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The business world changes quickly, the digital world even quicker. The problem is that very few business are really keeping up with the pace of change online and the rapid adoption of new media, device and applications by their customers.

The truth is that there are now very few industries unaffected by the web. Whole new business models are emerging daily that totally interrupt entire industries. If it hasn’t happened to you yet it will soon.

In 2012 the need to adapt will be more crucial than ever. Those that do will benefit and see their market share grow or uncover new markets. Those that don’t risk falling well behind or losing it all.

Here are the 9 things your business must do now:

1. Get serious about online

It seems amazing to be writing this in 2012, but there are still many business owners and marketers who don’t appreciate how much the internet is changing their industries. Most have “ticked the box” by slapping together a website but have since done little more.

Newsflash: your customers start their search for a product or service online (including mobile). They want the best information available immediately. If they can purchase or inquire online, they will. If they need to physically visit your location to do business with you then, 1. you better hope your competitors are in the same boat, 2. you must give them enough information online to ensure they make it to your fine establishment, or your competitors will.

Your bog-standard website won’t do the trick anymore. Unless you get really serious about online and make it central to your plans you can start considering new career options.

2. Get good at producing content

Potential customers aren’t looking for you, they’re looking for answers and solutions. They don’t Google “Acme Fasteners”, they search for “best fasteners in Smithtown” or “how to find the best fastener”.

Potential customers also trust the word-of-mouth effect of social media and are more likely to visit a site recommended to them by a “friend” online.

The key to all this is producing good content.

Good content offers solutions. It’s helpful and useful. Its not about your business, its about your customer’s potential needs. Good content gets shared online. It becomes popular. It tends to ranks higher in search results. It speaks to the customer.

You need to produce good content on your website on a regular basis. Static websites don’t deliver business.

3. Get social

Still think social networks are for kids and geeks? Think again. Social networking has become ubiquitous and increasingly seamless. The most exciting start-ups are around social networking ideas that are interrupting old business models.

People like to share good information. They like to share ideas and discoveries. They like to share information about themselves. Social networks have made it easier than ever to share information at the click of a button.

Facebook is closing in on 1 billion users. Google+ is only 6 months old and is on track to hit 100 users in February 2012. Twitter has an estimated 300+ million users. Then there is LinkedIn and numerous other networks.

At the very least you should enable sharing buttons (like the ones at the top of this post) on your website so that visitors can easily share that great content you are hopefully producing. You don’t even need to be a member of these networks but you should be catering to those visitors who are.

To really get social you need to set up accounts and dedicated pages for your business with the Big Four: Facebook, Twitter. LinkedIn and Google+. Then you have to work those accounts. There’s no escaping this, it has to be done.

The upside of getting social are significant. The downside of not getting social is also significant, but more painful.

4. Get optimised

Being found online in search engines is not just a luxury, its a necessity in 2012. At a time when 97% of people begin their online search for a product or service using a search engine its incredible that 87% of business websites are poorly optimised for search. You need to immediately start optimising multiple pages of your website for important industry search terms; the more they address needs and solutions the better (see Get Content). This is one action could make the biggest difference to your business and give you a significant advantage over your competitors.

Test your website’s optimisation here.

5. Get data

Never in history has more customer data been more freely available. A clever online strategy can tell you so much about your market, your customer needs, your customers habits and your potential customer’s details. Website analytics, social media analytics, conversion forms and more can all work in unison to help you improve the marketing accuracy of your business. Simple conversion forms on your website can help you build a sizable and relevant database.

6. Get converted

Attracting traffic to your website is nice, but converting that traffic into fans, inquiries and sales is even nicer. PDF downloads, newsletter subscriptions, inquiry forms, free trials….these can all work to help turn visitors into customers. But it only happens if you provide the right call-to-action. What are you doing to convert your traffic?

7. Get mobile

The smart phone is ubiquitous. The tablet is fast replacing the laptop as the casual computing device. We are now less tethered to a desk and more mobile than ever whilst remaining totally “connected” online. Mobile is expected to account for over 20% of all searches in 2012 and it’ll continue to grow from there.

Then we have social networking which fits so neatly hand-in-glove with mobile devices.

