Don’t Brand Your Small Business Website, Position It.

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There’s been a bit of talk in the blogosphere lately about small business branding and the idea that the owner’s personality is an integral part of a small business brand ["it's not we, it's me"].

While I don’t necessarily disagree with the comments in these posts, I must confess to getting the heebie-jeebies every time I hear the words “small business” and “brand” in the same sentence. It’s normally associated with amorphous marketing chatter about “building your online brand” and “leveraging brand equity”.

Beware of “Branding” B.S.

The problem that I have with the term “branding” is that it connotes strong images of corporatized, awareness-based marketing.

To “brand” a product or service is to literally imprint your mark on it. Brands started as a way to differentiate items that are (to the naked eye anyway) rather similar (e.g. horses).

By imprinting your brand into the mind of Mr. Consumer, the hope is that, at the time of the purchase decision, your awareness-building will pay off and you’ll be more likely to get the sale.

That’s great, but the branding paradigm just does not apply to most small business lead generation situations.

Unless you’re marketing a mass-market service, and/or have deep pockets and a penchant for spending sprees, then you should be spending every marketing dollar and every ounce of psychic bandwidth generating actual qualified sales leads, not building awareness.

Far too many websites fail because they’re all about eye candy and not enough about effective selling.

Don’t Brand. Postition.

If your primary marketing challenge is online lead generation, then you should think of the Internet as a one-on-one, direct marketing medium, not a branding medium.

*** Sidebar ***

DIRECT MARKETING: Marketing that aims to elicit a “direct response” from individuals viewing your website [e.g. a newsletter signup, an email enquiry, an order].

MASS MARKETING: Simultaneous standardized marketing to, a very large target market through mass media. [online, this model might be followed by the likes of Google, Odeo, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Amazon]

*** End Sidebar ***

If the Internet is a direct response medium, then rather than creating fuzzy feelings with diffuse branding efforts, my advice is to focus your energies on effectively positioning your business in the mind of potential clients.

That means answering the question, “Why should I give my business to you, when with one click of a mouse button, or by flipping open the Yellow Pages I can find 10 other providers who offer the same service?”

If you can answer that question in a compelling way, you’ll generate top-quality enquiries and sales leads. And you can do this whether you’re a household name on the Internet, or your website went live only last week.

Further reading

See copywriter Bob Bly’s related post, “Is Madison Avenue Advertising a Total Fraud?”.

Till next time

Will Swayne
Online marketing consultant

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Re-engineering your business model

Like about half the Internet, I’ve been reading Steve Pavlina’s Blog over recent days (sheesh, that guy is a machine). One thing that caught my attention was a comment on the often-heard statistic, “80% of businesses go bust within 5 years” .

Steve commented that, of the nominal 20% that survive, the vast majority end up doing something quite different from their original business plan. This meshes nicely with my belief that most business plans aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Within a month, your nice ring-bound business plan is so out of date you have to waste another week writing a new one. Or just do what most small business owners do and put it in the bin and and wing it from there.

This has certainly been the case for me – my business model has morphed consistently over the two and a half years that I’ve been running Marketing Results. And further dramatic changes are in the pipes for 2006.

This article traces how my own business model has developed and some of the wrong turns that I’ve taken along the way.

How my business model has evolved

The impetus for starting my marketing consulting business was partly the fact that a cushy consulting contract with my former employer was showing signs of winding down. I needed something to go on to, and I had become very interested in high-leverage marketing techniques espoused by the likes of Jay Abraham.

Answer: A marketing consulting business!

On the surface, consulting sounds great. It doesn’t require stock, equipment or expensive premises. But there are some hidden catches. One is that any humbug can be a consultant, but it takes real smarts to sell consulting services.

In my case, it took at least a year to get a handle on how to market my services (i.e. to graduate from Marketing for Consultants 101). Then it took another year to decide on my current business model (i.e. fee for service Internet marketing consulting and lead generation).

Phase 1

My initial service offerings were a hotch-potch of the various skills that I had picked up in my previous direct marketing role:

• Trade consulting (specialising in the Japanese market)
• Direct marketing consulting (a fully outsourced direct marketing solution)
• Websites that sell (web design and marketing)

I had little success with this lineup. Apart from the relatively poor fit between the different services, none of our offerings were developed into a sufficiently compelling proposition for clients.

Phase 2

There’s a joke my Dad used to tell that goes like this:

Man to Insurance Salesman: Do you realise you need a licence to sell insurance in this state?

Insurance Salesman: I knew I wasn’t selling any, I just didn’t know why!

Hey, I didn’t promise it would be a good joke.

