I’ve been working with a client that I really like. This client came to me on the strength of several jobs I’ve done for other, similar companies which, of course, isn’t that unusual. Some clients appreciate that I know a particular sector and see that as a strength – it’s logical.

We’re now addressing a major piece of marketing material, so I wasn’t particularly concerned when he asked me to send over a copy of a similar piece I had written for another company. It’s reference, why not? Half the battle in marketing is knowing what everyone else is doing.

Imagine my horror when my client came back to me and declared that he intended to use my original document (written for another client, remember), change a few words here and there, publish and – quite possibly – be damned.

Morally, ethically and professionally this is just completely and utterly wrong. And I told him so, expecting him to see the error of his ways. But he argued his point. The other company in question is not a direct competitor as such, they are both working within specific – and separate – localised geographic areas. They both have essentially the same offer, the copy I wrote worked for the other company, why not for him?

I have to confess to being completely shocked by this attitude. We are talking about probably the most important piece of marketing he is about to produce and he wants to plagiarise the work that another company paid for. Payment, of course, is not the point. He is doing his business no favours whatsoever by taking this approach. Getting to know the market in which you operate is essential, but so too is finding ways to be different, to develop your own distinctive tone of voice. What works for one business will not necessarily work for another. In my client’s case, the social demographic of his audience is different to my previous client’s – he is operating in an altogether more affluent area and his audience, albeit with the same needs to be satisfied, is far more middle class and well educated than the audience profile I worked to before (ethnic minorities, low wage earners).

As I write I am struggling to get out of this mire, and can only hope I can make my client see sense, to realise that producing a carbon copy of another company’s material will not differentiate his business. And, in any case, how can he possibly use exactly the same words to promote his business and be genuinely passionate about his offer. Wish me luck!

And finally launching the site is a massive milestone event, a momentous moment for any small business owner. I know, I’ve done it myself and helped countless other small business owners achieve this.

But it’s amazing just how many small (and even larger!) business owners I speak to who feel that a website should be done as cheaply as possible or see it as a one-off exercise – one more tick on the ‘must do’ list. This is one of the BIGGEST marketing mistakes you will ever make.

A website that is approached in this way will undoubtedly turn into a pretty parking lot that fails to deliver leads or generate sufficient sales for your business. Every business exists to make sales, so your website has to be a fundamental tool in your marketing toolkit. In fact, it’s one of the most important.

No small business currently trading or even starting out in 2012 can afford to take such a blinkered approach to having an online presence. This doesn’t just apply to e-tailers but to all businesses with an online presence – whether yours is a service or product business. If you have a website now, it needs to deliver!

Your most powerful marketing tool

As your website will be one of your largest marketing and business start-up investments, it’s vital to get it right first time.

To make sure your website doesn’t gather virtual online dust and doesn’t generate the leads or sales your business deserves, take a look at my top 3 tips below:

1. Start with your end goal in mind

You need to clearly define what actions you want your website visitor to take and build the content, navigation and engagement elements around this to support it and aid conversion to this goal(s).

If you fail to do this, you will end up with a site that might look good but will probably never support your commercial objectives or contribute to your long-term business success.

Write down what you need your website visitors to do to start the relationship with your business and/or buy a product or service from you.

Map out clearly the steps in the process that will lead to a successful outcome for your business – for many of us, this is either a warm lead or an actual sale.

Some web designers (not all I hasten to add, and most certainly not the lovely web associates I have selected to work with) can be a hindrance to achieving this. They are, after all, passionate about design and can often spend more time on the look of the website than they do on search engine optimisation and effective techniques to aid visitor conversion. Or perhaps worse, they just get carried away with the latest whizz-bang fad in development (the past obsession with using Flash or snazzy animated landing pages springs immediately to mind!) – these things often just annoy your website visitors and send them straight back to the search engine to look elsewhere.

2. Invest in your future success

Build the website you will need in 3-5 years time NOW! You must understand your future requirement of your site. Nobody has a crystal ball but it is vital to consider your long-term business plan so you can choose the right technical platform to deliver this over the next 3-5 years.

