At Chilli Chocolate Marketing we have one rule when it comes to computers: when in doubt, get a Mac. We’re undoubtedly in the minority though, as all recent studies show that Microsoft Windows still dominates the Australian corporate desktop.
Tech guru Renai LeMay of Delimiter recently asked a range of industry commentators – including yours truly – about the pros and cons of using Macs in the workplace.
Read the full article: “Apple’s undiscovered country: Macs in the enterprise”
Simon Garlick (Twitter: @simongarlick)
Over recent months we have worked on a number of projects with one of the most well-known names in South Australia’s home-improvement industry, Homeplus Improvements. We have been able to assist Homeplus Improvements with a number of behind-the-scenes technical details – the sorts of things we touched on in our post “Know your domain details” – in order to launch a new website to support Homeplus Improvements’s salespeople and sales activities.
Has it worked? Well, over the six months of the website project we’ve seen:
- Visits increase by 81%
- Pageviews increase by 87%
- Clickthroughs from Google increase by 65%
- Site bounce rate* decrease by 31%
(* this stat measures how long people stick around to read other pages on your website beyond the first page they visit. The longer people stay at your website, the lower your “bounce rate”)
These statistics are due in no small part to a successful Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign, one which among other things has seen Homeplus Improvements claim the #1 search-result placing on Google for target keywords of “room extensions” and “Adelaide”
“We’re really happy with the way things are going. People are always talking to us about the website, the salespeople now have a great online presence to drive new business, and the website is bringing in new leads all the time. We’re thrilled!”
- Steve Davies – Director, Homeplus Improvements
If you’d like to turn your website into a marketing tool that helps drive your business, call us today on (08) 8224 3300!
Here are some common-sense tips in a guest post from Hayes Knight SA Director Tim Sargent, aimed at improving efficiency in the office and maximising the usefulness of your time, both as an individual and as a member of a workplace team.
Time is money, as the old adage goes. But how many of us actually consider what that means to us personally? Well, what it means is this: when you waste time in your business you waste money in your business.
Australian small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) now regard email as their most important form of communication. Email is vital to doing business in the 21st century. This is reinforced by recent surveys suggesting that SMEs in Australia regard a loss of phone service as an inconvenience but regard a loss of email service as business-threatening.
Yes, email is vital for business. But what do you do when email starts impeding your ability to do business?
Does your Inbox look like this?
- group discussions where everyone Replies To All
- file attachments that need your edits or comments
- tasks you’ve been asked to finish
- requests for help or info from your colleagues
- invitations to meetings
- newsletters you signed up for
- personal messages
- sales pitches
- spam
If you answered “yes”, then your email itself has become a task rather than a tool to help you accomplish tasks. You might even be approaching email bankruptcy – the point where you just write off your unread mail and delete all your unread messages, regardless of their content.
There are a number of technological tools designed for people in this situation. But here’s a very simple solution that you can use without involving your IT team or installing anything new: set aside time to process your email and do it then.
“But I do process my email!” I hear many of you respond. But here’s the important bit: only process your email during that time. Don’t do it at any other time.
Nominate one or two times – maybe first thing in the morning and immediately after lunch – and devote those to processing your email. If you’re working on a document during the rest of the day and you hear that “New Mail” sound, don’t stop! keep working on that document! Even better, close your email program if you can and only open it at the times you’ve designated as email time. Set up an Out of Office autoreply on your email account at all other times, informing your would-be correspondents something like
“Thank you for your email. I am busy working on other tasks at the moment and will respond if necessary at a later time. If your request is critically urgent, please call our office on XXXX-XXXX and ask for a message to be forwarded to me.”
Email should be a tool – not a hindrance.
Meetings
Even though email has replaced many aspects of face-to-face communication, meetings are still an important business tool. They enable team members to stay up to date on progress, they assist with delegation and decision-making, and they facilitate discussion of important matters.