This was my situation in Phase 1. Things weren’t working because the cash register wasn’t ringing, but with very little data to go on, it was hard to understand what the specific problems were (at the time – now with the benefit of hindsight and greater experience I could list them in about 2 minutes).

One thing I did know was that our offererings were far too broad and unfocussed. So I got rid of trade consulting (originally, that was supposed to be our lucrative core business) and added advertising copywriting as a stand-alone service. Direct marketing consulting morphed into general marketing consulting.

So now our service offerings were:

• Small business marketing consulting
• Websites that sell (web design and marketing)
• Advertising copywriting

A day or two after we changed the website, we turned on Google Adwords for the first time. That very morning, we received our very first enquiry for copywriting. At last, some positive feedback.

Phase 3

With the combination of our new service offerings and effective Google Adwords campaigns, new leads started to trickle in. Not enough to pay the bills, but enough to get a foothold.

At this stage, I remember our strategy was to first get smaller copywriting jobs and aim to convert them into repeat business and more comprehensive marketing projects. Copywriting was the “doorway service” that would lead to further work [that turned out not to be the case].

It was now a year since I started the business. The cash wasn’t rolling in like I expected, but we were making some headway.

Around this time I decided to enrol in Jay Abraham’s Internet Marketing Empire course, a 6-month mentorship program with a US$6,000 price tag. This was a huge leap of faith, and it meant dipping (further) into savings, but I felt it would be worth it if we could really build competency in one area (especially the area that had brought us our first few clients).

After starting the course (but not necessarily as a direct result) our sales started to pick up. We started two consulting contracts with new clients that would pay our bills and then some.

One of these turned out to be a huge success. The other client turned out to be a shyster with an aversion to paying their account (but that’s another blog post).

At any rate, things were picking up.

Phase 4

About 16 months after starting the business an acquaintance, Chris Khoo, came by my office to say hi and mentioned that he was looking for a job. Chris is a very good programmer with all the Certifications to prove it.

On the spur of the moment I asked him if he’d consider working with us. He said OK. I didn’t have the cashflow to pay him but figured that we could see how it goes for 3 months and reconsider from there.

Although the first couple of months were scary, it worked. Chris brought a new set of skills to the business that were effectively like pulling out an old steam engine and replacing it with a modern petrol equivalent. Because although we already had the marketing skills, our technical skills were severely lacking. Chris helped to correct that imbalance.

Phase 5

18 months after starting the business, we had started to focus more on Internet marketing consulting and “websites that sell”. There were a couple of reasons for this…

1. Our web projects were getting fast results for clients.
2. Most of the variables of a website project are within our control. With, say, marketing consulting, much of the implementation can depend on circumstances beyond our control.
3. Websites enable the work to be spread across a team. Marketing consulting tends to be me, one-on-one with the client, leaving us with excess capacity elsewhere

Red Flag: At around this time, we identified a problem. Namely, I was the bottleneck that was slowing down our capacity to perform work.

As our only copywriter, I was spending too much time copywriting and not enough time selling. While I was flat out, our other team members had excess capacity.

We tried to alleviate this problem by outsourcing copywriting work etc., but with poor results. This issue alone probably slowed down the growth of the business by 12 months.

Simple 80/20 analysis showed that revenue and profits were coming from websites, not copywriting (in fact, copywriting is probably negatively profitable), yet I found it very hard to pull the trigger:

“Yes, but isn’t it nice to have that one or two thousand in revenue that’s being generated by copywriting every month?”

The simple answer to that is that time saved on copywriting could lead to an extra 6 or 10K in revenue from more profitable website work. But sometimes it’s hard to do the obvious.

As business owners, we become attached to our business model. We grow more reluctant to take on risk on an ongoing basis, having survived the initial risk of starting the business. Now I realise that a certain degree of risk is an integral and ongoing part of running any business.

So it wasn’t until almost 10 months later that I finally removed copywriting from our website as a stand-alone service. As soon as I did it, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders.

If you’re wrestling with a change to your business model like this, just do it. You can always give the new change a 30 or 60 day trial, and if it doesn’t work out, return to the status quo.

Further changes ahead

Another series of events over the past couple of months have made me rethink my entire business model again. Basically, our current model is hopelessly flawed. It’s 10,000% better than the one we started with, but it’s still flawed.

Why? Because it relies too much on gruntwork and volume. Certainly, as the business owner, I do far too much of the 80% of activities that lead to 20% of results.

Our current model revolves around constantly getting new business. Yes, we have repeat clients, but because my focus is on obtaining new business most of the time, when we do work for repeat clients, it tends to be on a reactive, rather than a proactive, basis.

