The long running debate about the impending reforms to our legal profession is still raging on and its intensity seems to be increasing as we approach what some perceive as Judgment Day, 6th October 2011, when the Legal Services Act 2007 ushers in the most controversial aspect of the reforms, Alternative Business Structure (ABS).
For the benefit of those that are not fully up to speed, The Legal Services Act 2007, comes into full force on 6th October 2011, with it bringing 3 major changes:
1. The creation the Legal Services Board to supervise the regulation of legal services.
2. The creation of the Office for Legal Complaints, which is the new independent ombudsman service to deal with consumer complaints and redress, and
3. And finally, the most controversial part of the reforms is that it permits the creation of new forms of legal practice, namely Legal Disciplinary Practices (LDPs), and more controversially, Alternative Business Structures that allows external ownership of legal businesses.
It is ABS that has attracted the label Tesco Law, as it opens up the opportunity for financial institutions, large retailers and others to add legal services to their existing range of products and services.
With a market reputed to be worth approximately £19 billion a year it is difficult to imagine large corporate companies not wanting to take a slice of the market. In fact the Halifax, AA, MORE TH>N, Natwest, RBS, Allianz and the Co-Op have already entered the market and its only a matter of time before others follow.
Did you know that something like 80% of all the activities of law firms are non-reserved activities? In other words, most of the work that law firms do doesn’t require to be done by a solicitor. I don’t know about you but that really surprised me because the implication and real danger here is that there is no strong reason why consumers should continue paying for qualified solicitors to do work that could be done by almost anyone or a computer.
The general public perception is that solicitors are expensive and unless law firms can demonstrate added value to justify their charges, there is a real danger that the legal market is ripe for the picking. Large corporate companies are experts at commoditising goods and services, largely by standardizing and automating processes and then offering these services at cut down prices to their existing large customer base.
If you are a small to medium size law firm, you may be thinking how can you possibly compete against such powerful corporate brands. One only needs to look back into the 90s and see how destructive the out-of-town supermarkets have been to the small in-town grocery stores and small businesses generally. The natural inclination may be to diversify your fields of expertise away from what is commonly perceived as potential bulk style services such as personal injury, conveyancing, Wills, etc, which for many small high street practices has been the bread and butter work that has sustained us.
Now this may surprise you, but I’m going to suggest to you that diversification may in fact be the worst thing you can do right now, unless you have the necessary resources available to provide these additional services without impacting your bread and butter work. In fact I will go as far as to say that you need to identify what is your core business and laser focus on that one thing and have your other work as supplemental to it.
Find out more about Tesco Law and what you can do about.
This is why no one is buying from you
By · CommentsEver wondered why, no matter how hard you try to get your message across of the superiority of your product or service, even though it’s clear to you that your prospects need it, they still don’t buy?
The reality is that winning new customers through online marketing alone is hard, and it’s getting harder. There are many tactics and tricks employed by marketers to get you more attention, and with each new trick, the next one becomes harder because everyone is wising up.
Does That Mean That Online Marketing Doesn’t Work Any More? You don’t have to look very far to find stories of various businesses that are going through what some may call explosive growth following successful online marketing campaigns. This then raises an important question.
What Makes a Successful Marketing Campaign? This is like asking “what makes a strong house?”
There can be different answers to this question but it all begins with having a strong and well structured foundation.
In my previous post I touched on one of the elements of strong foundations, “know what you are selling“. In this post I’m looking at another crucial part of the foundation namely who you are selling to. Some people refer to it as your:
- Niche
- Target Market
- Ideal Customer
Whichever term you use to refer to it, knowing who you want as a client/customer has never been as important as it is today.
The days of spread marketing is over, as my report, Ten Reasons Internet Marketing Fails for businesses, emphasises. They don’t work anymore. If you are like most people, you’re being bombarded with advertising & marketing messages from the time you wake up till you go back to bed. Most people don’t listen or pay attention to these messages any more. They’ve heard it all before. The only messages that’s likely to get through your potential customers’ insensitive filters are those that are so specific to them that they feel that the message was crafted just for them, and it’s about something that they care about.
