Marketing, Politics & Pro Wrestling or…
Make Me Care…

I apologize in advance for the soap box I’m about to get up on. But it’s my blog and I think it’s about time I injected a bit of myself into it.

Just a few days ago, I arrived home to find a wad of political paraphernalia stuffed into the crack of my front door. I had apparently missed a visit from one of the local candidates hot on his campaign trail and in his ever increasing wisdom, he had decided to leave me an “promotional packet” that would educate me on his campaign in the absence of a face to face meeting.

Now I know the above paragraph drips with cynicism but that’s just my naturally disparaging outlook on life. In fact, this is not the portion of this story that aggravates me. It didn’t bother me to find this material stuffed into my door jam. In fact, because my area has three brand new candidates campaigning, I had been eagerly awaiting any opportunity to find out what they can do for me.

Read that last sentence again carefully, because this is where the brochures and flyers fell a considerable distance short of the mark. This is also where this ties in to marketing. I wanted to know what the candidate could offer ME!

After only a few minutes of reading through the material, the inner marketing critic that lives inside of me awoke with a start. I couldn’t believe that somebody would have gone through the effort and expense of actually getting this drivel professionally printed. There had been no effort to find a professional copywriter to assist in putting together the packet. The text droned on and on about where this gentlemen went to school, the fact that he was a student athlete, his first business experience at six years of age, yadda, yadda, yadda… They even conveniently included a hurricane preparation check list just in case I didn’t know by now what I needed to have in the event of a hurricane in January.

Over and over again, I repeatedly found myself asking a single question…

WHO CARES??????

Seriously! Who cares about this garbage? Why wouldn’t they have immediately addressed our primary concerns? Tell me how you’re going to fix the crime problem. Heck, even if you don’t want to get into the details of how you’re going to do it, tell us that you will do it. This is where we hit the meat of the problem.

Everybody is focused on these three letter acronyms during the election campaigns. FNM, PLP, DNA. Well I’ve got a new three-letter acronym for you…MMC. It stands for Make Me Care.

This is not just applicable to politics. This is applicable to any marketing efforts. I’ve seen many Bahamian marketing campaigns fall flat on their face because more time and effort was spent focusing on the company or business instead of on the customer.

This is even more prominent on websites and blogs where the cost to include this sort of self-hype is reduced. Everything you write, everything you put out needs to be looked at from the point of view of the customer. Make everything you write, matter to the customer. Instead of saying, “We’ve been in business since 1996”, why not write, “With over 16 years of experience in this industry, you can depend on us to …”

Do you see the difference? You’re selling to the customer. You’re giving them the exact same message but in terms that matter to them.

Let’s be real for a moment. We’re all in business to make money. If there was no money, there’d be no business. Likewise, if there were no customers, there’d be no money or business. We need to make the customers care. Spend some time and thought developing your marketing materials. In fact, if your business is high profile enough, (let’s say politics for example?), then you should probably get a professional to help you craft your brand and your marketing materials.

I’ll say it again; we need to make the customer care. Look at professional wrestling. We all know it’s staged, we know that they’re pretty much lying to us and we know they’re in it for the money. But we still watch. We still tune in every week. Why? Because they made us care.

When it comes to designing a website in the Bahamas (or anywhere for that matter), there are three main ingredients to a successful website:

• An aesthetically pleasing layout
• Proper structure of information
• Traffic

These ingredients do not exist in a vacuum, they each depend on each other and work with each other to produce a successful website. Just like baking a cake, if one of these crucial ingredients is missing, then the cake is ruined.

However, this article is going to focus primarily on the first point.  That of having an aesthetically pleasing layout.

Don’t judge a book by its cover.

You may have heard the above phrase many times before.  However, when you visit a website for the first time, that’s exactly what you are doing.  The design and the appeal of a website is the very first thing you see and notice upon arriving.  The colors, the layout, the images and the logo, all play a crucial part in how a person perceives your business.