Rarely do freebie templates and website creation sites deliver this requirement. Don’t do it on the cheap using free templates, proprietary website creation sites that may not even be around in 2-3 years time (you then lose your most precious marketing asset), or get a ‘friend’ to build static web pages that will limit your ability to update your website weekly and add valuable content as you develop your business. It really is false economy.

I have met so many business owners who took this approach and within a few months (typically under a year), they realised they had a white elephant that was holding them back, forcing them to start again and incurring much more expense in the long run.

3. Get to know every website visitor, on every page

If somebody visits your website and leaves without completing one of your goals or progressing a little down the pathway to conversion, you have failed. It is such a waste – someone found your business, had a look around and walked out.

If you had a physical bricks and mortar shop would you ignore potential customers visiting your shop and not interact with them? Would you let them walk out without understanding a bit more about how you could help them or satisfy their problem or need? So many websites replicate this offline experience so well!

It’s a true recipe for online failure. Make sure you build analytics and data capture into your website on every page, so you understand visitors’ behaviour and what content they do or don’t interact with, and capture their details to enable you to start to build the relationship.

Think back to your goals and the map you created of the steps involved to convert a website visitor or repeat ‘lurker’ into an actual customer.

And this is only the beginning!

If you want to find out more about building a successful online business, why not come along to the BIG eCommerce Conference on 29th May where I’ll be revealing five steps that every small business owner needs to work through to achieve online success.

I’ll share my step-by-step approach to guide you through the myriad of marketing techniques and the online marketing information overload that many of you have told me you suffer with.

This event has a great line up of online marketing experts, it’s going to be a fantastic day for business owners to supercharge their business performance online. I’d love to see you there!

Over Easter, I got away for a week’s skiing, staying with my family in a shared chalet. The early part of the week was spent getting to know the other guests and, not surprisingly, dinner conversation would often turn to the question of ‘so what do you do for a living?’

This question tends to make me shudder. I was surrounded by a property developer, lawyer, several teachers, a few accountants, a management consultant amongst others, all of which sound like proper grown-up jobs, ones to which you can immediately nod your head in understanding. Even secretary to an MP seemed like a plausible occupation.

But when I said I was a copywriter I simply got blank stares, a very blunt “so what does that mean?” or the usual confusion that I do something terribly interesting in the world of copyright protection and patenting. And actually, trying to qualify my profession by saying that I write brochures and websites didn’t necessarily make things any clearer for some of my companions.

It hit me just how often this happens, that copywriting is one of those jobs that goes on in the background. I don’t think any of the other guests would have given a second thought to the fact that someone (quite likely a professional copywriter) had spent time writing engaging and persuasive content for the website or holiday brochure from where they picked their ski holiday. It’s rather like the realisation I had when watching the BBC’s recent series on the London Underground, which introduced me (and I’m sure many, many others) to all those unseen workers who fulfil a whole raft of duties to keep the system up and running. Or, more romantically, like the fairies my mum always claimed would have to come and clear up after me (I was young, okay, although she was probably still saying it when I was a teenager!).

I’ve already admitted in an earlier post that I don’t know who writes what and that it doesn’t matter. But I have definitely failed to appreciate that outside of the marketing world, people believe that good copy obviously appears on page or on screen as if by magic! I can only hope that my fellow guests returned home a little more aware and might occasionally wonder how much work has gone into creating an ad, a flyer, the wording on a piece of packaging, a catalogue…

Are you aware of the new set of Social Reports released by Google?

In terms of building visibility and authority on the Web, which is what largely determines your search rankings, the value of what I call online PR and within that social media is growing by the day.

Up to now it’s been difficult to measure the effect of social media engagement through Google Analytics but now Google have just announced a new set of reports that will show you which social channels actually help to drive visitors to your site and which are directly or indirectly influential in achieving your goal conversions.