So I asked myself – why is that? The reason is because new business is much more profitable than repeat business, given our current service structure. Our current model requires us to continually chase new work to pay our considerable [$10K+] overhead, and the end result is that repeat clients sometimes miss out on ongoing services that could significantly benefit them.

Quantity at the expense of quality. It doesn’t make sense.

So in 2006, things are gonna change around here…

1. We’re getting rid of our city office and moving to a cheaper and more informal suburban office (all our work is done over phone and email anyway).
2. We’re laser focusing our offerings on profitable websites and online lead generation.
3. Proactive consulting services will be offered to our best clients on an ongoing basis. This will not only produce far better results for clients, but it will free up my time to focus on working proactively with them.
4. Our mantra will be “quality, not quantity”. My primary goals will be enjoyment and balance. When you have those right, profits normally follow.

Further updates to come

That’s the theory anyway – we’ll see how it pans out. Further updates will be added in 2006.

Will Swayne

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Using an FAQ page to boost lead quality

It’s one thing to generate leads or enquiries with your website, but it’s quite another to generate qualified sales leads.

If you’ve every run an Internet-based business, or get a significant number of leads from the Internet, then you’ll know what I’m talking about. It can be frustrating to get email enquiries, only to find that most of them take up too much of your time without leading to any sales.

These “low-quality” leads normally come from someone who…

• Doesn’t yet understand how you can help them
• Is merely asking a routine question that is answered clearly on your website
• Approaches you very tentatively, almost defensively, with a great deal of resistance toward proceeding further

If you get a lot of this type of enquiry, then your website isn’t really doing its job (or people aren’t reading it properly – that happens a lot too ). A good lead generation website will relieve you of much of the burden associated with attracting new business, not produce extra “busywork” that wastes your time.

That’s where a good FAQ page can help.

FAQ pages – an easy way to increase your lead quality and quantity

A good FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page should achieve three things:

1. Reinforce your USP – the reason why your target customer would be foolish not to deal with you over your competitors
2. Clarify and reinforce your website content. It’s often easier to find answers to common questions in a list of FAQ’s than to scour through individual web pages.
3. Raise and address common objections. If you’re more expensive than the opposition, say so, and explain why. If you only offer 3 varieties and your competitor offers 10, explain why. You won’t convince everyone that your way is best, but at least you can filter out many of the people who wouldn’t be interested in your solution anyway.

Striving for Authenticity

Sometimes it’s tempting to answer the questions that you wish customers asked. It reminds me of the Simpsons episode “Two cars in every garage, three eyes on every fish” when Lisa is cajoled into asking prepared questions to boost Mr Burns’ likeability with the voting public:

Mr. Burns – your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?

I recommend trying your hardest to keep your FAQ questions authentic. Overly obvious self-promotion will tend to diminish your credibility. I sometimes find it useful to get a third party to read FAQ content and provide feedback before deciding on the final draft of an FAQ page (or any sales copy, for that matter).

A non-exhaustive list of sample FAQ questions

Here’s a list of FAQ questions that could appear on most types of lead-generation website:

• What do you do?
• Who do you work with?
• How are you different?
• How can you help me?
• What do your services cost?
• How long have you been in business?
• What are your credentials?
• How many people are in your organisation?

Of course, there will also be a bunch of questions that relate to your specific industry. I’m often asked if we do telemarketing or direct sales for clients (we don’t), so those questions are included in our FAQ.

FAQs as a filter

FAQs are a good filter, and an easy way to boost your average lead quality. They should also boost your volume of high-quality sales leads.

Yes, you’ll still get people who don’t read your FAQ page and who contact you with routine questions, but that’s a part of being in business.

One final point: questions are a natural part of the buying process. It’s common for ready-to-buy prospects to ask a few questions before going ahead with a purchase. What I’m talking about here is systematizing the routine so you can handle the exceptions with greater thoroughness.

Will Swayne

P.S. I’m currently writing a newsletter on more advanced methods of pre-qualifying sales leads. It will be coming out in Janurary, so if you’re not a member of my list and you’d like to get this info, sign up free here.

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Ideas on International tele-commuting

This is my first post from Fukuoka, Japan. I used to work in Japan and I still return 2 or 3 times a year for business and to catch up with friends.

As more than one blogger has no doubt commented, it’s great to be able to keep in touch seamlessly no matter where I go, providing I have an Internet connection.

In fact, the time difference between Australia and Japan is only an hour. If I wanted to, with a few minor adjustments I could work up here periodically and switch easily between Australia and Japan.

