Slides from a seminar & workshop held at HBV Enterprise, Hackney, UK as part of the ERDF funded eInnovate Programme.

1. eInnovate The successful SME website Presentation by SpencerStones Consulting

2. eInnovate Delivered by: In partnership with: Part funded by:

3. Today’s Agenda Sales and Marketing elements of todays Business Website Session 1 Break (20 mins) Session 2 Building Trust in your Digital Brand Break (20 mins) Session 3 Search Marketing – the basics

5. The importance of the Marketing Mix online & offline working together.

6. Growing an Audience for Marketing Online

7. Email Marketing

8. Blogging for Business

9. Search Engine Marketing beyond the basics – projecting your ROI.

10. Social Media Marketing tools

12. Online Promotion

13. Online Virtual Merchandising – Products & Services

14. Online Sign-ups and online accounts

15. Online Market Places – Amazon, Google eBay, Ali Baba

16. Taking online orders for goods and services

17. Online Payments for goods and services

18. Web Security - PCI DDS Standards - what you need to know and implement

20. Session 1 Sales and Marketing elements of todays Business Website

21. Address Your Audience - Think about their perceptions of the content you create! Before we get into the guts of what sales and marketing content should be on your website, let’s take a moment to ask 'who is this web site for?' Do not forget your audience; every piece of content on your website is there for one reason only, to be read and consumed by your audience to promote and grow your business. Your company website is a marketing tool and nothing else! Well now, that’s not strictly true; if you have a transactional site, or the site itself actually delivers the service you provide, then there is an argument that says it’s a point of sale and your fulfillment house as well.

22. Service and Product Descriptions – Part 1 be short and to the point, highlighting key benefits of the service. You need to answer all of the following questions in each of your Service Descriptions: Purpose – What is the purpose of the service or product? Who? – Who is this service for? Who is eligible for this service? Why? – Why would a customer need to purchase this service? What? – What are the benefits of the service? How? – How is the service delivered? When? – What time frame is the service delivered over? Contact – How do I contact someone about this service? Price – Not always appropriate if you have tiered pricing Related Services – What other services could be of value? Up sell of service – Can you up sell the service? Down sell of service – Can you down sell the service? Testimonials and reviews of the service

23. Service and Product Descriptions – Part 2 You are writing these service descriptions for the website audience, not for some internal audit. Keep it clear, short and detailed enough to engage interest with the potential client/customer. Many websites fail to convey in a timely manor the content that they were created to market and serve. You need to focus your Product and Service Descriptions to be clear and to the point. You need to make them instantly accessible to your audience, either by having them on your home page, or one click away with a very prominent link to click

24. About Us - A perfect opportunity to market your business! Part 1 It’s not just your potential consumers that you need to cater for with the 'about us' element, you will also need to think about your second audience – the supplier. How do you write an 'about us' section: You need to keep it short, punchy and above all, engaging. The 'about us’ section is an excellent place to build buy-in from your audience, whether supplier or consumer. The more you express and connect emotionally with the reader at this point, the less work you have to do to convert the audience to your cause – selling goods and supplying services!

25. About Us - A perfect opportunity to market your business! Part 2 Get personal. Show the reader who works for the company. You don't need to give out any real personal information, but the more you open up and engage, the more the reader will associate with you. Try to think of the company as an individual, one that is trying to impress and build a relationship with someone they just met on a first date. You need to emotionally connect to get to the next base! Oh, and do not forget the 'about us' page provides you with an opportunity to engage your audience with a 'call to action!'

26. Contact Us - A great place to engage with your customers! Part 1 Why have a 'contact us' page, other than to just give your address, phone numbers and email addresses? The contact us page also gives you an opportunity to engage with customers, get additional marketing messages across and get your customers to buy into your social media content. What do you want users to do when viewing your contact us page? There are certain items that must be on your contact us page from a legal point of view if you are selling goods and services in the UK. It is useful to think about how you will manage the communications initiated from your contact us page.

27. Contact Us - A great place to engage with your customers! Part 2 Think about the different business processes that your business performs; accounts, customer service, returns, shipping, and supplier relationships. A form is a good way to engage the audience and capture communications online. You can then take advantage of this touch point! Think about how many touch points you have with your customers, and think about how at each touch point you can market your services and products to the customer. Add a map to your contact us page, detailing your locations and service areas. This will help customers find your business and help you be clear and open; this builds trust as the audience connect to a physical presence behind your online presence.