The main reason so many businesses are reluctant to invest in marketing, whether online or offline, is that they don’t believe they’ll get a good return on their investment. Guess what, I wouldn’t be surprised if you are one of these reluctant business owners.
One of the primary reasons marketing don’t produce a good return on investment is…
They Try To Appeal To Everyone
As a result the message is weakened and doesn’t have the impact it could have if it was well focused.
If this is your approach to marketing, I understand how you may feel. You may be thinking “Why focus on a specific niche with maybe about 1000 people when you can go after the entire national population and make more sales?”.
The unfortunate reality is that more people from the 1000 are likely to buy from you when you target them with your marketing, than the entire UK population with an untargeted mass appeal marketing messages.
Granted, targeting your marketing isn’t easy to do, which is a good thing because if it was easy I won’t be in business, and when you do it you immediately gain advantage over your competition who either have given up on marketing or are still doing spray and pray marketing.
7 Steps To Target Your Marketing Efforts
- Make a list of different types of customers you serve
- For each type, list their demographics information
- For each type, using the demographic information, separate them into multiple groups e.g. income, location, occupation, etc.
- Choose the group you are most passionate about serving
- Find out what they want that your service offers
- Develop your marketing message to appeal to the chosen group based on what they want
- Find out where and how they like to get their messages and deliver your marketing messages there.
Did you benefit from reading this article?
Please feel free to share your thoughts and experiences by commenting on this article.
You can also learn how we help businesses increase the effectiveness of their marketing as well as request a copy of my report, the Ten Reasons Internet Marketing Fails for businesses.
Why website visitors are not buying what you sell
By · CommentsYou may have noticed that your online marketing efforts are not producing the same results they once did, even though you may have a lot of traffic on your website. For many businesses the reality is that no one is buying. Attracting visitors and turning those visitors into paying customers isn’t as easy as it once was. While it’s fashionable to blame it on economy, the state of the economy may have very little to do with it.
In the Ten Reasons Internet Marketing Fails for businesses, one of the reasons given was lack of clarity, such as not having a clear understanding of what you are offering (or selling) and who you are offering it to (or the type of customer you’d like).
I’ll address the first part here, knowing what you are selling. In the next article I’ll address who you would prefer to buy what you are selling. In other words, who your marketing is directed at.
Let me ask you this…
Why would anyone buy your product or service?
Customers don’t buy into a product or service per se. They buy because a product/service:
- Offers a solution to a problem
- Makes a person feel good
- Give the person an opportunity to spend time with friends and loved ones
- Provides ego, prestige and bragging right
- Is fashionable and makes the person feel good about themselves or feel important
In other words customers buy benefits, they buy what your product or service can do for them, they buy experience.
So what benefit and/or experience are you selling with your product/service?
To a large extent , internet can be described as a gigantic and very crowded marketing billboard. If you are able to get a potential customer’s attention the chance of them making a purchase from you is very low. Not necessarily because they don’t want what you are selling, not is it because your offerings are inferior, but most likely they don’t know what you are selling or they don’t think you are offering what they’ve been looking for.
When I ask business owners and those who run businesses what benefit or experience they are selling, the look on their face is almost always of surprise, shortly followed by a look as if a light bulb had just come on in their head after I’ve explained what I meant. Yet, most still come back with a list of features of their products and services.
Example:
A company that provides content management systems said:
“we provide companies with a system to store their documents in the cloud… and we offer top notch security”.
It turns out that this company removes the complexity of managing a business’s IT systems by removing the responsibility of owning and running IT hardwares, in a way that a business won’t even notice that their equipment are not running locally, without changing the way a business uses their IT, and has the added benefit of being able to let their clients direct access to specific files on your systems (securely), removing the task and the risks of them having to use email (which is unsecure) to send files back and forth with clients.
What company (other than those whose business is managing IT systems) wouldn’t want to have the complexity of their IT system managed by someone so they can focus on their own business?
