Camel Media Group - Blog

The Vexed Question Of Customer Toilets

Mike — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 06:57:12 +0000

I was shocked last week. We’d stopped at a bar in Puerto del Carmen for a drink (we ended up having two), and having paid the bill I decided to use the toilets. Entry to the gents was barred by a coin operated lock! I needed to pay a Euro to spend a penny! I reluctantly paid my Euro, and vowed never to set foot in the bar again.

Of course I posted the picture you see to Facebook, and added the comment: “A bar in Puerto del Carmen that charges a Euro to spend a penny. I now understand the meaning of the phrase "Taking the piss. "

Most replies were amusing, but one got me thinking:

“Toilet rolls, soap, hand towels and metered water all have to be paid for. Budgets are tight for people running bars! Signs saying the facilities are for the use of clients are frequently ignored. When I worked in a bar we always said yes if someone asked, it is the sheer cheek of those who come, some regularly, having chosen a spot on the beach for their two week holiday and coming in every day, never buying anything, even a bottle of water and just barging in as if they had every right in the world. They are virtually stealing from the meagre profits of the bar owners. Perhaps all you people who think they are being mean would like to put up a sign inviting them to use you bathroom if they are in need?”

I have some sympathy with the point made, although it wasn’t relevant to my story, as I had been a customer.

But I do regularly see signs in bars that say “Toilets for customer’s use only” and having to ask for a key is becoming more and more common.

At the end of the day, it’s a problem here in Lanzarote. We have very few public toilets, and as we all know, when you have to go, you have to go. I began to wonder if there might be a better way.

Here are a few of ideas:

1/ Use it as a marketing opportunity

Put a big sign up outside the bar saying “Please feel free to use our toilets.” This will be unusual, and will immediately make people who see the sign feel good about the business. Then use the opportunity to sell to the people who you have captive in the toilets. Strategically place on the inside door of cubicles and in front of the urinals, advertisements that tell them what you can offer. Great Sunday lunches, entertainment on a Thursday and so on. You might just convert some people who wouldn’t have come in during their stay to do so.

2/ Use Guilt

Again, put up the big sign that says “Please feel free to use our toilets.” This time, put notices in them which say “We’re happy to offer free use of our toilets to all, but this does have a cost to us to keep them clean and stocked. Please consider buying a drink while you’re here, and if not dropping a few coins into the box on the bar. Thank you.”

In this scenario, you still get the benefit of the “Feel good” sign outside the bar, and a percentage of people will have a drink, and some will put some coins into the box. Those are all wins for you. Sure, some people will do neither, but most reasonable people will do one or the other.

3/ Turn it on it’s head!

How about this for a sign outside the bar: “Toilets available to all! €2.50 charge includes free large beer!”

Any one of those three ideas changes what is a frustration and point of contention to bar owners and the public alike into something that benefits both, and that has to make sense.

What do you think?

Google +

The Most Important Habit Of Successful Business People

Mike — Sat, 14 Dec 2013 12:24:45 +0000

There’s one very simple habit that all successful business people seem to share.

Being on time!

Being where you are supposed to be, when you are supposed to be there conveys so many things:

You’re organised
You respect the other person’s time
You’re disciplined

Add all those together and you can see that people are much more likely to do business with you.

Conversely, when you’re late:

It suggests you have placed a low priority on the meeting
You feel your time is more important than the other person’s
Your likely to let them down in other ways

It’s so simple and so obvious, but too many people get this most basic aspect of doing business wrong.

Don’t be one of them.

How Are You Going To Thank Your Customers This Christmas?

Mike — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 23:38:57 +0000

Most companies will do something over Christmas to thank their clients for their continued custom.

For some, it’s a fairly naff marketing exercise, where they’ll take out an advert in the local press thanking their “many customers for their continued support.”

For others, it’s a pretty standard email which wishes their clients a “prosperous 2014.” Sub text: So you can continue to pay our bills!

And then there are the bottles of wine, usually distributed by the reps rather than the business owners – always welcome, but hardly exciting or original.

So where’s the surprise and delight? Where’s the original thinking? How about doing something that will get not just your customers talking about your business, but your potential customers and even people who have never heard of your company?

