I recently required the services of an out-of-hours GP (yes, I know, silly me) only to be put through to the new NHS 111 service. My answers to the operator’s questions were duly guided through a computerised diagnostic tool and a paramedic dispatched to treat the cardiac arrest I wasn’t having. I don’t even want to contemplate what this cost the NHS but I’m guessing the difference between a paramedic being sent out to a rural area versus the patient ably making their way to a surgery to see an out-of-hours GP is quite extensive. (more…)

We use WordPress to build our websites. We use it because we think it’s the best web content management system out there. (more…)

This video shows that the “lone nut” who starts a trend is important, but if the trend is to get going it takes a few brave souls to join in. These first brave souls are known as first followers. They’re vital if a trend is to become important because they give it credibility and show “the masses” that it’s OK to join in.

If you were one of the first people to sign up to Twitter or use Pinterest to market your business, you can give yourself a pat on the back. You were a first follower. You helped to make them the business tools they are today. You were also one of the first to take advantage of what they could offer your business. But aside from spotting something that will help your business before anyone else catches on to it, where else can we apply the first follower principle in an online context? And how does it help?Let’s take one example. In an environment such as LinkedIn you can be one of the first to answer people’s questions in forums, fill out surveys or offer an opinion. This raises your profile by showing people you’re an industry commentator and a “go to” expert. It also shows the person you’re answering that you’re supportive and interested in what they have to say – and we all love to think that! And you’ll often find that other people who join in after you will often refer back to your comment, raising your profile still further and giving you more credibility.

We might not all be switched on enough to spot the new Twitter or Pinterest. But we can all show our support for smaller things in smaller ways. And doing that can be just as important and give your business results that are just as important.

If you want to get the real story on the behaviour of your customers, readers, etc., don’t rely on self-reported data. While such data can be fine for simple facts, like, “Did you eat breakfast today?” it will rarely answer questions like, “Why do you prefer Grey Goose vodka?” (more…)

I’m not a big watcher of YouTube videos but there are some themes that just captivate me. Well these videos do just that (much to my wife’s annoyance).

“Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae or rather the numerous covers found on YouTube, which propelled the original’s success, demonstrate the explosive effect of social media and the awsome creative tools many of us have available – From the geeky Star Wars to my favourite by from the Cookie Monster (above) or even a poorly shot but funny effort from a Harvard Baseball team.

What does all this mean? It just shows how people are driven to do some great (or just plain funny) things when they want to be part of something greater than themselves

Seth writes

‘Smart marketers in this circle acknowledge that their product or service isn’t for everyone, but bend over backwards to be sure that some people will be able to fall in love with it.’

This resonds with me but it’s not easy. He goes on to say.

‘When the thing you sell has communication built in, when it is remarkable and worth talking about, when it changes the game–marketing seems a lot easier. Of course, that’s because you did the marketing when you invented the thing, saving you the expense and trouble of yelling about it.’

If you can do this you have something special.

Here at Rather Inventive we build our websites using a tool called WordPress. It offers lots of benefits, but perhaps the most important of them is how easy it is to use. In terms of adding, moving and removing content, just half an hour of training will get you going. It means that once we’ve built your website, you can really take ownership of it and develop it over time. It also means you don’t need to pay anyone to maintain it because you can look after it yourself.

(more…)

Seth Godin on Reconsidering decisions

“Jay Levinson used to say that you should keep your ad campaign even after your best customers, your wife and your partner get bored with it. Change it when the accountant says it’s time.”

 

Clients often tell me how they don’t like the design anymore, or it’s time for a change. Sometimes it’s better to just wait and move onto more important things.

In my last post, we looked at how to create a sitemap for your website. Now we’re going to review some of the ways to make the content of the site customer-focused and useful. (more…)

When thinking about your sitemap, there are two things you  need to bear in mind. What do your customers need? and then what do search engines need? Answer both questions with your sitemap and you’ve made a good start on a great site. (more…)

Most people turn to a web designer when they need a new  website because they know that making a good first impression is vital. But people  use the content to decide whether or not to buy, so it’s vital that it’s as  professional as the design.

If you’re thinking about writing your website content  yourself, here are five reasons why you should consider hiring a web copywriter  instead.

1. A web copywriter will save you time. If you’re  busy or you simply don’t like writing, you’ll never find the time to write and  your website will never be finished. Brief a web copywriter and they’ll do the  hard work for you.
2. A web copywriter will save you money. If you’re  writing content, you’re not doing business and you’re not making money. Give  the job to a copywriter. Then they can do their job – and you can do yours.
3. A web copywriter will have a fresh perspective.  You know your business inside out. Is there a risk you’ll use jargon or  structure the website in a way that only an insider will understand? The  chances are your customers aren’t experts in your business. A web copywriter  will make sure that your business is understandable to everyone, not just those  in-the-know.
4. A web copywriter is an expert in writing for the  web. Writing for the web is different to writing for print. A web copywriter  knows how to make copy work on screen. (See Top Tips  for Web Copywriting for a few hints).
5. A web copywriter understands search engine  optimisation. Your content might be fantastic. But unless it’s been optimised,  there’s a risk no one will ever see it. A web copywriter understands how search  engines work and how to maximise the chances of your website being found. (See Choosing  Keywords for SEO for an introduction to this area.)