28. Marketing Support - Your website is a key link in the sales and marketing chain! - Part 1 Your web page is a large part of your sales and marketing efforts. From a sales point of view all websites act as a sales support tool, and in some cases are where sales transactions take place. From a marketing point of view, think about how your website supports your marketing efforts. Your website also acts as an important anchor of your strategy to build your data warehouse Your home page is an excellent touch point! Add an 'email sign up' here, and make sure you are clear to the consumer about what they are signing up for e.g. newsletter, promotions and how they can unsubscribe.

29. Marketing Support - Your website is a key link in the sales and marketing chain! - Part 2 You need to think about the different needs of consumers arriving at your website after they have received marketing communication from you. Each communication or group of communications should have their own landing page. With a landing page tied into your marketing messages you can respond to the conversation that started when you communicated to the consumer, and the consumer engaged with the marketing message. If you have sent an email and you are talking about a promotion, build a landing page on your website to support that marketing message and welcome the customer to the site by confirming to them that you are listening and say thank you for expressing an interest in your promotions to then. Give them more information about the promotion, and make sure that you put in a call to action to capture their interest, whether it be a sign-up form for a service, request a call back from you, or purchase a product by placing it a shopping basket.

30. Marketing Support - Your website is a key link in the sales and marketing chain! A company with a website is now expected by many consumers to have a Social Media presence, and your website needs to support this marketing channel with clear ways for your audience to follow you on these channels. Social Media is also a very useful way to get content from your website, your marketing, to audiences, which in turn can help you build your data warehouse and sales pipeline. Ensure that every piece of content on your website that has the potential to act as a piece of marketing can be shared by your audience with their friends and followers on Social Media. PR, love it or hate it, can be a really effective way of getting your message out to your audience. Make sure there is a clearly defined area of your site that supports your PR efforts.

31. Managing the customer relationship online Successful business websites work hard to start, build and manage relationships with customers. The more Customer Relationship Management (CRM) your website can take care of, the more opportunities to leverage touch points you can create, and the better relationship you can build with your client base. A tried and trusted solution to CRM online is to allow customers and potential customers to log in to your site to manage the information you hold on them, view their past sales, and manage the information and marketing they wish to receive from you. Your customer service team can refer to this information in their dealings with clients and can add to it when talking to and interacting with clients by updating information, and adding notes about the client’s needs requests.

32. Legal Compliance There are a number of Legal issues when selling and promoting goods and services online that need to be addressed. Your website needs to comply with these, and you need to be clear with your audience where they can find policies and disclaimers for your sales policy, your privacy policy, using the website, and company registration details. Consider taking expert advice on these pages as they may end up having a large impact on your business if you get them wrong.

33. The Second Audience - Don't you forget about them! Not every visitor to your website is interested in purchasing services or goods from you. You need to think about segmenting your audience. Visitors looking for recruitment opportunities need to be messaged in different ways to your main audience. Other audiences that need special treatment may include charities, investment houses, stakeholders, shareholders, partnerships with other businesses.

34. Human, Search Engine, and Social Media Optimisation What is optimisation? Well, from a website point of view, you could say that it is the process of engineering your website, its contents and the way in which the audience consume it to get your marketing delivered in an effective and consistent way. When optimising your website, you need to think about the different audiences that consume content from the site. Humans being individuals consume your content in different ways, and have diffident needs in order to consume that content. Different browsers, platforms and devices are used by humans with different skills, mindsets and abilities. Think about how these audiences interact with your site's Navigation, Pages, Site Search and Images (humans and search engines can be blind or short sighted!). Some audiences such as search engines can see behind the content of your site, and spend time looking at the structure of your site. You may need to think about serving different content to different audiences on different devices. Many sites have mobile versions targeted at different mobile devices.

36. Product & Service Descriptions – Be clear about the services you provide.

37. About Us – Connect emotionally, get across your company values.

38. Company History, including why the company was started.

39. Contact Us – Engage with your clients.

40. Build Trust with Trust Flags – Past and current Clients, Reviews, Testimonials.

41. Support for Social Media – Follow and Share (including share by email).

42. Include a Press Page, or add a press section to contact us page.

43. Customer Relationship Management – Log in for individual content and pricing.

44. Legal Pages – Sales Policy, Privacy Policy, Website usage policy.

45. Address the second audience – Your Suppliers, Recruitment, Stakeholders.

46. Sell, Sell, Sell - Up Sell, Cross Sell, Differentiate products and services.

47. Human Optimisation – Navigation, Cross Browser, Cross Platform/Device, Accessibility.

48. Search Engine Optimisations – Tags (Descriptions, Keywords, Page Titles), URLs.

49. Social Media Optimisation – Follow and Share support including send via email.

50. Landing Pages for your Ad campaigns to convert interest into a sale or following.

52. Can your website be trusted? Who is this company or organisation? Can I trust their opinion? Is the service they provide a good one? Will they take my money and run? Are the products they sell any good? You need to address these if you are going to get your message, service or products across to them!

