The Power of Your Website

There is no doubt that if you don’t have a social media marketing strategy for your business, you are definately late to the party.  We spend a tremendous amount of time with our So Fun Media clients -parent to myHealthyOC.com- working on their digital marketing strategies.  You have to be great at Facebook to build a community around your business.  You must be interesting on Twitter if you want people to follow you.  Be engaging on Linked In, or you will be ignored.  But, what I always find equally challenging is helping our clients to also step back and realize how important their good ole website is to building their business.

In the old days, we thought that if you just put up a brochure website that was good enough.  Then we realized you had to have the social media links and should probably think about how to create call to actions and have a contact form (yes I’m over simplifying it).  Today, there are dozens of things that the experts will tell you that you must do for your website.  While, there are many, many techniques to website optimization, I also believe that to just get you started on this path there are just FIVE ESSENTIAL things every website and business should have to ensure your visitors engage in the form of a contact, referral, buy, or repeat visit.

NUMBER ONE = How easy is it to quickly get a visitor to the information they need?

• What do you sell, how much does it cost?
• If you are a services business, what do you do, how do you do it, and what value does it give me?
• Does a visitor have to weed through layers of pages to find the answers?
• Are your pages full of tons of text that is hard to understand?
• Is your website overloaded with ads or too much video (i.e. eye distraction)?
• Do you consider your design complex or simple?  If the answer is not simple, we should discuss why you made it complex.

Have someone that doesn’t know much about your business go through your website.  Ask them for genuine feedback.  What I often tell my clients is that if I can’t get to the information I need about your company on the home page or within one page, it is probably too complicated and should be rebuilt.

NUMBER TWO = Do you have a call to action?

• When someone lands on your website, do you immediately tell them what you want them to do on your website?
• For example, let’s say you sell juice cleanses (we do some work in this space).  When a visitor comes to your website, do you immediately guide them to buying juice?  Or did you use the home page (landing page) to rattle on about why juicing is healthy, how it works, the ingredients, etc?  In this example, the goal is to get someone to have enough information on the first page to say “I want to buy” or “I’m interested in buying, now I will learn more”.
• What if you sell services?  Can be a bit harder to land on just one page, but if you think about it from a buyer’s perspective, tell your visitors very quickly what you do and how it will help them.  Do you need pages of text to do that?  As my business coach always said, if you can’t tell me what you sell in 30 seconds, you have lost my attention.  Tell them what you do in 30 seconds on your website.  Make it easy.

 NUMBER THREE = Target your audience

• When we use the internet to find information, we usually know exactly what we want.  I don’t search for “shoes”.  I search for women’s shoes, in red, size 10.  If I go to a website that sells shoes, they need to very quickly get me to red, size 10 or I will move on.  Same case with your potential customers.
• For example, you sell fitness services.  We do a ton of work in this space and what we know is that when people are looking for fitness options they don’t search “fitness”, they search “Corona Del Mar Yoga” or “Tustin Pilates”.  If this person searches for these things and they find your website, do you quickly introduce them to yoga or pilates?  Or, are you just a “fitness studio?”
• Side note for fitness businesses – establish your demographic (women, men, youth, athletes, executives) AND most importantly target your geography.  People do not drive more than 8-10 miles for fitness.
• Every business has a target market.  You should know exactly who buys your products or services that is who you need to target on your website.  Don’t be a “catch all” company, that is not how we buy.  If you sell to parents, talk to parents (giving them the info they need).  If you sell to corporate executives, give them information that will make a business difference.  Not sure how to do this?  Give me a call, I’m more than happy to help.

NUMBER FOUR = Make it easy to commit or buy

• Did you know that the average shopping cart has a 75% abandonment rate mostly because the process was too complex?   You need to make it VERY easy for someone to buy your products or to contact you to learn more.  Don’t hide your contact page at the bottom of your website, or six pages deep.  Put it on the homepage with a huge arrow pointing to it (kidding of course, but you get the picture).  We are busy folks and we don’t have time to waste, get them there easily and make sure you respond IMMEDIATELY.

NUMBER FIVE = Spend some time and money optimizing and measuring your site

• Most of you have heard of SEO.  In its simplest form, SEO makes it so that when someone is searching for what you sell they can find you easily.  Google likes certain things about websites and you need to make sure yours meets that standard.  If you are a “marriage psychiatrist in Newport Beach”, make sure your website says that (in multiple places).  SEO is a bit more complicated than this, but there are tons of information available on this as well as many companies (including ours) that can help you with this.
• If you want to use your website to build your business you MUST also invest some time in the tools that allow you to see what happens with your site traffic.  Google Analytics is free and can be an amazing source of information for you to understand how many visitors you have, what they do when they get to your site, what your conversion rates are (visitors that took a desired action)?  There is no way for you to utilize your website as a sales and marketing tool if you don’t monitor and measure results.

The internet is how we buy, learn, share, and engage today and if you want to grow your business you cannot afford to not have the best, most kick ass website in your industry.  Stand out, make it simple and easy for your visitors to “buy”, track your results, and measure growth.

