If your anything like me then you know that there is nothing worse than good businesses with bad marketing, they can’t generate sales and as a result they can’t increase their marketing budget. It’s an evil evil cycle, but recently I spoke to the guys from supercarhire.co.uk and they spent me to a short video that talks more about viral marketing and how not to be boring in your marketing efforts. Tom and Jeff from supercarhire had a lot of capital tied up in stock (supercars) and as a result they weren’t able to market that much, but they used some pretty sneaky marketing techniques to get there brand in-front of buyers. 

I’ve been waiting to write this post for a long time now and have actually been writing it for about 3 days, its not long and it is a bit ranty, but there has been a lot of thought into it. Why do some businesses fail, but the very same businesses (same products, same services) succeed?

It’s the age old question in business, some people say its due to lack of motivation for the industry you are in, which is a good point. Others say its 100% down to funding, if you can’t utilise funding and sort cash-flow for your business, again this is 100% true but its not the number 1 reason why businesses fail, especially in the modern age.

Businesses fail because your customers are not “impressed” by your business.

Let me explain.

In 2015 I set-up a business called Ghost Fitness with a couple of other partners. We wrote the business plan and were all happy with it. Today this business is coming along nicely but we made 1 HUGE mistake in the start that was involved around people being un-impressed by the products and the service of “purchasing” in general.

The issue was we all had other businesses or full time jobs, which meant fulfilling orders that had come through sometimes took 2 or 3 days, adding the delivery cost on top of this meant people were looking at 7-10 days for their items. Although individuals loved the products and the response we got from them was overwhelmingly positive, the main issue was people simply didn’t get the products fast enough.

The solution? – Well it was a difficult one at first as none of us could just send all day packing orders, and the business itself wasn’t profitable enough to pay someone else to do so, instead we decided to think to the future and scale. The solution was to utilise Amazon and their FBA projects. FBA allows amazon to store, pack and deliver your item for you, they take a fee but as long as your product is over £10, the fee is usually only £3.20. This means that if it costs you below £1.80 to produce, which it did in our case, we could still make £5 profit per sale. Get up to 20 sales a day and that’s a cool £100 / day which was our short term aim.

This made customers a lot more “impressed” by the process of purchasing and hence had a knock-on effect for the business in its entirety. By this I mean people started telling others and the word of mouth knock-on effect came along nicely! Also reviews started to flow in from Amazon, most of these being extremely positive. Reviews also sell products, so these reviews led to more reviews which lead to more sales and so on! The knock on compound effect is for real! Start the ball rolling and it will keep rolling as long as you started it down the right way!

Simplifying the business was the best way, people could see the price list for each model and then call or email to book, that’s it! That’s all he needed! So we stripped the site and made it painfully simple to use. Then we worked on ranking him in Google itself for the keywords that got the most searches, this was a lot easier with a simple site and Google responded well with some great ranking increases. This mixed with old school marketing methods and PPC ads was enough to generate £10,000 worth of sales a month! That’s a £120,000 per year business in 5 months, not a bad return on time investment!

Strange title but I will explain in-depth why search engine optimisation for industries that are considered “ugly” or “boring” is the most effective marketing strategy and why all business owners should invest as must as possible into marketing their site on the search engines. Although SEO is the most effective long term, there is nothing wrong with using PPC for shorter term gains. I personally recommend to clients to do both, utilise ads and the organic results and you can get even more traffic, once you rank 1st or in the top 3 for your pre-selected keywords you can reduce the amount of ads you run to increase your profit margins! It’s easy except it takes a lot of money and time.

I recently finished a digital marketing campaign for garage shelving UK, as you can guess this was a site that sold garage racking, shelving, pallet racking and all of that stuff. The competition was crazy high, Amazon, B&Q, Homebase, Argos, Tufferman all on page 1. We were currently on page 2. Trying to outrank these guys was going to take some funds and some smart SEO. We knew links and great on-page would do it (like anything else) so we went to work.

The reason SEO is so much more important for boring industries, such as the garage shelving one (Yawn.) Is that people don’t bother shopping around. There is not really many styles of shelving and as long as you set-up your site well and its easy to purchase and your prices are what people “expect” to pay, they will just buy from you without really looking around for a better deal or a different product. This is the same for local industries as well, people would rather save time than money when it comes to generic or less interesting products. And as a result ranking in the top 3 results for competitive keywords, means this traffic converts extremely well!! I’m talking 10% range.

