Web Strategies

A quick note: Go to the edge.  Define your niche, make it very narrow and focused and dominate it.  With 300 million potential customers in the United States alone, even if your product appeals to just 1/10%, that’s still 300,000 people, and that’s likely more than enough to keep you busy for years to come.

We’re working with a client that manufactures and markets a speciality product in an industry with fairly large barriers to entry.  We’ve been working with them for years on a generalists mass market appeal model to move as many units as possible.

After some time, it’s gotten very expensive trying to be everything to everyone.  Time to switch gears and follow the advice I’ve had in my gut - edge here we come!

For more information on edges your business can explore, check out Seth Godin’s Free Prize Inside or Contact Intero Design Group today.

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In a recent post I promised a lot more information on one of Intero Design Group’s core competencies: Awesome web design for the real estate industry.  To get things started down this road, I’m going to generally touch on the most important aspect of your organization’s digital presence - delivering on your customer’s expectations.

All small business marketing on the web is about delivering on a customer’s expectations and being able to capture their attention based upon that delivery.  The challenging thing about real estate on the web is that the customer’s expectation is continually evolving in an area of increasingly advanced technology - it’s hard to keep up.  To a certain extent, this could be said for any business, so let’s explore that a little further:

2000 Customer Expectations:

• Fortune 500 Companies - You need a website.  Nothing fancy, but I want to be able to see some updated news and find out a little more about your products.
• Real Estate Agents/Brokerages - You have a website?  Fantastic!  I get to see your photo plastered on (yet) another place so I can feel good about what a hot shot my hot shot agent really is.
• Dentists, Doctors and Veterinarians - Sounds risky mixing my health and my computer.  I probably can’t trust health information online, but I guess that WebMD site did recently launch…
• Car Dealerships - You should probably invest your internet marketing dollars in text-based classified ads on Trader.com.
• E-Commerce Stores - Give me a decent selection, these great prices I hear about and please don’t come through my computer and steal my identity.
• Restaurants - Why would I need to look at your website?  We have one computer and we don’t eat at the computer in this household.
• General and Other Small Businesses (Accountants, Mechanical Contractors, B2B Outfits, etc.) - You have a website?  Huh.  I’m a little impressed - you must be big time.

2008 Customer Expectations:

• Fortune 500 Companies - I don’t want to just read about your company anymore, I want to experience and explore it on my terms.  I want to get a feel for the culture.  I expect to find a well stocked PR department with the “official line” about what you’re doing, area offices and lcoations, your stock price and financials, videos, career openings and a blog maintained by the head cheese - your CEO.
• Real Estate Agents/Brokerages - I want the biggest and most photos, the fastest search and maps of where my future dream home is located.  I want to access this information from your website, from my home or office and from my cell phone while driving around for hours looking at houses.  I want demographic information tied to the homes and neighborhoods I’m interested in.
• Dentists, Doctors and Veterinarians - I want information and I need it now!  My child feels warm, can I chat with a nurse in a secure, real-time environment?  I work a 9-5, make it easy for me to schedule my next appointment online or track my pet’s immunization history.
• Car Dealerships - Real time inventory and pricing.  I want to cross reference the year, make and model I’m interested in with recent customer reviews and information from Edmunds, KBB, etc.  I want to make you an offer and hear back within an hour.
• E-Commerce Stores - Cross-referenced and timely inventory.  I’m looking at books on marketing my small business, show me books on forming an LLC without me asking for it.  Update me when my item ships and give me a way to track my order.  Invite me back via timely email correspondence tailored to my previous purchases.
• Restaurants - What’s cookin’?  Let me see the full menu, photos, rotating specials and make a reservation.  If you hold events, I’d like to be notified via email and/or text message.
• General and Other Small Businesses (Accountants, Mechanical Contractors, B2B Outfits, etc.) - I want to get in touch, schedule a maintenance request, manage my account and pay my bill online.  Anticipate my needs and make your website useful for me to do business with you!

In my next post, I’ll delve more in to the specifics of what’s up in real estate and engage in some shameless self promotion on how Intero Design Group is helping keep small real brokerages and individual agents on the cusp.

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While we’re on the topic of marketing for the local dining, bar and entertainment scene, today marks the grand opening of Zing Restaurant located in an historic building at 543 Indiana Avenue in Indianapolis.  From all that I can find about this cool up and comer, it sounds like an awesome concept.  A social dining experience, high brow fare, newly renovated facilities - sounds great!  (More information here: http://indianapolis.dbusinessnews.com/shownews.php?newsid=164714&type_news=latest).

