Category Archives: Website Optimisation
How To Increase Your Web Leads By Going Against Best Practices..!
In this article I wanted to share some interesting experiments we ran for a client of ours last year which, in return, brought about an amazing return on investment.
My client, who already had a website in place, was unhappy with the number of leads that were coming from his website. He had good positioning in place already and people were being referred by other social networking sites, but the number of sales were just really disappointing! Armed with this knowledge, my objective was to look at barriers that may be getting in the way of leads being generated from his site.
“The First Test Resulted In….112% More Leads!”
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
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 to get more from your pay per click (PPC)!
Want a way to generate more from your pay per click spend?
Lets run through this scenario together
- You have set up a highly targeted campaign in Adwords (so that your website is listed in the search results for phrases that match your business services.
- You get clicks to your landing page or home page (generally a specific landing page) in your very competitive market place – well done all is going well
- The visitor then views your web page & takes no action, non what so ever (no lead generation or sale?)
- Visitor leaves the site – no sale and money and opportunity gone!
- Your none the wiser either! Frustrating isnt it?
OK, you have done your job, you have generated the interest, you have sent the visitor to the page, but no action is made (ie, no sale or contact made from that visitor) now what?
If the PPC is working correctly does this mean the website is broken or needs to be refined to encourage sales and leads from its PPC visitors. Chances are Yes!, Well not broken but needs work to create sales.
I believe that any site can gain sales, the secret ingredient however is having the entire “sales funnel” correctly aligned around “traffic-interest-activity-analysis” if any of these are failing or not in your sales funnel equation then you advertising is not working it’s potential!
Food for thought isn’t it? If you would like to know how we can help your website generate more from your PPC give me a call some time.
Dave Lemmon
Marketing Director/Owner
021 425692
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
Improve Your Website And Sell More
Did you know that you can increase your website’s ability to sell significantly by looking at implementing small changes to pages within it.
See how we helped Museum Hotel increase their bookings 20% month on month and improve their level of conversions by 100% on their website by improving the functionality, usability and engagement levels. We tell you how in our PDF attached.
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
Quick steps to SEO greatness
I was working with a client of mine on a project and he happened to mention that his wife was working on a website project to help families become more interested in playing golf.
His wife had being working with an website agency to promote this service and the site has just gone live. He wanted to get this site promoted in search engines such as Google. He sent me the link and asked for my help.
I asked if he would be able to give me some search phrases that his wife would like the site to be found for. He come back the next day and give me five lines of phrases. Out of these five lines the words he gave were very generic and in most cases they were just one word. I then asked him to resend me a list of search phrases that were more specific to what the site was promoting. The next thing I know a page document was sent to me with the note; ‘please take the content for phrases from this document’.
Ok, I reviewed the document and was able to determine some key phrases to focus on and then went about briefing my friend on some ways to help the site get found.
Here were my tips:
- Come up with a load of keyword rich search terms you want to be found for.
- Add these to your home page content and then start building paragraphs of text around these, making sure the content and paragraphs stay within a structure that is still well written.
- Make a headline on the home page that indicates in one good headline what this site will provide to the end users…make the headline all about what’s in it for them and if possible include some keywords that will also help your rankings.
Then I asked him to check his <title tag>, this is an area that the spiders of search engines see and report on but not normally noticed by the average user that views a website page. His title should include these same keywords separated by commas to make it more readable for the search engine spiders.
The next tag to review was the <meta-description>. This is important for rankings and clicks in search engines because this is what people see in the search results when your site comes up. In this area it is a good idea to have a call to action and to summarise what the visitor will find on your site.
Armed with these quick tips you will be on your way to SEO greatness! Good luck!
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
Benefits of website analytics
I often come across clients who have been given the website stats from their current web hosting company, but don’t know how to make any sense of that information. There is an amazing amount of information contained within website analysis tools that can give you insight into a few things that you might find of real value.
Here are some things that you will be able to find out once you have some simple know-how into interpreting the information at hand.
You will be able to see what areas of your website have the most interest to your visitors. This may indicate to you what people are most interested in and then you may be able to capitalise on this information by making this page more informative, more engaging and more sales orientated. For example if you sell a number of items on your website and find that 60% of your visitors go to a particular item on your site, this can indicate that this product is of real interest to most and you can work with your website designers or website marketing company to help you make the most of these visitors.