Example:
A solicitor that specialises in employment law says:
“I’m an employment solicitor”
In consultation with this solicitor, it turns out that she helps businesses with 3 to 10 employees ensure they are up to date with all employment related legal matters that could effect them, including funding, financing and other benefits that they may be entitled to, as well as help them avoid fines and imprisonment.
If you don’t articulate the benefit that your product or service offers, why would anyone buy what you sell? Knowing what you are selling requires that you also know who you’re setting it to and what they actually want from such product/service. The two are really interdependent.
You may already know your product/service inside out. The question you’ll want to ask yourself is, do you know what benefit it gives to those type of prospects you want to have as customers?
The following questions may help you gain a clearer understanding of your product/service from your potential buyer’s point of view:
- Why was your product/service invented, how did it come to exist?
- What problems does it solve or help solve?
- In what ways does the use of it change the life of those who use it?
- In what ways are your existing customers using it?
- What are your existing customers opinions and experience of it?
As you answer these questions, you’ll begin to see a different picture of what you sell. It is quite possible that this new perspective is the one your prospects will relate to more than your existing one. Your next challenge is to communicate this new perspective of your products/service to those you want to attract.
A common complaint amongst small business web site owners is that they don’t get any web traffic and the little that they do get doesn’t produce any leads or inquiries for their goods or services.
I have covered in previous articles some highly effective ways of getting good quality local leads using 3 very simple techniques i.e. google’s local business centre, video marketing and press releases.
In today’s article I would like to cover one tactic that is as yet under used, yet highly effective means of getting new customers – by using the synergy of combining on and offline marketing. As an internet marketing Service Milton Keynes, we’ve been using this technique frequently with great results.
One of the best ways of getting an almost guaranteed and quite sudden rush of traffic to your web site is to run print campaigns. Print advertising is one of the most underused medium for getting traffic to a web site — it’s probably a huge opportunity waiting to be tapped by you, starting today.
How to Utilise Offline Marketing to Get More Traffic & Leads Online
1. Identify your specific customer that you want to target and attract to your website.
2. Create something that you can give away and which you prospect can download or access online. This can be a short report (word document) of anywhere between a couple of pages to 5 or 6 pages. Ensure that whatever you put together gives value content as this will more likely create a closer relationship with your potential customer. Turn this report into a pdf file which you can do quite easily. If you don’t know how, do a quick search on Google for a pdf converter.
3. Create a single page lead-capture page, also known as a squeeze page. This is a special webpage with one only objective, to capture the potential customer’s name and email address. The enticement you use to get them to provide their details is your free report, which is why the content of the report must provide value and be something that your potential customer would want. Once your potential customer completes their details they are automatically sent the report by email. This service of automating email messages to customers is done quite simply utilising one of the many auto-responder services that are available online such as aweber.
It’s a simple exchange – you write a valuable free report that contains good information — the visitor volunteers their name and email address in return for the free report, and also at the same time agrees to receive additional e-mails from you… although you also say (on the lead page) they can unsubscribe any time they want.
4. Next step is to promote that site (squeeze page) in print in the most appropriate tabloid for your product or service. Write an advert that talks ONLY about the free gift you’re giving away. Give them a link to the web site — where they can go to get their hands on the valuable free information revealed in your report.
The result of that promotion should be instant massive traffic (depending on where and how much you promote your offer). The result will be not only traffic to your web site but also the generation of hundreds or even a thousand or more sales-leads… people who have expressed an interest in a report which relates directly to whatever it is you sell.
5. You can then use email marketing to communicate with the people whose names and email addresses you have collected.
If you already own a large database of active and interested email subscribers you can use this tactic to boost your sales and revenue substantially and print advertising is one of quickest and most reliable ways of collecting more leads.
UK Mobile Web Users on the Increase
By · CommentsIt’s no secret that more and more mobile users are using their mobile device to search the web, instead of relying on their home or office computers.
A study conducted by comscore showed that almost 16 million people from UK accessed the internet in December 2009, driven by the rise in smartphone devices which are used by more than 1 in 5 of UK mobile phone users.
This has some implication for businesses in terms of their internet strategies.