Here’s the Google Analytics Blog announcement about these now essential reports:

‘Measuring the value of social media has been a challenge for marketers. And with good reason: it’s hard to understand exactly what is happening in an environment where activity occurs both on and off your website. Since social media is often an upper funnel player in a shopper’s journey, it’s not always easy to determine which social channels actually drive value for your business and which tactics are most effective.

But as the social industry matures, marketers and web analysts need true outcome-oriented reports. After all, although social is growing in popularity, brand websites – not social networks – remain the place where people most often purchase or convert.

That’s why we’re releasing a new set of Social Reports within Google Analytics. The new reports bridge the gap between social media and the business metrics you care about – allowing you to better measure the full value of the social channel for your business. We wanted to help you with 3 things:

1. Identify the full value of traffic coming from social sites and measure how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions.
2. Understand social activities happening both on and off of your site to help you optimize user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs).
3. Make better, more efficient data-driven decisions in your social media marketing programs.

The Social Reports allow you to analyze all of this information together and see a more complete picture of social impact than often used today.’

And here’s a sample of the new Overview Report that shows a snapshot of Social Value:

The Overview report allows you to see at a glance how much conversion value is generated from your social channels. The Social Value visualization compares the number and monetary value of all your goal completions against those that resulted from social referrals – both as last interaction, and assisted.

A visit from a social referral may result in conversion immediately or it may assist in a conversion that occurs later on. Referrals that lead to conversions immediately are labeled as Last Interaction Social Conversion. If a referral from a social source doesn’t immediately generate a conversion, but the visitor returns later and converts, the referral is included as an Assisted Social Conversion.

I have been helping several of my clients over the last couple of weeks to set up their Google Analytics reporting for their new website. Having a new website up and running is very exciting and usually the fruits of several weeks (or months!) hard work to make it happen. But setting up your website tracking is a vital step (and it too often gets overlooked unless you have someone like me on your case! ), to help you measure how effective your new website is being as part of your overall marketing approach.

Did you know that if you view your own website, you will be counted as a visitor and perhaps you are the only visitor?! Let’s hope not! So one of the key things to set up is to make sure you are not counted in your own website traffic. Here’s how to do it…

How to exclude your own visits from your Google Analytics website tracking data

This is so simple to do – I love it!

Follow these simple steps to get a more accurate view of your website visits…

1. Firstly, visit this website to find your own IP address.

2. Access your Google Analytics account and then go to Admin (top right corner).

3. Click on the Filters tab (just below your Profiles).

4. Click on +New Filter button

5. Give your filter a name like ‘My own IP address’

6. Filter type: make sure you have selected Predefined filter

7. In Exclude: select from the drop down ‘traffic from the IP addresses‘ and then enter your IP address code.

8. Click Save.

Hey presto! You will now have more accurate website traffic reporting. Let’s hope you still have lots of visitors.

Note – some IP addresses are not static and change so this doesn’t work for everyone but worth looking into.

If you need to get more visitors and sales from your website, do get in touch to find out how to achieve this with less marketing effort and wasted money! I’ve helped hundreds of small businesses be more effective with their online marketing.

Email marketing is a proven marketing tool and put simply, it works! For many businesses it has shown to be more effective at delivering a measurable ROI and increased sales than social media. The powerful email analytics coupled with my favourite, Google Analytics, shows you who’s reading, who is sharing your emails with others, how many email subscribers have visited your website and which pages. It allows you to target and refine your email marketing activity further, identify those most interested in your business, and recognise what people find most interesting about your service or product.

Equally, social media allows people to connect and interact with you in a different way, so it’s important to look at using both and offer your audience choice on how they interact with your business. And it’s much easier to share social media based content with other people, so it’s hugely valuable in terms of getting more exposure and engaging in a deeper and personal way with your ideal customers.

So here are my top tips for integrating the two marketing methods and making it work really hard for you:

1. Promote your social networks in your email
If you’re using social media then you need to let people know. Make sure you add the relevant icons in you emails – and make them stand out!