The bottom line is that you have to pay serious consideration to how you business will compete with the growth of the mobile consumer. Is your website mobile friendly? Should you build apps? Is there a particular aspect of you business that is more suited to mobile that you can build upon?

8. Get inbound

All of these above points add up to an Inbound Marketing strategy. Inbound is about attracting visitors and converting them to customers rather than the old advertising approach of blasting everyone with the hope of hitting some potentially interested buyers. Inbound leads to higher conversion rates and better use of your marketing budget. The more you think “inbound”, the more you will be acting like a modern web marketer.

9. Get dedicated

Smart, modern online marketing isn’t a set and forget exercise. Its not something to give to the junior to take care of “because they use Facebook”. Your online strategy requires a dedicated approach and dedicated resources. We have been increasingly helping our clients recruit and train marketers who are working full-time on online marketing strategies. There’s a lot to look after: numerous social networks, generating great content, tracking conversion and implementing mobile solutions.

The businesses who decide dedicate adequate resources to online are those who will prosper.

Over at Media Hunter, Craig has posted an interesting introduction to the field of trade promotion optimisation. Its a fascinating field that could seriously benefit from an integrated online approach.

Still not taking social media seriously as a significant contender for consumer attention?

A recent Nielsen survey reports that Australia led the world in average time spent per person on social media sites in December 2009.

When narrowed by individual country, with 142.1 million unique visitors the United States had the largest number of social media and blog users in December, followed by Japan, which had 46.6 million unique visitors during the month. Australia led in average time per person spent, with the average Australian spending nearly 7 hours on social media sites in December. The United States and the United Kingdom came in a close second and third, with 6 hours and 9 minutes and 6 hours and 8 minutes, respectively.

Almost seven hours per person per month spent on social media. That’s a lot. Especially when you consider another Nielsen survey in 2009 revealed that long-established traditional media like newspapers and magazines are only gaining our attention for an average of 8 to 12 hours per month.

Australian’s now spend an average of 16.1 hours per week online and 3.7 hours per week on mobiles. The booming smartphone and about-to-explode iPad market will only see our online engagement continue to climb.

Once again, the question is….does your marketing reflect the new hierarchy of media consumption or are you still casting your bait where the fish no longer bite?

A new US survey indicates what a huge impact websites have on client’s ultimate purchase decision. 97% of the 200 buyers surveyed admitted that a provider’s website influences their purchase decision.

The RainToday.com survey included more than 200 buyers responsible for more than $1.7 billion in professional services purchased, such as accounting and financial consulting; architecture, engineering, and construction services; human resources consulting; IT consulting and services; legal services; management consulting; marketing, advertising, and public relations; and training services.

According to the survey, 74% of buyers report the service provider’s website holds at least “some influence” over their ultimate decision to buy services from the provider, while only 3% of the 200 buyers surveyed say a provider’s website has no influence whatsoever over their purchase decision.

The message is clear: if you aren’t taking your web presence seriously yet, you are losing serious business.

Forrester Research put out a great report on US Interactive Marketing Spend recently showing where marketers believe effectiveness will increase and decrease in the next three years.

The three biggest expected INCREASES were in Created social media, Online video and Search engine optimisation (SEO).

The areas predicted to have the biggest DECREASE in marketing effectiveness were Newspapers, Yellow Pages, Telemarketing and Radio.

(information sourced from SEOMOZ)

Marketers see greater potential in interactive channels

From Ben Parr at Mashable

We know that Twitter believes that businesses are central to helping grow and monetize the microblogging service; recent integrations with Citysearch and LinkedIn have foretold its interest in the space.

Today though, Twitter (Twitter) has begun to take its biggest steps in providing new features to businesses and monetizing those features. In a blog post, the company announced that it has begun beta testing its first feature made specifically for businesses: “Contributors.”

An explanation of the contributors feature

Contributors is a feature that focuses on creating more authentic engagement for business accounts. With Contributors, a business account with multiple contributors (say, for example, the @Twitter feed) can add the specific user that tweeted on behalf of the business to the byline.

Here’s Twitter’s explanation of the new feature in testing:

“The feature we are beta testing is called ‘Contributors’ – it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account. The feature appends the contributor’s username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.”

The other big revelation by the company is that Contributors is just the first of several business features, some of which will be visible by users, and some which will be internal for businesses.

