DIY PR by Penny Haywood Calder

Got some thought provoking tips on social media from Seth Liss, SunSentinel.com's news community manager. He's making the point that a lot more people are using social media now and it's harder to get noticed. But social media is still a better bet than advertising for driving business to ecommerce sites, so it's worth making the effort.

He kicks off with the obvious: drop the drab everyday stuff.

When you do post a newsworthy event, he points out that it's the details that make it more interesting. How did it happen? Where? How does that make you feel? Not easy in 140 characters, but when was really good communication ever easy?

He reminds us to avoid engaging in a 1-2-1 conversation on public sites - it's really boring for everyone else.

He also reminds us to place posts with links into context. We need to judge for ourselves whether the link is worth pursuing.

It looks as if people have had enough of blatent promotional messages from their friends. Edelman's Trust Barometer survey shows "the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company has dropped from 45 percent to 25 percent since 2008." (Edelman's annual Trust Barometer survey is based on nearly 5,000 25-minute interviews with informed people aged 24-60 in 20 countries).

He suggests sharing good information is the key to being interesting. Develop interesting sidelights on your business sector to demonstrate your knowledge in action.

Plus timing is key. Most people dip into their social media accounts so they miss a lot: If you can spot patterns when key people are posting, you can predict when they are more likely to see your posts.

Finally advises: listen first, then comment. "If people know you are interested in what they have to say, they will most likely be curious about what you have to say as well."

I'd say: there's no quick fix. It's a case of listening well before you speak to have a better chance of engaging with well respected people with a good following. People who enhance your own line reputation, and in turn, that boosts your online business.

Labels: DIY PR, ecommerce, online PR, online PR and marketing, online sales, PHPR, PR, social media

Generally, the high value sales “follow the face”, especially in the early stages of generating business-to-business service sales, even if the sale and most of the service delivery happens online.

1-2-1 networking and building relationships and referrals is key at this stage.
But you can accelerate a business relationship in between seeing people face to face by staying in contact in a thoughtful and helpful way. For example:

1) Provide personalised news snippets – maybe send a link and a note - like a personal Tweet?
2) Keep them up to speed with e-newsletters if you have contact permission and know they'll be interested
3) Hang out online and comment on their blog, answer or comment on their forum posts - that's really good for generating feel-good as many blogs don't generate much feedback.
4) Ring if you have news that could be very useful – keep it light. No pressure.

It's worth keeping in mind when you are desperate for a sale that they tend to come when you don't push. Not everyone is immediately ready or able to buy immediately, so these contact efforts are never about in-your-face selling. It's about being a familiar and trusted contact - and being at the front of their mind when they are ready.

This is the fifth in a series of posts re-visiting some of the 30 low cost or free publicity techniques featured in PHPR's founder's best-selling book: DIYPR, the small business owner's guide to 'free' publicity by Penny Haywood.

The 30 techniques are a mix of digital and offline sales, marketing and PR tools because you need to work all three disciplines (sales, marketing and PR) to effectively boost a business.

That's because:

PR raises awareness.
Marketing describes the features and benefits of your offerings and decides how to position them in the market (positioning for price, gaps in the market, distribution etc versus your competitors).
Sales matches the benefits to an individual buyer's particular needs and handles the mechanics of the sale and after sales service liaison.

As the series develops, choose a few to trial for a few months.

The aim is to work up to 10 varied publicity techniques that work for you and your business to create a rolling PR Plan for success.

Your feedback is most welcome and may be included (with proper attribution) in the forthcoming revised edition of DIY PR.

Labels: boosting your business, business promotion, DIY PR, ecommerce, online sales, PR, public relations, publicity

I am indebted to Simon Allen here at shopfitter.com for sending me a link to this article. It details a case study where the requirement to register resulted in an $300 million loss in online sales revenues.

The $300 Million Button

I don't know about you, but I recognised myself in Jared M Spool's description of online behaviour when website users are confronted by a simple login/registration form involving just a email address and password, with login/register options and a forgotten password link.

We see this all the time, so we assume it's a well proven formula that will work if we copy it.

Yet how often do we arrive at a similar form and wonder whether we have registered or not with the site? It's fine if we use the site a lot, but a real pain if we don't. I buy from very few sites frequently enough to be familiar with the login procedure and it seems I'm not the only one.

Just like the users they researched in the article, I put in an email address and stab way at a variety of the usual passwords. And if I've changed my email address, was it before or after I registered? No wonder they found some people had registered several times. Others (to the tune of some $300 million) gave up and either found another seller that was easier to buy from, or did without.

Most users resented the registration process. First-time buyers weren't sure whether they would be repeat customers so they had no interest in relationship building. They viewed the process as yet another spam generator. Most repeat customers couldn't remember whether they were new or not.

Yet how many marketing people bang on about collecting email addresses to create a permission-based list that will be your future gold dust? Yes, the ability to send well-timed and well-spaced offers and interesting information to customers will surely generate repeat sales. But it is counter-productive if the timing of the contact information collection gets in the way of the first sale. I suspect you need to analyse user-experience to determine the best point in your repeat sales cycle and make the process as easy as possible - every keystroke counts online.

Simon was making the point that this doesn't happen with web shops on the shopfitter.com platform, and it's a good point.

I remember being commissioned to write a series of case studies (one of our specialities) for an online payment provider that didn't require the payee to register. The first interviewee reported a 24% increase in revenues on the day they switched to this payment services provider. When I asked the others, none had noticed, but when they looked into it, all saw 20+% increases in sales as a result of a massive drop in failed carts (purchases abandoned during the sales process).

The next time I'm specifying or re-vamping a web site, I know I'll be looking at removing barriers to sales, not creating them. The memory of the $300 million invisible sales hurdle will live on in my memory.

Labels: case studies, ecommerce, online sales, shopfitter.com