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All the standard web stuff that every company should have, done for you:
- Online registrations for standard social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook
- Online registrations for standard free business listing services (Google Places, Bing Local, etc)
- Online registrations with logos and corporate colours on business review sites such as Qype, HotFrog, etc
- Set up social media monitoring and alerts for you, to your email – so you know when people are talking about you
- Set up a blog for you… and commission and deliver at least three articles about your business, each month
- Set up Google Analytics for you, properly, so you know what’s working and what’s not
- Set up Call Tracking so you can tell where the leads come from
You’ve probably been to seminars and meetings where the speaker has told you about all the free online resources you should be using? When you start trying to do what you’ve been told, it takes so long, and the forms and registration processes are so confusing, that you’ve given up. You’ve got a mix of partly filled in registrations, missing registrations, and outdated content (old addresses and phone numbers, etc)?
If you’re in this position, we’ve put together a basic online promotion package that covers all the core elements that you should have. If you’ve got partway through registering, or there’s old address or contact details, or old business descriptions, we’ll fix them up for you, so you have all the basic stuff covered. So call us, and get all that stuff to happen, at a sensible price.
We’ll also give you the instructions you need for your web site, so that your web design company can add two essential business tools – Google Analytics (free) and Call Tracking (normally £60 per month plus inbound call costs). And that’ll allow us to monitor your Google Webmaster Tools (you probably didn’t even know that you had them!)
Here’s what we’ll do, in detail… But you probably already know most of this, you just haven’t done it!
Social Media Registrations
We’ll set up or update your existing accounts, tied to your business email address, on each of the main free services:
- Facebook Corporate Page
We’ll submit logos, and set corporate colours, corporate messages, web site URLs, phone numbers, addresses, and so on, for your main business location. Where relevant, we’ll set up email alerts. On sites that allow it, we’ll attach your blog and website and Twitter feed.
Business Directories and Review Sites
We’ll add you to, or update your existing listings on, the main free business directories:
- Google Places
- Bing Local
- Qype
- Ciao
- HotFrog
If you’re a local business, we’ll look for local listing services that will help you, and if you’re national, we’ll look for national listings services in your sector.
Media Monitors & Alerts
We’ll set up daily (or if you prefer, hourly) monitors for your business name, competitors and key product names – up to ten in total – so you can know what’s happening. We’ll use a mix of free services (Google Alerts) and paid services (Trackur – normally $18/month).
Blog and Article Writing
A blog is a user-managed website that allows you to write about what interests you and your clients. We run a blog where we write about technical stuff to do with web marketing for our very techy clients – and another blog with some articles to help small and medium sized business owner managers to work out what’s important in online marketing.
Blogs help you to be found. They show that your business is still active, and that you are paying attention to what’s happening in your industry. They are an indirect form of advertising that can generate a lot of visitors to your business, interested in what you have to say. We’ve got one article that has been active for about three years, and gets around 20 visitors per day, for example.
How does that material get generated? Writing well is a specialist skill – and time consuming. So we employ some journalists or other skilled writers to phone you, ask about your business and then write articles about what they’ve learned about you and your business. They’ll look for the most interesting angle. Typically they’ll need a half hour phone call with you to find enough material for about three articles – so one short phone call each month, and you’ve got new articles of a decent length, covering the topics that you care about, in well written English. All helping to drive visitors to your site and building your reputation.
We’ll hook your blog to your LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, so people can see what you’re writing about (or what we’re writing about you).
SEO, Web and Call Analytics
You should really know what is driving enquiries. It’ll help you prioritise budgets to the most effective marketing sources. This element of the package is about measuring how people reach your web site, and what sources drive them to the phone, to completing enquiry forms or sending you enquiry emails.
Call Tracking is pretty clever. This service can create special phone numbers for your offline marketing literature (newspaper adverts, or brochures) and track how many times those numbers are used – so you can measure whether those sources are working.
