Online retail landscape looks bright:

And this trend is set not just to continue but to grow. Bain & Co. forecast that by 2020, 95% of music and 75% of books will be sold online. And even luxury goods, reticient at first to embrace the internet given the lack of advice from trained sales staff they could give to customers, are now enjoying significant sales growth derived from online transactions. A greater proportion of luxury fashion is sold over the internet than mass-market clothing, which is testament to just how much mindsets in the luxury goods industry have shifted.

Multichannel results in greater value transactions:

This is all achieved without mentioning m-commerce. Mobile phones are increasingly being used to research purchases before consumers hand over cash in stores or online. About 20% of sales in 2010 were classed as multichannel, meaning that orders were picked up in store or goods were ordered online after research in a traditional shop or showroom. Deloitte recently published research showing that multichannel customers spent an average £143 per transaction compared with £57 for traditional store customers.

So for those retailers vulnerable to online competition, the future does not look particularly bright. Moreover, research has shown that the more consumers shop online, the harder it is to sell at a healthy premium. This explains much of the trouble for the likes of HMV, and retailers of electrical goods such as Comet and BestBuy.

Social Networks

When the craze first started, we all frantically sought out friends past and present. Remember Friends Reunited? That seems like the steam age already, but it was in reality, less than a decade ago. And then Facebook. We quickly formed a network of friends.

Not really knowing what we were going to do with this new network, we followed the herd nevertheless. A competitive element seeped in…I have more friends than him or her. Our instinctive curiosity could be satisfied through checking out other profiles, ex girlfriends etc. Social networks also gave us a great sense of empowerment..shall I or shan’t I accept their friend request.

But then most hit a brick wall. We literally run out of friends to invite, things to share etc. We get bored..we try to delete our Facebook accounts..only to reinstate them promising ourselves to waste less time on social networks as a whole, in the future.

Interest Networks

The brick wall having been reached, where do we go? We have all of our friends in our network. There is nowhere to go. So we turn to interests. Online dating sites have been grouping people by interests for years. Now we venture forth to make new connections based upon interest groups and conversations via social media, that we want to be part of. Twitter is the modern day internet forum. But its ability to harness the information of people..their interests, their background, professional profiles etc, makes Twitter nothing short of manna from heaven for brands.

Brand Networks

Research.ly are clearly on top of this game. They work with brands to determine what people are saying about the brand, who is steering the conversation…a Twitter search engine if you like.

All this is about is knowing our customers. The more we know about them through “listening” and research ( not an inquisition – a lot of the relevant information is on profiles/bios and in the conversations) the better brands can connect and engage.

This is a big leap from pushing out general marketing messages!

In fact, your lack of size works to your advantage. You can change your strategies much more nimbly than a large company; and adapt new methods of engagement much more swiftly than you more bulky competitors.

The Toprank Blog – one of the finest social media marketing blogs around in our humble opinion, is a great resource for you to leverage the opportunities available in the world of Web 2.0.

“Content is king” is as old as the hills, but the key now, is that there are so many social media platforms, that you can take advantage of to raise brand awareness, engage with relevant prospects or customers, and achieve your marketing objectives. Videos, podcasts, blogs, flickr…all offer ways for you to be innovative and unique. Do this, and you can acquire a loyal group of followers fast; as well as compete with blue-chip companies for the same space.

Money is not an impediment any more. Most of the tools can be set-up for free. Your time will be your biggest expense in the early days, as you learn by trial and error, what works and what doesn’t.

One way to increase adoption and results is to develop a process that is followed by anyone in communications, media relations or PR that is in a position to publish content online.

By adding a process, it adds accountability as well as the likelihood that a much greater quantity of content will be keyword optimised and promoted to extend the reach of news direct to end consumers as well as to journalists and reporters doing online research.

Here is a possible framework, which we hope will help you.

• Objectives:  What are your goals? You can’t finish your mission without an end goal, so it’s important to identify some kind of general website traffic, citations, links, social engagement and organic referring traffic goals.

• Audience:    Who are you trying to reach? This question can be answered at a broad level in relation to online PR and news content as well as at the individual content level. Keywords and promotion tactics can vary whether it’s direct to consumer, journalists, analysts or bloggers that you’re after.

• Social Conversations & SERPs:  Listening to social conversations about the topics important to your company, brand and constituents is essential for knowing where to engage and promote. Think of it as reconnaissance.  The SERPs, (Search Engine Results Pages) are your SEO battlefield and it’s important to understand what types of content is being displayed for your most important keyword phrases. While personalization is a factor that can make the SERP experience vary according to your location and web history, it still makes sense to identify what media types are included: web pages, images, video, blog posts, news, etc.

