Supplyant

Everybody’s favourite social network Facebook today officially declared it had reached 250 million users worldwide. Whats even more staggering is that it added 50 million new users in the last 3 months or 500,000 new users every day. Whats amazing is that Facebook isn’t the site with the fastest growth, that lies with Twitter.

Lets put this into context:

Number of years it took to gain 50 million users for other media.

• Radio – 38 years
• TV – 13 years
• The Internet – 4 years
• Ipod – 3 years

What does this mean to me?

• If you and your company are not on twitter already get on there and at a minimum secure your company names.
• If your designers have not made consideration of this media and don’t have it in the road-map they are too slow.
• If you think this is all about websites your wrong, Twitter and Facebook are very mobile phone friendly applications.
• If you don’t act now, it will be too late.

Take a look at this video we posted earlier to bring you up to speed on how quickly its all moving.

If you need help with your social media strategy please contact us, it would be great to hear from you.

When your starting a new project its important to do your research and due diligence to understand  whats going on out in the big wide world of the internet.  Luckily Google has a great tool for visualising search trends.

Google Insight allows you to look at how many people are searching for a particular phrase over time. What this tool allows you to do is gain some great additional information about the market, which in turn gives you great insider knowledge to use in your business plan.

• Seasonal ups and downs in particular niches become really clear
• Which of your competitors is growing and which is shrinking
• How different brands compare over time
• Is a brand or market segment you’re looking at, growing or falling.

Example 1: Supporting the good online retailers.

Two wheel brands have adopted very different strategies with online retailers marketing.

Dotz provide great support to high quality online retailers. They see the benefits to the Dotz brand by working closely with retailers, who are then able to present their products in the best light, adding further value to the brand. Nice work from the distributor.

Wolfrace continue to support online retailers that over-discount and show the products in a poor light. The upshot is that the poor representation and over-discounting has devalued the brand. Wolfrace are now trying in-house retailing and should use the extra control this will offer them to begin rebuilding their brand.

This graph shows growth in interest in the brands.

Example 2: Seasonal trends in the DIY sector

Its incredible to see how closely Homebase and B&Q track over the years

Do you have any good examples for you market? click here to comment online

Registering at websites is a pain in the rear end.

It takes effort and that stops people using your site. Giving  details to untrustworthy sources scares your visitors and stops them registering.  OpenID has been developed to address these issues.

OpenID fixes the problem by using trusted sources like Google and Facebook to hold your contact and password details. What this means to your users is that they will no longer need to register at every new website they visit. Instead they can simply use their Facebook password, saving them time and hassle!

OpenID has been kicking around for a over 5 years, but it’s only now that the key Internet players like AOL, Google and Facebook have come on-board, that it seem to be gaining widespread recognition.

What this actually means to you as a website owner is

• Sites that use this technology offer a better user experience
• Shopping sites will see a reduction in errors with customers details
• The registration barrier is removed meaning more people will  be interacting with blogs, reviews sites and other discussions
• Your users details are held securely by the issuing authorites like Google and Facebook.

The good news for you is that OpenID integration is due for release on all Supplyant platforms within the next 2 months

The other good news is that  you may already have an openID account

Want to see it in action? There’s a great example of how this is going to work over at http://uservoice.com/session/new

The days of tweaking text on your homepage to guarantee a good result on google have gone. People linking back to your site are 70% of the reasons that google will put you high in the search engines.

But how do you  find out who’s linking to you?

In an unusual twist from our normal love of google its Yahoo that does the better job of helping you out on this one.

1. Go to Yahoo
2. In the search box type  link:www. yoursite.com (substituting yoursite.com for your actual site)
3. Yahoo site explorer tells you who is linking back to you.

But don’t stop there!

Try the same search with your competitors who get better rankings than you. This will give you an idea of places that you could contact to arrange links on there pages too.

I love seeing people get great result from newsletters and subscribers. But how often should you talk to them to not wind them up? I think your schedule depends on three key factors.

Can you commit to a regular schedule?

To your subscribers a consistent schedule is arguably more important than the ultimate quality of your articles. Do people watch East Enders every day because each episode is always better than the last?  People hate change and miss you when you miss an appointment.  Using feedburner or a similar service for managing distribution of your newsletters lets you stop worrying about timing.

Do you have something to offer which is wanted?

Are you nagging me to do something or offering me something. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out which one you should be doing. Friendly advice great, ordering me to do something bad

Leave a little room for nice surprises

If once in a while my wife phones me and says “come on home I’ve got my best lingerie on”  I am always going to make sure to pick  up her calls. Nice surprises once in a while means I keep coming back.

I schedule my newsletter to appear on tuesdays and thursdays, but of course every now and again I chuck in a little surprise.

Are you getting them too regularly, or not regularly enough? Tell me here

The answer to this question has launched a whole industry of search engine optimisation companies.

If the internet is an item on your marketing strategy, it’s important you have an understanding of these key concepts.

SEOmoz, one of the best search engine optimising blogs, put this chart together which does a great job of illustrating it in simple terms.

Site history (5%)

• How old is your domain?
• When did ownership of it last change?
• Does it have a history of doing anything dodgy?

The Words on the pages (20%)

• Is a good title and description given?
• Is the structure of the site and its content organised in a way that makes it easy for Google to read?
• Do the words on the page talk about the item you specified in the the page title?

Links back from other sites (75%)

• Does your site have good quality links from other sites?
• Are the sites that link back to you relevant?
• What words are used to link back to you (very important)?

You can help your marketing programme along by:

1. Putting content on your pages that’s good enough for  people to want to link to.
2. Hanging out on other sites, earning permission to post links to your own site.
3. Getting your suppliers to link to you with words, not pictures.

