25 Years ago most businesses used the telephone Yellow Pages as their primary means of advertisement. In many areas now, yellow pages are not even published or distributed. Today the Internet is the primary means. A website is only one piece of the Internet advertising puzzle. In some cases a website is not even required. Social media, email or blogs also are useful marketing tools. You must be able to reach to customers past & present and the Internet can provide that medium. Cost per person is very low compared to other forms are marketing such as print, radio, TV, direct mail, etc. In many cases these other marketing tools are used to drive to the Internet. You can provide a lot more information and selling points online than in a 3″ x 5″ ad. The Internet allows for realtime updating whether used for information or sales. An ever growing number of people now carry smart phones and devices with the Internet always in their pocket. There is no other form of marketing that can connect you with customers 24/7.
Websites
A website begins with your domain name. It will also be a part of your business’s brand. This can be your business name. It can also be an indication of your product or services. Like your business name it should be: Easy to remember, easy to spell and easy to type aspeople are poor typists. Try to avoid dashes. Domain names can be .com, .net, .org, .tv, .biz and many others. For any business .com is the preference. Org or net should be avoided as they have a different meaning. Beyond .com none of the others have any benefit with regard search engine ranking regardless of what the sellers of domains tell you.
You will need a website host.The host is who actually hosts the files, images and applications that make up a website. Bigger does not mean better in this area. Godaddy spends many millions on advertising but has poor performance and often outdated enthronements. Some others give you a limited environment. This means there are features of a website that you will not be able to incorporate either because of technical issues or they prefer to sell them as add-on services which increases your cost. Currently we recommend HOSTGATOR for hosting services.
There are many means to creating a website and your webpages. Some hosts offer template based systems. This can be fairly easy to learn although have limitations. There are also web applications like WordPress, Joomla & Drupal which offer an interface similar to a word processor but have many important capabilities that can be incorporated. You can also have your entire website designed for you or the initial pages as a starting point towards the future HERE.
The biggest and most common mistake made pertaining to websites is looks. They worry so much about appearance that functionality is reduced and content often is less effective. Incorporating certain features like flash might look great on some systems but will not work at all on others including an iPhone and newer android devices. Large images are also an issue. Not everyone everywhere is on a high-speed Internet connection. Those people are not going to wait for your webpage to load. Some design fancy websites that require the newest web browser. Nobody is going to upgrade their browser just to view your fancy website. There are another 958,919,789 websites for them to check out. You are trying to reach 100% of potential customers and not 50% of potential customers.
Visitors to your website must be able to quickly and easily get the information they seek. That translates to having content and navigation organized in a simple way. If they have to search and fumble they will leave. A webpage should never require more than three pagedowns. If there is a lot of content on a single page consider breaking down to multiple pages. You could also include a mini-menu at the top of the page using anchor tags for each section.
Language and grammar are also important. The average reading level in the United States is an 8th grade although one in five adults read at a 5th grade level. Google offers a (advanced) search feature that gives you the reading level for a search string or website. As you see here (above) using the search string “Pole Dancing” related webpages have 69% basic reading level. This is not necessarily for education of site visitors. Reducing the reading level makes pages quicker to read and digest. There is also a danger otherwise of “talking down” to the readers. Most eight-grade kids are 13 years old. So when writing & designing content, do it as if talking to a 13 year old.
One of the most perplexing things is people who continually fail to give out their website address. Often I think its people ashamed of their website or worse yet business. It should be given out more often than your first name. One pole studio owner mentioned she was upset that someone she spent many emails helping with a pole move went to a different pole studio for private lessons when visiting her city. Turns out in a dozen emails she never once gave her website! This is a case of business stupidity! Always give out your website address. Otherwise either take down your website or close your business. Even if you do not think that person would be interested, maybe someone they know will need your services or product. Marketing is all about reaching people and a website is one of the best marketing tools.
Websites today are about content. Visitors want to get what they need quickly, easily with no headaches. An hour spent on content will get you further than ten hours spent on appearance.
You can read an excellent article about websites On This Page HERE.
Social Media
Social Media includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+ and another hundred others. You do not need to be on all of them. Social media in general is usually utilized or or misused. It should be both a marketing tool, to maintain interest from your current customers. or keep them informed of your current business.
It should not be used the same as a personal social media account. The fastest way to kill a social media account or page is to reuse posts from other people, pages or accounts. A business needs to have its own identity therefore you need to use all original content. The highest quality posts will:
- Inform of new products, services, classes, shipping policies or sales
- Educate on how to use your products or services or something pole related
- Entertain. Everyone could use a laugh. It must be related to your business.
Stay clear of grumpy cat, cute kid videos, pictures of cars, that new Beyonce song. They will get those from many sources. Totally avoid personal posts. Your wedding, parents anniversary, child’s graduation, dinner at the steak house, all go in your PERSONAL social media page. Your BUSINESS profile is for business only.