You can view what keyword search phrases people have used to find your web site. This is helpful if you want to know what people are typing in before coming to you. This can help determine what your website is not getting found for as well. For example if you sell a product or service but find very little of your visitors are finding your site using this search phrase, then it would be useful to discuss with your website search engine marketing team ways you can improve the position of your website within the major search engines to get more of the visitors you want.
You can also check out where most of your customers are leaving your site. You might ask why this matters? The reason this is very useful is it allows you think about why people might be leaving on a particular page more so than others you have. For example say you have a hotel and your rates page is the page where most people leave your site. This may indicate your rates are too high or there is another issue with this page.
Use a marketing team that specialises in the analysis of web traffic so that you can gain maximum value from it. Armed with this information you can make informed changes to your website to make it work better for your business.
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
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
How to grow your business using the Internet
Growing your business using the Internet.
One way to a grow your business is to start looking at ways to generate more visibility using the Internet. Here is a good step-by-step method to ensure your site is well optimised so that when people type in phrases that are closely related to your services or products, your site appears in the top 10 (with a bit of luck)! While some search phrases are near impossible to be listed for due to their competitive nature, look for niches that you can be found for and don’t give up.
For example if you are a hotel in Auckland, instead of looking to target the phrase ‘hotel in Auckland’, think about a closer term that may only be available in your hotel. Eg ‘Hotel in Auckland with Pool’ or ‘Auckland Hotel with Sky TV’, really think about these as a collective whole. Instead of wasting hours on the larger more competitive terms, be found for many that have lower competitors in that search space.
The importance of having your site optimised can mean the difference between surviving or not in lean times of economic gloom.
Here are my top five ways to get your site optimised today:
- Make sure your website has good content (remember – ‘content is king’). Ensure your content includes keywords in it that you would like to be found for.
- Make sure you link these keywords to other pages within your site that have relevance to the keyword. Looking back to the example above again, if you have a pool, state somewhere on your home page that you are a hotel in Auckland that has a pool and then link to a page on your site that has more information about the pool.
- Make sure the main headline on your home page tells people what you have to offer. In place of the normal ‘Welcome to…’, replace this with your unique sales proposition. This will help you get found in Google as all headlines are generally spidered well when Google searches. This will make it more likely that your site will appear in search results for these phrases.
- Make sure your page names are related to the phrases that you would like to be found for. So instead of About-Us.html make sure the names are more in-line with the content, eg ‘About-{your name} .html’.
- Make sure the content on each page is at least 200 characters long. Anything less and the likelihood of your site appearing within search engine results diminishes.
Having your site optimised regardless of the competitive nature of your business is a great practice anyway and you never know…you might just get lucky and be number one for the most popular search phrase in your industry!
Good luck and keep optimising!
Cheers
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
SEO for hotels
How to grow your hotel sales!
While the industry as a whole is a very competitive market there are some that stand out as innovative, creative, adaptable and brand focused. It may seem easy for some hotels that are smaller in size, but there are options for larger hotels to have these traits as well so that they can discover a long-tail of opportunities in the market place.
Over the past ten years I have worked with a number of hotels that were generating more room sales, selling more luxury based packages and exceeding the growth models that others were experiencing.
What I found was that all of these outstanding hotels were embracing the Internet and looking for opportunities and niches for themselves in this market space. One thing that particularly stood out for me was that these hotels were managed by people who wanted more sales from their own website, instead of leaving sales to a third party (all of which charged a very high commission model for each booking generated).
The ones that were growing were really utilising the Internet to drive customers to their own site, while others were just happy to take what they could get from their third party suppliers. Most of these hotels were not interested in rocking the boat with their supply chain – to them it was just easier to use this method of third party booking engines. My thought is that leaving it to a third party to bring in bookings is just crazy, but what can you say or do to change their minds? Obtaining more bookings from their own website to most owners or managers is in the ‘too hard basket’.
So, as I said above, the hotels growing in leaps and bounds had common traits and goals – they wanted more bookings from their own website, and at low or no commission rate.