It doesn’t have to be expensive, either.

But it does need to be different.

Here’s a fantastic example that has gone viral on social media. Yes, it cost West Jet time and money, but that’s not the point. You can create surprise and delight for the price of a bottle of wine.

Here’s the story:

Google +

Don’t Hide Your Price From Potential Customers

Mike — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 12:19:54 +0000

Over the years, marketers have spent plenty of time finding ways to “hide” from us the price of the products they are selling:

1/ Not giving us the price at all!

The thinking is that if you don’t publish the price, or you don’t put a price tag on it, people will ask, and that will give you a chance to sell to them. Forget it! Most people simply won’t ask!

2/ The old .99 trick

Honestly? Do you think we read €6.99 as €6, as opposed to €7? We’re not that naive!

3/ Losing the currency unit

This is a really dumb one. The thinking is that 27 sounds cheaper than 27 Pounds. We’re quite bright, we add the currency unit in our heads.

4/ Taking out the hundreds and thousands

This is a recent innovation and you hear it on TV advertising all the time. A new sofa at £499 becomes “Four nine nine.” The latest Peugeot is from “Eight four nine five” on the road. And did you spot the double whammy? No currency unit again. I’m not fooled, are you?

Be proud and be loud about your pricing!

Please, retailers, give it to me straight. I want to know how much it is and if you try to hide it with some marketing psycho babble, I’ll only think you’re open to negotiation, or worse, ashamed to be charging so much.

If your product or service is €150, then tell me it’s €150, and then give me some great reasons its good value for my money.

Where Have All The People Gone?

Mike — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 11:52:36 +0000

It’s an old adage: People do business with people.

And yet somehow, in this digital age, many companies have forgotten it.

I scan adverts, social media streams and read company’s websites every day, and it amazes me how often it’s impossible to find out anything about the people behind the business. They are hiding behind contact forms, grand words about the company’s mission and a slew of high quality product images. That makes some sense if the company in question is a multi-national, but if you’re a small or medium enterprise, show me your human face, tell me your story, sell me your passion.

I’m much more likely to call or email in my enquiry if I know a little something about you.

Should I Be Using Google + For My Business?

Mike — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 11:40:21 +0000

The simple answer is yes, but read on:

What’s Google + ?

Feel free to skip this section if you already know.

Google + is effectively Google’s answer to Facebook, so it’s yet another social media platform to use to promote your business. And I can hear what you’re saying already:

“Oh no! Not another platform to set up and work!”

But stay with this post, because at the end I’m going to give you the bottom line – three things you can do which will take less than 30 minutes to make Google + work for you.

Talking of bottom lines, why bother?

Because its a Google product and Google “owns” search. if you don’t rank with them, you may as well turn your website off now. Its not clear yet how much the search engine relies on what it calls “Social signals” from Google +, but I’d be happy to bet that as the platform grows, it will become more and more important.

But there’s more, and this is vital:

The links to your website in Google + are what we call “Do follow” links.

That means the search spiders see them and follow them. And that’s different to Twitter where the links are “No follow” and Facebook, where the privacy settings effectively keep search engine spiders away. To make it clear, when you post a link to your website on Google + and whenever someone shares it, the search engine spiders will see it and visit it. It’s long been said links are the currency of the internet, so those links are valuable.

OK, what should I do?

Three things:

1/ Create a Google + profile for yourself and connect it to the content on your website.

You do this by inserting a piece of code on your website called “Rel=author” which tells Google who wrote it. It’s quite easy to do yourself, but your web person can help as well. One side benefit of doing this is that when people find your content in search, it will be attributed to you, and your photo (from your Google + profile) will appear alongside it, like this:

In the example, my work only ranks 5th on Google for the search term, but my post is the only one with an image of the author on it – people are much more likely to click it!

Here’s the link on how to set rel=author onto your website

2/ Create a Google + page for your business and connect it to your website.

Once again, it’s a case of inserting a code into your website, this time called “Rel=publisher” and it tells Google that your company page on Google + is connected to your website.