So there you go, five reasons to use a web copywriter. I  hope they’ve convinced you to consider one for your website project.

 

While parking in Chepstow for our team meet-up I was short 30p for the pay and display. I bounded over to the Tourist Information office in the hope they might break a note for me – The kind woman that greeted me was unable to change my note but instead gave me the 30p I needed. Thank you, who ever you were.

To further brighten my day the cafe we had decided to meet in had the best breakfast sandwich I have ever seen. See the picture below, it was the sour dough club if you’re interested. It really was amazing!

Just like every other marketing medium, a website has to earn its keep. The good news is that you can find out a lot more about what  people do when they encounter your website than when they come across your offline marketing messages.

How many people visit your website is just the start. You can also find out:

• What they look at
• How long they spend browsing it
• How many take action after browsing
• and more.

And armed with the knowledge about how people are interacting with your website you can tweak it and tweak it until it is getting the response you want.

When we make changes you can:

• See if there’s been an improvement in how many people visit or how long they spend on your site
• Decide if something’s worth doing again
• Know if the website is bringing in enough revenue by itself (a great position to be in) or if you need to continue a mix of activities (probably the most advisable course).

That’s all very well, I hear you say, but exactly how do you measure all this? The chances are that your website provider will have a  statistics package, but it may not offer all the information you need.

The solution is Google Analytics. It’s free, simple to install (just a matter of copying and pasting some code onto each page of your site) and provides a wealth of information. So if you’re not impressed with your stats package or you don’t have one, I’d always recommend Google Analytics as the tool to turn to.

Learn more with our Guide to Google Analytics.

Here are the last five suggestions for using internet marketing to promote your business on a budget. (You can read the first five here.) (more…)

The web offers a wealth of tools that can help you market your business on a shoestring. In this post and the next one, I’ll take a look at ten ways the internet can help promote your business. Spend 10% of your marketing time on each one and you can build your business on a budget. Here goes … (more…)

You may have heard of “features and benefits” when talking about marketing your business. Here´s a quick guide to what they are and how they help your business. (more…)

A guide to choosing the right search terms for your business

First things first. What are keywords? They are the words or phrases that someone looking for a business or service like yours will type into a search engine to find you. And if those words and phrases don’t feature in the content, their website won’t come up when someone types them into a search engine.

As a general rule, your keyword list shouldn’t be very long. (If you’ve got 150 words or phrases in your list, you’re either running a multinational business with hundreds of products or you’ve got too many words on the list). Around 10 to 12 words or phrases is plenty for the average site.

So how do you choose them?

 

Part one: brainstorming and choosing

Brainstorm all the words that come to mind when thinking of your business. Don’t worry at this stage how many you’ve got. Now look at each of them in turn and ask “if I was looking for a business like mine, would I type this into Google?”. There are three possible answers:

• yes
• no
• only if I combine it with one (or more) other words or phrases in the list.

Remove all the “nos” from the list and combine all the “only ifs”.

 

Part two: checking and exploring

The next step is to check your list.

Enter them into Google (or your search engine of choice) and see what comes up. If your competitors or websites similar to yours are coming up, you’ve probably got the right keywords. If they aren’t, you can remove them from the list.

Ask your customers what they would type into a search engine if they wanted to find a business like yours. If they match yours, that’s great. If they don’t, add them to the list.

Use Google’s keyword research tool. This will provide you with suggestions you may not have thought of. It will also give you an idea of how competitive your chosen keywords are so you can assess your chances of appearing high up in the rankings. And this is extremely important.

 

Part three: assessing the competition

The last and perhaps most important step in this process is to assess your chances of appearing high up in the results when people search for them.

Let’s take an example. If you sell cars, you might think your top keyword is “cars” and that you need to be on the first page of results when people search on “cars”. But realistically

• you won’t be
• you don’t want to be (honestly!).

You won’t be because you’ll be competing with every single website in the world that’s about cars. The chance of being in the first one hundred pages, let alone the first page or the number one spot are remote, to say the least. Optimise your site on the word “cars”, you’ll never be found by your potential customers. The result? A website that isn’t doing its job.

