I’ll quickly point something out before you start reading, I’m not an SEO specialist, a designer, a marketer or a techie. However, I do have a unique stand point when it comes to SEO – I work with all of those people I mentioned above as I run Carrot Media. Most of these people mentioned consider themselves to be experts or knowledgeable in the area of SEO but do they in fact know what they are doing?

I’m a business man and all I really want to know is, if I’m spending £1000, what is my return on the investment (ROI). Not only do I need to see my initial investment recovered but I need to make money and recover the costs involved in carrying out the work. So if I invest £1000 in a market strategy, I need to see a £5000 return. SEO is just another marketing strategy which should be reviewed on a regular basis in these kind of terms.

Let’s get back to basics. So, what is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation which means in basic English, getting someone to the top of a search engine for a particular keyword phrase. For example, if I type “Carrot Media” into Google are we top of the list? The answer is yes, but feel free to check. Sounds fairly simple doesn’t it? Unfortunately, it’s not and it’s a hugely complex area full of algorithms, rip off merchants and misunderstanding.

So what should you do?

At Carrot Media we don’t offer SEO as a service to our clients! However, every website we deliver is built with search engines in mind and includes things like: SEO friendly URLs, Robots.txt, XML Site Map, integration with Google Maps, etc. Our clients don’t need to really know what these technologies, tools and techniques do apart from it’s giving them the best possible base to work from and give them a chance of achieving good search engine results.

As most of our clients are small businesses we have the view that although we could do the SEO, the Return On Investment isn’t always achievable.
As an example, one of our clients has been working with a company specialising in SEO which has boosted their site traffic by 50%. Great you might think? Wrong! This client has in fact not actually seen a large enough increase in sales to cover the money spent.

Every site we now produce is built with a robust and SEO friendly content management system so we actually train our clients in the basics of SEO. This technique has seen us generate the best results for our clients way beyond selling SEO as a service.

There have been occasions when SEO specialists have been brought in but as we view every client as unique we can advise correctly for each case.

The site is live!

After months of hard work getting our eCommerce business ready to launch, we’ve finally done it! Eliot Turner Ltd launched a few minutes ago and is ready to take orders of our exclusive handmade jewellery.

We’ve not got all our stock listed yet as this has been an extremely time consuming process. More items of stock will be added to over the next week or two. We’ve implemented a solid stock management system, which will allow us to reorder and list new stock on a weekly basis. As most of our items are either limited editions or one offs, we can offer our customers something extremely unique.

We’re already looking at diversifying into a few other areas but you’ll have to keep an eye on the site to find out more as it happens!

We’ve got a lot happening over the next few weeks so keep coming back to see how we’re doing. We’ll be sharing stats about visitors, turnover levels and experiences via the blog.

Finding manufacturers of handmade jewellery was easy! I started by scouring the internet and visiting trade fairs. I had to twist a few arms to let me into some of the buyer fairs but after a few weeks I had my initial list. We realised there were a few hurdles to cross in order to get into this market but we felt that we had the edge.

We then hit a major stumbling block when we found out they didn’t want to sell to us. This might seem crazy but we’d forgotten to take a really important factor into account during our market research.

When we had contacted a few suppliers initially who we thought manufactured appropriate lines we’d been fairly vague about what we were planning. Our conversation went along the lines of; “We’d like to stock some of your lines, what are you terms?” We received in-depth information about trade pricing, payment terms, minimum orders, etc.

We were ready to confirm our intentions to order from them and we were being turned down. This reasoning was quite simple, that although they’re small businesses they didn’t want to lose control of their brand / identity. Many of the suppliers feared we could create such high demand we could become their only customer. This would leave them exposed if we decided to change to a new supplier or discontinue their product lines.

It’s important to remember that most of these businesses are what I refer to as cottage industries. A cottage industry is an individual, in this case manufacturing jewellery, who works from home and typically on a part time basis. This type of business is very much a lifestyle choice as they don’t want to take on staff, in order to keep costs down. I now know that several of our potential suppliers had young children so wanted to be a ’stay at home’ parent, but still have an income. They felt that by supplying to us they could jeopardise their existing client base and the longevity of their own business.