53. How can I get my audience to trust my website? To resolve this question and to show your audience (visitors) that: You are who you say who are, you are good at what you do and you will deliver on service and products you sell them. To do this you need to have trust flags - these are pieces of content on your site that jump out at the audience and says “We're to be trusted”.

54. How you look is a key factor in building trust with your audience! The first point that people most often subconsciously make a judgement on is 'Quality of Design.’ Before the average visitor to your site reads any content from your home page in any detail, they will have already made a judgement about you and your company based on the quality of design of your site (Graphics, Colours, Layout.) This process happens in the first second or two that a visitor looks at your site. A bad site design flags up trust issues before a visitor has any other tangible way, such as by reading content, to trust you. Do yourself a favour and remember that in this case you are what you look like!

55. Trusted testimonials and reviews help build website trust! Before consumers part with their time and money, they want to know that the product or service they are buying is a good one. This is where you can deploy the “Trusted Testimonial”. Alot of savvy consumers these days are increasingly cynical about testimonials on organisations' websites. The piece of content you put there to gain the potential consumers' trust can itself make you seem untrustworthy. So how do you get your “Trusted Testimonial” trusted? Well, the best way is to get the trust of a major brand to back up the testimonial! The web is now full of review sites that will review everything from your website to your delivery of service and/or products. The trick here is to get your consumers to place their review on a third party site that you can quote and link to from your website in order to get the consumer to trust the review to trust you!

56. Show your audience that your website is a secure place to transact business! In order to provide a service or product, you need to get paid for it! People do not like handing their details out over the internet; they are concerned that they will get ripped off and that their personal details will be all over the internet for all to see. You need to get the message across to your consumers that you care about their security and their personal details; you must establish a rapport with the client here. Have a privacy policy that tells clients exactly what data you store, why you need it and what you are going to use it for. Make sure that your site uses an SSL certificate and uses it to form a secure connection when transferring sensitive Be sure to make the consumer aware that you are using an SSL certificate. Most of the providers of SSL certificates will let you use their site seal to display on your site. These seals act as trust flags and work wonders in breaking down the consumers perceived barriers to online payment.

57. Build trust by emotionally connecting your brand with your audience! These days people want more than a service or product, they want to purchase it from a trusted brand! If you are not a high street behemoth or a world renowned service provider, how the hell do you gain trust in your brand? You can start by telling people about the company, why it has the authority and brand values to deliver services or products, why your products and services are as good as, if not better then the big boys. Write a few short paragraphs on why you love to deliver services and, or products to people. Connect emotionally with your audience, and trust is not far behind.

58. Be clear about the route the consumer's money takes from their bank account to yours! If you take payments online, trusted credit card symbols are a good move – provided you take the card in question. Tell people who is going to be processing the payment, and what payment gateway are you using. All payment gateways let their clients use their logos on the client’s site, it helps them promote their services and it helps you by association with a big brand that is trusted!

59. Get awards for your products, services and website to build authoritative trust! These days, every product or service has a whole industry of people wanting to give you an award for it. Google your service or product plus the word “awards”. If you can get an award logo, badge, or medal on your home page you could see your sales increase overnight

60. Build trust by affiliating with a trusted brand! Look at ways you can join affiliations and place their logos, badges, or seals on your site. These affiliations carry trust points with your consumers!

61. Trust comes from truth! Be careful about your site content. Never exaggerate or mislead your audience into believing you are something you’re not! If you have the best product in the world, the cheapest price, the greatest service, can you prove it? If not, do not say it! You’re using the internet through your website to showcase your goods and services. Your audience is going to use the internet to research your goods and services, and they will check up on you! Never hide a bad review unless it is offensive to your audience. Remove reviews that contain racist, homophobic, sexist, ageist and bad language, as people will associate your brand with them. If you are open in your communication in responding to a bad review, and more importantly if you needed to put right a misunderstanding or a bad job, people will trust you more than if you just ignored the review in the first place.