The problem?  I’m interested!  Where can I find out more?  After spending a little over 5 minutes (an eternity on Google’s watch) searching for terms like zing, zing indianapolis, zing restaurant indianapolis, zing bar indianapolis - I come up empty handed.  A few blog posts here and there about the architectural renovations of 543 Indiana Avenue, a mention of their grand opening on Indy.com and that’s about it.  Anything of value?  Nothing, nada.    Where can I see photos, make a reservation, check out the menu, day dream about how great my next hot date at Zing is going to be and sign up to get updates of things happening at this awesome new place?

The lesson?  If you’re going to go in to business, you’ve got to get in the conversation and the conversation IS happening online.  If you don’t write about your brand, someone else will and it may not be the information you’d like to share.  So, c’mon, Zing, don’t be afraid - join the conversation!

For more on joining in, I’d turn you to Sarah “Intellagirl” Robbins’ recent blog post at Ubernoggin’ or get in touch and we can help!

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So, we broke one of our own blog’s rules and took a break from the regularity of blogging.  This goes to show that it takes a ton of work and discipline for any small organization to maintain their blog effectively.  Work piled up, clients called, work was done, and we’re back - balanced between working on and working for our business.

In the coming posts, I’ll be back on the horse with more information on effective web design for Realtors and real estate professionals.  Intero Design Group serves literally hundreds in the real estate profession, and I have a thing or two to add to the conversation.  From mash-ups to Trulia, Google maps to mobile home search, we’re there and we’re going to be talking about it.

After that, I want to introduce you to our latest focus area - video production for the web.  Yeah, yeah, you’re thinking that we’re about 2 years behind YouTube, but the time has come for the small to medium sized organization to truly harness video on the web to tell their story, reach out to new prospects and convert.

 Stay tuned!

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All companies have a niche.  For years, in association with our sister companies, ours has been designing websites for real estate professionals - REALTORS, mortgage companies, commerical property owners, residential property management companies and so on.

Over the next few entries, I’m going to cover what you, as a REALTOR or real estate professional should look for in a website and web design company.  How can your site generate leads?  What’s the latest and greatest “must have” technology?  What’s just a fad and what’s powerful and meaningful to your customer?  If you already have a website, let’s open a dialogue and talk about what you’re doing that works and what you’re doing that needs to be revised or scrapped all together.

In the meantime, take a look at some of the firms we work in conjunction with:

• www.AgentSitesToGo.com - Template-based websites for REALTORS.
• www.SeeItOnYourCell.com - Mobile phone home search tools for cutting edge REALTORS.
• www.YourIDXLink.com - Map-based home search and lead generation.

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In my last posts, I covered a few basic reasons why small businesses should blog as well as some mistakes that small businesses can make when starting to blog.  (If you’re not convinced, get in touch and we can chat more about it.)  Today, I want to riff a little on how small businesses can blog.  To start, I think it’s important that I share this little snippet that I ran across:

Successful blogging takes discipline.
Successful blogging takes practice.
Successful blogging takes planning.
Successful blogging takes skill.
Successful blogging takes style.
Successful blogging takes knowledge.
Successful blogging takes passion.
Successful blogging takes commitment.
Successful blogging takes vision.

While I think that a lot of this is redundant, I certainly feel that most of it holds true.  For your small business to have an effective blog (one that delivers a solid return on investment and generates readership from the types of people that you’re trying to reach), it’s important that you plan and develop a vision for what you hope your blog will accomplish.

When I work with clients on implementing their small business or corporate blog, we focus first on the type of customer they wish to reach then on the types of content they hope to share.  Next, we see how both correlate with key words that users may be searching.  By developing a key word strategy, you can help your small business with SEO (search engine optimization) and better keep your blog on message.

When it comes to style, it’s important that your blog mesh with your message and the overall image of your business.  If you sell sporting goods and have photos of flowers on your blog titled “Big Dog Advice”, then you have an image problem.  Take a look at the latest from author Seth Godin, “Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync?”

Discipline is key in your small business blog.  When you develop a reader base, it’s important that you meet their expectations by delivering timely information on a regular basis.  Intero Design Group helps companies set up blogs with scheduled posts and establish norms and systems within your organization (whether a one man show or 100 employees from coast to coast).  When you get in to a good groove, keeping your blog fresh shouldn’t take long and can result in a really positive set of information that you can share with your readers.

