You open the small box to reveal a guitar pick.

“Great. Just what I wanted”

I can tell you are lying, but I appreciate your vague attempt at gratitude.

So I start to explain that this is no ordinary pick. Oh, no. Far from it in fact.

This is the pick that Jimmy Page threw into the crowd during the recent Led Zeppelin reunion gig.

Enlightened with this knowledge you’re now viewing your gift in a whole different light. But it’s still the same nondescript pick you dismissed 2 minutes ago. So what’s changed?

It’s simple. This small, flat piece of plastic now has a story. It has been given a character. It’s become far more than the object itself.

And because of that, you won’t forget about it. You won’t leave it to gather dust at the back of a shelf. You won’t let your kids play with it. It’s also highly likely you will tell your friends all about it.

By giving an object a story you will, in turn, give it a character and people would much rather buy stories and characters over objects any day.

So what stories do your products have?

Photo credit to Aidan Jones

At the next meeting I was told  “we’ve done some research online and found out that HDNL are rubbish”

I searched for “Home Delivery Network Reviews” and came up with this truly awful review.

So I use DHL for our internal deliveries… how did they fare?

So what about ParcelForce the preferred carrier of the person I was speaking to.

So were do we go from here.

Management of online reviews is set to become a hot topic in the next few years.  Strong brands can get away with bad reviews to a certain extent, but a bad review can signal the death of a weak product or service.

Equally as a consumer, to state the obvious,  make sure you look at similar products before jumping to bad review conclusions.

As the saying goes “Everybody shouts if your drains smell but nobody takes the time to tell you your drains smell great”

Whats the best review you have ever seen?

The new year is always a great time to refocus your efforts and polish up your marketing plan. I spent a lot of time over Christmas pondering what e-tailers must do in order to have a successful project. Here’s my thoughts:

Do every one of these 4 things well and you cannot fail

• Have a truly great product,  unique service,  or a notable offer (the last resort is lowest price).
• Provide good quality listings and a simple checkout. Good enough to not put people off.
• Get found. Don’t wait for customers, go and find them.
• Provide awesome customer service whatever the cost.

To be clear, if you mess up any one of these you will fail. Do these right and you will win.

Are you covering each of these rules?

On the wall next to my desk I have a piece of paper with my simple rules of e-commerce which I always revisit to remind myself whats really important.

Here’s my 5 simple rules:

Rule 1:  Its not about you, its about them

Its wrong to use your site to tell people how great you are and how great your products are. Its been proven a million times before that talking in terms of your customer works better. Look at your site or the products and ask “Whats in it for me?”

Rule 2: What is remarkable?

What are you really good at? Can you offer the best delivery times in your market, the latest ordering, best returns policy, cheapest prices, latest products. What do you do well enough that somebody would write about you on another website or tell friends.

Rule 3: Get found.

I spoke to somebody the other day who proudly claimed to be “Northampton’s best kept secret”. What an idiot i thought, you don’t get rich by being a secret. Get out and about, speak to people, promote. If you have rule 2 sorted properly then shout about it as loudly as you can.

I ordered an item just last week from a really ugly site, just because it was the only one I could find that sold what I wanted.

Rule 4: Don’t give them a reason not to buy

How many times have you visited a site and it looked great and the prices were good only to find checkout was a pain and it wouldn’t tell you what the delivery price is until you log in. Show the site to some friends and see what they think when they use it. Have a look at these reasons why people leave you.

Rule 5: Remember that thing you did that worked really well on another site?

Its painful sometimes to keep doing the same things over and over again. But its less painful when your profits skyrocket because you stuck to something that’s proven to work.  I’m not advocating stopping new ideas here, but new development is expensive and time consuming. Better to start quick with an old idea than never get going with a new one.

In my opinion, if you follow these basics methods you cant go too far wrong.

Do you have any rules you follow? I’d love to hear them.

On my first visit I was blown away, there was simply nothing else like it. How could the local store possibly compete with this furniture monster?

In those days IKEA were considered an overnight success but I read a very interesting article that gave some great facts about IKEA that confirm that if you keep at it and the ideas good it will happen.

Great facts from that article:

• The big idea came about because IKEA’s owner couldn’t fit the chair he brought in his car
• Its estimated that 1 in 10 babies were conceived on an IKEA bed.
• IKEA floundered for 30 YEARS before it found success overseas.

A great quote

The second great quote i came accross was from the founder of the LinkedIn business network:

‘If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.’

I’m positive the first IKEA  flat pack chair wasn’t the best chair ever, but he got it out to market. This quote  shouldn’t give you an excuse for not giving your website everything you’ve got.

What I hope it re-inforces is that your site will never be finished. Testing and measuring the successful elements of your sites design as early as possible are the key to fine tuning it to your audience.