Now you are yelling at your monitor “Where the heck will I get this original content?” What about pictures or videos taken in your own studio of yourself or students. You will need to get permission (Here is a sample Model Release) but most students will love to be featured on your social media page. In fact they will be the first to share it with their friends & followers which extends the reach for your business! There are many image editing programs to add text. You will want to include in all your posts your website or business name, usually in any image or video. An excellent, easy to use & (my favorite four-letter word) Free image editing program is Irfanview found HERE. You can also borrow images from elsewhere on the Internet but add your own text over them to make original content. Make sure there are no licensing issues with any images or video before posting. In videos realize that if copyrighted music is used, Youtube, Facebook and others impose restrictions on availability because of licensing issues.
The great thing about Social Media is that its free to use besides reaching a wide audience. While many of these systems offer paid promoting of posts, they usually will not be a worthwhile investment. If you can create good content with your posts you can find others will repost or retweet and maybe their followers can do the same. Your posts can then have their reach growing exponentially. This is called “Viral Marketing.” One word of warning: Do not Like your own posts! The systems use this as a negative and its pretty tacky too.
Also try to include in whatever posts, tweets, etc. with an “Action Item.” An Action item is simply embedding a direction sign. It could be a link to your website. A link to the system for scheduling pole dancing classes. A poll or questionnaire. Its using a post to take them somewhere. Without an action item your post is a Dead End sign. Do not just hope they call or stop in unless your action item is a coupon to redeem over the phone or in person. It will not be 100% of the time as some posts may be just to keep your followers engaged. We recommend at the least twice a month you at the least have a “Heartbeat Post.” That is a post that tells not necessarily your followers but others your business is still alive. Many systems offer scheduling posts which can make this easier. People often will check a company Facebook page or Twitter account to see if there are recent posts. If not, they may have second thoughts about dealing with a business that might not be around or does not offer support. Websites are expected to be static but social media should breathe.
Email
Email is one of the least used forms of Internet marketing. Except of course by people selling those pills! There is a reason why you receive many SPAM messages besides they being almost free. People still buy, even from them. With a targeted email list you can do much better.
Every real email address you can collect is worth money. It does not mean that every one will result in a sale. It is overall the is a percentage of every hundred address that will result in a certain number of sales. You should be collecting email addresses from current customers or even inquiries.
Sending bulk emails (many recipients) is not as simple as it sounds. If you use your personal email or send from your computer, there will be strict limits. Some Internet service providers (Comcast, Time-Warner, Sky Broadband, Virgin Media, etc.) have strict limits on how many recipients a message can be sent to. Some as low as twelve recipients. Free Email services like Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook, etc. also have their limits. If you send beyond those limits, the other recipients are just dropped. You will never know they did not go out. There are also limits on how many email messages and/or recipients per hour. Violating these rules has three main issues:
1) Your email account may be closed for violation.
2) Your messages can be marked as SPAM as many people never check their SPAM folders.
3) Your email account can be blacklisted where some mail systems will not forward the messages to their recipients on their system.
Do not use them!
The better website hosts will support thousands of outgoing messages per day. Again the big names like Godaddy have very low limits making them useless for this purpose. Some hosts will even have built-in applications for managing your email lists as well as designing & sending to your email lists. There are also web-based applications such as phpList which is free to install & use. If you need support of installing, configuring & using an email management program like phpList you can find it HERE. These applications allow you multiple lists so emails can be targeted specifically to new versus existing customers. Male or female. Location or whatever criteria you want to base them on. They also allow you to use other information you may have gathered a.long with the people’s email addresses. If you get their names, these apps let you insert the name into the emails. That is how you receive emails from companies with your name within the message content. Makes it more personal.They also handle the throttling of sending messages so they are less likely to be perceived as SPAM or over loading any email server or gateway. The best feature of these applications is they automatically handle new subscribers and people who wish to be removed from your email list.
Your email messages should be designed to be attention grabbing. People do get plenty of emails. You have a few seconds to grab attention and get the reader to finish your message. Just like social media, you want there to be action items. Do not just say “Call us” or “Visit our website.” You need to include links to take them there. Even telephone numbers can be clickable links in an email so if reading on their phone you have done the dialing for them. Always include your business name and contact information at the bottom of each email. That is regardless if it is included elsewhere. It is alright and can be beneficial to include images or pictures in the email . Be aware though that some will not see them. Always include the “Alt” text that will take the place of missing images. Keep the images small so to decrease loading time and make the message display well even on small smartphones.
Emails are not only for outgoing. Incoming email is also a very useful tool. For support or sales, it can be less time-consuming than telephone calls, reducing business expenses. Giving a means of contact through email as you communicate with customers elsewhere (message forums, website blogs, trade shows, print media or handouts, etc.) adds a sense of positive trust & confidence in your company, products and services.