The last things you need to consider in your foray in to small business blogging is readership, measurability and analytics.  How many people are finding your blog?  What terms are they using to find you?  Once there, how long do they stay and how many pages do they read?  All of this can be used to measure overall effectiveness and return on investment.  I know I often harp on this subject, but without these types of indicators, you could be writing for yourself.  We call that a journal, not a blog.  At Intero Design Group, we use a multitude of statistical suites including Google Analytics, Webalizer, server logs and more.

In closing, there are tons of resources online - just Google “small business blogging”.  Some good places to start are this article from Business Week and this brief overview from About.com.  If you need a little guidance on the technicalities, considering consulting an expert.

That aside, you now have everything you need to know about getting your business started with its own blog presence!  Just remember, before you throw out a blog, make sure you’ve got the right kind of message, image and team in place to best represent your organization.

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I’ve done a lot of research lately on corporate and small business blogging and what businesses can do to have a blog that really focuses on ROI (return on investment).  In summary, blogs have really evolved over the past 5 years from being only something that some nut with an agenda rants in to being a valuable tool to candidly learn more about a particular subject or what a particular company brings to the table in terms of expertise.

Small business blogging can be a good idea for a number of reasons.  First off, SEO (search engine optimization).  By developing and to build a blog with your team, you’re rallying the organization around a cause that will enhance your site’s performance in search engines.  Building a library of valuable and timely content driven information will raise your site’s rankings on Google, Yahoo! and other major search engines.  Simply by building the blog and sharing information relevant to your business, you can bring your organization (be it large or small) from page 10 to top 3 in no time.

Secondly, we’ve gotta face it - we’re not all in a position to make all the right decisions for our business or personal life right now, today.  Typically, the average consumer will visit seven websites before deciding on one to actually engage and do business with.  Whether you sell a product online or in stores, generate leads or you’re just looking to spread your message, a blog can help turn strangers in to friends, then friends in to customers.  It allows you to build rapport and share information in a lively, candid and no obligation manner.

That said, keep reading our blog and take all the free information you care to have - we’ll keep dishing it up for you!  Ours is a business model built on service and education of why and how our web design services can work for you.  Contact the staff at Intero Design Group if you’re ready to get started on your own small business blog.

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As I meet with clients from Indianapolis and across the country and work with developers and designers from across the world, it often comes up - why the web?  Why should we all be devoting so much time and attention to Internet-based marketing versus the traditional marketing machines that are already tried and true?  Why is web marketing better than traditional marketing?

First and foremost, is the concept of permission marketing versus interruption marketing.  This is the idea that there are customers looking for exactly what you have to offer without you reaching out to 1,000,000 people with a shotgun approach ad.  Only the most targeted of customer needs to even bother knocking on your door or wasting your time.  If you run a Toyota dealership in Tuscon, why waste time taking calls from someone interested in a Fiat in Fargo?  At the same time, wouldn’t it be nice to get calls from someone in Tulsa that is, in fact, interested in Toyotas?  Afterall, the world is flat and you can ship that new 2009 Avalon right over.

Secondly is metrics, measurability and scalability.  The typical small business used to run a classified ad in the Sunday paper as a one shot deal and sit by the phone in hopes of calls.  In today’s fast-paced, web driven marketing world, you can deploy your message, measure results, modify your message and make it as small as your local market or as large as a global campaign within days all with the few clicks of a mouse and a little help from some web design pros.

I’m sure I could go on for hours, but I’ll close with the notion that the web is where your customers are.  If you’ve noticed that your “yellow pages” ad and billboard aren’t delivering the calls that they once did, then you’re not alone - it’s okay.  Use of the world wide web as the first stop for information on anything from sports scores and movie times to big decisions like airline tickets and new homes will continue to grow.  You can be the champion in your business by helping to create an effective web presence.

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Welcome to the corporate blog of Indianapolis web design company, Intero Design Group. Our global team in Indianapolis, Indiana and Surat, India is excited to share this blog with you, the small business owner, and shed some light on the ins and outs of small business marketing on the web.

In an ongoing, candid and constantly updated fashion, we’ll be covering a range of topics from quality web design to email marketing - even corporate blogging and why your business should be communicating with your prospects in this new, off-the-cuff manner.

Best of all, our entire staff has been invited to get in on the action! So you have at your disposal not one, but twenty something web design professionals from across the globe.

As President of Intero Design Group, I extend a warm welcome and look forward sharing our insights as we grow our company in the Indianapolis market and answering any questions you may have.

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