2. Don’t be shy!
Including social icons is one thing, but telling people to do something with them is far better – if you want people to follow you on Facebook or Twitter, ask them. A call to action is a powerful marketing tool and can be highly effective.

3. Convert your social followers into email subscribers
Don’t forget that it can work both ways. If you have followers on Facebook who don’t subscribe to your email, it’s not that much of a challenge to alert them to your email sign-up page. The same goes for every single social media platform you use. If you send out an email newsletter to subscribers, add a post or tweet about the latest issue, make sure your followers know they’re missing out and how they can ensure they receive future editions straight to their Inbox.

4. Give them an incentive
We know we can all be lazy, even putting off a simple click of the mouse for another time – which then gets easily forgotten in our busy day. So give people a reason to click on the icons immediately. For instance, if you run a restaurant or café you could offer a half-price meal as a reward, selecting a random new subscriber every day for a week or if people ‘Like’ a photo of your latest food or drink offering on your Facebook page. There are strict rules about running promotions on Facebook so make sure you know about these!

5. Get them tweeting
Want to draw attention to something specific in your email campaign? Add a link that allows your readers to tweet and retweet about it, so ensuring that particular message travels further and to a new and wider audience.

6. If you have a blog, use it!
Your blog is your space, so use it to your advantage. Make sure you add regular reminders to encourage people to subscribe to your email. If they’re enjoy reading your blog already, it shouldn’t take much to convince them.

7. Add an email opt-in form on your Facebook page
Did you know about this function? It’s simple to do through Facebook Apps or you might be able to do it through your email marketing software provider. I use (and love!) Mail Chimp and they have a Facebook App to do just that. Simples!

Have you found an effective way of joining up your social media with your email marketing campaigns? Do tell me what has worked for your small business!

Here’s 4 simple tips to help you find topics to blog about:

1. Go Google

We all understand the importance of using keywords in online content for search engine optimisation (SEO), but have you ever thought about using those keywords as inspiration for a blog post topic? Try a Google search for a phrase you’d like your blog to rank for on the search engines. Now go to the left hand column and select ‘More search tools’ and from the new menu select ‘Related searches’. You will be presented with a list of related searches for your original keyword or phrase.

So if I put in marketing as a generic search term, I end up with about 20 related terms, such as ‘define marketing’, ‘free marketing’, ‘pr’. Just looking at this small list immediately gives me some ideas…

‘Everybody talks about how important it is, but how do you actually define marketing?’
‘Integrating PR into your marketing strategy’
‘Are you using free marketing tools to best effect?’

A great way to start bouncing blogging ideas around.

2. Use the Google Keyword Tool

Working with the Google Keyword tool is a different angle to the approach above. You’ll get a much more comprehensive list of search terms plus the relevant figures of how often a term is searched and the competition for the keyword or phrase. Watch out for those that indicate a high monthly search volume but low competition for the keyword, and then think about how you might use it to create a blog post topic. Your blog post is then more likely to rank highly and be found.

3. Wordtracker keyword questions

A perfect tool for anyone suffering from writers’ block. Wordtracker identifies the most popular questions people are entering into the search engines.

So, if I use ‘marketing’ again as my keyword the results include:
What is lead generation marketing?
What are examples of marketing tools?
What is affiliate marketing?

Any of them could be the start of a blog post and each keyword you enter gives you a list of 100 questions – try it for yourself and see what Wordtracker throws up.

4. Analyse this!

Do you use Google Analytics or the analytics embedded within your website’s back end to monitor the incoming traffic to your blog? If you notice that a particular keyword or phrase is driving traffic to your blog then it’s worth capitalising on it – think of how you can include it more and what other blog posts you can generate to develop around that theme. It’s a way of giving people exactly what they appear to want, and it’s easy to modify just through ongoing monitoring.

I know this blog post looks a little like a shameless plug for Google, but I love the fact that these tools are at your fingertips and are mostly free to use. It’s very easy to waste hours surfing the internet, aimlessly looking for inspiration when just a few minutes working with any of the tools I’ve mentioned could give you some great blog post ideas. The only problem then is having enough time to write all those fantastic blog posts!