• Resources:   Content, people, processes.  What content and media do you have to promote? If you put out a press release, adding images and/or video can increase distribution quite a bit.  Who do you have available to you to help? Copywriters, IT, marketing. Adding SEO and Social Media components to content authoring and publishing processes will ensure more of your content goes out in an optimized state.
• Tactics:  What channels to optimize? This is where information captured in Listening and SERPs helps you decide what kind of content and which social channels to optimize for.  If news, images and video are represented in the search results and there are relevant conversations happening around social media sites including some or all of those media, then your “marching orders” are to leverage those types of media in your news optimization.

• Measure:  SEO, Social, PR. Knowing when you’re a success is important for productivity as well as reporting upstream in your organization. Setting goals, making benchmark measurements and then tracking progress as skills and effectiveness are refined will help you stay on track.

SEO insiders have wondered whether this new search innovation would affect placement strategies. And the simple answer is: yes. Yes, there will be changes to the way SEO professionals run their clients’ campaigns. Yes, this will affect the industry as a whole. And yes, we believe SEO professionals will have to adapt to meet ever-evolving needs.

But to think that this development is rocking the SEO world is to misunderstand the realities of the industry. In its roughly 15 years of existence, SEO has grown from being a small wildcat operation run by webmasters and content services to being one of the most dynamic, fast-growing sectors of the tech market. The reason for this rapid growth is because — not in spite –- of the constantly evolving nature of search engines.

Of course, as with any complex question about a dynamically evolving industry, there is a caveat. While the Bing-Facebook agreement and the recent updates to Google will change elements of how we do our business, the fundamentals will remain the same. As much as innovation shapes the day-to-day processes of optimization, the core foundations of the industry remain unchanged. The goal was — and still is — putting clients at the top of results pages, whether this is through organic search, paid search or social media.

Social media is nothing new in the world of online marketing. Facebook alone has 500 million users. We have already seen certain Twitter feeds included in Google search results. Before long, results may integrate other social networking sites, like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and myriad other sites that haven’t even been developed yet. For SEO professionals, this change highlights the need to integrate social networking if they haven’t already.

The Bing-Facebook agreement is indicative of the many changes that have taken SEO from a small-time game to a major, innovative industry. SEO is not about counter-punching, and it’s not about simply reacting to the changing search-engine landscape. Instead, it is about growing alongside search engines. It is about evolving with them to ensure that searchers get the results they need.

For years now, successful SEO firms have not been focusing their efforts strictly on organic search results. They’ve been steadily evolving along with changes in search engines: new Google algorithms, the emergence of Bing, the development of Google Local, instant searches, paid search, and searchable Twitter feeds. To be successful, SEO firms now need to become something more advanced: Digital Media Agencies.

Digital Media Ageniess are about handling the many online representation needs of their clients. While top search engine placement remains the major goal, it is just one aspect of what they seek to do. A Digital Media Agency also seeks to manage a client’s online reputation, create and maintain their social presence, and handle the many other aspects of a client’s online brand.

Will SEO professionals have to change their strategy in reaction to a new social media paradigm? The answer is yes. Their evolution into full-fledged Digital Media Agencies is imperative. And as the social and search industries continue to change, so too will Digital Media Agencies need to innovate.

SEO is the art of making sure your site makes the front page of search results, regardless of the search engine. If you want to be found for computer repair in Birmingham then you need to make sure you’ve done enough small business SEO to be found by Brummies with broken computers. You’re not worried about people in Leicester for example. They’re not going to be your customers, so there’s no reason in trying to reach them. This is where local search becomes more important.

Some small business SEO experts will tell you that keyword advertising and pay-per-click is the best way to go. However, depending on your industry and search terms, that can either be a shot in the dark or an expensive form of marketing. Before you give that a try, there are plenty of affordable search engine optimization strategies that exist for small business people.

Achieving your own small business SEO: When you’re just starting out, you may not have the budget to hire a small business SEO firm. So hopefully you have plenty of time. It’s actually fairly easy to manage the basics. For instance, when you produce your website, make sure you follow proper search engine optimization techniques — using proper keywords in page titles, sub-heads, and throughout body text — and build backlinks by leaving comments on various blogs and websites.

We should be prepared to spend a few hours each day on building backlinks. While many of us don’t have the time to spend a few hours doing this, it’s still important to put some time into it. Even if you only allow yourself enough time to put in three comments a day, you’ll have 100 backlinks within five weeks, which can greatly boost your small business SEO.

