Internet Marketing and the Small to Medium Business

With 900,000 small business websites already published in Australia there is an assumption that somebody must be doing something right and that thousands of visitors are just waiting to see what we have on offer. Yet simple mathematics says that the chances of a website being visited are small. 

With a population of 20 million people and assuming everybody is a player, the average (900K / 20 million) is about 22 visits in the average viewing timeframe.  To better this we need to attract repeat visits, take clicks off our competitors or have an overseas audience.

Another 500,000 businesses haven’t bothered to build a website and before I head off to find them it might be a good time to find out what they are facing.  The following comments are seen as the major issues holding these businesses back.

• We are told we must advertise on the internet and optimise our websites so search engines can understand us easily.  Certainly, we can help the search engines understand our website, but that doesn’t guarantee a flow of traffic.
• We are told that we are socially unacceptable, or worse, behaving illegally, when we send commercial emails.  Our friends tell us they trash all commercial emails, report everybody to the spam police, never visit a socially unacceptable or risky website and only want to tweet on their mobile phones anyway.
• Gen-Y claims they can’t be sold to.  Maybe the 500,000 businesses without websites are owned by Gen-Y?  Or does Gen-Y sell to everybody else but don’t buy themselves?   Actually I mostly hear that Gen-Y can’t be sold to from Gen-Yers who develop websites and would like me to believe they are the only people who understand the young. Research indicates Gen-Y buys a great deal online but they are conservative in what they buy. Gen-X are adventurous being the main online buyers of food and beverage;  for gen-Y it’s clothes, electrical goods and music. 
• Fraud is on the increase and the most frequently seen scams involve direct approaches from alleged maintenance personnel who offer to “fix” viruses we aren’t aware we had and actually didn’t have until the fraudster gets access to our PC . Viruses are inserted one after the other until the PC no longer works and several hundred dollars has changed hands so the “repair” can continue.    I’m seeing so many of these scams they can only be described as an epidemic.  Web security will become a much bigger issue in the next couple of years.

So - the internet is pretty much like real life in many ways.

If we really want a website, what can we do?

First up a few static pages aren’t really enough.  Successful websites are living breathing things, reflecting the life of the organisation or individual who owns the site.  Otherwise the public will only visit once and what’s the use of that?  Active engagement is the name of the game, and this comes from high-value content presented effectively. It’s said that a customer isn’t a customer until he has visited three times.  The similarity to a wild animal’s hunting pattern is remarkable.

How do we attract visitors?  Pay per click advertising, search engine optimisation, email, tweets, facebook, linkedin, newspaper or magazine advertising, community engagement, television, affiliate websites?  The list is long and the solutions are varied.  Yes, we did say tweets.  If it suits you then use it.  Better to have many ways of attracting customers to our business and monitor the results to find out what works, then re-focus the effort.

If you would like to find out more, please get in touch.  There is no obligation and we would like to talk with you about what you have in mind for your business.