This was the opposite reaction to how a large wholesaler would react. A wholesaler would want a minimum spend from day one and expect steady growth in the first year.

Obviously being the entrepreneur, I don’t normally take no as an answer. I changed tactics and instead put in place steps to protect their brand values and also in some cases set maximum order values. Even though I tried to reassure many of the suppliers we still couldn’t get a step further with them. I never thought we’d be in this kind of position and this meant many of my assumptions about stock management had to be reassessed.

Despite these unforeseen issues I had a list of suppliers with the necessary information about how they operate and their stock & manufacturing capacities. With that in mind, it was now time to design our stock management process to build a solid business system around it.

Top Tip

If you are planning to manufacture your product and hope to scale your business up quickly then look at ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), sooner rather than later. A successful ERP system will allow you to bring together aspects such as manufacturing, sales, marketing, etc into a seamless process. Alternatively if you are already running an ERP system and looking to sell online, you must review your system to see if it will be able to cope with the changes to your sales / marketing process. An increase in the sales of a certain product could mean that the manufacturing lead time is affected.

I thought I’d provide a sneak peek of what will be unveiled as our website design for Eliot Turner Ltd in a about a week from now. In my previous posts about “Our Brand” you will see how our website will sit nicely alongside all our other materials. I don’t want to spoil the surprise on the 1st of February so we’re not giving much away.

We did produce an initial design last summer, but then went back to the drawing board as we needed to think more carefully about our brand values. You can see our original sneak peek design by clicking here. We promise this is the final design and we’re sticking with it, at least for a few months!

In a recent post I discussed our brand values and why they were important to consider before designing a logo for Eliot Turner Ltd. As some of the more observant readers of the blog will have noticed we recently changed our holding page which revealed our final brand design.

It is important to remember that although the logo is what most people associate as being a brand, it is only the first part of a branding process and must be reflected correctly across all associated marketing literature. Some of the areas we considered are:

• Logo Design
• Stationery Design
• Order and delivery confirmations
• Email Signatures
• Printed marketing literature
• Email mailshot design
• Advertsing both online and offline
• Packaging

All these items are different methods of marketing / communication, which will reflect our brand. We used our company colours as the primary way to create brand recognition. You can see from the Eliot Turner Twitter page we have even made sure we have correct brand alignment. Our brand goes beyond colour but into the quality of the packaging, what paper we use for printing and how we word our communication.

Here are a few items of our branding which should give you an idea of how things are looking:

Check back later this afternoon when we’ll be revealing a sneak peek of our website!

Over the last few months we’ve been working hard to get our ecommerce site (www.eliotturner.com) up and running. We had planned to get everything finished much sooner but have had numerous challenges which we’ve had to overcome. These have included problems with suppliers, changes to our team, increased work load at carrotmedia and other unforeseen problems. We could have pushed for a pre-Christmas launch but decided this was going to be unwise as you can see from our post “Why miss the Christmas Rush”.

I’m happy to report that we’re now only 10 days from our official launch day and are in the final stages.

We’ve prepared a number of blog posts, which will be released over the next 10 days that will give you an insight into our challenges to get this far.

I hope you come back and visit us on launch day which will be the 1st of February 2010. In the meantime enjoy the posts!

As we’re getting close to launching our ecommerce website (www.eliotturner.com) I thought we should talk about some of the processes we’ve been through while building our own brand.

I’ve been in the business of running a media agency for over 5 years and in that time have been involved in the branding design of hundreds of companies. In that time I’ve come to discover that this is a hugely complex area and the design of the Eliot Turner brand was no different. I’m not writing to tell you everything you need to know about branding as this is a massive subject. I’ve outlined some of the techniques that we used to design our brand, but I’d recommend you always work with a skilled designer or media agency. A good brand doesn’t have to cost the earth and by working with a local company you can get really good value for money. As a quick guide you should be looking to pay in the region of £500 to £2000 if you are a small business. Remember that the logo design is only part of a branding process and a brand is more about how your image is carried across all marketing and sales materials in a consistent manner.

