Category Archives: Website Sales
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
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
How do I start marketing my business?
I often hear from clients who want a price or a quote for a pay per click campaign (Google Adwords)…they have read somewhere that if they advertise in Google they will generate more sales from their website!
Hi Dave they say… “I want to start advertising in search engines so that we can make more money using pay per click. How much do you charge for this? ”
While the simple answer to this is to give them a rough price and hope you are the lowest in the quote contest, our approach is to gain a meeting with the person interested in the quote so that we can discuss with them their goals, products and services in more detail.
What I discovered many years ago is that per per click alone will not make you rich, the only way to make it successful online is to combine a number of activities together to help you gain as many sales and customers via your web marketing. No, this isn’t a magic formula, its more about designing a strategy around making the goals for the client happen!
While it is true that you may increase your sales from some of the additional advertising you do online, the bottleneck for 90% of our clients is making that website sell for them. If your website doesn’t sell well then you are wasting your time and money.
It puzzles me that people still do not understand that the most important element of the marketing is on their website! PPC and new visitors will only take you so far… in regards to making and generating more business and sales. If your web site is converting only 1% of all visitors no matter how many come looking you will still only covert that same percentage. The objective is to help you design a website that increases this most important element – your “website”. Improving your website alone, can really increase your sales and return on investment sometimes (if you have enough traffic already) without any need for huge spends in PPC traffic.
Eh…but how do I improve my website…? What analytical data do I track, how can I track what people are doing on my website, where can I get visitors from, how can I track my online videos, how can I get my website found on search engines, where are visitors viewing, what are they typing in to find my site, and what they are thinking while they are surfing around my site…What do I have on the home site that is stopping clients from contacting me? How do I know if it is working well for people at all? All of this tracking, reviewing and analysis is what all marketing companies should offer, but little if any (apart from us) do this.
Here is my top 4 suggestions to help your business grow online!
- Use a marketing company to help you improve your website.
- Use a marketing company to help you analyse your web traffic.
- Use a marketing company to create a search engine optimisation strategy for you.
- Use a marketing company to create a pay per click strategy for you.
Don’t get lost in the crowd – grow your business with expertise behind you
Tell next time…
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
More website sales tips
Credibility
Credibility is key so make sure you site conveys messages of confidence; ensure that you have testimonials from customers on your site so that you can give the people visiting your website confidence in your company’s ability to perform to their expectations.
If you don’t have any testimonials, please don’t make them up! That would be just kidding yourself and lying to your customers. Go ahead and ask your current customers for testimonials, if your products and services are really that great, your customers will be more than happy to send you some nice testimonials.
One approach I have used in the past is to send my customers an email asking them for a testimonial and giving them some lead questions like: how did you find our service? would you recommend our services to others? what benefits have you gained so far from working with us? how long have you used us? etc.
These lead questions make the testimonial easier for the customer to just fill in the gaps and send it back to you.
Everyone is busy out there, working harder than ever before in business so making this as painless as possible will give you the biggest chance of getting a response.
Once you have this information, assemble the testimonials into categories if relevant and then place them on your website. Get them on the home page so that new visitors see this information straight away!
The perfect testimonials have photos of the customer, the customer’s website if relevant, as well as a contact number. If you do place this information about the customer on your website, please ensure you seek their permission first.
What’s in it for me?
When a visitor first arrives at your website they are looking for indicators that you have what they are looking for. To ensure they can see these indicators it is really important that you make it very clear what you are selling or offering.
A lot of websites have “Welcome to” and while this is very polite, it does nothing to ensure that the client sees what you have to offer instantly. What I recommend website owners to do is to remove the “Welcome to” and replace that with a main heading.
Say for example you are offering “Walking Tours in Auckland” I would advise my customer to ensure that was the main heading and it was clear and visible to all that entered your site.
At the end of the day you have to “Scratch the itch” of visitors that come to your site, by having your main offering in big bold headings it ensures they see “What’s in it for them” straight off the bat.
Your photo is worth having a look at
Having your photo on the website works well to really personalise the website experience. It helps reinforce to visitors that there is a real person behind this website and it also indicates that you are happy to stand behind your offerings.
I also believe it helps the sale process because at the end of the day people buy from other people, not from websites!
If you can bring your photo and personal approach into the site it will bring in more sales.
People like to see who they are buying the product from.