However, just like email, meetings can get out of control and can be detrimental to your ability to do business. If you are spending more hours per day in meetings about work than doing work, you have a meeting problem. Here are some tips to help keep the negative impact of meetings to a minimum:
Make sure there is a meeting agenda before the start of the meeting and make sure that everyone has it and has read it. If you have been invited to a meeting, request an agenda before confirming your attendance. The agenda ensures that everyone knows what the meeting is about, and what the meeting is not about. No-one likes attending a meeting in which half the attendees are unclear of the reasons for being there in the first place.
Never be afraid to query the duration of a meeting. If you receive an agenda that contains items that can be discussed in 30 minutes yet the meeting is to be two hours long, respond to the meeting organiser and ask why two entire hours are necessary.
If your attendance at a meeting does not appear necessary, decline the meeting invitation. There’s no greater personal time-waster than the meeting that you have to attend “just to be across” an issue. If you leave a meeting asking yourself “why was I in that meeting”, that meeting was a waste of your time.
Ensure that each meeting you attend concludes with a clear summary of the meeting and that action items for each attendee are clear. This summary is often a brief email from the meeting organiser outlining what was discussed and what the outcomes were. If the outcomes and actions from the meeting are not clear, that often means more emails and possibly another meeting just to establish what happened at the first meeting. When you start having meetings about meetings you know things are out of control.
Self-analysis and self-awareness
It’s difficult to identify exactly where your time is being lost if you don’t have a clear picture of what you’re working on from day to day. It’s like keeping track of your vehicle’s odometer – it’s hard to know where all those kilometres on the clock came from if you don’t keep a logbook.
So do the same for yourself at work: keep a logbook!
Record what you’re working on from hour to hour as you do it. Obviously the longer you record your work the more useful your data will be, but even a record of a single working week can be of immense benefit to you.
As a rule of thumb, 80% of your time delivers 20% of your effectiveness. And consider the converse: 20% of your time delivers 80% of your effectiveness.
You need to be able to identify that positive 20% of your time because what you do in that 20% is vital to your business. If you’re not keeping track of your time, how can you possibly know which activities are your business-critical ones and which aren’t?
This is something that you as a SME business operator need to bear in mind: working harder and longer won’t necessarily improve your business or your quality of life. Maximising the activities that are of direct benefit to your business will. Keeping a logbook of your time can help you identify those activities that result in revenue-generation – and, more importantly, those that don’t.
Be critical of yourself and what you’re doing. To say of a task “this is not worth my time” is often difficult, especially when that task may be enjoyable or something you find easy. But if it’s not a task that generates revenue for your business, you should be doing one that does instead.
Tim Sargent has over 20 years experience in consulting to small and medium size businesses and possesses formal qualifications in accounting, marketing and human resources. With over 10 years experience as a director of professional services firms, Tim has been consultant to a large variety of business sectors and business structures. As well as being a Director of Hayes Knight SA, Tim is a board member of and Treasurer of Flavour SA and is an associate of the Institute of Chartered Accountants.
This article was authored by Simon Garlick of Chilli Chocolate Marketing and Tim Sargent for Flavour SA. Reproduced with permission.
Hot on the heels of the commentary in our last newsletter regarding the importance of your website’s geophysical location for search engine listings (“Location, location, location“) comes news that Google now includes your website’s load time as a factor influencing your Google Ranking.
Load time? What? Well, what this means is that Google will consider your website to be less important if it loads slowly. If you can click on a link to your company website then go and make a cup of coffee before the frontpage loads, you should be worried.
Here’s Matt Cutts from Google explaining why:
So how can you speed up your website and get back in Google’s good books?
Here are some quick tips:
Make sure your server admin has tuned your web server for speed. A simple tweak like enabling HTTP compression on the server can speed up your site’s load time by a huge degree.
Make sure your site is well-designed at the code level. Clean efficient code makes for a faster-loading website. If you wouldn’t know a well-coded site from a badly-coded one, talk to someone who would!
If you have a database-driven site, consider implementing a software solution to enable your site to be presented as static pages. Every millisecond that your site has to talk to its database now counts against you.
Optimise your site’s images. Image files like GIFs, JPGs, and PNGs each have advantages and disadvantages. If you don’t know why you should choose one over the other, you may be slowing your site down unnecessarily.