Happy blogging!

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It’s very easy to get attached to those techniques you feel most comfortable with or to select those that you can actually afford to use. Just because they are cheap doesn’t mean they are right for your business and sometimes the marketing tools used aren’t even cheap – I hear of many small business owners still taking expensive one-off adverts in glossy magazines for example!

I appreciate that it can be incredibly difficult to take a step back from your business and review your marketing tactics with a critical and objective eye. But it’s worth the effort and it needs to be done, because if your marketing isn’t generating the sales or leads your business needs, then it’s quite possible that you’re not using the right techniques. They might be good techniques for another business, but if they’re not working for you, then it’s time to take stock and plan a new marketing approach.

So how do you know if you’re using the right marketing techniques or not?

Some people adopt a ‘spray and pray’ approach; they do some random marketing and hope for the best, get a few responses out of it if they’re really lucky and then repeat it or perhaps move on to the next marketing technique that takes their fancy, particularly social media. Tempting I know!

Your marketing won’t always hit the mark first time but continual misses are not good for your long-term survival. So to make sure your marketing strategy really hits the spot, you need to measure everything that you do. Identifying and targeting your audience is, of course, the first step and then you need to consider the message you want to send out and what action you want them to take (never underestimate the importance of a call to action!). Test it out on a smaller audience first and then analyse the response you get. If it’s overwhelmingly positive, then you can refine and repeat to improve your results further.

But if the response is poor and you get no enquiries or sales from it, you need to think again and make some refinements. Ask yourself if it’s the message or the method you’re using. You may need to test a few more times before you hit on the right mix. The point is, you will get there and you will find the right marketing techniques to suit your business – all those misses will be teaching you something important about how you should and shouldn’t market yourself, so don’t see them as failure.

To be a successful small business you need to become brilliant at marketing what you do, not just brilliant at what you do! You need to find the right marketing approach to achieve this.

Finding the right tools to help you

Whatever techniques work for you, there are always useful tools that will help you measure the success of your marketing.

For instance, if you’re using social media tools such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck are brilliant for identifying the tweets that have generated the most website traffic.

Using Goals in Google Analytics allows you to track the path Twitter visitors take, and whether they have completed any of your website goals, such as subscribing to your newsletter or which blog posts have been most successful in driving website traffic based on the keywords you have identified.

Tweetreach shows just how extensively Twitter has amplified your messages.

Social Mention can alert you to where your business is being talked about online.

Start using these kind of tools and you will build up a good picture of how your audience reacts to your marketing messages – remember, knowledge is power.

And don’t forget the simplest tracking method you can employ. Asking every new sales lead or enquiry, how they heard of or found your website or business.

Putting the theory into practice…

Here’s how it’s worked for one of my clients. Natasha Wiggins has run NW Make-Up for more than seven years. Specialising in hair and make-up for weddings, Natasha had done sufficiently well to build up a team of artists working across the South East, but she realised that to take her business to the next level she needed help with her marketing.

Now, Natasha is truly brilliant at getting out there and meeting great contacts. She’s a real people person, she’s great at networking and she gets involved in wedding fairs and meeting other wedding-related business introducers such as venues, photographers and bridal shops, but that’s just one way of connecting with her audience and she knew it wasn’t getting her the return she clearly wanted. Which is where I came in. I took a good long look at Natasha’s marketing strategy and could see where, without a huge amount of effort, she could make some significant improvements.

Upgrading her website onto a WordPress platform and refining the keywords used and her onsite search engine optimisation was the first building block we completed.

Next we moved onto the power of blogging as we agreed that it had a key part to play. Every month, Natasha and I plan and write blog posts around the topics and keywords we have identified as important drivers of website traffic and leads for the business. I then use the Google Analytics report to review how the blog posts have performed, which ones have created the most interest and which have driven the most quality traffic to Natasha’s website. With this knowledge I can feed back to Natasha and we can jointly plan the next month’s batch of articles to further build on what her audience wants.