Got any great quotes or stories tell us about them here

The fact given was that the number of people using the book on a weekly basis has dropped by over 20% in the last 4 years.  Interestingly yellow pages advertising rates don’t appear to have changed.

So is it worth being in Yellow Pages?

As with every form of advertising it all depends on your return on investment. On that basis you shouldn’t do yellow pages unless:

• You monitor where your leads come from
• You monitor how many of these leads turn into customers
• You look at the lifetime value of those customers

Once you have an understanding of how much your yellow pages customers are worth to you its a far simpler decision.

What about Yell.com?

Yell.com is a good site for local search its worth appearing on there but:

• It will not give your own site any google friendly back links
• Its going to be under serious threat from Google Local which is free
• Its going to be under increasing pressure from other free providers

Despite this exactly the same rules apply its all about your return on investment. Spend a pound, get more than a pound back in profit then go for it.

Google local

Here’s an example of what google shows you if you search for decorator in Northampton.

This ones easy, its free, it gives you a really high position on google and its easy enough that you can do this yourself. You can do it here

Have you had any good or bad experiences with Yellow Pages. I would love to hear them, or you can tell us about them here

I had never spoken to them; I had not heard of the company; I didn’t chase them around interrupting the persons day; I didn’t get his name from a list of prospects and call him out of the blue; I didnt spam them. They came to us asking for help.

What was unusual about this contact was that they found our site searching for “ASOS annual report”

At position 8 on google was this result:

The tricks that ASOS is using to get 100% growth | Supplyant

In my eyes ASOS stand out clearly as a company using a common sense, planned approach to rapid growth. ASOS’s recent annual report, gives a great insight …
www.supplyant.com/…/the-tricks-that-asos-is-using-to-get-100-growth/ –

They found the site despite the site not ranking for any of the traditional web design or web marketing type phrases (its just too new to do well for them yet)

It just so happened the person concerned was an ASOS shareholder looking for the report but thought that our page on google looked like it  offered something that might be of interest to him.

He also happened to be looking for help marketing his brand new website, and thought that based on what we had said we might fit the bill.

Better still he also gave us some feedback on how we could tweak our site to make it clearer for people like him. I’d like to thank him for this.

Every article you write, every comment you make on somebody elses site, every twitter, facebook or forum post you interact with may just generate you best customer ever.

Remembering the Target

The Coke v Pepsi battle is one of marketing’s finest case studies:

• Coca Cola (aka the market leader)
  Just think of coke’s Xmas adverts; traditional values rule for the Coke marketing team. They are secure with the biggest market share. People buy Coke because its not changed for a hundred years. Mums buy Coke for the family
• Pepsi (aka the challenger)
  Everything that Coke is they attack. The flout tradition and push directly for a young audience desperate to try new things. They will try anything to get some extra market share. Kids buy Pepsi for themselves

So what does this mean to me?

If your the market leader, never change your logo. People buy from market leaders because they feel safe.

If your not the market leader find ways to be different to them. People wont remember your logo changes but will remember what makes your products and services better.

But just as Web 2.0 has become commonplace, people have started looking forward to Web 3.0  and to what the internet of the future will look and feel like.  Thinking about where the technology is going  gives us an opportunity to start planning now.

My Web 3.0  Trends & Predictions

1. How you will use it ?
   Stop thinking about the web being something you need a computer to use.  It’s started already with the iPhone, even now people are spending huge amounts of money on products and services using phones. Just last week potn.com received an order for a £1000 set of wheels, which was placed using a phone and PayPal. In the next 5 years mobile phones will become the primary method of interacting with the Internet.
2. Single Log In?
   Open ID is a technology that’s growing quickly and being adopted by Google, Facebook and every other hi profile tech company. What this technology will do is allow you to log into any site on the Internet with exactly the same details. No more registering everywhere you go.  By taking away the registration barrier interaction with sites is easier and will become much more common place.
3. Information overload will see social marketing thriving.
   The Internet is crowded already and there’s more information than you can keep up with. This will lead to more people joining groups of like minded individuals who’s recommendations will become more valuable than any advertising.  Management of this information overload will become a hot topic and lead to development of radical new ways of keeping up.
4. PUSH PUSH PUSH
   At the minute you visit websites, but as web 3.0 kicks in you’re going to find more information pushed to you. In whatever form they take, subscription based services are going to take over.

Do you have any predictions of what’s coming next?

Everybody is talking about twitter at the minute (here’s a quick guide) but you may not have heard of squidoo.  Squidoo is a Seth Godin creation that offers you another spot for talking about yourself (quick guide).

The aim of the game, if at all possible, is to take up the whole of the front page of google with results associated with your brand.

If you haven’t done so already

• head over to twitter and sign up for an account
• head over to squidoo and set up your page

This will help you on your quest to take out the whole front page.  Ill be posting soon about the secret of dealing with all these networks without wasting time, so stay tuned.