Making marketing pay

Thanks to Ross for ably standing in for me last week. I was actually back from Butlins when Ross wrote it, but as you’ll see, we’ve been mad busy this week, so it was just easier for Ross to write last week’s diary entry. But a pleasant change for you I suppose! So maybe we’ll have other guest writers as the weeks go on. Get ready, Lee! I’m calling on you next!!

So what have we been up to? I’m beginning to find that marketing a website has many more facets to it than just marketing an offline product.

We’re on a quest to improve our conversion rates, that is, the number of new members who actually sign up after coming to the site for the first time. This is a tricky number to establish in itself, because of the structure of our site, with it’s members pages and non-members pages. But we think it’s about 1 in 10 at the moment, which I’m led to believe is pretty good! But when we set our 1st year targets, I wanted a 1 in 4 conversion rate by the end of the year. So after some discussion, we’ve made some key changes.

Firstly, we’ve changed the look of the home page. A great design by Lee & his team now means that on the front page there are 3 activity ‘tasters’. There were always free ‘tasters’ on the site (and still are) for each activity category, but you have to click on each category icon to see them, and then they’re not displayed in quite the same way as the rest of our resources. So now there are also some on the home page itself, along with the graphics we use for each category, and now they will be seen by a new visitor straight away and should be quite eye-catching.

We’ve also opened up all the content in the ‘gold bar’ menu items. So the sports, organisations, holiday reviews etc can now all be viewed by non-members as well. We’re quite proud of these pages, and we realise that members aren’t joining up just for these pages. Instead our members are joining to use the thousands of activities we have on our database. So we’ve opened these other pages up as public pages to show off what we do!

Hopefully the combination of these 2 changes will prove our quality sufficiently to persuade more potential new members to join up.

Our email newsletter has also been redesigned, so it’s now more in keeping with the look of the website, and that’s due to go out today. So perhaps that will also return a better conversion than the previous newsletters we’ve sent, which I think have been too dry.

I guess this is just a continual thing, reviewing your product, tweaking what you do and trying to find lots of little things to improve your business. I watched a business training video last week, that I’ve seen many times in the past (I used to present it myself to our business owner clients), called ‘Making Your Business Really Fly’ – also known as the ‘Wally’ video! But it’s the first time I’ve seen it as a business owner myself, and I got quite a lot from it by watching it from a new angle.

One of the key messages in it, is that you probably won’t find one major thing that’s going to make your business take off. But it’s the culmination of lots of small things that make the biggest difference, and so instead you should spend your time improving 100 little things by 1% each. The biggest downfall for most businesses is that they have lots of ideas, but ‘fail to implement’ them (‘FTI’ the video calls it). I’m not sure that’s so true for us, as I think most new businesses are continually looking for new ideas and trying out new things. But I think as many businesses become more established, it’s easy for them to become more complacent, and they don’t spend time as often looking at new marketing methods etc.

Talking of marketing, we’re still doing lots of things. We’re trying a combination of editorial and advertising in some very focused, local, publications at the moment. This works out quite cheap, but it’s frustrating that most of them won’t be in print for a couple of months yet, and just because it’s cheap, doesn’t mean it’s effective. The combination of 10 small adverts still mounts up, so we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

Plus we’re now looking at more online advertising as well. The difficulty is knowing where to advertise, how much to spend (when you don’t have a lot at all!), the percentage return you should expect (so you can establish whether it will be worth it) etc. There’s an awful lot of choice out there, from advertising on emails, banner adverts, listing on databases, and so on. We’ve narrowed it down to a couple of alternatives, but we’re holding back from making a decision until cashflow improves a bit more.

We’re exhibiting at The Practical Parenting Baby Show at NEC in Birmingham this weekend. So early this week I’m putting together the final checks for the stand design, the admin tasks and the lists (again!) of things we need to take.

Other developments this week, is that we’re about to launch our ESCAPE! Programme for our members. This is something we thought we’d have to wait ages to do, but I’ve found a way of doing it slightly differently than how I originally planned, so we can launch it much earlier than expected. Whippee!!

So we’re now offering ESCAPE! days out to major attractions, at exclusive rates. We’ve agreed 4 dates so far. Three in the summer holidays to Chester Zoo, Eureka! And Camelot Theme Park. Plus one just before the summer holiday, when we’re running a Teddy Bears’ Picnic for babies, toddlers & pre-schoolers. I’ve centred them on Northern England for now, because the majority of our members are based there. But I’m about to arrange 2 more for the Midlands (hopefully this will be apt after the NEC show) and 1 or 2 for Southern England. Our members in the South are scattered far and wide, so it’s more difficult to find somewhere that suits a lot of them. We’re hoping this scheme will encourage recommendations to friends a bit more, so clusters will develop making it easier to plan future ESCAPE! days.

This should be up on the site by the end of the week, including a new ESCAPE! logo and downloadable booking forms for our members. We’re not attempting to deal with the booking & payments through Worldpay at the moment, because (as usual!) I’ve not left Lee’s team with enough time. So downloadable booking forms and cheques in the post will have to do for now!

So back the grind. My ‘to do’ list is so full I’ve split it into tasks for each half day this week! Kate from Sticky Bobs told me about a great time management tool last week. You calculate a ‘priority quotient’ by grading each of your tasks from 1-3 (one is the lowest!) for their urgency and importance – 2 separate figures. Then you multiply the 2 figures together and then rank your tasks according to their priority. What a great idea - when I have time I’ll do it.

Oh dear, that’s not quite the right attitude is it!

Kirsty