I was asked by Adam Jolly to give some advice about the web and its value to small businesses for his forthcoming book The Growing Business Handbook. I'm very happy to acknowledge help from colleagues in the KITC, and particularly Vishal Soni and Jason Marshall
The article
If you are searching for growth, look
online. In the UK, the web economy now accounts for 8.5% of all activity, which
is a higher figure than any of the world’s other main markets.
To give you a sense of scale of the change that is
happening, consider online groceries. They already account for 4.5% to 5% of
the market. If they continue growing at their current rate of 15% a year, their
share will be 10% to 12% by 2020.
So how can you as a small enterprise start
capturing this potential? Here are a series of relatively easy steps that you
can take that might end up transforming your business without saddling yourself
with too many extra costs.
Phase 1: web presence
First, change your mindset. It is no longer a
matter of thinking whether you should be online, but about how you must build
your presence.
At a minimum, whether you are florist in Canterbury,
a curry house in Margate or anyone else, you have to create a basic web page.
It is how your customers now find you. Many brands represent themselves through
their “domain name” like google.com, or amazon.co.uk, so it’s worth finding
which domain name you can purchase for yourself, such as floratheflorist.co.uk.
This name will then be a key part of your overall brand, and you can then publicise
it through local online directories, many of which are free.
At this web site, as well as saying who you are and
where you are, you can start adding details that your customers will find
useful, such as what you have on the menu or what bouquets you might recommend
for different occasions.
Alongside your own activities, it will be worth
placing yourself within a wider picture. As a florist, you might point
customers towards your preferred maker of vases and carry a link to an online
ordering service like Interflora.
Similarly, at the restaurant, you might plug
yourself into a national infrastructure for making bookings. Any visitors are
likely to go through one of these networks in planning their trip. Like most of
us, they are likely to rely on recommendations from other customers on sites
such as Trip Advisor. These reviews can be highly influential in how anyone
unfamiliar with your area makes their spending choices.
Phase 2: social media
So far, you are still taking a relatively passive digital
approach. On the web, you generally rely on customers to come to you. On social
media, or Web2.0 as it’s sometimes called, you can connect them with more
directly.
If you build your own page on Facebook, you can
start sending out messages to those who choose to like you, highlighting any
special offers you might be running.
On Twitter, you can create an account for yourself
by finding a name that no-one else is using and put a @ in front of it, like
@floratheflorist. Anyone who follows you will then receive your tweets. It is a
powerful way of starting to build a relationship.
When you tweet, you can highlight any words or
phrases, such as flowers for Easter, with a hash tag #flowersforeaster. Anyone
who is searching for that hash tag will then find you.
You need to find followers, of course. People may
give you all sorts of different advice, but probably the simplest way is to
follow people: if you follow them they are more likely to follow you. Then, once
anyone comments on you and you respond, all their followers will see what you
have to say. Another way of attracting followers is to forward (or “retweet”)
others’ tweets.
Advertising on the web has completely changed how
advertising works. Instead of placing an ad in a newspaper, and hoping that
some of the readers will respond, it’s now possible to target your
advertisements. You can choose to advertise to people who search for particular
words, and you only pay when someone has clicked on the link to read more. The
cost will depend on the level of demand for any combination of words. ‘Cheap
booze’ is likely to command a premium. ‘Curries in Margate’ or ‘flowers in
Canterbury’ are likely to much more affordable.
Phase 3: e-commerce
Once you have worked through these options, you
will have created your online presence. The next stage is to start making sales
directly through e-commerce. Again, you can go a long way without incurring too
many upfront costs, or too much technical effort.
You can create your own shop on e-Bay, who, as well
as running auctions, let you sell direct through their ‘buy it now’ option. Or
you can become a partner on Amazon and appear on its listings when customers
search for your type of product. For services, like hotels and restaurants, sites
like Trip Advisor are now moving beyond its origins in customer advice into linking
directly to hotel booking sites like hotels.com. If you want to sell through your site, companies
like PayPal will process payments for you, saving you the complications of
managing credit cards.
Potentially, such activities will transform the
nature of your business. Think about second-hand books. We used to travel the
country, dropping into shops in the hope of finding a title. Now you can
essentially see a whole country’s stock of second-hand books on a site like abebooks.com
in an instant.
Equally, in your own business, you might start
expanding into areas you never thought possible before. Our florist in
Canterbury, for instance, could look at selling animated cards to send with
bouquets.
Phase 4: brand dialogue
By inviting your users to start conducting a conversation
with your brand, you are moving from a static presence online to a more dynamic
two-way flow. But how do you keep yourself fresh and ready to engage?
Right at the start, you want to make sure that you
retain the option to manage your content. Many of the companies we see at the
University of Kent tend to create a striking first site, which they struggle to
adapt as the nature of their business changes and expands. One way of keeping
your site up to date is to use a Content Management System (or CMS); your web
site developer can advise you about this.
Later, as you move into social media, you have to
be ready for the eccentric and unexpected comments that you might attract. So
it is worth thinking in advance about the tone you might adopt. If a slip-up
happens, rather than being defensive, it is generally better to be graceful. Your
relationship with your customers and clients has changed: now you are in a
conversation with them, and keeping track of what’s happening on your social
media is something that you need to keep on top of. That way, you can keep
building your audience.
You’ve
seen how quickly things have changed in the last five years with the advent of
twitter … one thing for sure is that there will be the same number of
surprises in the next five years, so keeping up with what’s going on on the web
is a real priority for all small businesses.
Social media policy
- Define: What type of company you want to be seen as - informal, formal etc. Remember your target audience.
- Time: Online promotions and monitor the response
- Monitor: What is the sentiment toward your business and topics related to you
- Respond: To the key topics that are related to your business and to your target market
The Kent IT Consultancy
The Kent IT Consultancy is an IT consultancy based in the School of Computing at the University of
Kent. Its mission is to support the community by solving business
problems with technology, as well as providing its students consultants with
the skills to make them more employable. Its motto is “the graduates of
tomorrow supporting the businesses of today”.