Incoming emails does not have to mean giving out your personal email address. In fact, we recommend never giving out your personal email! Remember to keep personal and business separate. If you own your domain name (other than free websites or blogs) you can create many email address with it. If you are a business making widgets for pole dancing you might use Role email addresses like these:
- Sales@polewidgets.com – Incoming Sales Questions
- Marketing@polewidgets.com – Wholesale Sales
- Webmaster@polewidgets.com – Website Support
- Techsupport@polewidgets.com – Technical Support
- Register@polewidgets.com – Product Registration
- PoleExpo@polewidgets.com – Customers from the last Pole Expo
- Newsletter@polewidgets.com – Subscribers to your newsletter
- Billing@polewidgets.com – Accounts Receivable
- JohnSmith@polewidgets.com – John Smith
- HeatherSmith@polewidgets.com – Heather Smith
It should be noted that using role based email adresses have a strength and weakness. The strength is that many email systems for sending bulk email do not allow importing of role base emails. That can help reduce the number of unwanted emails. The weakness is your message may be sent to the SPAM folder although there are workarounds for dealing with that issue.
SPAM is always an issue when making any email address public. Of course by using role based emails it isolates your personal email address. Email filters will often need to be implemented to automatically delete messages containing certain words. Many SPAM filters today do a good job of reducing them.
You may almost never need to give out your email address directly. Like on this website a contact form allows email communication without printing your email address. Your reply will include an email address but it does not have to be printed. In fact often companies will give out the URL of their Contact Form page in place of an email address. Contact forms can prompt for specific information making them more powerful. A contact form could be used for product registration or technical support prompting for information such as model number, serial number, date of purchase, etc. A pole studio might use one for new student inquiries asking for fitness level (how far can they run? ); months of experience of pole dance; have a pole at home; etc. Many contact forms also can allow upload of images or videos which in the pole industry provides valuable additional information.
Blogs
For some in the pole industry, they do not offer enough to fill a website or such as an independent instructor may want to promote themselves through a timeline. A blog may not only provide an easier mechanism to communicate but a better one. A single blog timeline means visitors see first the most recent posts which may be more appropriate for your needs. Most blogs also support categories and tags which can be used to easily locate important topics. A blog can be self-hosted (your own domain name and host) or one of the many blog hosting sites such as Blogger, wordpress.com & Tumblr, Each of these are free although they charge for add-on services. The cost of some of these add-ons can actually make the cost much higher than a self-hosted blog or website. In addition, they decide what features are available which limits functionality. It can also be difficult to later move from one of the free blog systems to a self-hosted website. Still, there are some who will never require more than a simple blog and can save the expense and time of managing a website.
Smartphone/Device Applications
Most smartphones, tablets and related devices are like mini-computers. They can run applications from simple to fairly complex. There are several main operating systems for these devices (Apple IOS, Android, Windows Phone) and applications are developed separately for each platform. While not considered exactly an Internet medium they often use the Internet in some way. They can be effective in distributing information. While more expensive to implement than the others described above they can be useful in other areas.
They can be simply an interface to information contained on your website or the webpages directly. Some use them to providing information they purposefully exclude from websites to add another connection to their customers. There is always a trade-off between content kept within the application and served from a website. Content within the application allows that content to be used even when no Internet connection exists. It also can make the application very large in size, reducing the install base. Consider as well that the content can become dated as it will only be refreshed when the entire application is updated. Using content stored on a website, keeps content fresh. There are methods to keep content on a website but have it stored in the application although it requires higher device privileges that can sometimes be an issue. These applications do often promote the branding and reputation of your business and that by itself can pay for it even if few users actually use it.
This all applies at the worldwide, national and local levels. If you are the manufacturer of poles or accessories, your competition will drive you to build better quality products and offer a higher level of customer support. While there will be an increase in expenses for Research & Development, it will be offset by the overall market increase. Often manufacturing costs will decrease as a byproduct of the R&D. It should be noted that when quality increases, so do sales by consumer confidence. LCD TV’s, computers, smartphones, all saw increased sales as a direct result of an increase in product quality driven by competition.
The established studio was to send some beginner students they couldn’t accept to the new studio. While the new studio sent advanced students back. There was also some monetary provision set aside as well. (They just recently started this arrangement and will update in the future with results.) This has thus far increased business for each. This will again drive each to improve their services and facilities increasing their own business value. If the established studio is smart how they handle things and positions itself as the premiere studio, they should be able to command a higher rate for classes and private lessons. Not only than the other studio but more than before the new studio arrived on the scene. From there they should increase their business profits. As the new studios students get too advanced for their instructors they will need to move to the established studio. All because of the competition.
Pricing Game.