Here’s the link from Google on how to set Rel=publisher onto your website

3/ Share your content onto Google +

Finally, the easy part. Whenever you add new content to your website, share it with your page (and your profile) on Google + so that the search engines sees it quickly.

Those are the basics, and if you do that for now, you should see some benefit and you will at least be represented on the platform.

Questions? Leave a comment.

Google +

Three Quick Wins To Make Your Facebook Business Page More Effective

Mike — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 18:30:24 +0000

Facebook is a sea of confusion for many business people. They struggle to understand how to use their pages, and there are plenty of examples of pages that are nothing more than a series of broadcast posts telling anybody who is reading them (usually less than 10 people!) what a wonderful company they are!

The thing to remember is that Facebook is a “Social” platform, therefore treat it as such. When you’re out for a drink with friends, you are in a social situation.- you don’t dominate the conversation, you listen to other people and you do your best to be interesting and entertaining. If you want your numbers to increase on Facebook, and stand a chance of getting people to want to do business with you, you should treat it like any other social situation. Be entertaining and interesting, listen to other people speaking, and comment on what they have to say. How hard can it be?

On that basis here are three things you can start to do today, that will make your Facebook page more effective:

1/ Invest time in liking, sharing and commenting on other people’s stuff

This is the biggest single area where most businesses fail on Facebook. You see them all the time – they have 134 “Likes” but they only “Like” 3 other pages. That means in their own newsfeed, they are only seeing the output of those three other businesses. In reality it probably means they don’t ever look at their own newsfeed by pressing “home.” All they do is write their own stuff. They’re just not “listening.”

Find other businesses that relate to yours – it’s easy to use search to find them. “Like” them, and then spend time reading what they are saying and commenting and sharing their good stuff. They will do the same for you, and then you are exposing your business to their readers as well as your own.

2/ Only post stuff that is interesting, useful or funny

It’s a simple test before you post anything. Is it interesting, useful or funny? Not to you, but to your readers. If the answer is no, don’t bother! It might be really interesting to you that you have increased your warehouse space by 17.3%, but does anyone else give a damn? I suspect not. However, if that increase means that you can despatch your goods to me with next day delivery, then maybe I do care. So think about phrasing your news in your reader’s terms, rather than your own.

3/ Remember you can’t actually sell anything on Facebook

Facebook is not a selling platform – I cannot buy your product on Facebook. I either need to visit your own website, call you or come to your place of business to buy it. So don’t try selling on Facebook! Use it as a way to send people to where they can actually buy. If you have a website I can buy from, send me there, if I need to come to your premises, guide me to it. Use Facebook to send me where you want me to go.

A couple of other things you can do:

1/ One of Lanzarote’s biggest Facebook pages is our own Lanzarote Information. If you’re based here on the island and you use Facebook, then “Like” our page so that we can interact with you and you can get a chance to expose your business to all our readers. Here’s where to do that: Lanzarote Information on Facebook

2/ No time for Facebook? If your business isn’t on Facebook or isn’t active there, you are missing out on the marketing opportunity of the century! We can guide you on how to make Facebook work for you, and we can even “do” Facebook for you. Contact us for more information.

Why You Need To Speak The Same Language As Your Customers On Your Website

Mike — Fri, 30 Aug 2013 10:53:24 +0000

I’m not talking here about English, Spanish or Chinese!

I’m talking about the use of words. Whatever business you are in, you are probably an expert, and using expert terminology and language on your brochure might serve a purpose – to let people know that’s exactly what you are!

But on a website, it can be disastrous, because search engines are designed to serve up searches based on what people actually ask them for.

Let me explain further by giving you an example. Let’s imagine I’m going to write a piece about how aircraft fly. I could call it “Bernoulli’s principle.” It could talk about how the principle was based on fluid dynamics and was then applied to compressible flows like gasses. It would tell the story about how this research, in the 1700’s went on to form the basis of the construction we now know as an aircraft wing.

A piece written in that way would impress any readers with my knowledge, and it might attract the odd academic who wants to understand more on the subject and who types something like “Bernoulli’s principle of flight” into Google. But the numbers would be miniscule.