When Google announced this change to its ranking policy, we made several “speedup” tweaks to one of our testing sites and saw improvements immediately. If your website is crucial to your business and you need someone to translate the search-engine technojargon into plain English, talk to us today about Search Engine Optimisation.
I have long retained one leftover from my time living in Sydney: membership in the NRMA. When my household acquired another vehicle recently, I contacted the NRMA — hey, I’m a customer! — to make sure that the vehicle was added to my account so that I would still receive roadside assistance if I ever found myself in a tight spot.
The operator I spoke to informed me that I would need a new membership specific to that vehicle, effectively doubling my payments. When I queried this policy and pointed out that a membership in South Australia’s RAA would cover me regardless of which vehicle I was in, the operator suggested that maybe I should just cancel my NRMA membership seeing as I lived in South Australia anyway.
I was gobsmacked.
“Let me get this straight. I’ve been with you for over ten years, a regular paying customer, and you’re saying… maybe I should just swap to another provider?”
The operator replied with some indifference that I might as well. I replied that if the NRMA didn’t care if I remained a customer or not, I didn’t care to.
Here are some things I might also have pointed out if I thought that the operator cared:
- It costs far less to retain an existing client than to acquire a new one.
- It’s at least twice as expensive to bring on a new customer with an existing service than it is to retain a customer with that service. A business that loses one good customer has to sign up two more just to break even.
- Current customers are any business’s best source of referrals and cross-sell opportunities.
But I didn’t. So I didn’t.
Suffice to say that I am now an RAA member 
If anyone from the NRMA is happens to read this, you need to talk to your customer service representatives… they’re not helping your organisation!
Kelly Wright
Since last October (when we asked rhetorically “Social Networking – what’s it all about?“) we’ve fielded a lot of enquiries about Internet social networking and how exactly such services can help small businesses and their operators.
We’ve found some great resources at UK site Marketing Donut for getting started using online social networking to help you as individuals, to drive sales, and to form stronger relationships with your customers.
LinkedIn is a free business-focused networking platform that seeks to replicate the ‘real-life’ process of word-of-mouth introductions between trusted contacts. It has a global reach, with 8.5 million members, and straddles a great many industries and sectors.
Facebook is a free networking website which enables friends to keep in touch with each other by acting as a hub for a range of online social activities. ‘Friends’ – ie people who opt into each other’s networks — can post short ‘status updates’ about what they are doing or feeling, share photos and videos, recommend other websites, leave messages on message boards, have ‘real time’ online conversations, and much more besides.
Twitter is a free online ‘micro-blogging’platform that enables you to send punchy messages (‘tweets’) to other Twitter users. Messages are limited to just 140 characters and can be read by anybody else on Twitter, even if they are initially directed at members of your personal network (your ‘followers’).
So what are you waiting for? Jump in!
Thank you to all of you who’ve sent me your chocolate recipes – its amazing the number of you that require alcohol with your chocolate
I’m going to try each recipe and if I absolutely love it I will put it in our newsletter – with you and your company credited of course!
This issue however I’m going to give you one of my easiest recipes using chocolate.
Chocolate Omelette (I have been making this for years and it never gets old)
- Four eggs
- 2 Tablespoons Drinking Chocolate powder
- Chocolate buttons
Beat the eggs like you would a normal omelette then mix in the drinking chocolate powder. Pour into a non-stick oven-friendly frying pan and cook until the bottom is set. Sprinkle the chocolate buttons (chopped pieces, chips etc) over the top of the omelette and then put under the grill until cooked to your liking. Put a large spoonful of Pauls Dollop cream or vanilla ice-cream on the top and eat.
Enjoy!
Kelly Wright - kelly@chillichocolatemarketing.com
Back in April we talked about the practice of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in a post entitled “SEO and why you need it“. At the moment the most popular and important search service on the Internet is Google. This won’t always be so; something shinier always comes along. (Remember Altavista? Lycos? No? Just me then… –Simon) But right now Google is #1.
