Amanda Commented “I was very pleased with the website design that was produced by Purpose Media and everyone I have talked to about the site has been very complementary. The site is simple to use and my Internet based business has flourished because of our beautiful products and the great presentation we are able to give on our website.”

Despite recent reassessment of government spending funding is still available to support training, mentoring, coaching and business development. While this is not directly related to web development it can be used to devise business strategies to make your business more successful when trading on the web. If you interested in finding out the full details of how this funding can be accessed call Matt Wheatcroft on 01623 600694.

The chart shown below is real life data from one of our clients and it shows how the number of visits from offline sources, paid for search engine advertising and the organic search engine results has varied over the life of the site.

Offline marketing strategy

It is worth noting that this business is working with a marketing budget and has been pro-active identifying offline marketing opportunities that can be used alongside online activity. You will see that shortly after the site first opened for business in 2008, the majority of the site visits were generated through offline marketing activity. This offline activity combined with bookmarking by site user has seen the traffic from this source continue to grow over the past 2 years. This has been achieved with regular updates to the site with both content and evolutionary design changes playing their part in this growth.

Paid for search

Google Adwords campaigns were first undertaken in 2009 and due to the success of this technique additional keyword phrases were targeted throughout the year. The tactical nature of paid for search engine advertising combined with excellent analytics reporting tools, means the cost effectiveness of the campaign could be monitored to ensure a return on investment was achieved. The list of paid for search keywords has continued to expand and the more productive phrases have been pursued more aggressively, over the past two years. This has seen a 33% increase in traffic between 2009 and 2010.

Organic search

The holy grail of any search marketing is to reduce advertising spend while growing search traffic. While this sounds counter intuitive it can be done by successfully optimising the web site so that it ranks well in the organic search results. If successful this strategy can have remarkable results as shown in figure 1 above. In year 1 the traffic sourced from organic search increased by 325% while in year 2 it increased by an astounding 643%. In terms of revenue the organic search produces approximately 3 times the volume produced by the next largest contributor.

How can Purpose Media help you?

If you would like to enjoy similar growth in your online business then call Matt Wheatcroft at Purpose Media to discuss your ideas.

Reasons to integrate Sage with your Web Site

So as a business using both web and traditional routes to market why would you want to integrate your web site with your Sage 200 or Sage 50 accounting software? Well the most obvious attraction is the time savings available when recording sales details within your company accounts.

Most reasonably successful small retail web sites will deliver a large volume of low value transactions. Typically daily transactions might reach 70 / day, at busy periods in the year,  representing an unacceptable workload for manual book-keeping.

Business Inventory Management

When selling through multiple channels stock / inventory management can become problematic for many small to medium sized businesses. The use of a central system like Sage 200 or Sage 50 is a very good way to ensure that your business has all of the information it needs to properly manage stock, so that fulfillment issues do not lead to uneconomic work.

From a web site perspective Sage Integration will prevent the sale of items that are currently out of stock or discontinued. This will remove the need to process orders that cannot be fulfilled, thereby improving customer satisfaction and leading to a greater likelihood of repeat custom.

Direct Transfer of Customer and Order related data

Direct transfer of customer and order information, without the need to re-key that information across systems, will lead to better quality information. This will deliver a consequent reduction in lost staff time, resolving issues associated with these inaccuracies. Invoicing and other backend functions will be more efficient and allow orders to be fulfilled from stock more quickly and with fewer errors.

Sage Operations

Sage integration enables your company to run the day to day operations of it’s e-commerce web site direct from Sage. So that product promotions and discounts, for example, can be applied by changing product settings within the Sage software. This reduces the requirement for your staff to become familiar with additional online systems, consequently reducing training requirements and costs. However the web site administration functions remain available so that a fallback option exists to ensure the business is able to continue trading online despite any Internet connection issues outside the control of the business.

Management Information from Sage

Sage business software has been developed to provide management with an instant and accurate view of the business, so that you can make faster and better informed decisions. It contains powerful analytic tools that let you pinpoint exceptions and anomalies, highlighting inefficiencies and opportunities for innovation, productivity and growth. All of this functionality relies extensively on accurate data input. Sage web site integration ensures the accuracy of information supplied from the web site delivering more accurate Management Information.

Secure Data Transfer

The security of data is a very important issue for the modern business. Whether we are talking about Business Continuity / Data Recovery or unauthorised access to company and customer information (hacking). Failure to address these issues could be embarrassing or could cause major financial losses to your company. For this reason our Sage Integration process ensures that company and customer data is protected at all times, during the transfer between the web site and the Sage business system. Out Sage Integration techniques also ensure that the web site will continue to function if communication with the Sage business system is lost and the transfer of all order related data will recommence when the connection is restored.

Website Sage Integration Technical Support

Purpose Media believe in fully supporting our customer base with technical and web marketing support, to ensure their web site becomes and remains productive. When customers develop bespoke solutions to fulfill their Sage integration requirements they can reasonably expect on-going technical support for that system from Purpose Media. We will therefore fully support your system throughout it’s life to minimise the impact of any failures on your business.

The brief: To develop an eCommerce website solution capable of launching the ‘all-in-one’ into the marketplace via World Wide Web. The site needed to be:-

• Appealing to the consumer and geared towards generating sales
• Functional in terms of being able to manage products that required personalisation
• Easy to administer to ensure ease of updating and management of orders
• Search engine friendly and with the ability to be optimised efficiently

The solution: The Purpose Media team took on the challenge and set about consulting with the client (by telephone and email!) to identify what unique features were required to ensure this unusual product was displayed and marketed effectively. The product proved a point that we consistently make i.e. that the best eCommerce websites are not ‘off the shelf’ but are tailored specifically to a clients business needs and around the product itself.