All it would require is…

• A laptop (I’m working on a Toshiba T6/518CME right now)
• An Internet connection. In most countries this isn’t a problem, but in some places (e.g. Vietnam), it may mean making do with an old skool dialup connection – not fast enough for anything much more than email.
• A phone (I rely on Skype for inter-office communication, and use a Brastel phonecard for client communication).

That’s about it. The only thing that I’d like to have right now is a phone number in Australia that goes straight through to my Japanese mobile – certainly no challenge technically, but I haven’t got around to setting that up yet. .

Will
From Japan

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The death of autoresponders?

One of the staples of online lead generation and Internet marketing over recent years has been the “autoresponder” [definition].

In essence these are automated email programs or services that can help you communicate with small or large volumes of prospects or clients. If you’ve ever signed up to an online “eCourse”, “Special Report” or newsletter, then you should be familiar with how they work.

Autoresponders are a powerful conversion tool. I use them extensively in my own Internet marketing efforts and also implement autoresponder strategies for clients. Yet I can’t help thinking that autoresponders are begining to fade as the killer conversion tool that they used to be. Let me tell you why…

Autoresponder Overload

This morning I work up to 8 new email messages – oooh goody!!!

Problem is, 7 of them were autoresponders. A coupla years ago I might have given more time to any one of those messages, but today I skim-read each message and unsubscribed from two lists. That’s 15 minutes of my life that I’ll never see again

The problem is not so much autoresponder technology, but the fact that everyone and his dog is starting to use autoresponders, and that much of the content is, frankly, mediocre.

This trend is set to continue – there will be more autoresponder lists for any subject you care to mention, competing for smaller and smaller slivers of an increasingly jaded audience (that’s us!).

In other words, if you want to continue to make this strategy work for you, you have to make sure you’ve got the right autoresponder strategy and that you’re executing it well. Here are a few guidelines for using autoresponders as a lead generation tool…

Tips For Avoiding Autoresponder Mediocrity

1. Build strongly targeted lists. The Internet allows almost infinite segmentation. So your list should be strongly focussed on a specific target audience. Don’t build a list of dog owners; build one of poodle owners instead.
2. Provide value in every communication. An autoresponder message should be 90% good content, 10% selling. Once you’ve built up a “store” of goodwill you can send the occasional harder-selling message, but what you’re selling has to appeal strongly to your list (the more targeted your list, the more likely your offerings will appeal).
3. Make sure your mail gets delivered. I’ve heard it said that up to 20% of most email lists never gets delivered because of over-zealous spam filters and other technical problems. Encourage your list members to enter your autoresponder sender address into their email “whitelist”, and avoid “spammy” content. Some autoresponder services such as Aweber feature spam-checking features to help you send email that complies with most spam filters.
4. Best-of-breed content. Anyone with $20 a month to spend can start an autoresponder list, and if you’re in a popular niche you’re bound to have competitors. Only great content will keep your list interested and motivated to give you their business.
5. Regular communication. It’s very easy for the frequency with which you communicate with prospects to “taper off” as you become preoccupied with other things. Do everything you can to resist this tendency. If you don’t have time to write the newsletter yourself then outsource it to someone who can (e.g. we write monthly newsletters for a number of our lead generation website clients).

So it’s not rocket science – just regular, high-quality communications to a targeted list.

Will Swayne

P.S. If you’re a business owner or independent professional who would like to generate more sales leads online, subscribe free to my new customer marketing eGuide – I promise you nothing but high-quality content that will help you get ahead.

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Just plain fun to watch

I was checking out Google Video this weekend and was impressed by another very slick AJAX application from the guys at Google.

If you have 9 minutes to kill, check out this very watchable video of a russian acrobat performing action sequences in a Soviet-era housing estate to a French hip-hop soundtrack.

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Online Marketer Crusades Against Tiny Fonts: Formatting Guidelines for Higher Conversion

You probably already know that your web content or “sales copy” can have a significant effect on the conversion rate of your website. Instead of converting, say, 1 in every 100 visitors into an enquirer, sharp sales copy might convert 2 in every 100 visitors.

But what you may not know is that the way your content is formatted can also influence your conversion rate.

Even mouthwatering sales copy, if laid out in the wrong way, can flop. So this post is to help you avoid formatting mistakes and increase your conversion rate at the same time.

The two concepts that you need to keep in mind when formatting copy for high conversion are Readability and, for want of a better term, Conspicuousness.

8 Important Readability Guidelines

Reading a computer monitor strains the eyes much more than reading a printed page. That’s why many of the layout techniques that have been shown to lead to higher conversion rates are related to readability.

If your copy is easy to read, more users will read it. More readers means more conversions.