Google’s search engine is based on an link analysis algorithm known as PageRank. Google occasionally tweaks the PageRank algorithm to place greater or lesser emphasis on particular variables in order to improve its service. One of the things that Google has done recently is to include the geographical location of a website’s server as an influential PageRank factor.
If your eyes are glazing over right about now, the short version of this story is: where your website is hosted affects your Google ranking.
In other words, if you are in Australia and you search for cars using Google, the search engine will tend to place car websites that are hosted in Australia at the top of the search results. In other words, if you are an Australian business with a website hosted offshore, that’s hurting you.
You may have chosen that web hosting company in the USA or Hong Kong because of a great deal or because you knew someone who already had an account at that hosting provider and at the time it may have been a wonderful idea. But it’s not any more.
If you are in this situation, talk to your website administrator first. If you don’t have a website administrator, or if the website administrator you have doesn’t know what on earth you’re talking about, give us a call on 08 8224 3399 or drop us a line at info@chillichocolatemarketing.com.
Use of Internet Social Networking – sites and services such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others – in Australia is exploding.
New figures released by Nielsen revealed that Australians spent 1.6 million hours on social media sites in June this year, up from 800,000 hours a year earlier.
Nielsen’s director of market research, Melanie Ingrey, said social media was always going to be a successful category this year but the extent of that success has caught people by surprise.
“To see a category double its time online numbers in a year, off what was already a considerable base, is truly phenomenal and the mind boggles at where we can go from here,” she said.
I also noticed this bit of information earlier this week:
Total prime time TV audiences have fallen below 5m in Australia, according to a new analysis of viewing data so far this year. This is despite the arrival of the new Freeview and subscription TV channels to tempt viewers.
According to the analysis of figures across the prime 6pm to 10.30pm slot, the average audience has fallen from 5,027,868 in 2008 to 4,969,810 in 2009. This marks a decline of around 60,000 prime time viewers per evening – or a fall of just over 1%. This is despite the Australian population growing by more than 2% during the same period.
Coincidence? Not at all. Online Social Networks are changing how people spend their leisure time, and it’s changing the way people work as well.
In the past month I have delivered a couple of presentations to groups interested in online Social Networking and how it can help individuals and their businesses. Interest has been very high and I’ve been invited to speak again – so consider this a pre-invitation invitation! If you’re interested in Social Networking and what it can do for you and your business, and you’d like to attend one of our presentation-slash-discussions, drop me a line via email.
Simon Garlick
More than once recently I’ve been asked by a client, or a potential client, about sales. “How many more sales will we make if…” is a question I’ve heard more than once. My answer was – can only be – “I don’t know”. And it’s the truth. This may come as a shock to some readers, but sales and marketing aren’t the same thing. They are often bound together mentally, in “Sales and Marketing”. But they are very different things, and I’m not even sure that someone focused on one can be focused on the other.
Marketing is about telling a story. It’s about creating a narrative that connects with people who are interested in your product. Sales is about turning that interest into a purchase decision.
Imagine that your store, Frobozz Electric, sells widgets. You want to sell more widgets. Marketing might start spreading the word that widgets are important things to have. Your marketing team might set up a newsletter or a blog or publish articles that talk about widgets and connect with the widget-using audience. Your marketing will remind people that if they’re looking for widgets, widgets from Frobozz Electric are the widgets to have. “The Frobozz Electric widgets, now they’re the real deal,” your marketing will say. People who have a need for widgets will be thinking about and talking about Frobozz Electric. Soon there’s a line of people queued up outside Frobozz Electric. They know they want widgets and the Frobozz Electric widgets are the ones they want.
Everything that went into creating that line of people outside the door is marketing. Everything that happens inside the door is sales. Good marketing gets the customer to walk through the door; good sales gets him or her to buy something once inside.
The most important thing about good marketing is that things be countable. How many people came into the store? How many people visited the website? How many people rang the office phone number? At what times, on what days, how long after the newsletter went out? Show me the numbers! Only with numbers can we establish if marketing is actually working for the business.
Kelly Wright
Head Chilli Chocolatier