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18th
OCT

How not to launch an e-business

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, customer service, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership, Online Retail, Social Media

A recent article at Inc. suggests that the easiest way to launch an e-business is not to have a great business plan but buy a website through a broker on which to launch it. I’d like to suggest that ‘easy’ is not a good route to business growth and that buying somebody else’s mistake is an unlikely way to achieve success.

Inc. suggested Ebiz brokers and eBay as the best places to find sites. There are more established locations to find sites for sale such as Flippa and Dalton’s Weekly

Looking at the ecommerce section of business brokers sites can also show up potential opportunities. UK brokers include:

Knightsbridge
Avondale.

Even if you can find a good site (and if they were going concerns with a good customer base why would they be on the open market, rather than brokering a goodwill deal with a competitor who can see their value?), there are inherent risks in this approach:

1.    The observable traffic on a site you purchase may have no value or even a negative value, if it’s not convertible
2.    Search engine rankings are fragile and Google, in particular is tough – if there are hidden dangers in the site you buy (cloaking, embedded automatic content generators, black hat blogging), stripping them out is costly and even when they’re gone, you’ll find yourself penalised by the Google algorithm
3.    The seller wont always give you the full story – it’s all very well asking questions but it’s quite another thing to get honest answers: when e-commerce fails, very few site owners are willing to own up to their mistakes in front of a buyer, even if they recognise them.

There aren’t any shortcuts to starting a successful online business. The business fundamentals have to be right

•    Products
•    Pricing
•    Promotion
•    Reaching the right customer base
•    Customer service.

If any of these are less than excellent, online customers find out quicker than any others, and spread their disillusion faster and wider than any others, using social media to inform a wide audience about your failure. They may be low barriers to entry in setting up an ecommerce business but without a clear strategy and unique selling proposition why will customers buy from a new online business?

If the fundamentals of the business are right, services like Volusion can help build a scalable online business. Volusion is an all in one software solution which already powers 30,000 online stores. It takes a lot of the headaches out of starting an online and, unlike many other solutions, it is targeted at UK merchants.

However if your aim is build the best possible online experience for your customers, starting from scratch with a bespoke website may not be the cheapest or easiest option but in the long run it still might be the best one.

 

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6th
OCT

Real-Time Marketing and PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, customer service, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership, Social Media

9110f marketing 51GyL2BXe7gL 198x300 Real Time Marketing and PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business NowThis book is an exploration of value and speed. It’s like an equation in business physics – the businesses that learn to deliver value faster than others are the ones that gain market share and loyalty. Speed added to value provides competitive advantage in the internet age.

So how does it work?

Some people struggle with the insight and anecdote based approach that David Meerman Scott uses to take the reader through how people, and organisations, have coped (or failed) in using real-time opportunities to engage with the real world, in real time, by offering value rather than relying on a pre-determined PR formula.

From the Amazon reviews about it, there are people who complain about the anecdotal style Meerman Scott uses: that he doesn’t provide enough empirical detail; that the metrics just aren’t in the book.  And that’s precisely the problem that this book sets out to solve. You can’t operate in real time using a manual. You can’t know what’s going to come at you, and you can’t guess in advance how the world is going to change around you, and in relation to you.

A perfect example, and the most famous, is the ‘United Breaks Guitars’ saga. A musician whose guitar was broken by United Airlines became so disgusted by the way the different airports passed responsibility for his claim to each other, that he wrote a song about it and made a video. That video went viral on YouTube. Two associated businesses: Taylor Guitars and Carlton Cases, seized the real time opportunity to publicise the value of their products in relation to the video and gained market share as a result. United Airlines apparently lost $180 million by failing to respond to the story.

In a blog interview David Meerman Scott made a key point about the brutality of real-time marketing, “Losing control is the toughest principle. You have to let people talk about your organization in the way that they want to talk about it. You can’t complain that they didn’t use your key words”.

In other words, to succeed, a business has to take part in a real-time conversation, not control it, and that requires leadership.

So how does a business use social media, crowdsourcing, videos, mobile devices, media alerts and so on to deliver value in real time?

Meerman Scott offers a range of tactics to help organisations speed up their information gathering and shorten their response time, but over and over he makes the point that what successful real-time marketing requires is a new mind-set that accepts that action is outward facing and fast, not inward looking and risk-assessment based.There are many examples of how other businesses learned to listen to more voices, act more swiftly, make rapid course adjustments and demonstrate their core values in both success, and failure.  He also talks about how to drive real-time customer value through an organisation with zeal and enthusiasm.

The examples recognise the need for speed and agility, while helping readers to understand when process applies and when it needs to take a back seat to swift communication. Moving quickly at the right time is prioritised in customer-facing business areas, while ensuring core values remain integral to decision-making is seen as part of the strategic function of a management team committed to integrity of response when under pressure.

There are many obvious tips that businesses still ignore – Meerman Scott says a business should respond in the same medium that the challenge arrived in. So United Airlines should have made a video apologising to the musician and loaded it on YouTube. Insisting on using ‘formal channels’ means not being heard by the same audience who get to hear the bad stuff about your brand, company or product, so all efforts are wasted because you’re talking to people who hadn’t heard about the problem (but have now you’ve pointed it out) and ignoring those who had heard about it. In other words, you’re damaging your own brand.

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