You also get dynamic phone numbers on your web site. Having these unique (local area coded or 0800 numbers) lets you track which lead source passed the user to the site. You can get notifications of missed calls, and you can even set up call logging, so you can listen to calls for up to 30 days and review how you and your staff are selling on the phone. You can even have the Call Tracking software wait after the lead has hung up, and then let the sales agent or customer representative answer a question about whether it was a sale or a lead, and if a sale, what the value will be.
That call tracking software is normally £60/month, plus call fees. We’re bundling it, and throwing in the first £30 of inbound calls for free – that’s hundreds of calls (normally about £0.10 to connect the call, and about £0.025 per minute, so around £0.125 for a tracked inbound call, and if the per minute charge seems a lot, just call the prospect back to reduce your costs).
You also need to know what’s happening on your web site. Where are visitors coming from and are they buying, making enquiries or simply leaving? We’ll set up web analytics so these are easier business questions to answer. You can even work out whether our promotional package is working, using these two measurement systems!
We’ll give you instructions for your web designer to add the code to your web site. If you want us to add the code, we can do so, for a small extra fee (it’ll depend on the type of the site and the complexity, but typically is around £100 to do).
We’ll also set up some search engine ranking tracking – using a little known feature of Google search results and Google Analytics – which tells you what position your search results were in when someone clicked on them. This helps you understand what searches are sending people to you.
Finally, we’ll also tell you about how you can track newsletter and mass emails that you send out – find out whether people are using the email links you send them.
PPC Set Up Or Audit
If you don’t know about paid search (PPC), you’ll probably want to read this short article about “What Is Paid Search?”
We’ll set up a basic “brand” based advertising account if you don’t have a Google AdWords account – and we’ll give you a voucher that’ll probably last you most of the year. If you’ve got AdWords already set up, we’ll review it and tell you about opportunities you’re missing out on. You’ll need to pay a £5 registration fee to Google.
We’ll also set up an MSN adCenter account (for Microsoft/Bing search) for advertising on your brand based searches – so you can see whether people are searching for you on Bing.
SEO Audit
We’ll do a short audit of your web site to see what simple things can be changed that should help you in free search engine results pages. This is written up as a report for your web designer to implement, or we can give you an estimate for us to make the changes for you. This activity is sometimes know as on-site or on-page search engine optimisation – the techniques that get you more visitors from search engines. They’re well known, written up all over the place, and very often ignored by web designers – but they do make a substantial difference.
Other Stuff
We’ll do one free change of address details (business address, phone number changes, etc) during the course of the annual contract.
Another way of thinking about this is what is done once or twice and what is done on a monthly or quarterly basis:
Set Up
- Google Places
- Bing Local
- Qype
- Ciao
- Hotfrog
- Other local or sector (free) directories
- Call Tracking
- Web Analytics
- Blog
- Search Engine Optimisation Audit
- Social and other Media Monitors
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Bing Webmaster Tools
Monthly Activity
- Phone call to discuss your business interests
- Three articles for your blog
- Web analytics reports
- Call tracking service and call charges (£60/month, plus up to £30 in calls/month)
- Media Monitoring services ($18/month)
Quarterly Activity
Quick Quarterly Review of
- brand activity on paid search
- search engine optimisation performance and potential
- call tracking usage
- blog impact and the brief
How Much?
This basic package is about £50 per week – that’s probably worth less than an hour of your time.
Upgrade Options?
Yes, we’ve got them. This set of activities is the minimum that we think a business really needs to be doing to be visible on the web. For example, we can upgrade you with:
- Paid directories – a one off or annual fee
- More blogging on your site, or articles to be placed off-site or as a guest blog
- Online PR – press release distribution
- Expanded paid search activities, including MSN adCenter and Yahoo!Search Marketing, Facebook and LinkedIn advertising
- Integration with a CRM
- Reworking or building a new web site, typically using WordPress or an eCommerce system
- Training in SEO, PPC, Social Media or Web Analytics
Downgrade Options
We can take the call tracking out of it – but many small and medium sized businesses rely on lead generation by phone. We think losing this service would be a bad idea… but it can be done.
Everything else is pretty much at the minimum for a business with more than more than a handful of staff.