Welcome to Hot Lemon's Web Design and Marketing Blog for small businesses.
This blog is very much focussed on small businesses. So whilst we might talk about some big real world topics and issues - some normally reserved for the big corporate boys - there will always be a small business slant on our posts. We hope you enjoy our blog, and find it both enlightening and entertaining.
Please leave us feedback, we would like to know if we're hitting the right spot or not.
In our previous posting, (Social Media: Using Social Media for Business), we discussed the benefits social media can offer businesses and why businesses should be adopting social media as an integral part of their marketing activities. In this post, we build on that and look at some of the basics of social media which businesses need to consider prior to jumping in all guns blazing – so to speak.
Social media – not so different to the old
Like any other marketing activity – new media isn’t so different to old media in that respect – it needs to be planned and thought out, otherwise, you run the very real risk of putting a lot of effort in, and getting very little back. Very much like traditional media in that respect.
Unfortunately, a lot of marketing by small and medium sized businesses isn’t well thought out, without defined objectives, without a structured plan – and as a consequence, a lot of that marketing fails. Social media is no different.
So where should a business start with social media?
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The rise of social media – the Facebooks and Twitters of the world – is inexorable. Social networking is creating a new communications paradigm that in is challenging traditional sales and marketing techniques.
Should small and medium sized businesses get involved in social media?
And, if yes, what are the benefits of doing so? (or in other words, how do I get the finance director to give me the money to do so..)
Why businesses should be using social media
The answer to the first question is easy – it’s a definitive yes. After all common business sense dictates that you follow your customers – and if your customers are using social media – so should you – “simples”. Read More »
Build it and they will come….
If only online success was that easy. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Yet, this is one of the most common misconceptions that small and medium sized businesses have about the internet.
There are thousands of examples of websites littering the web, where businesses have spent a lot time, effort and money in creating an online presence only never to build on or market that presence.
More traditional than you think…
A website, in many ways, is like a traditional printed brochure. If you don’t market your brochure – send it out to customers, make it readily available, and no one reads it – then it might as well not exist. Likewise a website. Read More »
Failing to plan, is planning to fail….
Or, alternatively, one of my favourites:
“prior preparation prevents piss poor performance”
Like everything else in the business world (and the wider world for that matter) – planning and preparation is critical for success. Marketing is no different.
However, the majority of small businesses rarely involve themselves in the marketing planning process, preferring, instead, to do there marketing in a more ad hoc, less structured way. Whilst this may suit smaller businesses, for those businesses wishing to grow and develop themselves, this lack of marketing planning can potentially be a significant handicap for their future success. At the very least it will ensure that the resources dedicated to marketing the business (both time and money) will be at least partially (if not all) wasted, and at the very worst, could see the business bankrupt itself chasing non-profitable customers.
A marketing plan?
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Over the next couple of weeks or so, if your lucky (or is that unlucky), might be longer, we’re going to do a series of blog posts on some marketing basics, with a particular slant towards small and medium sized businesses. As you may already know, Hot Lemon offers practical marketing advice and consultancy as well as professional web design.
Marketing basics – measurement
“You can’t manage, what you don’t measure“
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Yes, it’s another SEO checklist.
This is the basis of how Hot Lemon assesses websites for SEO and usability (they are both important for an effective small business website). Much of this will be reiteration of previous posts and diatribes, little is likely to be surprising (well as long as you have read up about SEO before) – after all, it’s why we have called it a checklist – it’s a list of things to check to see if your site is working as hard as it should be for your business.
Whilst some of the checklist items may be techie, others are commonsense. We hope you find it of value, and if you have any suggestions of comments, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at Hot Lemon.
The SEO checklist:
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Further to my recent blog posting on blogging – “The blogging guide” – a real life situation has come up – as they do – which helps demonstrate the real world value of blogging for businesses.
The situation: wanting to say too much……..
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Somehow, my previous blogging post got lost in the ether. So, here, the complete guide to blogging for small businesses.
Well, when I say the complete guide, lets say an abridged guide that still manages to get all, well most of, the relevant points across.
Blogging for business
Blogging is now a very established part of the world wide web. Whilst being challenged in some quarters by the inexorable rise of social media – the growing desire to shrink everything down to 140 characters or less – it still has a strong role to play in businesses online representation and strategy.
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An increasing number of small businesses are now taking a more active interest in the online marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO) of their websites – be it by blogging, PPC (pay per click advertising – for example Adwords), Facebook, Twitter or by link building.
All of these are, for the non-technically minded, are easy to use. However, many of these businesses do not have a firm comprehension of how good (or bad for that matter) their websites are for SEO – having been designed and built by somebody else, or perhaps using a hosted self build service.
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In other blog posts recently, I have made mention of the “customer proposition”, when developing online or traditional marketing content. I thought it would be worthwhile to expand on what I mean by customer proposition.
What is a customer proposition
A customer proposition is a clear and concise definition of what your business offers your customers. It is in effect your promise to your customers – “do business with me, and this is what you will get”.