Read that last line again.  Your website is an online representation of your business.  The design and layout of your website will influence how a person perceives your business.  That perception is in directly proportional to the amount of trust they have for your business.  When it comes to your website, first time visitors are judging the book by its cover.

Another thing to keep in mind is that when surfing the web, a potential customer may have several windows or tabs open at the same time.  These other windows and tabs undoubtedly are your competitors websites.  If their sites are more aesthetically pleasing than yours, you can rest assured that your potential client will almost always opt to look through the competitors website first.

Today, anybody can design a website but not everybody can do it well.  A website designed by your 12 year old nephew will look exactly like it was designed by a 12 year old and will not win you any customers.  When looking at your website, look at your competitors or other similar websites and ask yourself “Is this a website that belongs to a business that I’d want to do business with?”

With that said, here are some design flaws to avoid when developing your website:

• Don’t use a Flash intro or other gateway page that requires the user to go through an additional step before arriving to your website.  If a user has to click an “Enter Here” button, you’re already losing the battle
• Make sure that your website’s width is not working against you.  At the time of this writing, most websites are being designed at a width of 960 pixels wide.  Anything smaller will leave too much empty space in the browser window of most users.  Anything bigger will require most users to scroll horizontally which would make your website wreak of amateur design.
• Don’t go overboard with the graphics.  Keep it simple.  You don’t need tons of fancy graphics.  Your main goal should be to go for a clean uncluttered design that helps your visitors get the information they want as fast as they can.  Avoid animated backgrounds, flaming text or anything else that you’ve decided to use simply because you think it may be “cool”.
• Make sure your navigation is simple to use.  Don’t over-use graphics in the navigation bar.  Make sure the navigation is self-explanatory and easy to use.
• Avoid using frames as much as possible.  Frames are a technology that web developers use to pull one web page into a predefined area on an existing web page.  I know it sounds a bit complicated so here’s an example that will clear it all up:http://242studios.com/framesExample.htmlIt’s a bit over the top but it serves our needs.   Sometimes web developers will put the navigation of the website in a frame and have the content load in another.  This is a terrible idea.  Frames do not behave well on mobile devices such as Blackberry’s and iPads.  Also, if a user tries to bookmark a page that uses frames, more often than not, they end up bookmarking just one of the frames.  It’ll be very confusing for a user who tries to revisit your website only to find out that they are coming to a page that only contains your navigation bar.
• Center your website in the page.  There is no reason for your website to be aligned to the left of the page.  If a user has a screen resolution higher than 1024 x 768, there is going to be extra white space on the page.  You want that white space to be evenly distributed on either side of your main layout.
• Use a simple readable font for the main text of your website.  9 times out of 10, I use Arial as the font for the body copy of the website.  Arial is very easy to read on a screen.
• Be mindful of color schemes that reduce readability.  Off-black text on a white/cream background is without a doubt the best color combination for your text.  Stray too far from that and you’re playing with fire.
• Make sure the main text on your website is actually text and NOT an image.  Graphic designers are not web designers.  Because of this, there are tons of graphic designers that still use non-industry standard software when developing a website.  Most of the time, this software generates websites that are merely images.  The easiest way to determine whether your text is an image is to try to select it.  If you can’t select the text, it’s an image and not text.  If all of your text is actually images, your website will take longer to load and it will not perform well in searches.

I could go on and on about design flaws but it’s up to you to use your common sense to avoid problems.  The best thing to do aside from hiring a great web developer (hint hint) is to look at the websites used by big name companies and see what they’re doing.  These guys have huge marketing budgets and they’ve spend a great deal of time and money determining what works.

Customers will normally do business with people they know, like and trust.  Your design is what will help them like and trust you.  Try your hardest to make your website convey a professional and trustable appearance.

