Online Shopping – You Shop, They Drop and We Build!

If you’re looking to build a business on the web? James Marchant, Diligence Creative Director, has some tips.

Diligence has helped many start up businesses to develop their first online store. We love the challenge that working with start ups presents; sadly we also see a number of them who don’t seem able to rise and maximise the potential offered by trading on the web.

There are a lot of myths surrounding online trading - not least of which is that all you need to do is build the website and the orders will start flooding in! With any business, either offline or online, you need a guaranteed 100% commitment to provide the appropriate marketing and sales support. A web based business is not an excuse to take your foot off the gas - you need to work long and hard at it to make the business a success and very few companies are lucky enough to see their new businesses take off without having to put an awful lot of blood, sweat and toil into it!

Unfortunately we see too many start up businesses who believe passionately in their product but have no customer or market research to back up their optimism. With over 1 trillion websites indexed by Google alone, the competition is fierce for your business!

Once you have your business plan in place and you are confident there is a market for your product then you need to think about marketing your site. Think of your website as a football pitch with the ball poised for the kick off from the centre spot. To make the whole experience work though, you need supporters in the stands and players on the pitch!

With any business you need a business plan and a sustainable business model.

You can start by asking yourself a few questions:

• Who is your target audience?
• How are you going to get your audience to visit your site?
• Are your products competitively priced in the market?

Think of the supporters as your target audience and the players as the marketing devices that will not only attract new supporters but also keep your existing supporters entertained – they’re great for repeat business.

So, how do you promote your brand new online shop? Well it helps to set a budget. Your major competitors could be spending millions on a variety of marketing devices - pay per click, banner advertising, Search Engine Optimisation and eMarketing. More recently we have seen an increase in companies using WEB2 devices, such as the social media sites, to generate prospects and sales from within these communities.

We work with many companies who have asked us to help with their existing online shops and help generate more traffic for them. Quite often we find that existing sites have no analytic programmes which is a basic function of any website. Without analytics, you have no idea how many customers are visiting your site – and without that it is difficult to develop marketing activity to increase your site traffic.

Here are our top five tips to online shopping heaven.

1. Make sure your site has an analytics programme – Google Analytics is free!
2. Make sure your site is optimised
3. Make sure your site is not out of date
4. Make it easy for people to shop with you
5. Make sure you get professional help before you build your shop

Happy Shopping!

Norway Nil Points?

We were proud to manage a conference and event recently on behalf of Statoilhydra.

Our guests – a healthy mix of Norwegians and Brits enjoyed a great day out in Rye, sampling some of the cultural delights of the town as well as some of the most interesting of Rye’s watering holes.

The Diligence-developed teambuilding product The Rye Adventure is now offered by The George Hotel to those of their conference clients looking for teamworking activities. In addition to The Rye Adventure Diligence offers a wide range of teambuilding and teamworking events suitable for organisations of all sizes and budgets – and for those looking for either indoor or outdoor activities.

If you’d like to find out more about how Diligence can help build key teamworking skills amongst your staff or your customers, contact our Events Team for more information.

Happy Birthday to us!!

It’s been a celebratory month for Diligence.

October sees us begin our third year and as well as relief at surviving the recession, we have a number of projects that have set our hearts aglow! Our client base and our turnover has increased ahead of expectations and we begin year three exhausted but full of optimism for the next year. We also welcome Adam Whitnall as the latest member of our creative team. As well as bring valuable additional web and HTML design capabilities, Adam also brings new skills including Illustrating and even Signwriting!

Diligence offers a comprehensive design, advertising and marketing resource. We thrive on hard work and believe that working better and working harder rather than working differently makes us stand out from the crowd.

The team is based mainly in our studio and offices in Hastings but we also have offices in Rye, Eastbourne and Maidstone, Kent. Whilst we work for some of the largest organisations in the South East, we also have wider business expertise and a range of low-priced marketing services are available for small business and start-ups.

Our Diligence eSuite of products, featuring low-cost websites is available for smaller businesses such as consultancies, pubs and restaurants.

We’d like to thank you all our clients for your support during our first two years and we look forward to continuing the good work into 2010 and beyond.

Remember that we are here to help your business – if you’d like to find out how we can help you, why not get in touch?