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Branding, or more accurately corporate identity, is critical for small businesses looking to expand. A strong corporate identity (almost a brand but not quite), can help businesses in developing their markets, expanding into other markets and building the trust of their customers.
Identity?
In terms of identity, we are talking about how your business presents itself to your customers. This is everything from your company name, logo, your print and marketing collateral, your website, your premises, vehicles, invoices and other administrative paperwork.
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Choosing the right web design agency can be a make or break decision for many small businesses, it can mean the difference between a website which works for them, or a website that doesn’t. Or, in more succinct terms, the difference between a website that supports the business and one that costs the business (time, money, reputation, brand).
Draconian* as the above may seem, its not an exaggeration.
For example, I have listed some of the more common issues which affect small businesses below. Note, not all small businesses experience these issues, and not all web agencies are bad – in fact many of them are very good. But it’s worth noting – for those businesses looking for an agency – what some of the pitfalls are.
Common web agency “non-best” practices:
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The home page of your website is the most important page of your website. But is there an ideal home page layout?
The simple answer is no, there isn’t.
The “perfect” home page will depend on a wide range of factors, and what would be perfect for one visitor won’t be for another. Variables which come into play here are the target market, their expectations of your site, the role and purpose of your website (is it to sell, is it to promote, to communicate, or develop relationships) – all of these will influence what should and, critically, what shouldn’t be on your home page.
However, many many websites get their home pages wrong.
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Email marketing can be one of the most effective forms of marketing for small businesses – however, if not done well, it can quickly become one of the least effective, as well as potentially exposing the business to reputational and legal risk.
So how can a small business make email marketing work for them, and where does it fit in within the ever rising social media world?
Firstly, why should small businesses consider email marketing?
Why should a small business use email as part of their marketing strategy? Simple, it can be one of the most effective means of direct marketing available. Setup costs can be relatively low, it can highly personalised to the individual receiving it and it can be immediate.
Businesses can use email marketing to (in order of effectiveness):
- build relationships with existing customers
- cross sell products and services to existing customers
- convert contacts into customers
- cold sell to new contacts / customers.
In addition, and the singular factor that attracts a lot of businesses to email marketing – it can be very cost-effective, or in other words cheap to set up and run.
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Further to a previous blog posting – where I briefly talked about making false savings – I thought I would take the opportunity to expand on that a little.
Now we all know the market is very competitive out there, and that like the government, we must all make cost savings as and when we can. However, there are cost savings and there are cost savings. By all means cut costs – to the bone if you have to – but don’t do it where it will have an effect on the customer facing side of your business.
Two key reasons for this would be (amongst many others I may add):
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Many small businesses find marketing a challenge. Not because it’s intrinsically hard or difficult, more because it’s not their specialism. Their specialism after all is running their business, not marketing their business.
But where should a small business start?
Hot Lemon has developed another list of some handy marketing tips and tricks to help small businesses market themselves effectively.
#1 failing to plan is planning to fail
Whatever you do on the marketing front, always plan plan plan. Plan as much as you can, from the time you’re going to allocate to marketing activities to the actual marketing activities. In effect build a marketing plan.
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Further to my own experiences, and some high profile cases in the media, thought I would jot a few lines about the importance of small businesses owning their online presence – specifically, their URL.
Unfortunately, this is too a common issue to ignore.
Your website is not yours!
Believe it or not, most small businesses which have got a web designer or agency to build their website, don’t actually own their website! They don’t own the URL (web address), the coding used for the site, or for that matter the words and graphics used within the site!
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Whilst reading an article on cost-effective marketing one of author’s key arguments was don’t try to save money where it would be visible to your customers.
Specifically, make sure that the customer facing side of your business meets, if not exceeds, the expectations of your customers for your business.
This is all related to professionalism – which I have blogged about before – in terms of making sure you present your business as professional at all times. But it got me thinking about a concept I’ve decided to call the “professional threshold”.
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Last week saw Kent 2020, one of the largest B2B exhibitions outside of London, which I had the pleasure of attending (as a delegate this year unfortunately). However, like all exhibitions that I have attended (and that’s a fair few), there were a lot of exhibitors that were simply not making the most of the opportunity on offer.
Exhibitions: cost-effective marketing
Exhibitions can be one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing for small businesses. Very few other forms of marketing or sales gives a business such an opportunity to promote itself to its target audience in such a short space of time. This means, however, that businesses need to seize that opportunity and make the most of it!
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Building on our previous post – SEM for small businesses, which provides some of the background on search engine marketing and why it’s important, this post dives straight into the subject matter on hand to offer Hot Lemon’s top ten tips on search engine marketing for small businesses.
All of these top tips have been created with the smaller business in mind. All of them are achievable on either a modest or low budget (if any at all), and the only real requirement is time. Whilst some of these top tips are time intensive in setting up, if managed on a regular basis, their ongoing time requirements will become more than manageable.
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