WHITE PAPER: The Art of Online Marketing

Marketing for tradesmen can seem difficult and complicated. It is understandable that, for someone whose job involves hard manual labour, marketing will be the last thing on their mind. Recognising and understanding the basics of online marketing can have a number of huge benefits to all businesses. This guide will go on to discuss the basics of marketing, providing easy to understand information so that tradesmen can easily implement it into their business strategies.

What is marketing?

When someone hears the word “marketing”, they automatically assume it means advertising in the form of posters and TV. But marketing is much more than advertising.

According to the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), “Marketing is the management process that identifies, anticipates and satisfies customer requirements profitably.”

Marketing is much more than shouting “buy my services” on a piece of paper. It’s about finding potential customers and tactfully persuading them to part with their money. Another way you might want to look at marketing is getting your message to the right people, in the right place and at the right time through the right method.

The benefits of word-of-mouth

As a tradesman, your focus will be on the manual element of the jobs that you carry out. You aim to ensure that your work is completed in a reasonable time frame to the highest standard possible. There is no room for mistakes in your trade.

But what if you do make a mistake? And people hear about it?

‘Word-of-mouth’ is one of the most effective forms of marketing which also has one of the biggest impacts on your potential consumers, especially when negative. It can sometimes be the deciding factor for many people, thus illustrating the importance of safeguarding your business reputation from the beginning.

Understanding online marketing

In order to market your business and your services successfully, you should understand just how the world is revolutionising.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that 60% of the population accessed the internet every day or almost every day.

Tradesmen will benefit from marketing their services online. It’s not only an effective way of letting people know that they are there, it’s an excellent opportunity to emphasise their good points and reassure a potential customer that they are the right person for the job.

It may be a nuisance to set up and maintain an online presence, whether it be an official website or just social media sites, but in order to be successful it something that should be considered.

According to national statistics by agency for information and communication technology issues ITU, there were 51,442,100 internet users to June 2010 which equates to 82.5% of the population. This means that you can reach the majority of your potential customers online.

What should I do?

SEO

The majority of the UK’s population visit the internet virtually every day. If people want to know something, they often go online and type their question into a search engine, such as Google.

Therefore, when someone needs to find a local plumber they are likely to type something like “plumber in Cardiff” into Google, which will bring up a list of results. Users tend to visit the websites that have come at the top of the search, it’s not often someone will go through 15 pages of search results to find a “plumber in Cardiff”.

The top results are those that are perceived by the search engine as the most relevant to the search. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a technique that can help your website get closer to the top. It allows search engines to find and rank your website higher than others. It can also be seen as a free source of getting targeted traffic to your website.

There are 5 steps that a search engine will follow before a website is ranked. Firstly it will ‘crawl’ the whole web to see what results there are for the search. Content will then be indexed, which means that it will be stored in a colossal database where it can later be retrieved by the search engine. It will then be processed when a search request is made, which will compare all the indexed pages in the database. As there is usually millions and millions saved in the database, the search engine will calculate the relevancy. Those relevant to the search will be retrieved and displayed.

Content

In order to write good quality ‘SEO’ content that is also relevant, the content must contain your keywords. Keywords are ‘a concept of great significance’ which enables people to find your product, service or information easier. Example, a plumber should use the words ‘plumber’, ‘plumbing’ or maybe’ emergency plumber’ in its content to ensure that search engines perceives the site is relevant to someone who is searching for a plumbing service.

Onsite

There are some other very important onsite aspects of SEO that must be considered:

• URL – Should contain keywords but stay within 115 characters. Within 75 characters is optimum, but this is not critical.

• Title Tag – Title tags are very important as they inform the search engine of page topic. These should contain keywords and be up to 70 characters.

• Meta Description – The description meta tag is important. It should read like a sentence and not just a list of keywords. It should be a compelling description and make the searcher want to click on it. The description tag should be between 150-160 characters.

• Canonical Tag – A relatively new tag that is best used on large sites with lots of content. It informs the search engines which page should rank for which content. It’s not essential and it can be detrimental if not used incorrectly.

Links

By getting relevant quality websites to link to your website can improve the way it performs on the search engines. The relevancy is important in order to show Google that the website is important in that sector. The higher the quality of the website, the more effect the link will have. It is simple to check how well Google ranks a website by downloading the Google toolbar and enabling the page rank tool.