63. Display trusted testimonials and reviews next to your products and services

64. Show that your website is a secure place to do business

65. Emotionally connect your brand with your target audience

66. Be clear how you process payments

67. Get awards for excellence in service, best product and best website

68. Gain trust by affiliating with well known brand names in your industry or sector.

70. What is Search Marketing? Search marketing is a cornerstone of digital marketing that utilities online search tools such as Google, Yahoo and Bing together with peoples' desire to find content on the internet. The aim of search marketing is to place a piece of content into the results of a query generated by an individual typing keywords in to a search engine that is trying to answer their query in the fastest time and in the most relevant way. That content is your marketing message, and you should care not only about getting it into the results, but also about getting it to the top of the results and making the content that is displayed in the results set relevant, engaging, and desirable to the audience you are targeting. Remember - Search engines are rigorous about which websites they list and in what order. Their prerogative is to list the most relevant links in the fastest times.

71. What types of Search Marketing are there ? Part 1 There are essentially two types of search; paid for and non paid for. 1) Natural search (also known as organic, and algorithmic search), is the original search type. Results are entirely organic in nature; that is, a search engine has not received payment in exchange for placement. 2) Sponsored search (also known as pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-performance and keyword advertising) is an option for advertisers to 'pay per click' to their website. It is based on a bid-for-keywords model in exchange for priority placement. You can also opt to pay Google per impression on most search engines. An Impression is an instance of your ad appearing in the search results. Typically you would pay per thousand impressions, or multiples of.

73. Personalised Search – Search results customised based on past search behaviour.

74. Image Search – Search results that display only images from web sites.

75. Video Search – Search results that display only videos from web sites, including YouTube.

76. Social Search – Search results are from your friends and trusted resources

77. Product Search – Search results are products with price and item description

78. Mobile Search – A modified version of search engines available on smartphones.

80. Link popularity – It’s not just about Key Words! The search engines want to see other sites linking to you - this gives them more confidence to rate your content highly. Effectively, links makes for a 'worthy' site. The more links there are to the site, the more worthy, and the more times the spiders will visit and take fresh copies of your pages. Link popularity needs to be cultivated. It needs to be encouraged and propagated. Raise awareness of the "link proposition" through viral marketing and press releases. This process is often refereed to as "a link building campaign”. Links to your site are the equivalent of "word of mouth" advertising in the search marketing world.

81. How to optomise your website for natural search (SEO) - Search Engine Optomisation Ensure the site is navigable - site maps and clear links to other pages will help achieve this. Think about the words the user would type into a search engine to find your pages, and weave them into the copy. Make the content relevant, honest and information-rich. Structure the content as best as you can with headers, sub-headers and highlighted keywords. Use text instead of images to display important names, content or links - spiders don't recognise the content contained in an image. Focus on building a quality website before looking for ways to improve your search engine ranking, take a careful and objective look at your website. If you want to achieve and keep your top search engine ranking, you have to stay relevant by constantly updating your site. The best strategy is to provide useful, well-written content on all of your Web pages. Segment and target. Even without sophisticated personalisation technology, the web allows you to easily target your messages, making them more relevant to users.

82. Competitor Analysis - Anything you can do, I can do better! Find out what your competitors are doing on the Web. Analyseeach of your competitors site. How does each site help tell the world about that company's products or services? Are they easy to use, do they have better navigation? Are they integrated with the company's other marketing efforts?

84. Find out the top search phrases for your business, and use the highest-volume keywords in your copy throughout your site.

85. Make sure your site is SEO ready. The page title, meta description, alt image descriptions, heading and subheading (h1, h2) attributes, and anchor text in links is vitally important real estate in the search marketing world!

86. Make every page of your site unique: as well as original content, each page should have its own topic, title, and page-specific keywords.

87. Make sure your keywords and copy are relevant to your audience and the product/service you are trying to market.

88. Check your site for speed. Speed is an important factor in the ranking algorithm.

90. What about Ad copy? With sponsored search, choosing the best keywords is important, but perfecting the 30 words of ad copy, just below the link, matters just as much, if not more. The position of a keyword-targeted ad on the search results page is calculated by the click-thru rate of the ad, the ad’s display URL, the relevance of the keyword and the ad copy to the search query, and the price that is bid. The top five or six positioned ads get the highest percentage of clicks.