Keeping in touch with your customers is paramount.  If you’re not talking to them then they just assume that you either don’t care or have disappeared. Traditionally newsletters have been a great way of keeping in touch but…

If you’re anything like most companies that have newsletters you are probably in this position:

• Nobody wants to write the company newsletter
• When it does get written, it’s about the company, rather than things that benefit the reader
• It gets sent to a bunch of people that haven’t asked for it.
• The newsletter gets sent once in a blue moon
• It’s posted or faxed
• It may, or may not, get looked at (you don’t know) and binned.

EPromo is a different, but simple approach.

You write articles on your blog, consistently.
Google lists your articles as ‘high importance’ and ranks them well.

New Suspects;

• find and read your article through Google, Yahoo etc and click to your site.
• look at other articles you have written of relevance to them.

Now Prospects;

• they now choose to subscribe to your free updates via email or RSS because your articles are useful to them.
• they have also subscribed to your article notifications on Facebook and Twitter.
• they have been impressed by your intent to delivery articles consistently and your obvious capability to get the job done.
• they think to call you when a job comes up. You get the job because they have learnt to trust you.

Now Customers,

• they appreciate you staying in touch, without appearing pushy.
• they think to call you when a new job comes up. You get the job because you keep on giving, even after the sale.

Now Fans;

• they confidently recommend your articles and you, to other colleagues and industry.

Analyse what’s been most successful for you, return to “Go” and collect more Suspects ……

The difference is not really in the news itself, but its ability for you to communicate more effectively, consistently and cheaply with your leads and customers.

Need help? Need a plan? Get in touch

A key strategy for building traffic to your site is by looking for other sites in your area of interest / business and interacting with them. Pretty much every half decent site out the gives you the ability to respond to an article or to join the conversation.

Including yourself in the social web is your responsibility as a business owner, not embracing this opportunity is like going to a night club and sitting in a dark corner looking at the beautiful people rather than chancing your arm and chatting them up.

Are you a lurker?

A lurker is a person who reads discussions on a message board, newsgroup, chatroom, file sharing, blogs or other interactive system, but rarely or never participates actively. Life as a lurker is really easy but isn’t going to make you any money.

Stage 1: Stop lurking and start talking?
Its scary getting involved for the first time, but this isn’t time for excuses, just get on with it.

• Stop being afraid of being wrong
• Stop being afraid of saying something stupid
• Stop being afraid that you wont be interesting enough

Your mission is to just say something even if its just hello.

Stage 2: Be Relevant
So, your going to comment on this article. If you write something constructive about the article then chances are as the site owner I’m going to be chuffed that your interacting and allow your comment. If you come on and talk about your company and not the article your going straight in the spam pot.

Stage 3: Build Trust
I don’t want to hear about your company just yet, I want your opinion. Ask me some questions build a rapport with the other members of the site. If you build trust with my members I might even let you tell people what your company does.

Try and sell yourself too quickly and you will burn your bridges.

Now the real test…. who’s been reading?  Bottle of champagne goes to the best comment/question…

Seth Godin has always struck me as a great thinker on modern marketing. If you want an insight into where the internet is destined I beleive this guy has the answers.

Today on his awesome blog, which you must subscribe to today, was this great post.

Most marketers are organized around more. More share. More customers.

And if you want to do that fast, it means marketing to strangers. Strangers that don’t care about you, don’t trust you and aren’t listening to you.

You market to a friend differently. A friend isn’t necessarily someone you went to summer camp with, it’s someone who gives you the benefit of the doubt. Someone who will listen, at least once, to your pitch.

I was talking to an author about his next project. The question I asked him was, “are you writing this for strangers or friends?” The implications are huge. It impacts how you design the cover, how you price it, what it’s about, where you sell it, when you publish it, how much you pay for store displays, etc…

You need to treat friends differently at every step along the way. First, don’t confuse the moments you’re supporting them or connecting with them with the moments when you are doing business. Second, understand that the most powerful win is when your friends tell their friends about you. This is worth 1000 times more than you talking about yourself.

The cool thing is that now, everyone has ten times as many friends as they used to. The social graph online is a fascinating, exponential factor in growing the list of people who might be willing to hear what you have to say (once).

Which means that your site and offer and products can be organized around friend selling instead of stranger setting.

Guaranteed: if you sell a friend the way you sell a stranger, you’ve made neither a sale or a friend.

If you can get you friends to become raving fans then they will do the selling for you.

Do you have any stories about customers who have gone above and beyond the call of duty to sing your praises?

Id love to here them by clicking here and leaving a comment

If your customers trust you, that puts you in a pretty awesome position.You all of a sudden have permisson to market to them on a regular basis and they wont think of you as a pushy salesman, but a friend wanting to help them out with there problems.

Building this kind of trust doesnt come overnight though. Marketing guru Jay Levenson will tell you it takes somebody seeing an advert 20 times to actually remember the advert even exists.

Your mission is to start  building your trustability right away, every second counts!

My top 3 tips for building trust with your customers are:

1. Customers love regular contact.
   Dont stop talking, stick to a schedule of regular newsletters or blog posts. The number 1 reason for customers not coming back is apathy. The only way they know your still open is if you contact them
2. Be real.
   Dont hide behind fancy corporate rubbish. People still buy from people and they love to know who they are buying from. Show pictures of yourself and your customers.
3. Dont hide.
   Dont sit in your office wondering why no one comes to see you, get out in the hallway and mingle. Your customers will trust you more if they see you commenting on other websites, getting into magazines and being an active member of the community you sell to.

Keep doing this and your customer will trust you and love you….

As a little bonus the first 4 chapters of Seth Godin’s excellent book on Permission Marketing are free to download at this address

http://www.sethgodin.com/permission/