Cre8tive Flow

Introduction

The previous articles in this Marketing Right Now series have helped you set a direction for your business and suggested how your Internet marketing efforts should be applied.  Now it is just a question of making it come out right. The challenge is to grow your business so as to achieve your goals.  Many businesses fail particularly in the early months so it is important to understand what needs to be done. 

Remember that growing does not just mean getting bigger.  It should meaning getting better.  That is not just in monetary terms like profits or returns to shareholders.  With a little extra effort and thinking, a business can have a successful long-term future and deliver good values to its customers, to its employees and to its shareholders.  Remembering all of these stakeholders is often handled by using what is called a balanced scorecard approach.

Adapted from The Balanced Scorecard by Kaplan & Norton

Although this is often applied to large corporations, some of this thinking is useful even for smaller companies.  As the authors of this approach, Kaplan and Norton, suggest, "Information age companies must create future value through investment in customers, suppliers, employees, processes, technology, and innovation."

That’s the big picture.  This final article will look at more immediate tasks which will be reviewed under three headings:

• Things You Control
• Things You Do Not Control
• Things You Must Manage

The Internet has changed the ground rules so that there are many fewer Things You Control.  Markets with global competition are much more turbulent than in the past.  You must navigate your ship through much more stormy waters if you are to succeed.

Things You Control

 

Like any good captain, you should ensure that your team can handle the important tasks.  Since the customer is the ultimate boss, that is a key determinant of what are the important tasks.  Many operational decisions are involved in that and these go far beyond the scope of this Internet marketing series. They are listed in the next section and all contribute to the satisfaction of the customer with the buying decision they have made.

Make The Sale, Deliver The Promise

Internet Marketing should create a favourable image for the company and bring the potential customer to a web page where they can take the purchasing decision.  The website must be designed so as to maximize the percentage of prospects arriving at the website who then convert to customers.  This involves many skills in web design, usability, accessibility and captology (the persuasive strength of a web page), which again fall outside the scope of this series.  If the conversion percentage is less than 5%, then this is something that still requires work.  In other words if your website is meant to ’sell’ and less than 1 in 20 who arrive take the ‘buy’ decision, then you’ve got to find out why that happens and correct it.

Once they have bought, your organization must deliver to the customer the product/service in such a way that they are fully satisfied.  Here are just some of the tasks involved:

• Delivering a product or service on or before time that works as they wish it to work.
• Providing a full range of customer service options in case they experience any problems in receiving or using the product.
• Providing information (including online) that helps them to get the best performance from the product or service throughout its life.

There is a huge amount of skill, experience, competence and effectiveness required from your whole team in taking all the operational decisions involved in these three major tasks.  You should tune your whole operational process so that you don’t turn off those customers you worked so hard to get.

Satisfied Customers Are Your Best Salespersons

The efforts of the previous section will be very well rewarded if customers do enjoy the total user experience.  Satisfied customers are the very best salespersons a company can have. If creative ways of maintaining their loyalty are devised, then they will make further purchases and encourage their friends to do so.  This can be developed as an important element in the company’s social media marketing efforts.

Conversely if some people do not convert from prospects to customers or if other customers are dissatisfied, then it is important to understand why these things are happening.  Sometimes understanding the reasons why sales do not happen or sales go sour is the clearest signal one can get of problems.  Often customers will not complain, even though they may be unhappy or irritated by produce or service features.  It’s known as cognitive dissonance by the experts: customers don’t want to signal that their purchase decision may have been the wrong one for them.  Your critics are the best friends you can have.  Remember comcastcares.

Remove Growth Blockers

Even if sales seem satisfactory, there may be subtle ways in which sales are being blocked.  If these involve the website, there are a number of ways this can be checked out.

One way is to identify what people do on the website, how they enter, where they go and how they leave.  There are a number of programs available to quantify these factors.  Google Analytics is one very effective way of handling this.  If that is something you have not heard about before, then you might want to check out the benefits of Google Analytics.

Since Google is such a big part of the traffic enjoyed by most websites, it is important to know of any ways the Google referrals may be blocked.  The website should be submitted to the Google Webmaster Tools website. If the verification process is also completed, Google then provides a large amount of data that can be explored to confirm there are no hidden blocks to visitor traffic. Complete information on Google Webmaster tools is also available:

Our suite of webmaster tools provides you with a free and easy way to make your site more Google-friendly. They can show you Google’s view of your site, help you diagnose problems, and let you share info with us to help improve your site’s visibility.

Things You Do Not Control

None of us is ever completely in control of our future. Unexpected things may intervene, competitors may come up with new approaches or may react to actions we have taken.  You have to stay alert.  Changes in society or the marketplace may represent opportunities or threats.  This may even require you to rethink your strategy.

Keep Your Radar On

The Internet provides an ideal way of watching for unexpected happenings.  Here are some of the tools you may use.

• Google Alerts
• Google Blogsearch
• Twitter Search
• Google Reader or Bloglines checking on appropriate RSS newsfeeds.

Check the Competition

The actions of your competitors can also represent opportunities or threats.  In particular the effectiveness of their online presence is something to watch carefully.  If you use the Firefox browser, then one particularly effective add-on is SEO for Firefox from SEObook.  Another useful tool from the same firm is the Firefox Rank Checker extension.  This allows you to easily check your website rankings in Google (US and international), Yahoo, and Microsoft Live search.

If their online presence seems more effective than yours, you should try to understand why this happens and use it to improve your own website’s effectiveness.

Things You Must Manage – Go For Your Goals

The earlier article on The Plan concluded with the following:

Planning is not a once for all activity but is an ongoing part of the road to success. The plan must set out the objectives against which actual performance is measured. Initially the plan may have some summary targets such as total prospects making contact or the number of items sold. In time as more knowledge is obtained, sub-objectives can be targeted as well.

Remember the plan is not just a forecast, it should be a personal commitment.  The plan should include sufficient detail so that if the bottom line does not follow the plan, other details will pinpoint the reasons why.  Corrective action can then be applied where appropriate.

For example for an e-commerce website, the plan might include the following summary parameters.

• Number of visitors to the website
• Number adding a product to their cart
• Number completing the purchase
• Average purchase value
• Total sales

By assessing actual results versus the plan on a weekly or monthly basis in a simple spreadsheet as shown below, the activities where improvements are needed can be highlighted. 

Similar charts can be maintained for particular subsets of data and the analytics programs mentioned earlier often will display such data in a visual format.

Conclusion

This series of articles has set out for you in a summary way the important tasks you will have in setting up your business and using Internet marketing effectively in growing that business.  Your success will come by applying these messages with passion, enthusiasm, commitment and dedication.  Your rewards will come not only in monetary  forms, but also in the words of appreciation you will receive from your team and from your customers.