91. Choosing Keywords Traditionally marketers bid on one or two term keywords (e.g. fast car), while searchers type in three or more keywords per search. Three word plus terms are generally the cheapest per click with higher conversion rates (depending on the keyword and the quality of the landing page). Add long tail keywords to your account, the phrases individually are unlikely to account for a great deal of searches, but as a whole can provide significant traffic (e.g. fast car for rent in London). Create a base list: Open up a spreadsheet or write down every single thing you can think of about what you do. What would people search for? What are the different products or services you offer? If you’re having trouble, go through your website. Pick out industry terms, brand names of your products, more general terms, etc. You don’t need every single term that someone could possibly search for at this point, but make sure that you at least cover all the areas that you cover in your website.

92. Choosing Keywords – part 2 Expand your list: The Google Keyword Tool is free, and it works! Make sure you check [Exact] under 'match types' on the left hand side to ensure that Google doesn’t include the search traffic for other words or synonyms. If the terms are exact match, the search traffic it shows for a specific keyword is the traffic for that exact phrase, no more, no less. When you enter a keyword into the keyword tool, it will generate out several keyword suggestions that all (more or less) relate to the keyword you entered. Scan through the list and check the box next to keywords that are relevant to your products or services. Now enter the second keyword from your base list, and so on. If the keywords that the tool finds are too broad or irrelevant, check the box “only show ideas closely related to my search terms” and it will give you less options, but keywords that are more relevant.

93. Choosing Keywords – part 3 Organise: You should now have a pretty substantial list of keywords! Now you just need to organize them. Split up the keywords first by common sense – products or types of services, or different terminologies, whatever makes the most sense to you. Now you need to think about writing ad copy for each set of keywords. Google uses a concept called ad groups. You can use these groups to write more than one ad per set of keywords Lets look at a live demo!

94. Writing and Testing Ad Copy It is better not to create ads on a blank canvas, instead consider opening your web browser and enter the search term. This will give you an idea of what ad copy is already being used for a search term. Don’t be all things to all people! It is better to create focused, concise and unique propositions in your ads than generic claims. Your ad is a window to your site. The message in your ad needs to be consistent with the language on your website.

95. Terminology for Search Marketing SEM - Search Engine Marketing. As the name implies, SEM is the process of advertising through search engines. It is an umbrella term that includes SEO and Pay-per-click advertising or PPC. Whereas SEO is a means of optimizing websites to appear in search engine results, PPC is purchasing clicks from search engines. Backlink – Backlinks are links found on another website that leads to your own. Building backlinks is thus important because it affects a site’s PageRank, which consequently affects its search rankings. PageRank – Created by Google, PageRank is an algorithm the search engine uses to determine important pages on the web. For example, if Site A has a backlink to Site B, it is reflective of its trust to Site B. The more links leading to a site, the more it is deemed important. Linkbait – While linkbaits are often thought to be written materials, they can also come in video, photo, quiz formats, and others. Linkbaits are web contents published on blogs with the primary aim of creating backlinks to a certain website.

96. Terminology for Search Marketing - part 2 Anchor Text – Think of anchor texts as the face of hyperlinks in webpages. Anchor links contain backlinks and are clickable on websites. Google associates keyword-rich anchor texts to a website’s content, thereby making them a useful tool for search engine optimisation. Title Tags – Do not underestimate title tags. Title tags are the first thing viewers can see upon clicking a web page because they appear on the top of the browser upon navigation. Title tags are one of the most important factors in Google’s algorithm which is why they should contain unique but relevant keywords. Keyword Density – A particular page’s keyword density is a formula used by search engines that calculates the number of times a certain keyword should be used, depending on the total number of words in a web page. Keyword Stuffing – A black hat technique. Keyword density used to be an important factor in Google’s algorithm which is why practitioners artificially inflated keyword density in web pages. This search engine optimisation practice can get a website penalised by Google. Web Crawler – Used interchangeably with the terms “search bot” or “spider”, web crawlers are computer programs used by search engines to scour the web for new links and webpages.

98. Keywords are important, but content QUALITY is more important.

99. Search engines don’t read your content – humans do!

101. Your Website and Content Structure need to be refined for SEO - Page Titles, Page Descriptions, Highlighted Text, Headers and Sub Headers.

102. Group sets of Keywords together, then write Ad Copy that is relevant to that set of Keywords