When is it time to hire a small business SEO professional? Eventually you will reach the point where you just don’t have time to put into your small business SEO. The time you took to submit those three comments, or the two hours you had been allowing yourself are now being taken up with other marketing, selling, meetings, fulfilling orders, and completing projects. You know your small business SEO is important, but you just haven’t had time for the last several weeks.

This is the time to start looking for a small business SEO professional. Presumably when you’re out of time to do it, you’re also reaching a success plateau which you’ll have a hard time moving off of if you can’t devote the time to your optimization efforts. A small business SEO professional will not only devote the time that you don’t have anymore, but they have been able to keep up with the latest developments in the technology and techniques. They’re reading the latest articles, they’re using the latest tools.

If you try to catch up, you could have a small learning curve you have to overcome before you’re ready to start your small business SEO efforts. And if this is something you continue to put off, you’ll either have a bigger curve later, or you’ll eventually start to slide back off the front page.

Hiring a small business SEO professional allows you to stay focused on those activities that make you money, rather than the ones that will detract from them.

Search engine optimization is going to be crucial if you’re trying to build your online brand, and attract local customers. While you can do most of the work yourself, you ideally want to get to the point in your business growth that you need to hire a professional to handle it for you. Regardless of what you do, small business SEO is going to be important enough to you that don’t want to ignore it.

With 10 years in marketing, advertising and 10 years in internet marketing, we can offer affordable solution for you to develop your brand online. We have two Google Adwords professionals in-house, and know how to drive sales through SEO. We have done it for our own sites!

The key to turning your business into a social media marketing success is focusing on the fundamentals that already make your business great, and enabling your customers to spread the word about your exceptional products or services.

Here is a 5-step plan for linking your customers’ experience to the power of their endorsement, which will, in turn, bring more customers to your business:

1. Start with exceptional service.

Though providing your customers with positive, memorable experiences may seem an obvious suggestion, the importance of this first step cannot be understated. Whatever inspired you to first open your doors (or whichever services set you apart from your competition today) is what you need to focus on in every customer interaction you have.

When you’re firing on all cylinders and giving your patrons a top-notch experience, you’re turning casual customers into passionate ones. For better or for worse, these are the types of people who are most likely to spread the word about your business to their friends and colleagues. And for any social media marketing campaign to take off, you need to have all-out fans willing to evangelize your brand and the great experiences they’ve had with it.

2. Engage your customers with interesting content.

Great service is a first step in building a passionate fan base, but the next step involves extending the experience outside your four walls. E-mail marketing helps you reach your passionate customers when they are not in your store by sharing news, tips and other information through periodic communications.

The benefits of e-mail marketing go beyond simply keeping your customers informed. The basic act of asking for an e-mail address strengthens the bond between your business and your customers because they are entrusting you with a piece of their personal information. And while an e-mail address may seem like a tiny detail, when someone gives it to a business, that proves the business is a trusted contact that the person would like to engage with on a deeper level. In addition, e-mail newsletters are easily (and often) forwarded to and shared with friends, so this a simple first step towards leveraging your customers’ contacts, if they choose to forward along your messages.

3. Help your passionate customers spread the word.

Forwarding an e-mail newsletter is still a great way for your customers to spread the word about your company, but social media marketing provides a lot of other ways, too. For example, archive your e-mail newsletter content online. This will allow you to post the newsletter as links on various social networking sites around the Web.

4. Turn casual acquaintances into passionate customers.

Sharing information with friends is the very nature of social media marketing, so using this channel to engage your most passionate customers will quickly increase awareness in your business among their contacts. This is why providing content to your most passionate customers is so important: Give them something worthwhile to talk about, and they will gladly share it with their friends. Some examples of items your business could post include:

• Details on new products, or changes to existing offerings
• Specials, deals, discounts and coupons
• News on upcoming events
• Information about community functions your business may be participating in
• Offers, prizes, rewards and contests

As the word spreads about your news, more customers will connect with your business via social media. In fact, customers are more likely to connect via social media than they are through e-mail marketing — but don’t let that discourage you. E-mail subscribers are more engaged because they interact through their inbox, which means they’ll be alerted when your message arrives, while social media contacts get distracted more easily. Social media is very popular right now, but remember that its users tend to be more like casual acquaintances in comparison to the passionate customers that e-mail marketing provides.