In this example it’s obvious, isn’t it? If I want to attract people to read the post, I need to use the language they would use, starting with the title, which should be “How do aircraft fly?” There might be a passing reference to Bernoulli, but we’d ignore the whole fluid dynamics thing and focus on the aircraft wing and it’s shape.

But spending much of my time on the web looking at business websites, I can see that too many people don’t get this. They’re writing for themselves, and for other industry experts and not for their customers and potential customers.

Here’s a simple formula:

1/ Before you write a word, have a think about what your potential customer might put into Google to find the piece you are about to write. Write a short list, and try to incorporate the words on your list into your piece, without making it read awkwardly.

2/ Think hard about the title. If you instinctively know what the “exact match” might be, like “How do aircraft fly?” then use it. “Newspaper style” clever headlines, for example “Swiss scientist from Georgian times is the real father of flight” simply don’t work on the web.

3/ Once you’ve finished, read the article again, and take out any language that your potential customer might not understand – we hate feeling stupid!

I’ll leave you with one final gem, from a company in the United States:

“Navigating the digital landscape can be overwhelming given the pace of its evolution. Executives hire us to enable informed and structured decision-making on digital strategies. We participate in strategic planning sessions to set digital direction and budgets, devise big new ideas for competitive differentiation, design multi-faceted digital marketing programs, evaluate and select vendors and technologies, train staff on new trends and best practices, and implement digital analytics and optimization systems.”

How many times did you have to read that to understand what they do?

In case you still don’t get it, they do the same as us.

We help businesses to sell more, using social media.

Understanding Google Analytics–Part Two

Mike — Fri, 23 Aug 2013 08:32:11 +0000

Visitors and page views

In the last post we talked about referral traffic, which is the screen I go to first when I’m checking analytics.

But the first screen you actually come to when you open it up is the one shown in this image, so let’s find out what each part of it means.

But first, let’s dispel a myth and talk about:

“Hits”

You won’t see “hits” anywhere on Google Analytics. And that’s because they are irrelevant. A hit is recorded every time your web server does something. For example, if I visit a page on your website now that has 8 images and two script boxes, the server will record ten hits. Looking at my server stats, I can see we record 400,000 hits on some days, and that’s because we use so many images. Ignore hits completely and anyone who tells you how many “hits” they are getting on their website is either giving you completely irrelevant information, or they are using the wrong term.

Unique Visitors (UV’s)

This is the key statistic, and it’s the measure that almost all websites use for success. As it’s name suggest a unique visitor is a person who has visited the website in the period selected. You’ll find unique visitors in Analytics to be much lower than in your server statistics program, because Google ignores bots, spiders and any automated web traffic that comes to your site. Analytics also only works for visitors who have Java Script turned on in their browsers, so it’s not 100% accurate, but it is the industry standard.

Visitors

This is very confusing, because Google also uses a cookie to establish if the visitor has been to the site in a previously defined time period, so the visitors figure is usually higher than the unique visitors figure. You, for example, will probably visit your site several times in a day. You’ll only be recorded as a unique visitor once, but each visit will show up in the visits figure. Best advice? Ignore this number!

Pageviews

This figure gives you the total number of page views the site has had. In other words, if you had only one visitor, and they read four pages of the site, you would record 4 page views. This is interesting to advertisers, and as the number of pages increase on your website, so this number will increase correspondingly.

Pages per visit

This tells you how “sticky” your site is. In our example, the average visitor views 2.15 pages of the site on each visit. It’s telling me that almost everyone who comes to the site clicks to view at least one other piece of information, which is reasonable, but I’d prefer to see that figure higher. The higher the number, the better, because it means people are really being drawn to read more of your site. “Newsy” and “how to” sites record low figures here, while “story” sites often record a very high figure.

Average Visit Duration

As it suggests, this tells us how long the average visitor spends on the site. In our case 2 minutes and 20 seconds. I think this is quite low, but it reflects the fact that our posts and short and image rich. Sites with lots of video or in-depth articles will record a much higher figure here.

Bounce Rate

A “bounce” is recorded when someone visits the site, views one page, and leaves. People get very hung up about this, but if you think about it, normal web behaviour is to do just that. When I want some information, I search, arrive at the answer and move on. When someone shares an interesting post on social media, I often just read that one post and “bounce” out. You can influence this figure by putting links to other content at the end of posts. But accept that this figure will almost always be well north of 50%. For example, once you’ve read this, you’re going back to Facebook, aren’t you?