Did you know?

The stock market value of The Coca-Cola Company, for example, was around $136 billion in mid-2002, yet the book value (the net asset value) of the business was only $10.5 billion. A vast proportion of the value of the business (around $125 billion) is therefore dependent upon shareholders’ confidence in the intangible assets of the business, and the ability of the company to manage these profitably. Coca-Cola owns few intangibles other than its “secret recipe,” its contracts with its global network of bottlers and its brand names. An independent analysis estimated that the value of the Coca-Cola brand name in mid-2002 was almost $70 billion, well over half of its intangible value.

Source: What is a Brand? By Tom Blackett of Interbrand

Our brand values

Our primary goal in creating the Eliot Turner brand was to promote our strengths and emphasise what we are good at and what we believe in as a business.

Our first job was to create a set of values for the company which are:

• High levels of customer service
• Value for money
• High quality product delivered to a niche market
• Elegance
• Innovate
• Honest, ethical and behave with integrity
• Give our customers different options compared to our competitors
• Care about our customers

Your list of company values becomes something that is often referred to as brand values. It doesn’t need to be a hugely extensive list and in many cases they reflect your own personal beliefs. You need to remember that if you have a list of company values you must always deliver them without fail or you dilute your brand values; this is considered a deadly sin in the branding world.

Your brand values will build the foundations and they must be communicated to the whole team to ensure authenticity. Many businesses jump the gun and start promoting a brand to their customers before they have the buy-in from members of their own team. If your team doesn’t believe in the values of the brand then you’re never going to get customers to buy-in.

Tell your customers

So once you have the buy-in from the team you need to do one more thing before shouting about your brand. Think about how you will communicate your brand values to new members of the team entering your organisation and third parties involved with your business. In the early stages of your business you will be organising advertising and other marketing activities. If you haven’t briefed your suppliers about your brand values they will make their own interpretation which can cause disastrous results. This is just one example in which your brand can be diluted, but even though it may be out of control you can assert a certain level of influence.

Once you have your brand values and have an effective method of internal communication it’s time to tell your customers. Please remember that every possible contact is potentially a new customer, so you need to reinforce your brand values.

These are the key areas we considered:

• Business name
• The names of product lines
• The slogan we use
• Logo design
• The style and quality of our stationery / printed literature
• Product pricing and packaging
• Where we are based
• Marketing
• How our customers could communicate with us
• How our employees perceive our values
• Most importantly the design of our website

We’ve worked on the assumption that if all these factors were in line with our brand values, we will have a constant result of strengthening the brand. As we are an ecommerce business we don’t see customers face to face so it’s sometimes difficult to judge reactions. We knew for certain that an unhappy customer with our brand wouldn’t be a returning customer in the future.

Top Tip

You may have heard of Michael Heppell, who is a bestselling business author. In his book “How to be Brilliant”, Michael talks about fantastic, satisfactory and bad customer service. He uses a great analogy which I’m going to use here. “You’re picking a friend up from the airport and the first thing you ask is, “how was the flight?” Most of the time you will get, “it was ok” and that is the end of the conversation. However, you are just as likely to get this response, “the plane was late taking off, they double booked my seat, they charged me for going 1kg over on my luggage allowance, the staff were rude…” or the old favourite, “they lost my luggage.” But how often do you hear “I had the best flight ever! I got to the airport and found they had double booked my sea, so they upgraded me to business class with no extra charge and gave me a free pass for the first class lounge. The staff were so friendly it made the whole experience incredible, I’ll definitely fly with them again.” This is an excellent example of how both a customer and the airline perceive a brand. Don’t forget that the customer with the satisfactory experience didn’t go onto mention the details of the flight or who they flew with. It’s only if you deliver excellence with your brand values will they go onto talk about who they flew with. As a rule of thumb those who have either a fantastic or bad experience will go onto tell 10 people. You need to ask yourself, how can I get my staff to understand about brand value  to this level?

Hang on a minute!