5. Keep the “virtuous circle” going.

If the ultimate goal is to convert as many people into passionate customers as possible, then it all comes back to providing a great customer experience. Use social media marketing to lure customers into your business, where you can wow them with the kind of exceptional service they heard about from their contacts. And if these new customers heard about your business via social media, try to get them to sign up for your e-mail newsletter while they’re there. When they do, you’ll know you’ve found another passionate customer, and your efforts will spin onward to their friends.

This creates a virtuous circle that will continue to build buzz and generate followers for your business with every new newsletter and great customer experience you produce.

From the Facebook storefront, Old Spice aficionados – yes they now exist – can buy branded merchandise from the Super-Bowl-to-Real-Time-Social-Media ‘Old Spice Man’ campaign featuring shirtless baritone and ex-NFL player Isaiah Mustafa, replete with washboard ads and comedic timing.

As with the UK store, P&G has outsourced all the heavy lifting with the Old Spice Man Campaign Store – the Facebook store is simply a storefront linking through to an external e-store managed by a e-commerce partner in Massachusetts that looks after fulfillment and customer service.

So one of our predictions we make when speaking about the future of social commerce is no longer a prediction – the emergence of Facebook campaign stores to support and monetize marketing campaigns – pop-up f-stores – engage with the promotion; buy the merchandise.  The P&G Campaign store is elementary, and no doubt could be improved, but all the elements are there.  And it’s there. Welcome to the world of Facebook Campaign Stores.

Why do we think pop-up (temporary) Facebook Campaign Stores are the future of f-commerce?  They’re quick, cheap and easy to set up, they help monetize campaigns, and ultimately, because they may help solve the century-plus old problem encapsulated in the famous quote of disputed origin) origin “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”.

Whilst much advertising, including the digital variety, is and should be focused on building lifetime customer value (AKA ‘Brand building) rather than producing sales bumps, any integrated campaign that creates a digital trace between advertising and buyer behavior can only be a good thing.

So if you manage a brand, why not take a leaf from the book of the biggest advertisers in the world, and throw up a Facebook store for your next campaign?  And if you are an agency, why not consider teaming up with the burgeoning number of f-commerce solution providers out there and start proposing campaigns with real ROI?

Why?

Because it’s 2010 and that’s just how it’s done. When using Social Media sites your main focus should be on sending direct targeted traffic to your site, building an arsenal of quality back links, generating online exposure by strengthening your websites online presence, attracting potential clients/users, shining a light on whatever it is you’re providing and building trust.

The four main pillars of social media that you should focus on are:

1. Blogs
2. Social Networking Sites
3. Social Bookmarking Sites
4. Forums

Social Media: Blogs

First if you don’t already have one, you’ll need to set up your websites blog that you will also need to optimize for the search engines: You’ll need it to connect to an array of services that will help get the word out about new content on the blog and site via the blogs RSS feed. You can then submit the RSS feed to a number of popular RSS aggregators that relay snippets of recent blog posts made and a link.

You’ll also use the site’s blog to generate exposure for the website through social media news sites such as Technorati and others like it. With a blog, people are more likely to link back to articles posted which in turn would help the site’s overall authority in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and Page Rank.

Social Network Sites

Networking is the key to any online marketing strategy, as it brings us that much closer to our targeted audience, and one-to-one with potential clients. Through Social Networking sites you should generate a following, a reader base, and interact with them in a way that will help shine the spot light on the company or product/service you’re offering.

A few of these sites include:

• Twitter
• Tumblr
• Facebook
• Myspace
• Linkedin
• PartnerUp
• Qapacity
• Ryze
• Talkbiznow

Search engine spiders troll these sites looking for links to something new and relevant so you should always utilize all the profile pages on these sites. You can easily do this by placing you site’s link and a bio where appropriate. Remember, keep your bios keyword rich and targeted but not spammy, that’s the key. With twitter for example, the Bio in your profile ends up being your profile pages description so keep things like that in mind.

Social Bookmarking Sites

These are an entirely different breed of social media sites and often confused with social networks. With social bookmarking sites, you end up generating exposure for the individual blog posts and articles. This is done by creating accounts on the top social bookmarking sites and submitting your article links as interesting to read content and spreading the word that way. Among those sites are a few popular bookmark giants such as:

• Delicious
• StumbleUpon
• Digg
• Reddit

Remember, the key to making any Social Media campaign work is interaction and one-on-one marketing rather than mass marketing and spamming  people.