While the majority of existing company websites don’t seem to have any strategic intent, those that do and are benefiting from having a well executed strategy will want to optimise their website for mobile users, if they want the opportunity to capture this growing traffic.
Particularly for local businesses that serve consumers, being online where you can be found is a starting point. Ensuring that your site caters for mobile devices can have the effect of visitors staying longer on your site, increasing the chance of purchase. On the other hand, if these web users cannot easily navigate through your site on their device, they’ll leave and may never come back.
What makes mobile search appealing for local businesses is the mobile triangulation and inclusion of GPS receivers on almost all new smart mobile devices. This means that when a mobile user does an internet search on their mobile, the result they get back is relevant to their current location. They may even get a map to what they’ve searched for.
All questions and options are welcome.
It’s finally here, Apple’s new iPad
By · Comments
Apple’s long anticipated new gadget is finally here and its called iPad. It is Apple’s attempt at breaking into the tablet computer market. Where others have failed, will Apple succeed?
So what can iPad do?
You can browse the web and manipulate pages with your fingers;
Plan with calender
Store contacts with an inbuilt address book
Find locations with an inbuilt map application with satellite view
Download movies, music and podcasts from iTune store,
Play games,
Watch YouTube videos,
Run apps from App Store unmodified
Download and read ebooks
Create documents, presentations and spreadsheets with iWork
iPad can obvious do all the stuff that I can already do with my smartphone – maybe iPad will allow you to do these tasks much easier. One of the reasons I’ve had a smart phone for the past 10 years is to avoid carrying paper notebooks and so I can travel light. But the fiddliness of trying to use a small keypad or having to pull out the stylus to write on my smart phone that never seems to recognise my handwriting, has been a constant frustration.
Will iPad make me ditch my smart phone at last?
At about 12.5mm thick and under 1kg in weight, up to 10 hours of battery life, if I can write naturally on this device, I don’t mind carrying two devices (iPad and a phone).
One thing that is clear is that adoption of iPad can only add to the widely predicted trend in which Mobile Internet overtakes PC for Internet access.
It’s official, UK is out of recession. Is your business?
By · CommentsYesterday the UK officially was announced to have emerged out of recession, even if just, with a growth of just 0.1 per cent in the last quarter of 2009, according to the Office for National Statistics. This is of cause significantly weaker than the 0.4 per cent growth foretasted by the economists.
Should we now be celebrating that the worst is over and that the only direction for growth is up?
Has your business returned to a sustainable growth?
It’s welcome news that the nation is cautionary out of the recession however, the personal economy for many businesses and individuals is still deep in recession. We all know that the recession has put a big hole in the finances of most would-be customers regardless of whether your are a B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer) company.
According to Howard Archer, the IHS Global Insight economist, “While the UK may be officially out of recession, it is far from out of the economic woods. Economic and financial conditions are still very challenging and the UK faces a tough job to build a decent recovery.”
Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable said: “The British economy has had the economic equivalent of a heart attack and is still very weak. With both the construction and banking sectors in trouble, we are not out of the woods yet.
“The economy remains dependent on artificial money creation and a government running a massive deficit…”
It seems quite clear that yesterday’s figures shouldn’t be used as a reason to ease your effort to drive your business out of its own recession. It’s probably time to crank up your marketing and promotions to capitalise on the newly forecasted growth as confidence slowly returns to the economy, which will largely be driven by online activities.
What’s your view on yesterday’s announcement, is the worst now over? Your comments are welcome.
Local Small Businesses Can Dominate Google
By · CommentsEvery time I read and hear people talking about online marketing for businesses, they seem to approach the subject with big businesses in mind or marketing that is great for national or international audiences; in other words they seem to be so focused on marketing for the likes of John Lewis, Debenhams and Vodafone (like these are the businesses that are in need of help!)… but, what about your local dentist? Solicitor? Plumber? or that great little coffee shop on the high street? These smaller businesses with more locally based customers and clients will go out of business if they do not bring in MORE CUSTOMERS? With this in mind I want to address some of the issues that face smaller businesses and how they can captalise on a growing trend in the use of the internet to search for local goods and services.