You’re thinking he’s not talked about the principals of designing a logo or any other design, surely this is the most important part of a branding process? In my view this isn’t the most important aspect. Once you have a plan for how your brand is to be communicated, hand it across to a skilled design professional. I’m going to burst another bubble; you can’t design your own brand unless you yourself are a branding designer. Even in this case I still would say this is a bad idea as you’re too close to the business. The three Fs being Friends, Family and Fools are also a bad choice for helping you turn your brand values into a logo or give you feedback as they don’t like telling you bad things.

So how did we overcome this problem of designing our own logo? We were in a very fortunate position as we’d just had a new member of staff join our media agency who hadn’t yet been briefed or told about the Eliot Turner brand. He was the perfect choice for turning our brand values / principals into the design equivalent.

I hope this gives you an insight and will make you think carefully about what a brand is really all about. If you are starting your own business, stop sketching out logos and first write down your brand values, then you can think about the design. It’s all too easy to get carried away with the exciting parts of the business such as logo design, but always remember, never forget the basics.

There are some simple checks I think everyone looking to setup a business should do before deciding that’s the name for them. It can sometimes be really frustrating to come up with a name and then perform simple checks to discover it’s not going to work for you. Here are a few pointers which might help you in your own process:

1. Check Companies House to ensure no-one has a company with your name already. Even if you are planning to trade as a partnership it’s worth checking before you get tied up with a larger organisation in a legal battle over “passing off” on their brand. As a branding process is extremely expensive and setting up a business is time consuming the last thing you want is to worry about legal issues. They come later as you become bigger and more successful!
2. Jump on a domain registration site, these sites have a search box which allows you to see which domain names are available. When you have done all your checks remember to try and buy every combination of domain name within reason as you need to protect your brand. This means protecting both singular and plurals of your name. A little common sense goes a long way when purchasing domain names. It might be worth checking similar domain names and the content they have on the site.
3. Search for your company name through a few search engines. Google is a good starting point and note that I say starting point. Google will tell you if anyone is trading under your name as a partnership or sole trader. If they are don’t let it put you off, they might be in a completely different market. It’s very difficult to have a company name that is completely unique. Oh and don’t forget if you’re going to sell internationally to check the meaning in other languages. Something many people forget when checking a company name in Google is that if it considers your name a misspelling you’re probably off to a bad start. This will be extremely bad for search engine optimisation / rankings.
4. Urban Slang should be your next port of call with the likes of wikipidea and urban dictionary. This is where a little creative thinking comes into play to see if your name has any adverse or hidden connotations – this could be Internet, school or urban slang.
5. Make your claim! As soon as you’ve found a name and all the checks are giving you good news.

These checks only take about 5 minutes, so use the tips above to give your brand the best chance to penetrate the market. Although it can be annoying to go back to the drawing board after finding your dream business name it’s better to foresee potential problems early.

There are whole books written on branding and name generation so if you need help I suggest investing in one.

Missing the Christmas rush might seem like madness but we decided not to launch Eliot Turner until the New Year. This was a tactical decision as we identified a risk which was not worth taking. The risk was regarding our stock management or the lack of it.

As we have a limited amount of capital in Eliot Turner we have to consider our expected sales. We recently launched an ecommerce website for one of our clients an award winning beauty salon in Newcastle. The launch of this site was so successful we had a slight panic about how to manage our own stock with very little sat on the shelf and little capital to order more. This particular website has only been soft launched as the owner is still uploading all the products. It proved our marketing formula and tactics when launching an ecommerce website are effective. If we launch the Eliot Turner website using this same formula we would face a short fall in stock.

So why not just re-stock?

Our suppliers are what I refer to as cottage industries that have few resources and little stock sat on the shelf. These suppliers during the Christmas period are themselves under huge pressure to meet the order requests from other retailers. This left us in a position where we would not have the capital to reorder in sufficient quantity and our supplier would be unlikely to meet our demands.

We are now building into our business plan a stock management structure which will allow us to ramp up stock levels in time for Christmas. The previous year’s trading history will also give us an idea as to the best selling stock so we should order the correct levels of each item / set.