For our example we had around 10,000 per month across 4-5 primary keywords. Ranking 1st for all of these keywords would lead to around 4,000 organic searchers a month. At a 10% conversion rate that’s 400 sales a month and at an average customer check-out value of £200, that’s 400 x 200 = £80,000 a month in sales. The company was currently only doing around £5,000 in sales from some longer tail keywords and PPC and social media ads.

I explained the situation to them, that the conversion rate for this search engine traffic is worth more than what you are spending on social. As a result we completely scraped the social media campaign which opened up around £500 / month for seo. He also introduced another £500 a month for SEO. Which meant we had £1,000 per month for 6 months to work with. Although we aren’t ranking 1st (or anywhere near) at the moment, we are onto page 1 and the conversion rates are still holding around 8%. 1st would likely lead to £80k of sales!

It seems every year we hear about some huge Google change that is going to rock the SEO and digital marketing community. But people forget that even the massive Penguin updates affected about 3% of the web. That’s a very low propotion of websites, even if you were a black hat SEO, the chances are you didn’t get affected as long as you weren’t trying to game the system “too hard” as it were.

In 2016 and beyond though the emphasis is definately on content and content distribution. Creating truly awesome content is what you should be looking to do from now on, but distributing that content is equally, if not more important. For example the infographic below (on the same subject digital marketing in 2016) by Bulldog Social Media is an example of great content distributed well!

Once they’d created the infographic the company decided that simply posting it on the site would result it not a lot of traffic or social traction, so instead of simply posting it, they created a tailored blog post, optimised with some relevant keywords and got going.

Once live the team utilised their social following on twitter, Facebook and Linkedin as well as reaching out to industry experts to see if they liked it and would like to share, this is manually creating the “viral” effect, which in business industries is pretty much impossible to do automatically.

This lead to hundreds of retweets, some great traction on Facebook and a number of people embedding the infographic on their website (such as here.) All in all the post gained a huge amount of traffic and some high quality natural backlinks as a result, this is the future of digital marketing and SEO!

LOCAL SEO: All you need to know

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization or SEO means to make the most out of a website to have a rank in an industry at a certain area. For example if a business only has a single location then that certain business will only want to have customers in the area where it is located. There is no point in nationally campaigning for your SEO because the highest possible return of investment would only be ranking high in locational keywords.

Local keywords have a general format which is “industry location” or to search for a local service in your area. An example of this format would be “real estate London”. There are different varieties for these keywords but since search volumes usually tend to be low for the local industries, getting the highest possible rank for this kind of keyword format is a primary target.

You need to be careful when you choose your keywords. In any SEO campaign, keyword research is among the important parts. Why? These keywords have the ability to make a campaign or break it even before it has begun. If you aim too high you might end up losing your money and investment. But if you aim too low, you might get no traffic even if you have managed to rank for all of your keywords since no one is searching for them.

Instead of aiming to rank with easy keywords, go for ones that will be most profitable for your industry and location. This will make a bigger ROI when you increase your rank. SEO has gone beyond being just a knowledge or time game. If you do not have any budget for your SEO campaign, then you will end up working a lot of hours trying to achieve the rankings that you want otherwise, you will not get any rank at all. Wisely calculate your ROI and create a money and time budget before you start campaigning.

Ranking Factors for Local SEO

• Business signals refer to information that is typically in your website like type of business and location.
• External location signals refer to name, address and phone number.
• On-page signal refers to the text and code on the website.
• Link signals are backlinks that point to your website and the relevance and quality of the sites they are from.
• Review signals are important. The review that you get from the Google business page will determine a small part of the rankings.
• Social signals are only a small percentage of the ranking, but it is still important to have accounts on social media sites.
• Mob or Beh signals refer to the click through rate of the website that you have and its mobile optimization. Make sure that you have a site that is optimised for mobile use. It is also good to have titles and a description that can get one’s attention. If you do, people are more likely to choose your site over your competitors even if you are not listed as number one.
• Search results that are personalised.