Here are a few of the most important readability guidelines to keep in mind when formatting your website:

1. Don’t use tiny fonts (nothing smaller than 11 px). Let users control font size.
2. Use high-contrast colours. Plain old black text on a white background is best for readability (I’m referring to body copy here – headlines and subheads can be other colours). For some reason designers seem to frequently specify tiny grey fonts on a white or grey background. This low-contrast combination is a sales-killer.
3. Use short paragraphs (suggest no longer than 8 lines). These break up your copy into bite-size chunks that are friendlier to the eyes.
4. Indent key paragraphs or place them in boxes. Again, this breaks up blocks of uniform-looking text and gives a “jagged” shape to your copy. This “jagged” shape gives the eyes more reference points.
5. Make links obvious. Where possible, use the default link colours and underline links for added visibility.
6. Experiment With Capitalising The First Word Of Your Headlines, Like This. Again, the “jagged” shape of the words appears to give the eyes more reference points, and this can actually translate into significantly higher conversion.
7. Watch line length. Long lines that stretch right along the screen are much harder to read than shorter lines. No longer than 500 px wide is a fair guideline.
8. Break your text up. Use plenty of subheads, lists and bullets.

Emphasizing the Important Stuff

The other layout concept that can influence the conversion rate of your website is Conspicuousness. In other words, drawing attention to important copy points.

This is because most website visitors “skim and scan” web content before anchoring on a point and starting to read. By using specific formatting techniques to get visitors’ attention, you can draw them into your copy and get them reading.

Here are some ways that you can make your important copy points more conspicuous:

1. Use significantly larger fonts for headlines and subheads – these don’t have to be obnoxiously large, but they should be large enough to become the key focal points of your copy
2. Believe it or not, RED headlines have been shown to produce significantly higher conversion rates than fonts of other colours. The theory goes that because red is a very conspicuous color, it draws attention and gets your visitors reading your headline. While this may be true, red headlines aren’t right for every website. Because they’re so often used for direct response “sales letter” style websites, then can sometimes make your site appear “hokey”.
3. Use boxes to highlight important points (e.g. case studies, testimonials, guarantees etc.) In direct marketing circles, these boxes are know as “Johnson Boxes”, and they have been shown to increase the readership of whatever’s inside.
4. Bright colours tend to attract attention more than dull colours. If you want to attract attention to a certain place, use a bright background
5. “Visual cues” such as arrows, bullets, graphical numbers etc. can attract attention to key points

So those are the key points to keep in mind when formatting your website content for maximum lead generation results.

Exactly how you execute these techniques will depend on the type of site, but they’re handy to keep in mind. And please, don’t use tiny grey fonts – this online marketer couldn’t bear to see any more of those.

Will Swayne
Online lead generation guy

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A primer in RSS and Podcasts

It seems de rigeur for almost every blog to have a “What is RSS” post, and I intend to be no different

What is RSS?

RSS stands for “Real Simple Syndication”. RSS is a technology that allows you to “subscribe” to a series of posts or entries on a website that interests you. This blog has an RSS “feed” as well.

If you like the content here, instead of checking back to see if the website has been updated you can have any updates automatically sent to your “feedreader” software such as Feedreader, RSS Reader or Google Reader. (These are all free.)

How do you access an RSS Feed?

First you need feedreader software (see above). Then you need to enter the name of the feed you want to get into your feedreader software.

For example, to subscribe to this blog, you would click on the link in the navigation bar, “Grab my RSS feed”.

You’ll be taken to a page with lots of options, but the simplest way to subscribe is just to copy the URL you see in your browser right into your feedreader program. In other words, copy this text into your feedreader program:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MarketingResultsBlog

Now whenever this blog is updated, the content will be sent directly to your feedreader. If you get sick of the content, just delete my feed address.

What are the advantages of RSS?

When I first started reading blogs, I wondered what the advantages of RSS were. Can’t you just check back at the websites you like to see if an update has been made? It only takes a second.

Well, you can do that – especially if you only follow a few blogs. But after a while you might find that you want to follow 10, 20 or even 100 RSS feeds, and some might only be updated infrequently. RSS plus your feedreader allows you to keep track of a number of information sources quickly and easily, saving you time and ensuring you don’t miss anything.

What is a Podcast?

A Podcast is an audio file (or series of audio files) that has been syndicated via RSS. Whenever a new audio file is posted, a notification will appear in your feedreader and you can choose whether or not to download the audio file.

Podcasts are a great way to access information quickly and easily, and they’re also a great way to communicate with your target audience if you’re in business.

That concludes my brief post about RSS. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment.

Will Swayne

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