I’m certainly a believer in the power of social media to do good and help businesses.
With pride, I can name countless examples where social media has helped me personally, as well as friends, business associates, and clients. It’s a hot topic everywhere and social media communities are springing up in astounding numbers.
But there are people who over hype it.
Example: If you ask someone like Zappos (the premiere shoe experts online), their success is not based on simply opening a Twitter account.
But there’s many “social media experts” who will take your money and tell you Twitter alone is the key to small business success.
So …
Whether you are a pure internet business promoting oil change coupons, or have a retail shop (i.e. coffee shop, Jamaican restaurant, or carpet cleaning company, etc) these principles apply to you:
Site Design
In almost all cases, your business website should be clean, fast loading, with intuitive navigation. This sounds like a given, but is still an exception with many small businesses. If your website has a “SKIP INTRO” Flash presentation, or large animated clip art gifs, we need to fix that … now!
Your site design plays an important part in the successful execution of every other step listed below:
Landing/Conversion Pages
Conversion pages are what turns a visitor to your website into a customer, or sales lead. These are often also called “call-to-action” pages.
Conversion pages typically are:
Product Page
This could be an individual product page on your website. If you are running a e-commerce site this would be your individual item page. It is important that it is clear what the potential customer must do to purchase the product.Newsletter or RSS Subscription Page
There is value in getting subscribers to your newsletter, as it gains you a footprint in their inbox, allowing you to “push” specials.Social Media Follows
Visitors to your site that use social media tools such as Twitter or Facebook should be able to easily click to and follow your company fan page or profile on whatever social media sites work for your business.Membership Pages
This is where someone signs up for a service on your website. Similar to product pages, membership pages should clearly identify what the visitor receives as a “member” and the signup form should be clear and concise.Quote Request or Contact Us Page
Many service industries (carpet cleaning, pressure washing, carpentry, etc) will have “quote request” forms or “Contact Us” forms in order to secure leads for jobs. These should focus on capturing contact information more than details about the quote request. Long forms tend to discourage quote requests. Your phone number should also be displayed on this page for those that don’t feel like filling out a form.
All of these pages are crucial for the success of your business, whether it is primarily online or offline. Whether or not these pages are successful can be tracked with very detailed (and free) analytics tools from Google and others.
A great resource for creating great landing pages is Gabriella’s Urban SEO site (Follow on Twitter). Read these articles about on page optimization.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you began at the top of this article with a clean and intuitive design and have spent time building well-crafted landing (conversion pages), the SEO “should” almost be automatic.
The only other suggestion would be to use Google AdWord’s free keyword suggestion tool and make sure your conversion pages, product pages, and information pages are titled and named with keywords of value to Google and other search engines.
We’ll discuss keyword research in future articles in addition to other reputable easy-to-execute SEO tips in future articles.
Social Media
Contrary to what many self-proclaimed “social media experts” may claim, simply opening a Twitter account and tweeting is not enough to garner business. Site owners should make sure the items above are completed first. It’s pointless to engage potential customers and then send them to something that does not exist, or to a poorly implemented shopping cart or website.
Naturally there are exceptions to this. If you are in the middle of implementing your site, or building your business and you wish to begin building your reputation as an expert in your niche or specialty it would be good to secure your social media accounts and begin starting conversations.
A local example in my town of Asheville, NC is the Jamaican restaurant Nine Mile. While they were putting the finishing touches on their restaurant they began posting pics on Facebook and Twitter and Flickr, updated followers regarding their progress, hurdles they had to overcome and so forth. Local Twitterers began connecting with their story, rooting for them to launch successfully, and showed up en masse after opening and tweeted their experiences.
More on this in future articles as well.
Everything Else
There is more that I simply can’t advise. You know your niche and business better than I do. You know your products, who the big players are, and the unique perspective your business brings to the table.
In the pipeline at Makovision are useful articles and screencasts to help you bring that perspective to an infinitely larger audience.
Keep in mind that larger audience might not necessarily be global. If you’re a local carpet cleaning company who cares if someone 2500 miles away finds your website?
Instead, use SEO, social media tools and rock-solid landing/conversion pages together so you can dig deeper into your local or regional market.
Your market may be smaller. And that’s a good thing.
That’s the goal here anyways.
What would you like to see covered on Makovision.com?
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Don what a nice thing to say… I am glad you find value in what I write. Sometimes it’s not easy coming up with articles. But to come up with great articles that help is rare. I guess we could start doing some link baiting with doom & gloom articles about technology or even bashing a certain industry… lame and nothing more than regurgitated content. Basically create that buzz in order to get traffic. Ultimately, unless you have some grass root, basic fundamental information to read the “traffic” won’t come back. I guess what I am trying to say is the posts I write and enjoy reading (like yours) are simple yet, informational I am glad you “get it.”
Thanks Gabriella. I think conversion pages and call-to-action skills are an important missing part of the online equation. Many prospective clients will complain to me about all the money they are spending on AdWords. After setting up some funnels to track performance it becomes clear very quickly their landing pages are very bad – even horrible. They might as well be using their money for kindling. Perhaps we can work together on some good useful articles in the future. Perhaps guest posting. Sounds wonderful and keep the great content flowing
DM
Hi Don,
I sent this link to Andy. He’s doing some pro-bono work for a non-profit and is about to pull his hair out because they don’t get the big picture. I think info on this page will help him layout what the client should really be looking for rather than big flashy images in a textless site.
I hope it helps him out! Basically those are the frustrations I have had dealing with clients over and over again. Hopefully the information is helpful to small businesses and non-profits – especially now when lots of funding is being cut and businesses are working on razor thin margins. It doesn’t make sense to throw that money away on something ineffective.
Hope you’re well by the way! Thanks for the comment
DM
Really good article, Don. I think you are absolutely right; a lot of people focus on Social Media to drive traffic to their site, which is fine, but they leave it at that. They fail to take a holistic approach to make sure they have done everything they can to increase conversions – either in actual sales, or, as you mentioned, increasing membership of the site, or subscribers to the company’s newsletter. Building a loyal following with Social Media is great, but then driving them to a poorly designed, poorly optimized site with poor content is a recipe for disaster; I see this all the time. (I think that was Gabriella’s point – Gabriella is such a great person and an amazing resource, nice to see you mentioning her
)).
Reputation is the new currency, and it is so easy to blow it. At the very least, those “Four Pillars” you mention must be taken into consideration.
Thanks for the comments Pierpaolo. Enjoy your vacation!