Percentage of new visits

It’s straightforward and does exactly what it says. For a new site, it will be high, and it will decline over time. If it gets much below 50% it means you need to do promotional work to attract new people to your site.

But what is “good?”

Here’s the problem. Every website is different. And if you start to compare your figures with ours, you could be comparing apples with pears, unless your site is in the same niche, with similar traffic and a similar posting style. That’s why Google has thoughtfully provided us with a comparison tool, which allows us to compare our own stats against different periods. And that’s when this becomes really useful, because you can measure trends.

To access this, just click the date box, and then select “Compare to.”

Here’s an image of the same information, compared to the previous year:

As you can see, everything is green, so I’m happy! All those key metrics are moving in the right direction. You can compare week on week, month on month and year on year, and this will enable you to see the direction your site is going in, which areas you need to work on and what effect any changes you make are having.

Stay tuned for part three! Join our email list using the box to your right, and I’ll let you know when the next part is live. It’s a good one!

Understanding Google Analytics–Part One

Mike — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 15:36:24 +0000

Referral Traffic

If you have a website for your business, then either install Google Analytics or ask your web person to do so for you.

It’s a free service from Google, and it will tell you so much more than any of the basic web traffic programs that are standard with your web hosting.

The information that can be gleaned is incredible, but it’s also quite complex. So over the next few weeks, we’ll take an elements at a time and explore it in some detail.

In this first part, we’re going to look at “Referrals,” which you will find under the “Traffic sources” and then “Sources” buttons. Click on referrals, and you’ll see a screen like the one in the photo, which is from our Lanzarote Information site.

I’ve chosen referral traffic because it’s the section I always go to first. The number at the top is purely the traffic that has come from other sites as referrals in the period selected. Click here to see the image larger

A referral tells you what site a person clicked through to your site from. So it will tell you:

How much traffic you get from your work on social media
How much traffic you get from websites you advertise on (like ours!)
Which sites you have links on that are sending you decent traffic

It’s an instant barometer of what is working and what isn’t in terms of your marketing efforts. If you’re paying a lot of money for a banner advert on a website, and getting little or no traffic, then you’re wasting your money. Conversely, if you’re getting a ton of traffic from a site that is costing you very little, then you should be looking at ways to get more links from them.

Let’s analyse the stats in the image for a moment, and pull out some bullet points to give you a feel for how I analyse these numbers:

Our top referrer is Facebook, with a total of more than 15,000 visits in the last 30 days. That’s substantial, and means the work we are doing there is very effective, especially considering we don’t ever pay to boost posts on Facebook. Our only cost there is time.
t.co is Twitter, and that gives us a vastly smaller amount of traffic, so maybe we should spend less time there and even more on Facebook!
Trip Advisor gives us a lot of traffic, especially considering we can’t have a “Page” there as we are not an establishment. Basically all that traffic comes from where other people recommend our site for information and include a link. The message to me is that I must continue to lobby Trip Advisor to recognise that destination websites like ours should have a place on their site.
Check the average pages per visit section, and you see that people coming to our site from Disqus (which is our commenting system) visit on average 5 pages, compared to less than two for most others. This suggests they are new visitors and want to find out more.
You can click each of these and see specifically which pages the traffic has been sent from. For example of Trip Advisor, I can see that the traffic in the last 30 days has come from a page in Trip Advisor where someone has asked about the sunbeds on the beaches in Puerto del Carmen – that’s an indication that we should write more about that topic.
Clicking further on tells me that the link we had about a year ago on The Daily Telegraph website still sent us 112 visits in the last month, so I should strive to get them to write about Lanzarote again and include another link.

Are you getting the picture? This is real data, about your actual visitors and how they came to your website, and it can inform you how you market your business, what content you should and shouldn’t have on your site, and which parts of social media are effective for your particular business.

Look out for more from Google Analytics, because it gets even more interesting as you delve deeper.

In the meantime if you have a burning question, just ask it in comments and I’ll do my best to answer it.