The thing is that the online competition for local businesses is insanely low. If you are engaged in marketing your business online, you’re probably spending your whole day competing in ridiculously competitive markets. Right now the average town and city up and down the country has minimal competition for local search. You don’t need to be fighting with the heavy hitters in your online market place in order to position your business in front of customers or potential customers for your local area. There is a huge gap in the online local market place that local businesses can exploit to get new customers coming through their doors. Below I set out some of the easiest things that you can do to make your business more visible online for local search.
You need to understand that the internet has become the primary method of information gathering. Just think of your own behaviour. Out of the last 10 times you needed to find some information, did you pick up the Yellow Pages? dictionary? go to your local library? or did you just ask Google?
With something like two-thirds of all searches for local business information done online (TMP Directional Marketing 2008) it makes a huge amount of sense to ensure that your business is optimised for local search.
So, if you are a small business that provides goods or services to your local area, the question is ……
Are you struggling to get business from your website?
Maybe you’ve invested a lot in a website that doesn’t get any visitors?
Do you wish you could get more quality visitors and enquiries?
……if your answers are yes, then ask yourself, WHY?
With so much scope and opportunity for small businesses to optimise their services for their local market, there is no rhyme or reason why online business generation can not work for you.
Simple Tricks and Tips for Small Local Businesses to get Noticed on Google
1. Get your business listed in Google’s Local Business Centre -
Being listed in Google maps and google local has quickly surpassed the importance of being listed in business directories such as the yellow pages. Make sure your business shows up when someone searches your business name and keywords related to your business.
i. Establish a business address in the city where you want your site to rank, if you are targeting a location which is not the location of your registered business address.
ii. Join a local chamber of commerce and request a link from its site.
iii. Do a search for your target town or city i.e. do a search for “town, city, county”. From the search results get links from the top pages associated with your target town, city or county.
iv. Link to your Google listing from your website using your target anchor text.
v. Include localised anchor text in your link building efforts.
vi. Include keyword terms in your business description.
2. Reviews
Google likes reviews, so encourage your customers to review your products and services publicly to boost your rankings and provide social proof value to the products and or services that you provide. This can have great results when reviews are placed in local discussion forums or on social media and networking sites.
3. News/ Press Releases
News, public announcements and press releases for a business or subject will definitely begin to show up more frequently on the first page of Google’s search results. A few tips to get your business’s news results in Universal Search:
i. Make sure that you send our your press releases on a regular cycle.
ii Include your target keywords in the title of your press release and sparingly throughout its copy.
iii Use PRWeb and other top press release submission services for online syndication to other sites.
iv. Anchor text target keywords in the press release to your site and other sources.
v. Include your target keywords in your alt tags with any images submitted with your press releases.
4. Video
Online video marketing is no doubt one of the best ways to present an idea, showcase the benefits of your business, or just simply to get your message across in an entertaining way, even if it’s only to increase your business’s brand awareness.
Video results in search engines are constantly gaining in popularity and visibility, so make sure video content is optimised for your target keyword. Video is also quite possibly one of the easiest ways website owners have in penetrating difficult search terms/markets and with technological advances it is so much easier today to record, upload and publish video content to the internet than ever before.
These are but a few of the simplest and quickest tips and tricks for getting your business presence felt in your local online market.
2009 saw the start of some significant changes in how Google’s search engines organises information with the launch of Universal Search. This will carry through into 2010.
This year, you will start to see that search engine listings will no longer be about ranking for number 1. With Google’s new (launched in early 2009) Universal Search options filtering into how its search results pages are displayed, you will be seeing other types of web content beginning to appear on its search pages – white papers, images, news, product search, video, blogs, etc. What this means for businesses is that the internet market has radically changed over the last 12 months. Effectively, Google (which carries over 70% of the online search market) has flipped everyone upside down. So now the market is wide open and local search can be exploited more than ever before. Who you thought was your online competitor yesterday may no longer be your competitor.
For now the key to success online is diversity marketing. Pay particular attention to what’s happening in Google world, learn to see through Google’s eyes and focus your business marketing in media that Google loves.