Your location does matter
Make sure people know where you are located, if you are selling products and services, people want to know that you do actually exist, you are contactable by phone, email or even by fax. At the end of the day, people want to be able to see that you are a real company with a real person behind it. These factors go a long way to reassuring visitors your products and services are in fact real!
Bring people to your site but only when it’s ready to sell for you.
You should be marketing your website to customers as much as possible. Get in touch with a marketing company that knows how to market your brand and site effectively.
Look for a creative marketing company (like us!) that will help you not just in your marketing of your site in Google but can also help you with your website.
There are many ways to market your site but Google AdWords in my opinion is the best method to instantly have customers banging at your door; but as I said above, make sure your website is ready and armed with tools to aid your sales numbers.
There is little point in having a marketing plan with Google AdWords if your website has major selling flaws. Get your marketing company to guide you through making your website sell more. If you have a marketing company now and they don’t offer you assistance with this, then go out and find a new one!
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
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
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
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
Hotel target marketing
How hotels can target the perfect client.
One way to attract more clients and increase sales opportunities is to target visitors with specific needs. For example if you offer conferences, meeting rooms, wedding packages, and/or gift vouchers think about designing some pages that are solely focused on detailing these features and benefits.
Consider designing brand new sites that focus on a particular offering and then look to target a segment of visitors that meet a criteria. Here are a couple of ways to broaden your appeal to a particular market:
- Create landing pages geared around one single product. Keep it simple, clear and make it easy for people to take action by contacting you for further information or for a booking.
- Create a page on your site that talks about nothing else but your offers. Provide some evidence of your brand, reputation, experiences and knowledge to add credibility.
Using a single product landing page can do your brand and sales a wealth of good. If these landing pages are designed to their fullest potential you can really boost up your rankings in all search engines as well.
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
Booking engine for hotels
Five tips for making your booking engine work better for you.
Over the years I have come across many hotel sites that make it harder then necessary to allow visitors to make a booking on their website.
Here are a few tips to help you make sure visitors can make a booking with ease:
- Place the booking engine directly on your home page.
- Ask your booking engine supplier to provide you with a booking engine that looks and feels like your own website, and that can integrate straight into your current design.
- Make sure the booking engine or a link to it is on every page on your website.
- On your ‘contact us’ page – also include another link to your booking engine.
- On your ‘rooms’ page – have a link under each room type so that visitors can go directly to your booking engine.
These simple recommendations can go a long way to ensuring your visitor can make a booking with you without them having to look… look… look…
Good Luck.
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
Google Adwords
You can use Google AdWords to really grow your business. With a tailor-made account and with some highly skilled management your products and services can quickly be flying off the wall. This ability to get in front of people looking for your services locally and world-wide is just amazing. Having seen the growth myself in our customers, the value and growth can be phenomenal, but owner beware! It can be an expensive area to advertise in if you have the account set up on ‘show to all and spend it all Charlie!’
Here are some tips I have used over the years to help ensure you minimise the expense:
- Keep the keywords to a small number
- Make sure you keep the ads focused on a specific offering
- Keep a watchful eye on your daily budget
- Keep track on the number of conversions you are getting in return
- Last but not least make sure you only advertise to people who are looking for your precise product or service. For example if you sell red apples, be sure you are only targeting people that are after red apples…green apple lovers not wanted!
For more help and advice please contact me on the form next to this blog! Keep advertising!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Google Adwords marketing
Many business owners go ahead and build their own AdWord accounts only to find that they end up burning a hole in their wallet! What may seem easy to begin with soon becomes an impossible challenge, unsure what to do next most people continue to just burn money without really understanding if their account is working for them or not. There is a common misconception that you can add some keywords to your account, come up with an ad for your account and walk away. Here are some golden rules to follow when setting these accounts up.
- Use a professional, seek someone that spends their entire life in this space, it’s a highly skilled area
- Seek expert advise on how to manage this account
- Ask a vendor to manage this, the time and energy you save on having an expert look after this for you will benefit two-fold. It will generate more sales, with less cost per sale and you can guarantee that Google does not take your hard earned cash with ease
- If you can not afford a manager, at least ask an AdWord manager to help you set it up professionally for you.
If you need to discuss your account with me please drop me note anytime….
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Does your website make it easy for people to contact you?
A golden rule for your website.
There is nothing more annoying on a website than having to search it to find the contact details.
The Number One Rule is this: Have your contact details clearly presented at the top of each page.
It’s so important to make it as easy as possible for visitors and potential customers to contact you.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
