Hard to spell, easy to work with

• 11 August 2009
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

The Panel

Jonathan Crossfield: Netregistry
Expertise: Online content

Michael Fox: Google
Expertise: Search engine optimisation

Stephen Murphy: payperclick.net.au
Expertise: Search engine marketing

Josh Mehlman: Moderator

From zero to hero

Josh Mehlman: Clive, tell us about your business.

Clive Flax: We are a systems integrator and we've been going for about 10 years. We provide infrastructure services for your servers, firewalls, routers, internet connectivity and workstations. We focus on small to medium business customers, anywhere from 20 users up to about 500. There are a lot of companies competing in the market, but there are not many that have our skills.

Josh: You've recently started revamping your website. What problems were you having with it?

Clive: Our major problem is zero traffic.

Jonathan Crossfield: How long did it have zero traffic?

Clive: For about nine years! When I started the business about 10 years ago my main priority was to get clients in the door and I didn't really have time to do anything on my website. We recently partnered with another company and they started sending us leads from their website for integration projects and I was quite shocked at the number of leads we were getting from them.

I started to realise that this would be a really effective way to grow my business. We have tried direct marketing campaigns, emails, phone calls, brochures and mailouts, but they haven't worked at all.

Target customers when they're looking to buy

Stephen Murphy: Obviously, with some of your customers, you might have a CIO or IT manager and they might be very specific in what they're looking for, the particular names of products and so on.

Jonathan: But smaller companies are less likely to have a designated IT manager. You're more likely to be talking to the guy who is responsible for IT along with half a dozen other duties within the business.

Josh: Like me!

Jonathan: Exactly. If Josh had a problem, how would he try to solve it online? It wouldn't be by typing in the name of a specific server or router.

Stephen: I think your customers will also have two different mindsets. Some will know what they need; but you also have trigger events for people who don't even know they need your product and services. They might be thinking, "I am going to move to a new office, it is a perfect time to get a new phone system" or "I am trying to reduce my costs".

Jonathan: This could also be why your previous campaigns have not met your expectations. If you target 500 people, only a small fraction of them would be at that trigger point.

Marketing to them online turns that on its head. That website is actually the biggest acquisition tool you've got. The people who are at that trigger point are looking for solutions, so you want to make sure that's when they find your site.

Simply the best?

Josh: Clive, you've told us that you're a lot better at providing these services than many of your competitors, but how does your website communicate that?

Clive: It's a hard one. When you speak to most IT companies, they will tell you that they're the best.

Michael Fox: I think it's a really fun problem to solve and there are people who have done this really well that you could take a lead from.

There is a guy, Gary Vaynerchuk, who is a wine expert and an entrepreneurial guru. He wants to sell himself as a wine expert to promote his online retail wine business. So he has built this whole TV show around wine tasting. And he is just super passionate and engaging. That builds him up as being a wine expert, so now when I think of wine I think of him, and lots of people in the US buy wine from him.

If you're targeting the specialist IT person, you could do a video talking about this wonderful Cisco router and all the different ways you can implement it to achieve different goals.

If you are targeting the 20-50 person businesses, go through the benefits of installing a VoIP system compared to your normal phone system, and the cost savings you get from that and the process of doing it. When Josh is making that decision, he will see you are an expert and you won't have given him enough information to try and implement it himself, so he will call you up and have you implement it for him.

Jonathan: I always advise people to steer well away from marking excellent customer service as their value proposition. Every customer assumes good service as part of the transaction in the first place. I'm not going to pay you for bad customer service.

Go back to the customer and the goal they're trying to achieve. Let's say Josh is searching for ‘IP telephony', he will come up with all these companies saying, ‘"We sell this system, we sell that system, we are the best, we are Australia's number one". But he would click on the link that says "we can advise you on the best ways to do this" or "we can give you a no-obligation thingy-whatsit". Anything you can do to reduce risk or give confidence and control back to the customer will get you more sales conversions.

Keep your content ticking over

Stephen: I think you're starting to realise you need an ongoing content strategy. You want to get your site a good ranking in search engines, and we'll talk about that shortly, but to maintain that front-of-mind position, you have to produce content on an ongoing basis. There is a direct correlation between how often you publish new content and how often the Googlebot visits your site.

So part of this is coming up with a content structure. Ask yourself what content streams you want to build over time. And the other side of that is using your analytics tools to find out what gets the most interest and therefore is an area of content that needs to be further developed.

"By writing that content yourself, you are showing that you are the expert, the best in the market."

Then you've got options. For the CIOs and IT managers, they might be thinking about cloud computing and how it is going to save them a load of cash somewhere down the line. You could let them know the benefits and the pitfalls of cloud computing, is it something they should look into now or not? Or if you're really good at router optimisation, you might write your top seven tips to optimise your router to get best performance.

Michael: By writing that content yourself, you are showing that you are the expert, the best in the market.