So here’s a big topic that I’ve been asked about quite a bit recently: Search engine marketing.  Also known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  To be honest with you this is a topic that I’m somewhat hesitant to write about, simply because it’s such a deep and complicated topic.  However, it’s also a very necessary topic to discuss.  Here’s a typical scenario that illustrated the need for this article:

You’ve just spent a small fortune and several weeks getting your website developed.  You’ve launched your site and it’s now available to the public.  But the problem is, nobody’s going to your website.  You thought for sure that all you had to do is simply launch your site and the hungry buyers would come flooding into your site with fists full of dollars begging for your product or service.

The Problem:

Therein lies the problem.  Nobody can find you.  With tons of new websites launched each day, you are the proverbial needle in a hay-stack.  Just because you’ve launched a new website, does not mean that you are going to be found.

Now the typical business owner starts to do some research on how to show up on the first page of Google.  They get bombarded by companies that Guarantee that they can get you on the first page of Google.  They’re also presented with tons of misinformation on the art of SEO.  They receive terrible advice regarding little “tricks” they can use to get listed higher in the search engines.

Allow me to try and cut through all the crap and break everything down for you.  Please note that throughout the remainder of this article, I will be referring to SEO strictly as it pertains to Google.  For all intents and purposes, Google is the only search engine we care about, as it’s the industry leader.  Also, if you’re performing well in Google, chances are you’re performing just as well in the other search engines.

The Concepts:

There are two concepts you have to be familiar with before we continue this discussion:

Keywords:

Keywords are the words or phrase that you want people to type into Google to be able to find your website.  For example, the Keywords that I target are “Bahamas Web Design”.  Before you begin any SEO project, you have to determine what keywords you want to target to show up on Google.

The main thing you need to understand about keywords is that you want them to be laser-targeted.  The more targeted the keyword, the better.  For example, I’ve had real estate agents tell me that they want to show up when somebody does a search for “real estate”.  The problem with this is two-fold.  First of all, people searching for “real estate” are not necessarily searching for real estate in the Bahamas.  Secondly, the competition on that particular keyword is bound to be huge.  You’re going to end up wasting a great deal of time, money and effort trying to rank well for a term that may bring you visitors who are looking for Canadian real estate.  The better search term would be “Bahamas Real Estate”.

Google Bot (A.K.A. Website Crawlers):

The Google Bot is program known as a website crawler.  This website crawler scours the web and looks at the information on each webpage it visits and adds it to the Google index so that it can be added to the search results.  Google has a page on their website that explains it in detail (click here for the page).  But for our purposes, it’s enough to say that this bot will go to your website from time to time, look at your content and play part of the role in determining where your website should be ranked.

The Two Aspects of SEO:

Now that we’ve clarified some of the terms above, we can get into the meat and potatoes.  There are two aspects to SEO.  The first aspect is what is known as On-Page SEO and the second is Off-Page SEO.

On-Page SEO:

On-page SEO is stuff that you do to your website to make sure that Google likes it and the Google Bot has an easy time indexing your website.  On-page SEO consists of the structure of the website (including the way it was coded) as well as the content.  Any web-developer worth his/her salt will have developed your website with strong on-page SEO in mind.  Proper mark-up and the proper use of CSS is all a part of the web developer’s job.  However, you also have to keep SEO in mind when developing the content that you’re going to put on the website.  You have to use your main keywords in the site’s title and throughout the text on the website.  For example, my website is not going to show up when people search for “Bahamas Website Design” if those words don’t appear throughout the website.

Good on-page SEO is the foundation of getting ranked well on Google.  While Google does not look favorably upon other aspects of SEO, Google not only likes On-page SEO but also promotes it.  In fact, Google has released a free eBook that explains Google’s best practices for optimizing your website so that it’s easier for the Google bot to crawl, index and understand your website.  You can get it HERE.

Off-Page SEO:

And here we are at last.  Off-page SEO is all of the things you do off of your website that helps your website rank well in the search engines (such as having other websites link to you).  This is where most people get in trouble.  This is where most SEO goes horribly wrong.

