Scroll through the job ads on Seek for accounting and office admin jobs and you’ll see the usual skill requirements. MYOB skills, experience using xero and of course high level Microsoft Office and Excel spreadsheet skills.
I did a search before Christmas and one particular job ad stood out. A Sydney building company needed to fill a job for someone who recently left and it contained a list of digital marketing tasks in the job description!
These skills were a nice to have, not mandatory, but it confirmed something I knew was coming – digital marketing tasks performed by office admin staff!
Show Me the Money: A thorough understanding of how to use Google can help you – and your business – earn more.
We’ve been writing about referral marketing a lot lately, and in a recent post about marketing action plans, we talked about why you should include referral marketing and/or networking as a marketing strategy in your marketing plan.
That may seem silly to some people, since networking doesn’t always translate to sales straight away, but we’ve discovered another reason why you should include it in your marketing plan: Google!Continue reading Is Google Your Sugar Daddy?
If your business isn’t using web analytics then you’re still not using your website to REALLY understand what makes your customers tick.
Ok, so you’ve got a website and on it you have all this information about your company — who your people are, what you do, how customers can contact/connect with you — and best of all: you get heaps of page views every month! Talk about winning the Internet! You’ve got this website marketing business down, am I right?
Except that maybe you don’t. And for this reason, we’re currently developing a new Digital Business Course to help businesses transition into the online world. A big part of that transition involves understanding how web analytics work, which is the bread and butter of any successful website — and indeed, successful business.
How to Use Web Analytics
To get the most out of web analytics, you kind of need to change the way you view your website. You need to see it as a form of marketing, just like an advertisement in a newspaper or a piece of direct mail. Once you start treating your website the same as you would any other marketing activity, it’s likely you’ll have some questions you’ll want answered.
Your Conversion Rate – Do YOU Know It?
Somewhere on this list — though we imagine that it would be on the top — should be “What’s my conversion rate?” To answer this question, you need web analytics. We recommend Google Analytics, namely because it’s free and extremely easy to use.
Your conversion rate is the number of people who have visited your website and carried out some form of action — signed up to a newsletter, made a request for more information, downloaded an e-book, and so on. In short, it’s any action that involves the exchange of information that you can later use to develop into a sale.
Constant Improvement
But the real genius of analytics lies in how it allows you to isolate problems with your website’s content and refine them. For instance, if you have a rather average conversion rate, but a high bounce rate (the number of people who leave your website within 30 seconds of landing on it), there’s a good chance that’s there’s something wrong with the keywords you’ve selected for your SEO. Or you’ve selected keywords that your website’s content doesn’t address properly. Either way, you need to fix this.
Finding Out How Your Customers Think
Once you do, you should see you bounce rate drop off and your conversion rate increase, which means more opportunity for more sales. And just think: if you didn’t have analytics, you’d have never known. This is what makes web analytics invaluable for small business owners, because it gives you rare insight into what makes your customers tick — what are they really looking for, and how can you adapt your business to meet their needs? — and provides you with the opportunity to meet those needs.
In essence, small business owners now have the same resources at their disposal as large multi-nationals, who typically spend bucket-loads on research and development, focus groups, and the like, trying to ascertain what exactly their customers are looking for — and even then, often don’t get it right.
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At EzyLearn, we use web analytics extensively to ensure we’re constantly meeting the needs of our students and potential students. Through web analytics data, we ascertained that a number of small business owners were looking for a cheaper alternative to MYOB, so we developed two new cloud-accounting courses: the Reach Accounting Training Course and a Xero Training Course to satisfy that need.
With all the right information (content) and systems in place, you can setup a website, optimise it for search engines and create a Google Adwords campaign in one day. Doesn’t that sound nice?
An experienced 123ezy website designer can setup a website for you using the sitebuilder (so you can log in at any time to make changes), create a Google account, create a Google Adwords campaign and get your business online quickly. Your consultant can also code up your 123ezy website with Google Analytics code so that you can measure your statistics from your Google Account interface.
Many website owners believe that they can create content and plonk it anywhere on their website and they’ll be inundated with emails and calls. They are missing the fundamental fact that people who are browsing the internet have potential 10-30 other website to visit until they find the one that they think is the best.
Here’s a couple examples of the goals I have for some of my websites.
Get website visitors off your home page (otherwise they’ll bounce)
Get people to take a short tour of what you can do for them (using images and maybe audio)
Give people a reason to interact with your website (like a free sample or information report)
Know the website goal and how to measure it (eg. the number of people visiting the website compared to the number of people who actually get to your Contact/subscription/ordering page etc).
Some fantastic news for you is that Google has all the tools to help you attract website visitors, funnel them to goal pages and measure your success. Advertising with Google costs you money, but most of the other tools are completely free (like Google website optimiser and analytics).
A great aspect about Google Adwords is that although it costs you money, you actually attract very specific potential customers to your website, customers who have typed in very specific search words and/or phrases. Better still you only pay for actual clicks to your website and not the people who just see your add.
So remember that when you promote yourself online you are looking for people who want something very specific so you need to find them and then funnel them to your own specific goals for them.
If you need some help please call me on 0413 007 481 or email steve@slisar.com.au
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Xero is a great bookkeeping program for tradies who are on the go and using their phones (or a tablet) all the time. From receipts scanning to creating quotes and invoices, receiving payments and keeping track of project costs.
bookkeepercourse.com.au/produ…
