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.

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.

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.

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.

We’ve been a little quiet on the blog for the last few months but we’re now in the final stages for launch. What we’ve learnt is to set slightly more realistic goals as although we can turn out a website in plenty of time our procedures and business processes have to be perfect. We realised it was pointless rushing the business and then failing to meet our customer’s expectations.

We have now produced a design which has been built by Ryan Downie (@ryandownie). Chris (@chrisbarber86) our technical wizard has written and integrated the ecommerce software with the new design. We have setup our own photography area and are in the process of taking product shots. During the setup of the store we’ve experienced a few challenges along the way in terms of stock management, changes in staff, photography problems and much more.

Over the next few weeks we will have a series of blog posts which we’ll be adding to the site to take you through what we’ve been up to, the challenges we’ve faced and how we solved any potential problems.

Unfortunately a month ago Gavin Elliott, carrotmedia’s creative director left the company. Gavin had been taking a creative lead on the project so control had to be passed over to our new designer. We’re thrilled to be working with Ryan Downie (@ryandownie), Carrot Media’s new designer to develop both Eliot Turner and the Ecommerce Experiment.

The handover unfortunately delayed some of the activity on both the blog and the Eliot Turner website. A change of designer meant that we had to handover all client projects at carrotmedia which is a huge task. We’re really grateful here at Carrot for all the help Gavin has given us getting the project up and running. We wish him well with his new endeavours!

It’s always hard to lose a key member of staff and as a small business owner it can seem difficult to see the way forward. Fortunately this is not the first time I’ve lost a key member of staff and being a realist it won’t be the last. It’s always important to let the dust settle for a few days before you start drawing up a plan as you don’t want to allow emotion to rule what should be a sound business decision.

We’re pleased to report Ryan is now fully integrated into our team and it’s business as usual at carrotmedia HQ.

Up to now, we have talked solely about online marketing, however it is important to include some traditional offline marketing in your campaign to drive traffic to your website and improve presence in the market place. Research shows that the majority of people visit a website after reading it in a newspaper or magazine or hearing it from a friend, someone at a meeting or on TV, hence why offline marketing is important for your online business.

 Advertise

There are so many adverts on the internet that people have learnt to tune them out and so placing ads on TV, print and radio can be extremely effective despite the claim that print media is declining. Also, offline advertising usually has something physical attached to it meaning people are more likely to remember it.

If you can afford it, advertising in national media will obviously have the largest reach however if you are running a small business, start with local media whilst building your brand and then move on to the national media once you are more established and making more money. There are plenty of local media stations that need advertising slots filled and won’t charge the earth.

Placing adverts in local or national print media can be highly targeted as there are now so many different publications out there. Choosing particular magazines which you expect your target demographic to read will almost guarantee traffic to your site providing your web address is clear. Often writing only the URL of your business in an advert is effective as it gains curiosity. This doesn’t require much space and the cost will be reduced.

Event programmes are an effective way to directly reach you target market. Search for relevant industry events for your field and advertise in their programmes.

The Yellow Pages and other directories can bring traffic to your site as more often than not people will check out your website before, or instead of, phoning.

Network

Talk about your business at any opportunity you get.  You will meet potential customers wherever you go  so anyone who asks you anything related to your business tell them your web address and always carry your business cards with the URL and email address on it. Attend Industry events and join networking associations and societies.  Choose carefully which events to attend – those where you expect your target demographic will be and announce your website address to all those you speak with.

Also, donating one of your products for a raffle at an industry event will act as extra publicity for your brand. The price of the product will be little in comparison to the exposure it will bring you.

Get articles published

If you can get an article published in a newspaper or magazine, you will get noticed by thousands and it likely won’t cost u much. Whatever your area of expertise, there will be an appropriate publication whose readers are in your target demographic. Make sure you include your web address with your name in the byline – not only will your article raise interest in you and your brand, but will also advertise your URL to every reader. The same applies for press releases, always include your web address.

Also, most local chapters of business associations have printed newsletters that are sent to all members. If you can commit to contributing an article regularly, it is a good way to get your web address circulating around your target demographic. Search all the associations in your area and choose the most relevant to your industry.

Put your URL on everything

Finally, put your URL on everything! Having your web address on things such as your vehicle and your uniform means everywhere you go people will see it. Also, it’s surprising how few companies have their web address on their company signs. Every person who walks or drives past your sign is a potential customer.

Following usability guidelines for your eCommerce site are obviously important. Design aspects of your website such as quick downloading, easy navigation and interaction with no ambiguity trigger sales, however selling to foreign markets requires extra consideration. An eCommerce site that only focuses on their target audience in one country cannot exploit the internet’s global reach and many eCommerce sites are losing much overseas business due to the usability of their site to international customers. Foreign consumers may have heard about your site and are able to find it easily but any marketing employed by your business will be wasted if they cannot connect with the content on your site, preferring instead to use a local site. Research has suggested that internet users are four times more likely to purchase from a website that communicates in their own language and over 50% of web users speak a native language other than English so connecting to these non English speaking countries will potentially double your audience and hopefully double your sales!

Localisation refers to designing your website in a way that can be adapted for and is appropriate to international customers. Taking into account language and cultural differences will allow you to communicate with more customers worldwide and increase sales. Applications can be localised to different levels depending on the user group or culture you expect to use your site. You may wish to keep the content of your site the same but translate local measures such as currency or time or you may decide to translate the product text and terminology to suit the appropriate country. Some eCommerce sites even go as far to change colours, images and symbols to suit the target culture as customers perceptions of service quality differ from country to country. For example, The colour red means error, stop or warning in western culture however this isn’t the case for Asian countries. In pursuing a global market, businesses should be sensitive to elements such as this. If you understand their local cultures, how they use technology and their expectations you will most likely be successful in selling to them.

Even simple differences between variants of English can make or break a sale. For example, British English and American English obviously differ with British using shopping basket and Americans preferring shopping cart and spelling variations such as colour and color. Customers who recognize that the site is based abroad will become less trusting of it, hence less likely to purchase from it. This isn’t a case of automatic translation but researching your target markets expectations and customs.

When did you last check your eCommerce site for these issues? Can you get more sales from applying simple changes?