Before we continue, there’s one major point that you have to understand.  Aside from on-page SEO tactics, Google does not reveal the factors that it uses to establish where a website is ranked.

Google does not want you to know the formula and processes that they use to determine website rankings.  The reason for this is very simple.  For Google to stay in business, they have to deliver relevant search engine results to their users.

If someone were to determine the secrets of manipulating the search results, then they could feasibly harm Google’s service by providing less than relevant results.  As I always say to my clients, Google doesn’t want people searching for Disneyland and ending up on the Playboy website.

As a result of Google’s need for secrecy in their ranking process, Google strongly frowns upon any attempt of webmasters to manipulate the search engine rankings via off-page factors.  Going overboard in your use of off-page factors for SEO can potentially harm your website rankings.  Google can at any time, ban your website from its rankings with no need to explain why.

This is why I’m so wary of so called SEO companies that guarantee their customers a page one ranking on Google.  Because Google has not revealed how to manipulate search engine results, any attempts to get onto page one of Google are simply guess work or the knowledge gained from trial and error.

I will not get into the off-page SEO factors in this article.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’ve done my fair share of experimenting with SEO.  In fact, I have managed to get a few of my testing websites to the top of Google’s results for several keywords.  But the results are spotty at best and can be catastrophic at its worst.  While I’ve had some websites skyrocket to the top of the Google listings, others have not.   And as if this isn’t enough, Google is constantly changing it’s algorithms and the way it ranks sites in an attempt to fight companies and individuals that are trying to manipulate the results.

In fact, Google just released what is known as the “Panda Update” in March of this year.  This update resulted in websites getting dropped from the rankings.  These were mostly sites that were using certain off-page SEO tactics.  The biggest site that got banned from Google was JC Penny’s website.  Google just recently removed the ban on the JC Penny’s website but that was only after massive media coverage and other efforts by JC Penny.

Now you have to think about this for a minute.  A multi-billion dollar corporation such as JC Penny’s with a major search engine marketing budget was blocked by Google.  If they couldn’t manipulate Google without getting caught, what chance do you have?  The message to take from this is that when it comes to SEO, Google always wins.

The Conclusion?

So in the end, when it comes to getting found by Google, it pays to follow Google’s best practices and advice as listed in their eBook (click here) and avoid shady SEO companies that are trying to outwit Google.

Now before I have you thinking that all is for naught, let me say that there are legitimate ways to use Google to get traffic to your website.  In fact, Google runs a program called AdWords (click here) that will allow you to advertise under the keywords of your choice and only pay when somebody clicks on the ad and goes to your website.  This article has already become longer than it should have, so I’ll have to do a separate article on the Google Adwords program,.  Suffice to say Google’s Adwords program is the ONLY GUARANTEED way to get exposure on the first page of Google.

You know, I’m always spouting off to anybody who’ll listen about the power of properly using email and internet marketing to improve your business.  Every once in a while, I’m actually treated to a real life example of a perfectly executed plan in action. Here’s the story:

This weekend I was out with my wife running errands.  After running around town for what seemed to be hours on end, we decided that it was time to find somewhere to have lunch.  As soon as I mention lunch, my wife whips out her new Blackberry and starts fiddling with it.  Being a bit surprised, I ask my wife what she’s doing.  Here’s her answer:

I’m looking for the email from Le Petite Gourmet so we can know what specials they have today.

This really blew my mind.  My wife is not what I would consider a computer geek in any sense of the term.  If my wife is using email to find out where we’re going for lunch, think about all of the untapped potential that other restaurants (and other businesses) are not utilizing.  Needless to say, we ended up going to Le Petite Gourmet for lunch.

Even More Food for Thought:

BTC now has an ongoing sale on Blackberry phones where users can purchase the phone and the data plan in which they can receive emails right on their phone no matter where they are.  Now imagine how many people are driving around running errands on the weekend.  How much more business do you think you could generate if you could reach your customers while they are already in their car and in a “buying” mindset.