This simple process of plan, develop, communicate, review and evolve is really effective. In the 12 months Natasha and I have been working together in this way, we have generated a 500% return on her marketing investment Natasha has made to date, and the amount of wedding bookings has more than doubled!

Is your marketing generating enough sales or leads for your small business? If not, why not get in touch for a free initial, no obligation consultation.

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When it comes to social media, I think there’s a bit of a bandwagon effect going on. Yes using social media has become fairly widespread, so why would you want to get left behind? New rapidly growing social media sites are springing up daily, like Pinterest. And Facebook isn’t just about just friendships any more, even the big corporates have set up Facebook business pages, so shouldn’t you have one too?

But there’s a key question that is often missing from this kind of ‘me too’ reaction to the whole social media arena – is it right for me and my small business? ‘Free’ is a very seductive word, add it to anything and people naturally want it without questioning the value or relevance of what they are actually getting.

And while the use of social media may be free, it does have a huge time implication attached. And for any small business owner, time is money. So now that puts a slightly different slant on it, doesn’t it? Not to mention the fact that if you start using social media but then don’t use it regularly and consistently, it can actually have a negative impact that will be damaging for your small business.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of using social media. The key is to make it work for you.

So here are 5 top tips for making sure it does:

1. Identify your target audience and how they use social media. If you are selling to other businesses why set yourself up on Facebook, if LinkedIn is your customers’ usual environment? You need to fish where the fish are!

2. Which social space will offer the best and most effective ways to engage with your audience? If you’re offering a free coffee and cake to three people every day when they visit your café, get tweeting!

3. Think about how you can add value and provide interesting content for your audience. There should always be a reason why you post new information.

4. Don’t take a scattergun approach. Focus on one social media platform first. Plan your content and work to a schedule so that everything happens at the desired frequency – and doesn’t leave your followers disappointed.

5. Measure, monitor and refine. Get one right, then you can consider if there’s another social media platform that might complement or enhance your existing activity.

And finally, don’t forget that social media isn’t the only low cost or free marketing tool. Why not sign up for my free Fruitful Factsheet on low cost marketing to get some more marketing ideas!

Years ago, when I worked in house at a design agency, I was kept busy not only with paid work but with requests from colleagues to help write letters, submit insurance claims and the like.

The requests were varied to say the least. I helped the guy in Production take on the might of Electrolux in order to get a replacement and full compensation for all the food that had been ruined when his brand new one broke down one Christmas. Another time, one of the new business team was desperate to get his elderly and frail parents moved into sheltered housing, was struggling to cut through all the red tape and asked me to help him prepare a report to convince the necessary agencies. The day he told me his parents were moving was a great moment.

More recently, I’ve found my writing skills coming to the fore in my voluntary role as a parent governor at my son’s school. During a period of change and uncertainty, I’ve introduced newsletters and other forms of communication to explain the situation and any developments. It’s impressed the local authority – they now intend to use our approach as a case study for other schools – and has kept parents and staff well informed.

And then I’ve just done a little bit of tidying up of a letter on behalf of someone who is organising a fundraising event for a charity and needs to get the support of local businesses. Oddly enough, the charity in question is one that – had I known it existed six years ago – would have given me a huge amount of support when my newborn fell ill and his first year of life was one of constant fear and worry. How could I not want to spend some time making this letter compelling enough to convince businesses that they should donate a raffle prize?

The reason I wanted to write about this is because it shows how a little planning and organisation of the content, combined with a rational presentation of facts and the right tone, can have a big impact on what happens next. Put it into a business context and it starts to make sense why copywriters exist!

And the one time it hasn’t worked? Communicating with the banks. I wrote the business case for my partner’s new venture so that he could secure the additional finance required to turn his plan into reality. It impressed but – not surprisingly – not enough to convince any of the banks to lend money to a small business. At which point it’s probably best I stop the suddenly angry tapping at my keyboard!