates in your AdWords is to make sure you have two ads running simultaneously for each keyword group you are running.
By default when you set up a campaign Google sets your campaign to show the ad with the highest click through rate by default which means you will never now how one ad compares with another.
In order to have the two ads displaying evenly go to the Settings tab as shown below.
Settings tab in Google AdWords
Then under the Advanced settings label click on the Ad Delivery option and then instead of leaving the Optimise for clicks select the option to Rotate and then click the Save button.
Advanced settings for rotating ads in your campaigns
Leave the two ads running for at least 100 clicks and then review to see which ad generates more clicks for you.
Once you have determined which ad is the winning ad, delete the loser and then create another ad that is similar to the winning ad from the previous test, then repeat the test cycle again. This should be done throughout the lifeline of your campaign management.
Without this you will never be able to gain the click through rates that you so desire. Onwards and upwards! Good luck and happy testing!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Hotel website best practices
Good ideas for creating a pleasant website experience for your customers.
As time goes on and people get accustomed to interaction through social networking sites our expectations of what websites should offer visitors are changing. I like to think of this as a free spirited approach to offering information about your hotel and its unique offerings.
When I design a website I start off by thinking about what my main objectives are and focus on accomplishing these. For some hotels, there are multiple objectives but try to narrow them down to a select few. Keep your objective at the forefront of your mind when you design or modify your home page.
Here is an approach that I like to use – list your objectives, your primary ones down to your secondary goals. For example, your primary goal could be to generate more bookings. A secondary could be to get more people signed up to special offers, or your Facebook account or just to your newsletter. Whatever they are list them on a piece of paper, and then print out your home page and circle what objectives you have met. Do the comparison and then have a shot at placing a new image on a piece of paper of what should be on your home page.
Some owners treat their home page as a sales tool, while others look to get people moving along through the journey to making a online booking. Think of ways to engage them, think about your objectives again and look to position your unique sales proposition and then make sure you have these on your home page. Make visiting your hotel a unique and easy experience from the very beginning (ie from your website).
The newest trends are videos or seamless photos of your hotel to create a virtual tour. This creates an interaction with customers as they can look through your entire hotel without needing to be there in person. Whatever you do, think about the visitors experience and make sure you attempt to connect and engage with them!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Target niche marketing for hotels
How hotels can target new clients for more business using the Internet.
Here are some tips I use to help hotels gain more customers, leads and sales using niche based sales & marketing:
- Analyse data from your website and look to see what keywords customers are using that find you in searches.
- Take these keywords and arrange them into small groups that are similar in nature.
- Take these keyword groups and think up a domain name that has these keywords in them.
- Purchase this domain name (or a variation of it if this domain name is unavailable). Buy the co.nz or the .co where possible.
- Set up website hosting for this domain name and then place on it content that is rich in keywords on this subject matter.
- Include testimonials from clients where possible to aid credibility, your key features and their benefits, and some photos and videos where possible to enhance the visual appearance and to help connect with the end user.
- Make sure your website page has great search engine practices included in it. Seek out an expert that can help or guide you.
- Look to advertise this subject in Google AdWords as another means to bring in targeted traffic, again bring in the experts to help you with this. Make sure you have set your goals up correctly.
- Set up Analytics so that you can track your return on investment. Best to set up conversions as well (so that you can track how many leads you are generating).
I hope this helps you!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
A plan for hotel social networking
Blogs, Twitter, Facebook – how to make the most of these if you are a hotel.
There is so much to be learned from the past year in regards to the whole social networking area. While some hotels have really engaged these areas, others have not taken this area of business to the levels possible either though lack of understanding what these tools can offer a hotel, or due to lack of management interest in this area.
I guess some hotels are relying on the old methods to bring in business, ie supply chains, email marketing, website marketing and other third party sources.
To me reliance on these services is costly and highly competitive. I now see these new mediums as a way to really grow your brand and increase your communication channels. What was once communicated on a monthly basis or through the mail can now be sent to thousands of people instantly, which is an amazing advantage if others in the market haven’t taken these social areas seriously as yet.
Even better, consider giving the advantage to these groups of followers by offering them the newest specials, the best rooms, the upgrades, the real deals… make this area your focus. Forget your website and email marketing for a month or two and concentrate on telling your staff that all communication of promotions and special offers must now only be on Facebook, Twitter or your blog and then watch this space erupt.
Not only will you begin to gain a huge social connection following but your marketing costs of using PPC and email marketing can be reduced as well. It might take a while to make this area respond for you, but take steps today and start building your following for tomorrow.
Good luck.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
More hotel bookings
Why not live chat?
Did you know that if you include a instant chat or a connection to a real people on your website that your levels of sales may increase by up to 30%.
The research has been done and hotels are now starting to embrace the need to connect with customers while they are surfing online.
With social networking on the increase people are becoming more interested in interacting with the hotelier before making that final decision to spend their hard earned money. People have questions and it can be the difference between making a sale or not.
If I was a hotelier I would take a reservation staff member and connect them to a ‘live person’ function on the website just to test the waters… hey, what’s the worst that can happen? At least you will know if this works for you or not. My tool of choice would be Boldchat or Live Person.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Online marketing for car rental companies
Discover a marketing plan that grew a rental car business by 1800%.
The Internet is full of companies advertising themselves in search engines as the company to use when looking to rent a vehicle. Yes, it’s a crowded space, and many have gone down the slippery slope of competing for business by cutting their rental costs per day (especially within the car area) where the larger companies have thousands tied up in stock and must look to discounting just to empty the yard! It’s a competitive area and one that must be managed carefully if you want to make a splash. But there is hope, we have managed to find thousands of leads for our clients using our creative marketing models.
Here’s how…
I have been working with rental companies for around five years now and over this time we have tried many ways to find opportunities to grow businesses. We started off like most do, with a search engine strategy to ensure we had all of the ingredients in place for search engines so that they could be found by Google, Yahoo and MSN (now known as Bing).
The method in the early days was to optimise their website and display all products and offers, ensuring they had all their offers and specials at the time nicely placed on the home page. This method worked for a while but we ran out of home page space with these traditions and the sites just become a clutter both to manage and to surf around.
I can only imagine what site visitors thought at the time – we were just overloading them with offers for specials and deals for vans, cargo trucks, cars, people movers, minibuses etc, and it was not working to the levels we were happy with. We then thought we just needed more visitors to the site, so we started an advertising program using Google’s platform. We soon found out that having more people visit wasn’t the solution, the problem in fact was due to the confusion and clutter we had on the home page – people just could not see the woods for the trees!
The question now was, how can we increase our leads and sales without having a home page include all the information needed for each customer type? What we did then was create a new creative marketing model to direct these customers to sites that closely matched their requirements. We did this by using the models below all bundled up into a web strategy:
- Landing pages
- Sales pages
- Advertising with Google, Yahoo and Bing
- Search engine optimisation
- Website Optimiser
- Live support/chat
- Facebook profile & brand advertising
- Automated customer signup process.
Line chart showing growth for one of our clients.
The results not only spoke for themselves, they were almost too good to be true. This marketing method worked and we were able to track the progress of this business and over the course of four years build up the sales from the Internet.
If you would like to know how you can grow your rental company to the levels seen above please contact me using the details below.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