Here is what I discovered most the successful hotels had in common between 2000 – 2009:
- They invested money into ensuring their website could be found in all major search engines.
- They used the Internet as a advertising platform to bring in more business.
- They had websites that made the process of booking online easy.
- They used an award winning booking system that was designed to blend directly into their website.
- They had invested in email marketing to send updates and special offers to all customers that had been to the hotel before.
Last year we saw a introduction of social media options like Twitter & Facebook and now many of the same hotels that succeeded back in the early 2000’s have rolled up their sleeves again with the intent to get value from these new models of interaction.
For me, social media interaction has an intangible return on investment. After all, it’s all about branding and keeping in touch with others through a medium that people use on a day-to-day basis. The value is blurred at best but the model is available and should be utilised to its fullest if you want to expand your brand awareness.
So lets look at the model from the early 2000′s again, now ask your self as a Hotelier, ‘what do I need to do to keep my business in growth mode though the economic times that we are in?’.
Here is my hit list for growing your hotel for 2011 (taking elements of the 2000 list as well):
- Invest money into ensuring your website can be found in all major search engines (use a specialised resource to ensure you keep in step with the latest tips).
- Use the Internet as a advertising platform to bring in more business – advertise not only in Google, but think Yahoo and Bing as well.
- Get your website into a new 2011 look and feel, look to engage users at the highest level. Make the site easy to navigate and keep the main focus and objectives in the website at all times (keep the booking engine in the design) so that people can book with ease.
- Use an award winning booking system that is designed to blend directly into your website.
- Make sure you utilise a company that specialises in web based booking systems as their major offering.
- Invested in email marketing to send updates and special offers to all customers
- Use the social media to brand and create more awareness of your product offers, use facebook as a medium to advertise offers to all followers.
- Use mini-websites to get in front of direct traffic and advertise these in all of your marketing materials, email signatures and printed business documents.
- Track all activity and report on your investments so that you can visually see if the return on investment is at a high level.
- Make sure your focus is on getting more visitors to your website(s) – the more bookings you get from your own site the more you will save – up to thousands on commissions that are charged by suppliers each and every year.
- Get in touch with a search marketing company that can help you reinvent yourself and your branded hotel with a sound strategy for more growth.
The way forward is simple: embrace the technologies available on the Internet; source experts that can offer you skills that your hotel does not have in-house; and focus on gaining more sales from your own front window.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Writing content for search engine optimisation
Here are some tips for SEO content.
When it comes to writing for search engine optimisation for websites, what helps me is that I always think about what people might type in Google and other search engines before I start forming structured content on the site. I often look up what people have typed in using the tools available in Google and I also look at websites that are currently in place for search phrases and review the content on their pages.
Once I decide the phrases that I want to be found for, I mix those words with the content supplied by my copywriters or given to me by the customer who owns the site. Here are a few other tips:
- Try using bold content to emphasis the search phrases
- Use italics to emphasise words or phrases
- Add blocks of content with links to other pages within your site to create some links for search engine to follow.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Home page mistakes
Some tips to help you avoid pitfalls on your home page
- Don’t try to achieve too many objectives on your home page
- Make sure you start up a conversation with the visitor
- Don’t depend so much on multimedia to convey your message to the visitor
- Don’t turn that home page into a landing page. Your home page after all is there as a doorway into your house – use it to welcome people in and then tell them where they can find items within your home. The intent of the home page… is to get through to your other pages and not necessarily to sell them right there right now
- Don’t assume that best practices will work for your website. Look to test versions to see which home page brings in more value. If your website has enough traffic look to using the tools available to track where people are clicking and then determine what other items either might be of use or can be removed from the page.
- Last but not least… keep testing!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Remember to make your website easy to use!
Usability is key to grow, grow, grow!
Don’t make your website difficult for users to read, review and find out more about your amazing business.
Learn to think about your website in regards to making sure it’s as painless as possible for customers to contact you or buy from your website without them having to guess their way through the sales process.
Consider having a usability study of your website completed by outsourced users. If you can stand behind users while they visit your site and watch how they navigate around even better. There are automated tools that help you in analysing usability issues. Use these and watch your sales go up! Contact us today so that we can help you increase in sales!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