It’s not just about getting websites to link to your site; it’s more about building relationships. This may involve supplying content, exchanging links or asking people you know with websites to link to you. Some advertising opportunities also come with text links. These are often called advertorials, which is supplying a guide or a document of information relevant to your sector.

Another way to get links is guest blog posts. This is where a blogger will invite you to blog about a certain topic. You can pay sites to link to you, but this is frowned upon by Google and you risk been penalised if spotted.

Affiliates

Affiliate Marketing can be defined as a “revenue sharing venture between a website owner and an online merchant”.

Website owners will agree to place advertisements on their website usually to help send potential customers to a merchant's website, in exchange for either an agreed fee per visit or transaction or a share of the profits.

There a various ways affiliates can display the merchants’ product or services, which can be anything from an advertisement on the website to an advertisement in the newsletter.

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to earn some extra money without actually needing to do anything. If you are a merchant you should get some good quality leads from your affiliates.

There are three different payment options, also known as the programme:

• PPC (Pay Per Click) – this means that the merchant would pay the affiliate every time a potential customer leaves the affiliate website by clicking on the merchants’ link.

• PPL (Pay Per Lead) – this would be when a potential customer registers at a merchant’s website, such as filling in their contact details or getting a quote’.

• PPS (Pay Per Sale) – the affiliate would receive a percentage or a fixed amount for every sale that is made as a result of advertising on the affiliate’s website.

Both the affiliate and the merchant should do a great deal of thorough research before agreeing to affiliation to insure that they are legit, trustworthy and have a good reputation. If done correctly, an affiliate relationship can be mutually beneficial.

How to find and recruit affiliates

It is important that you keep your affiliates updated, relevant and modern. One of the simplest ways to recruit new affiliates is to join an affiliate network that will do all the work for you. It is costly but maybe a handy starting point – especially if you don’t have a great deal of time on your hands.

You could hire an experienced affiliate manager to manage your affiliates in-house. This could be beneficial for you as you could have close discussions and ensure that you are both 100% certain of what is required.

But if it is something you want to do yourself then one of the most important tips would be to run advertising campaigns in search engines. This would bring traffic to your site and those looking would sign themselves up. It might be beneficial for you to have a separate landing page which would explain affiliates and the benefits and cost, if any.

You could also join affiliate communities such as the affiliates 4 u forum where you could make yourself visible to businesses or individuals that are already affiliates.

Or contact websites directly. Like the landing page, describe your business, what you’re looking for and the benefits of becoming an affiliate of yours. It is important not to get this bit too wrong, don’t contact a competitor to be an affiliate and try not to find affiliates who already send traffic to your competitors.

Email

E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing. It is useful for advertising a product, service or a brand to a global audience in a short period of time. It can be used to attract new customers but it is most widely used to improve relationships with current and past customers.

Email marketing can be highly beneficial as it allows you to tailor your message to specific types of people. With traditional marketing methods it is almost unfeasible to tailor the message to suit individual groups of people.

There are various types of emails, from newsletters to sales emails and the type that is used rests on the desired outcome. An email marking campaign can include a number of consecutive emails that build upon one another. One of the most common forms of building a successful email campaign is one that targets a specific upcoming date such as Insurance renewal, Birthday/Christmas or Mothers’/Fathers’ Day.

Email marketing can be cheaper than traditional mail marketing and a great deal cleaner and smoother. Its can sometimes be completed by an agency which means that you provide all the details and they do all the work. This is the most expensive way. Alternatively you could purchase an email marketing service, such as ‘dotmailer’, and employ a member of staff to put the email together and send.

However, it’s not as simple as just sending an email. When getting the right people to actually read and respond to marketing emails, and measuring and analysing the results, there is the issue of permission.

Responsible email marketing is based on the idea of permission. Essentially, permission is needed before a commercial email can be sent. If you don't have this permission, then the recipients of the email could regard your message as spam; unsolicited commercial (bulk) email.

There are a number of disadvantages to being accused of spam. Your email could be shut off, your email account closed, your reputation would be damaged and you could be subject to fines as it can sometimes be considered as breaking the law.

It is important that thorough research is carried out before sending a marketing email. Target customer, the right message, spam regulations and SEO regulations are some important factors to look into.

Conclusion

Online marketing is revolutionising marketing of the 21st century. There are many more qualities of online marketing, such as Social Media, Pay Per Click and link building which tend to be a focus after the basics are understood.