Forums

Further exposure can be achieved by registering on some of the web’s most popular forums, posting a few relevant threads, posts and general topics then adding links to your site/blog in both the forum signature and profile. DON’T join a community to spam them or talk incessantly about your website or business because like any community, listening, commenting, and making a genuine contribution here and there would yield better results and land you more potential clients, especially when people search for your business and find knowledgeable individuals representing your company helping others in the same industry online. It’s all about becoming an industry professional online!

In addition to forum marketing, you can also tap into e-mail based discussion lists and groups.

If you need any advice on how to maximise these different options for the benefit of your business, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us on 01694 724 899.

Well, you are not alone.  Every year, thousands of UK businesses buy into rogue services that fail to deliver results of any kind. The most popular type of service that Internet Marketing companies push is called Search Engine Optimisation, otherwise known as SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of increasing a website’s position in the search engines so that the website receives more visitors. If carried out correctly, an SEO campaign can deliver a measurable increase in targeted traffic:  visitors looking for a particular service or product.

By focusing on specific keywords, a website can be optimised to appear in the search engines for relevant searches. The more exposure a website gets in the search engines and the higher up in the results the website appears, the more visitors the website will get from its target market.

How do businesses get stung?

SEO is a specialist service that requires technical knowledge of how the internet and search engines like Google operate. There are a variety of scenarios that lead to a business feeling cheated by an SEO company. Typical scenarios are rogue SEO companies;

• Pretending that guarantees can be given for what ranking position a site will attain and how long it will stay there for.
• Not analysing the individual requirements of a client’s business and then applying inappropriate or ineffective strategies that don’t deliver results.
• Charging monthly fees on a rolling contract so that business owners see the campaigns as low risk (and essentially ‘worth a gamble’) but end up paying more than the value of the work done.
• Taking on clients that operate in extremely competitive environments where there may be no room for successful optimization.

10 tips to qualify an SEO Agency

So how can you avoid the unpleasant situations that we have just discussed? Research, preparation and asking the right questions are pretty effective in our experience. Here’s our top 10 tips.

1.    Ask them what guarantees they provide on indexes and rankings over time.

If they give any guarantees to do with Google (or other search engines), bin them
2.    Ask them how long it will take to get your website on the first page of Google

All SEO campaigns take time, and a real SEO company will say that a minimum of 3 months work is needed to make progress (unless you already rank for the keywords). Any mention of anything less, walk away.

3.    Do a Google search for their company name, paying particular attention at forum posts

Any negative experiences will come up, as will positive experiences
4.    Ask them what their rates are and how they price up campaigns

If they price per keyword that’s fine, but if they offer packages for £100 or £250 per month without first finding out what your needs are be cautious; the campaigns may not be tailored to what you need.

5.    Ask them what reporting they provide for clients

A genuine SEO company will provide monthly reports on what is being done each month for your money.

6.    Ask them what keywords their company website ranks for in Google.

Check their rankings. If they don’t come up, be sceptical. If they are a new company it’s acceptable to ask how they intend on ranking and how long it will take them (they should be at least trying to rank and have an understanding of timeframes) and only move forward on client testimonials directly from the clients (as well as doing point 2).

7.    Ask them what they think about your website

Most SEO companies will highlight how well optimised your website is for the search engines to read. Page titles internal linking, and keyword optimised copy are some points they should mention.  The emphasis shouldn’t all be on Meta Tags and if anybody tells you to focus on the “keyword meta tag” in particular, then beat a hasty retreat.
8.    Ask them how campaigns are planned to get you a return on Investment as soon as possible.

A good company will have a plan that will target low hanging fruit keywords to get an additional amount of traffic through to your website in the initial 1-3 months. Alongside this, they will have a long term strategy (3-12 months) to target the competitive keywords for your business. If they don’t provide a reasonable plan, question their approach and how long it will take you to see some form of ROI.

9.    Ask them what policies they have to protect your campaign and service from competitors.

An ethical SEO company will only service 1 client per sector or niche. By doing so, you will be sure that they will only optimise your campaign and not your competitors after you. If they do not commit to working exclusively for you within your sector / niche, be skeptical about their approach and ethics.

10. Ask them for case studies of their clients and contact details.

A genuine SEO agency will be happy to provide case studies and contact details for client references. These references will provide you with an unbiased, real life experience of the services being provided.

Conclusion

Just a few simple checks could mean the difference between a cost-effective campaign that delivers traffic, leads and clients, and an expensive failure that could even leave you worse off in the search engine rankings than before.

Remember to keep asking those questions! We have a proven record of delivering a return on investment when it comes to our clients regarding SEO. Why not give us a call on 01694 724 899, and we will be only too happy to answer any queries that you may have!