But why don’t you want to be? Because anyone searching for the word “cars” is unlikely to be looking for you. They’ll be looking for photographs, to find out how they work, to find out how many there are, etc etc. The one thing they aren’t doing is looking for you. So if you did manage to get onto the first page, you’d get lots of visitors, certainly. But how many would turn into customers?

Optimise your site on the type of car you sell (luxury cars, vintage cars, red cars) and where you are (Herefordshire, Norfolk ) instead and you’ll only be competing against other people who sell the type of cars you do where you do. So your chances of being at the top of the rankings are better. What’s more, if people type “vintage cars for sale Herefordshire” into a search engine, they’re definitely looking for you. The result? A website that’s doing its job.

Think of it like this. If you work in a shop, you don’t need every person in town visiting your shop, you just need every person who is looking to buy what you sell. Get your keywords right and you’ll attract those people.

Writing for websites is different to writing for paper-based  media, so if you’re new to it all, these pointers might help.

The first thing to remember is: reading on screen is hard!

It’s a lot harder than reading on the page. Think about the  way you surf the web – you probably skim-read, trying to get to the information you need as quickly as you can – it’s because it’s so much harder to read on screen that you’re doing that.

Remember that your readers are just the same as you. So it’s  important to do what you can to help them find the information they want – and make it appealing and easy for them to carry on exploring.

Keep things simple

There are some things you can do from a technical  perspective to make your web copy easy to read:

• keep sentences short
• keep paragraphs short
• use bulleted lists where you can
• use informative headings to break up the copy  and allow people to jump to the information they want
• better still, if a page is going on too long,  break the information up into separate pages so people aren’t intimidated by loads of scrolling text.

(Try this: go to the BBC News website. Pick a story and read  it through. Notice how easy to read and understand it is. Now print it out and  read it again. Suddenly, the sentences seem short – almost too short. That’s  the difference between reading on-screen and on the page.)

Write for your audience

Keep the reader in mind while you’re writing. Ask yourself  “what do readers want/need to know?” not “what do we want to tell them?” and remember that while you’re writing.

Try to write as if you’re talking to one person not making a  presentation to hundreds – this will help to keep you focussed on giving  readers what they need – and keep your style friendly and personal.

 

Keeping people engaged with your website is one thing. Getting them there in the first place is quite another. That’s where keywords come in, read our post on how to choose the right keywords for if you need help on this.

Every one of your customers has individual characteristics  that make them who they are. But those customers will often share certain  characteristics. Understanding what those common characteristics are will make your marketing more effective. And whether you’re marketing on a shoestring or not, that can only be a good thing.

How can understanding your customer make your marketing more effective?

Because you can:

• show that you understand their challenges and –  more importantly – how you can help them to meet them
• know they need what you’re offering – focusing your  marketing on the prospects you know will be interested means a better  conversion rate than if you focus on prospects that might be interested
• choose the medium that suits them best – if you’re  marketing to travelling sales people, local radio might be a good option; if  you’re dealing with marketing professional, email might be a better bet.

In short, you’re making your customers more likely to buy from you.

So how do you understand who your customers are?

You draw up customer profiles for five of your best  customers. Think about:

Who they are

• Name
  • Industry
  • Role
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Interests
  • Education
• What is important to them
  • What are their needs?
  • What keeps them awake?
  • What stops their company growing?
  • What wastes their time?

So for one of our customers you might end up with:

Sally runs her own  accounting practice which has grown quickly over the 2 last years. She is in  her early 30s has a young family and is a West Brom supporter. She has little  time to promote the company and is concerned the website looks outdated but is  worried she wouldn´t find time for any clients she did win.

From this we can understand that Sally is a busy person with  drive and ambition. Marketing to customers like her will need to reflect that  drive but also get straight to the point. Because she´s got so little time we  need to demonstrate that as professionals she can trust us to get on with the  job while she gets on with hers. We also need to remind her that an out-of-date  website reflects badly on a business she´s worked hard to build up so investing  now would protect her business – and even offer the capacity to take it to the  next level.

1. Know your audience/reader Create an email they will want to open and act on.

2. Interesting or challenging subject line A clear and honest subject line that tells the reader exactly what your email contains.

3. Personalise Often personalised content can increase open rates rather than a one size fits all approach.

4. Interesting and useful content Give the benefits to the reader, make it worth their time reading your email.

5. Ask for action Don´t leave them hanging ask the reader to take the next step, read more, or sign up.

6. Provide a quick and easy way to unsubscribe It shows you respect their data and it´s a legal requirement.

7. Recognisable From address If you can use a named email rather than a generic one this can increase open rates.

8. Run campaigns in plain text and HTML Many email programs only use plain text for their email preview. Effective use can improve open rates.

9. Be consistent Choose a frequency of sending that works for you and your readers, then stick to it to build familiarity.

10. Run experiments Don´t be afraid to test out different subject lines or content to find out what works best.