Building Your Business – The Value of a Story

Well, we did it, a few weeks in and the myHealthyOC Shop is running smoothly and ready for holiday shoppers to come buy from our local health partners!  As the ONLY local online marketplace that is dedicated to healthy Orange County businesses and buyers, we have an aggressive plan for growth and would love your feedback along the way.

Building a business through e-commerce is tough.  How do you drive traffic to it?  How do you get people to buy once they see your product?  Just building an online shopping cart can be very time consuming and expensive.  What we also know as marketers (I run a marketing company, too) is that providing a place to sell is only part of the battle. How do you get more customers?  How do you get repeat customers?  Have you heard that 82% of businesses (BuySellAds) are not happy with their Groupon results for getting return clients?  At the end of the day, if you don’t market your product or service, your business will not grow.

Today’s shopper has an enormous amount of information at their fingertips and traditional, two-dimensional marketing is under serious pressure.  How many of you get results from print or web banner ads?  What consumers look for most of the time is information.  What is it?  How does it work?  What will it do for me?  What VALUE does it bring to my life?  People buy from people they like, products they trust, and from service providers that take great care of them.  If someone is looking for a new Pilates class or chiropractor, where will they look?  The internet.  If someone is thinking about trying a cleanse, where will they learn more?  The internet. And, today, it’s not just the internet, it’s also social media.  We shop, share and research on social media channels. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube have become the places we go to learn more.

How do you make sure that your potential customers then find you?  And if they do, how do you keep them engaged when they get to your website or Facebook page?  This is the power of marketing.  People might be looking and you need to make sure that when they find you, they fall in love with what your company (product or service) is.  That’s the value of your story.

My mission for myHealthyOC was to create a platform where we could share our partners’ stories and where our community could buy products and services from the local businesses they love.  How do you tell your business’ story?

myHealthyOC Shop is almost here!

Have you ever thought as you are reading about a product or service, “I wonder where I can buy that?” Well, I am super excited to tell you that we are finally going to be able to give you that option!

The myHealthyOC Shop will launch in beta sometime this week. We are starting small with just a few partners to get this service off the ground. Through the myHealthyOC Shop, you will now be able to buy a voucher for our partners’ advertised goods and services. Much like a Groupon, our subscribers will be able to purchase a voucher and redeem it directly with that merchant. This gives us an opportunity to share our favorite local products and services and give our subscribers the opportunity to try them out.

I want to send a huge THANK YOU to all of our merchants that have signed up to sell their goods as part of the shop launch. To Ritual Cleanse, Pure One Environmental, Adia Nutrition, Xtend Barre, Herban, Jannae Beauty Institute, VR Green Farms, and In Motion OC,  we definitely couldn’t have done this without you!

If you are interested in learning more about the myHealthyOC Shop and listing your business, please contact us here.

myHealthyOC, now what?

30 days in and I couldn’t be more excited about where we are with myHealthyOC.   Our website traffic is unbelievably high considering how new we are, our Facebook is rockin and we have some great friends on Twitter as well.  Clearly the Orange County community was ready for a web platform dedicated to all things local, healthy, and fun!

When I had the idea for myHealthyOC.com, the plan was to create a single place where we could share great health information and connect our community with local healthy products and services.  The good news is that we have had a remarkable amount of local health companies come to us wanting us to share their amazing story and we can’t wait to do it for them.  The even better news is that in less than two weeks we are not only going to be able to share great information, we will also be able to sell vouchers for the products and services that we love.  Can you imagine learning about something new AND being able to buy it in one single place?  How fun is that?!!

Once we launch the myHealthyOC Shop, our next  update will be to release the myHealthyOC Directory listing where you can easily find local healthy businesses (think fitness studios, restaurants, specialty doctors, wellness practioners and more).

Thank you again for joining us on this awesome journey and if you have any ideas for the website or just want to chat about what we are doing, we would love to hear from you, please Contact Us here.

 

 

Why myHealthyOC?

After spending many years helping build businesses, I’ve realized that traditional marketing just doesn’t seem to be doing the job that it used to.  There have been countless times that I have questioned whether the expenses of our marketing campaigns were producing enough revenue to justify what we were spending.  Sound familiar?  A referral or lead here or there, but what I now know is that what moves the mark for the businesses I work with is that when we have the opportunity through networking or referrals to share our story more clients and customers follow.

When we buy today, most of us either search the internet for information or ask friends and colleagues for referrals.  Occasionally, we will hear someone telling a story about something they loved and we will then want to try it.  Thinking through this very simplified process, I had the idea, where do companies of the same industry (where like-minded folks would hang out) tell their story? Turning back the clock on the traditional magazine model, if you were interested in car stuff you read car magazines to learn about new things.  If you live a healthy lifestyle and want to learn about new, healthy products you might read Shape or Fitness magazines.  But, what if you wanted to learn about new healthy products and services that are close to where you live?  How would you find the best local juice shop or Pilates studio that fits your style?  Where do you go to could learn about them, buy from them, and tell your friends about them?  This is how the idea for myHealthyOC.com was born.  A single place we can all hang out and talk about fun, healthy, and local information. (more…)