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Twice awarded Global Award Winning Coach with Action Coach, Oxford-based business coach, Paul Avins, has a wealth of experience and knowledge in sales, sales management, marketing, personal development, training and business management, business coaching, and as a motivational speaker.
In part 3 of our interview with Paul, he talks about how SMEs should approach the new world of digital marketing.
Read part 1 of the interview: Business coaching for growth
Read part 2 of the interview: Essential business advice for SMEs
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): How does marketing strategy fit into a fledgling business? Is this different from a ‘growth’ business?
Paul Avins: Many start ups are under-capitalised because they underestimate massively just how much money it takes to build a business and get it going. Marketing to new customers is the most expensive thing any business can do.
But if you’ve got an existing business with maybe 2000 customers, there’s a lot you can do with the marketing with existing customers with things like newsletters, offers of the month, promotions, evening events, exhibitions, trade shows.
If you’re a start up business, one of the best strategies is to go to someone who already talks to your potential clients, and do a joint venture with them to endorse your service to that customer list. That’s one of the cheapest and quickest ways to get a start up off the ground, but not many people do it - they want to do it the hard expensive way.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): What did you know about SEO before you met Momentum?
Paul Avins: I knew quite a bit, and I’ve travelled to the States on numerous occasions to attend training about internet marketing and SEO. I was familiarwith a couple of guys, Perry Marshall being one of them. I’m by no means an expert but I understood it and I understood its potential.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): What do you think makes Momentum different from other SEO companies?
Paul Avins: Momentum look at SEO as a strategy rather than just “how do we generate more traffic?”. It’s a question of what traffic do you want to generate, and how do you structure a website long term, it’s not a quick fix. It’s standing back, looking at it and saying “what do we need to do with the business and how does SEO fit in to that?”
Momentum also have phenomenal tools and software applications that really allow them to go out and analyse the competition and tell you what everyone else in the market is doing, and how you can then plan a strategy to out-manoeuvre them. That’s a phenomenal USP that they have.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): SEO can have negative connotations. What’s your take on SEO, and do you know companies that have been burned by it?
Paul Avins: Too many people have misunderstood SEO in a number of ways; firstly they think it’s free traffic, my experience is it isn’t free traffic, you have to put in a lot of research, a lot of time and effort in. It might not cost you a lot of money but it will certainly cost you time.
There are an awful lot of people out there claiming that they know what they’re doing when they really don’t. I’ve come across people who’ve been burned by SEO companies. Getting to page 1 of Google can be done, but it takes a lot of time, effort, work and focus, it’s an ongoing project.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): How do you think SEO fits into a business’s marketing strategy?
Paul Avins: Recent research found that 83% of all buying decisions are researched online so if you’re not there and people can’t find you then they’re not going to buy from you. To have a business and not have an online strategy is pretty suicidal. If you don’t understand from a search engine point of view what people are looking for, then how can you ever market your business correctly.
From a marketer’s point of view, SEO is an absolute god send. We don’t have to guess any more about what people are looking for, we can research it, we can find it out. It fits into everything because if you don’t understand what people in the market are looking for, how are you ever going to frame your business and position it to be the solution to their problems?
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): Where do you think SEO, social media and other technology led marketing will go in the future?
Paul Avins: Who could have predicted what Twitter has done to the world of business two years ago? My belief is that social media is incredibly powerful but it’s only part of your marketing strategy, it’s not your only strategy. My view is that video is going to become more and more powerful in the future.
Social media is levelling the playing field for businesses like never before. What’s lacking now is that people don’t know who to trust. They can get the information but they don’t know who should guide them through the information. Marketing is more about positioning yourself as an expert and about people believing that you are the right partner to guide them through a purchase. And that’s about people caring more about who you are than what you do.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): Is the new online world so different from the traditional world of marketing, and how do people need to be ready for it?
Paul Avins: No it’s not that different. The fundamentals in marketing haven’t changed. You’ve got to have a great headline, you’ve got to have a great offer of your product, you’ve got to be able to help people solve a problem. You’ve got to be able to communicate that problem so they know they’ve got it, you’ve got to be able to articulate the fact that your service delivers features and benefits that solve that problem.
Twitter, Facebook, social networking, blogging - how you get it out there is a different sort of question, but we’ve still got to communicate value to a potential customer who’s got a problem - that is never going to change. Don’t try and fight it, you’ve got to try and understand it and try to include it in your business model. 50% of sites are now accessed through wireless devices and the iPhone and Blackberry have changed the world forever. If your site isn’t set up to take that kind of traffic, then you’re missing out. It’s looking at how you can integrate your business into people’s lifestyles - they want it now and they want it on demand and if you’re not thinking like that, you’re in danger of being left behind very quickly.
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