The job: Our team set about developing a bespoke website structure which incorporated a facility for personalising the garments and the administration area was developed with the knowledge that further development might be required as the demands of the business grew.

The marketing : An initial pay-per-click (Google Adwords) campaign proved successful in generating some business by the simple fact that the product had little competition, however the ‘goose’ was about to lay a ‘golden egg’ in the form of the ‘social networking’ revolution.

A growing number of comments on forums and blogs drew the attention of the parental portal website www.mumsnet.com. As mums were busy writing about their purchases news was spreading fast and the result was increased website traffic (visitors) and more SALES!

The business: We would like to compliment our client on her sheer determination to make her business succeed as well as acknowledge that it was her willingness to work in partnership and take on board advice and recommendations offered by our team, as well as our development and search engine expertise that has ensured the success story which is the ‘all-in-one-company’.

Did it work?  Oh Yes, and more…. To date the All In One Company has generated just tens of thousands in direct sales via the website alone in 7 months (November 2008 to May 2009). The website also generates over 6,000 unique visitors per month.

All this from a strange but truly brilliant idea… and there’s still more idea’s in the pipeline – “watch this space”.

www.the-all-in-one-company.co.uk

The brief: Solutions for Accounting was very clear.

• Core product needed to be highly ranked in Google in organic searches
• More access and control over their website content was required
• Training in SEO (search engine optimisation) was needed

A priority for the client was the visibility of a particular product known as Sage 200 Manufacturing software, which is a high end software package.

The solution: The challenge for Purpose Media as Solutions for Accounting website partner was to achieve high ‘ranking’ in Google’s natural listings (organic searches). This was no mean feat as there are literally thousands of Sage resellers in the country and when you are competing against the Sage ‘brand’ itself then getting to the ‘top’ was never going to be easy.

The existing website, in terms of design and layout was already clean-cut and easy to navigate. The site ‘branding’ was actually pretty good and reflected the right ‘image’, however, in terms of the search engines design comes secondary when considering site positioning or ‘ranking’ in the search engines. What was required here was more ‘back end’ (website function and administration) development rather than a re-design.

The job : Our team set about developing a new ‘back end’ structure and administration area for the website which provided more flexibility in terms of managing the website content, but more importantly within the structure we incorporated SEO (search engine optimisation) tools and features which provided the means to optimise the whole site.

The (SEO) tools

• Keyword (industry buzz words) rich URL Threads – identified each and every page within the site to create a ‘path’ for the search engines to follow
• Site maps- submitted new and updated ‘content’ (text)to the search engines ensuring the search engines had up to date and relevant information
• Titles / tagging and keywords- the facility for individual products and pages to be optimised in its own right.

Did it work?  Search Google for ‘Sage 200 manufacturing’, ‘solutions for accounting’, ‘sage 200’, ‘sage manufacturing’, ‘spindle software’, ‘sage manufacturing’, ‘sage 200 crm’, ‘sage 200 suite’, ‘sage 50 suite’, ‘sage 50 act’ and many more….

Solutions for Accounting’s website is on the first page for all the above keywords. Not bad to say they are in a highly competitive market in the “IT Industry”. 

www.solutionsforaccounting.co.uk

The brief: RMH required a website that looked both professional and corporate and was representative of their core business offerings.  The site also needed to be clean-cut and easy to navigate but more importantly it needed to be updateable by RMH Catering staff to enable them to keep it fresh.

The solution: An updateable website solution indicated some kind of ‘content management’ would be required. After considering the technical inexperience of the staff and the fact that the business was service based rather than product based it was recommended that a ‘blog’ based solution would be most suitable.

The job: The designers at Purpose Media set about creating a bespoke home page concept based on the traditionally corporate colours of blue and white. This immediately set the tone for the rest of the site consisting of simple top navigation but with an additional right aligned navigation used to direct visitors to specific types of events that can be catered for.

The main ‘call to action’ was to encourage a telephone call or email enquiry to arrange a personal visit. As the catering services are ‘bespoke’ the facility to sit down and talk about individual requirements was a key element of RMH’s service and therefore it made sense to offer a ‘menu sample’ rather than actual menu’s to encourage customers to discuss their needs and therefore receive a tailored service.

The marketing: As the RMH Catering website has only recently been launched marketing of the website to date has been a simple submission to Google, however a ‘blog’ article on our own Purpose Media site will give them some coverage to get them started. As with the majority of our clients a review of existing and potential marketing both on-line and off-line is offered free of charge.  Existing strategies need to be re-considered to incorporate the wider options available for Internet Marketing.

Further consideration to other areas will be required as well including:

• Location of customers. Local, regional or national
• Opportunities to market to existing clients and /or a new contact list
• Researching into on-line strategic marketing like pay-per-click
• Site optimisation- the site has built in tools that require skills to manage ‘keyword’ content. Advice is offered by us as well as actual optimisation if required.

Job well done?  Customer testimonials are our guide to levels of satisfaction and RMH Catering did not disappoint quoting:-

‘Hi Matt – Just to confirm in writing to give the go-ahead for launching the RMH Catering Website and to say a big thanks to you and your team for being such a Professional Outfit and I will have no problems recommending you to anyone. Once again Thankyou ‘

www.rmhcatering.co.uk