Oh, wait, this just hit me.  What if you’re a nightclub or bar?  You can now reach your audience on a Friday evening when they’re deciding where to go.

The implications are endless.

I know I’ve posted about the tracking your website stats before but I think it is so critical to the success of your online marketing efforts that I’ve spent some time and shot a video about it.  The video shows all of the marvelous features available to you through the Google Analytics service.  As I’ve mentioned in the video, there is no reason for you not to use this service.  It’s absolutely free and can really show you how well your website is performing.  Anyways, let me stop writing and let you watch the video:

The majority of Bahamian based businesses are leaving an absolute gold mine untapped.  What is this gold mine that I speak of?  This gold mine is your current customers and individuals who have already visited your business or website.

Any small business owner knows that it is infinitely easier to sell to someone who has already purchased from you in the past than it is to obtain a new customer.  So what are you doing to stay in contact with past customers?

Think about this:  How much money do you think you spend on getting one individual to visit your business or website?  How much money do you spend on getting them to make a purchase?  You probably spend thousands of dollars each month on advertising to get new clients, so why not keep in touch with them.

The answer to this conundrum is email.  Email is the key to improving your communication with your customers and potential customers.  Email can help you dramatically increase sales, improve your ROI, and perhaps cut your advertising budget in half.

Imagine if you collected the email address of all of your customers and people who visit your website and your business each and every day.  Now you can send them:

• Information and updates on your latest services and goods
• Special Offers and Discounts
• Time sensitive coupons
• Information on products and services related to their recent purchases
• Holiday Business Hours
• And Much More…

But imagine not only that you are able to do this but that you don’t have to pay the newspapers the ridiculous fee to do so.  Another advantage to this is that unlike traditional advertising such as newspapers and flyers is that the people you are emailing are highly targeted prospects.  You know that they have an interest in your goods or service.  They are more likely to buy from you than most other people.

Understand, however, that there are right ways and wrong ways to go about doing this.  Most businesses shy away from this sort of marketing because they either have not thought about this or they don’t understand it.  Due to recent spam laws, you cannot just start emailing random email addresses that you have collected over time.  Your customers and potential customers have to give you permission to send them email.  This will ensure that your business retains a good reputation but also ensures that you are only marketing to people who are truly interested in your goods or services.

It is a bit too technical to get into here but needless to say that when setting up an email marketing system you want to ensure that you are following all spam laws and preferably using a double opt-in system.

Another key feature to using email is that you can automate the entire process.  Any email marketing system worth its salt will allow you to set up several follow up messages and have them emailed out to subscribers automatically over a predetermined space of time.

For example, if you sell cars, you can collect emails from individuals who have purchased cars from you and you can send them follow up messages after the purchase of the car that promote back-end sales and products.  Some sample messages could be:

• Improving Your Car’s Performance (selling them accessories and performance parts)
• Time for an Oil change (Automatically sent three months from the purchase date)
• The best tires for your vehicle (Selling them new tires for their vehicle)

The list goes on and on but the key idea here is that this system would send all of these emails out automatically at predetermined times.  If you have an annual sales event, you could also program this into the system to automatically send out notices and invitations beginning three weeks before the event.

I could rant about this for hours but the needs for each business would be different.  The main concept to take away from this is that you can capture contact information from your current influx of consumers and market to them anytime you’d like, automatically.  This can increase your bottom line, save you money, save you time and it utilizes an asset you already have, your customers!

In future articles I’ll be writing about how to properly utilize a mailing list and how to get customers to sign up.  For now, if you have any questions or if you’d like to share something, please leave us a comment below.

