Hi Victoria here, director of The Bookkeeper Hub and HBA Encompass and author of Zest for Success. Today I’m talking about marketing. Being on the marketing bandwagon is an overview for a little while.
And today I’m gonna talk about websites. Now, I’m not a website guru. I’m not a SEO guru. All I am is an accountant and bookkeeper who has read and read lots of things on marketing. At the end of the day, everything comes down to consistency, making sure that all your branding is the same. You have the same logos, the same colors, and demonstrating on your website that whatever it is that you’re selling is useful to your potential customer. So not necessarily a hard sell or as I’ve mentioned before a marry on first date but you need to keep in mind that every time someone drops on your website, they’re thinking of them (WIIFM). WIIFM is an acronym for what’s in it for me. Everything that you write on your website has to be about your customer, not about how good you are or what you’ve done. Sure, you can have an About Us page but the important thing is there’s a compelling call to action for the customer to get something that is going to benefit them. Making sure that your message matches the market that you’re trying to talk to. So if you recall a few videos back, we talked about our target market and we gave the example of your customer avatar when we were talking about the old guys who like to play golf together, the Rolling Stones. The way you’re going to write something for someone of that genre is totally different to how you would write something for moms of babies, so totally different. Make sure it’s consistent whatever that you do and where possible always have follow-up automation because you know what it’s all about working smarter rather than harder. If you’ve got someone who’s got a sign up to your website, make sure that it automatically flows through to your mail system and you can send them in a follow up email like ‘hey, thanks for signing up. Here’s the eBook I promised you.’ Or whatever it is. You know what your website will send you an email every time someone signs up and you need to physically attach something and send it through. You want to make it automated as possible. And the same with payments. If you’ve got a shopping cart or you’re selling something on your website, you want to make sure that all your apps and everything works together so that there’s no double entry and it just flows through an automated system. Then last but not the least, talking about that landing pages. I don’t know if you know what a landing page is. That’s a page that’s specifically designated for whatever your call-to-action is or whatever it’s trying to sell. So generally at the top of a website there’ll be a home page and about us page, a contacts pages, services page. If I was to go out today and specifically sell my Zest for Success training, I would have a page that doesn’t show on my normal links but is in the back of my website that’s called Zest for Success training. Whatever marketing that I do would push people directly to that page. And on that page explained I to them the benefits of what the training is, what they’re gonna get out of it, and why they should buy. It’s all about them. It’s all about with them. But you can have as many landing pages for as many products or services as you need to. It’s just a matter of either you sitting it up or getting your designer to set it up. And while we’re talking about that, let’s talk about whether you should do this yourself, whether you should get a designer, whether you should do it in-house, or whether you should outsource. Now outsource does not necessarily mean someone sitting in India, sitting there doing something for you. It’s as simple as having a website designer who designs your website for you. They’re not working in your office. They’re outsourced.
Now, I’m gonna go on at length in another video about the benefits of a supposed offshore outsourcing versus onshore outsourcing. It would always come to cost at the bottom of the day. The important thing is that you need to work out what’s the best use of your time. Websites are great but you can spend an awful lot of time doing minor changes here and there. And one thing that I’ve found over the years is if you have a great website designer and they have a product or service that allows you automated updates where they go in and do your WordPress updates or whatever it happens to be as well as changes here and there and they charge you a monthly subscription for that. That’s usually a great outcome because if you want extra landing pages produced or you need something changed or whatever it happens to be, they got the time and resources to get that done for you. If you’re waiting for you to have the time to go in and do it, then it’s a waste of your time because you could be either out earning income or working on your business. So that’s kind of the end of chapter 2 which is our overview of marketing and the next chapter that we’re gonna talk about is business structures. Now, I promise not to get too deep and difficult with this one but it is something that is important for all business owners. So see you at the other side.