Flash is a KILLER

Adobe Flash is a technology that is popular for adding animation and interactivity to web pages.  It’s usually easy to spot a website that uses Flash by either a loading bar or some sort of fancy animation throughout the website.  Flash is hugely popular.  In fact up until a little under a year ago, I was using Flash to develop websites for my clients (e.g. http://lakesideplazabahamas.com), I had even won awards for my use of Flash in several interactive CD’s for the U.S. Army Corps.  But now I’m telling you to avoid Flash like the plague!

What happened?  In a word…Apple.  Steve Jobs the head honcho over at  Apple has decided to completely boycott Flash as a technology (you can read his letter by clicking here).  What this means in laymen terms is that Flash is not available on Apple’s mobile devices.  Any portion of your website that uses Flash is now completely inaccessible to website visitors using the iPhone, iPad, iTouch etc.  Try it yourself.  If you are using an iPhone or an iPad, try visiting the website above.  You’ll see nothing.  The entire website is unavailable to you because it was completely developed in Flash.  There are also mobile devices other than the Apple products which also don’t allow for the use of Flash.

With the speed at which mobile devices are rapidly replacing desktop computers, it’s in your best interest to avoid using Flash on your website.  But what if you have to use Flash?  Or what if your entire website already exists as a Flash developed website?  Not to worry.  We now have the possibility to show a different website to visitor depending on what device they are using.  Any web designer worth his/her salt can create a second version of your website that is developed specifically for mobile devices.  But perhaps you don’t have the time or money to develop a completely new website.  At the very minimum you should put together a basic page with your contact information.  This will avoid your visitors on the mobile devices from seeing a completely blank page.

If you need help developing a mobile friendly version of your website, please use the Contact Us page to send us an email.  Leave a comment below if you have any questions or comments

Okay, so maybe the title is a bit over dramatic but this is perhaps one of the most important things you can do for your website.  Towards the bottom of the article I’m going to show you how to get all of this for free.  Are you ready?  Here it is:

It is absolutely essential that you add some sort of tracking and statistics to your website to track the visitors and other data.

This is so important I’ll say it again.  You need to track your website data.  The most important benefit of web marketing over traditional marketing is the ability to measure your results and make changes accordingly.  How can you determine what improvements to make to your advertising if you aren’t tracking the results?  There are so many benefits to using tracking on your website that you would have to be crazy not to implement it.

You can even use your tracking and stats to monitor the results of traditional advertising method such as newspaper ads.  Imagine placing an ad in the Tribune with a call to action that asks people to visit your website.  If you have your tracking set up on your website, you can monitor the amount of people who visited your website the day that the ad was run and determine it’s success.  If your website received a surge of traffic then you may want to consider using this again.  If your website didn’t get a surge of traffic then you can now try other forms of advertising (perhaps Google Adwords or Facebook Ads).

The kicker to all of this is that perhaps one of the best tracking tools available today is absolutely free.  Google offers an absolutely free service called Analytics that you can use to monitor your website traffic and stats.  Just visit the website at http://google.com/analytics to sign up.  You’ll need to have a Gmail address to sign up (which is also free).  Once you’re signed up, Google gives you a code snippet to insert into your website.  Once your code has been added to the website, you’re done.  Just sit back, relax and watch as Google gives you insane amounts of data.  You’ll get information such as how many visitors you’ve had, what pages they’ve viewed, which websites they came from to get to your website, what words they used to search and find your website, what countries they’re from and tons more.

This is such an important ingredient in your web marketing effort.  Every website we launch at 242Studios.com is connected to this service.  If you don’t do this, it’ll all fall apart

So I’ve created a new website.  If you know me, you’re wondering why I created another website instead of just using my current site (http://242studios.com).  I want this website to be more about trying to help people than trying to sell them something.  My hope is that if I’ve helped you with a tip or trick here, you may decide to use my services in the future or perhaps to mention my services to somebody else that is currently in need of a website or help with an existing one.  Please visit my About Us page to find out more about the problems I’m trying to address via this platform.  If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please leave a comment below.