Twitter’s getting serious about ramping up its business presence. This may just be the beginning of the Twitter business model. We’ll have more answers soon enough.

Excerpt of Report by Jeanne-Vida Douglas. BRW Magazine

Technologies once limited to only the biggest budgets are now affordable for businesses of any scale. Here are five of the most rewarding. 

Information technology has been the biggest driver of productivity since mechanisation took over from manual and animal labour at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Research from Finland suggests that access to simple data storage and processing computing facilities will increase the productivity of an average worked by 9 per cent a year; access to the internet will boost it by 14 per cent; mobile computing will increase worker productivity by 32 per cent.

Nonetheless, small businesses, which stand to gain the most from investing in It services, are often the most reticent to take advantage of the opportunities technology provides.

Unlike their larger counterparts, SMEs are often founded and run by specialists. The real estate agent, the carpenter and the distributor all know their trades, but don’t necessarily have the time to investigate emerging technologies or sit down to create a strategy for how a certain piece of software or hardware might make their businesses run more efficiently.

Those who take the time to investigate and invest in IT, however, often establish for themselves a substantial advantage over their competitors, and ultimately enable themselves to exploit the access to resources, staff and range of customers that would otherwise be out of their reach.

WEB MARKETING

Although 80 per cent of small businesses in Australia use the internet, and almost 43 per cent go online to place orders or buy products and services, fewer than 25 per cent of these businesses actually extend such a service to their own customers, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports.

Having grown accustomed to static $500 websites, many smaller companies balk at the cost of creating a more dynamic and effective web presence, and as a result are losing potential customers.

“It’s hard when you’re a small business – especially in the trades – where you know that spending $20,000 on your machinery or tools will increase your productivity, but you don’t really understand how investing that money in your website will boost your business,” business manager for the Melbourne head quartered construction company 4Walls, Kelly Savvides, says.

Nonetheless, by integrating search engine optimisation technology into the company’s website, 4Walls was able to respond in a more targeted way to web-based searches. And as a result, it could win more work.

“There is no point in having an aesthetically pleasing web site that no one can find,” Savvides says. “We only need to win one contract as a result of being easier to find on the web and we cover the extra cost of making it more functional.”

With 80 staff scattered across Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra, removalists King & Wilson decided to make a substantial investment in the technology underpinning its company website in 2004, to offer customers the opportunity to get quotes and customer service over the internet.

Using technology from Melbourne web software specialists bwired, the company paid off the extra cost within a month due to increased sales.

“Investing in the internet totally changed the way we advertised. We pulled out of the Yellow Pages in Sydney and Melbourne because the internet was generating enough work,” managing director Andrew Wilson says. “At first we thought about the internet in terms of look and branding, but we found out more about how people look for information on the web and now we just keep tweaking the site and get more business as a result.”

Inbound marketing is like a magnet for your company

Basically there are two forms of marketing:

Outbound marketing- where you spend money trying to interrupt your potential customers with your message

Inbound marketing – where your potential customers find you and decide to find out more

Outbound marketing is like a shotgun. Inbound marketing is like a magnet.

You are probably already doing Outbound marketing, so here are 8 reasons why you should be turn your marketing Inbound in 2010:

1. Outbound is becoming less effective. Consumer’s are flooded with choice and have the ability to block your message. They increasingly resent interruptive marketing.

2. Australians now spend more time online than with any other media. The average Australian spends 16.1 hours per week online (2009 Nielsen Annual Internet and Technology Report). Shouldn’t you be fishing where the fish are?

3. Over 90% of people begin their online search for a product or service using a search engine.

4. Good search engine optimisation, great content and a social media strategy all help you get found online.

5. Inbound marketing leads and inquiries are highly qualified and motivated, therefore improving your conversion potential.

6. Inbound marketing is investment in your organisation’s future. Effective SEO and great content has a lasting effect, unlike Outbound which stops as soon as your budget runs out.

7. Inbound marketing is extremely cost-effective and totally mesaurable. Your CEO will love your ROI reports.

8. Most of your competitors haven’t discovered Inbound Marketing or aren’t doing it well….yet. Now’s your chance to get a head start on them and own a new space.

If you’re frustrated by the diminishing returns from your existing marketing plans, maybe you should investigate moving part of your 2010 marketing towards an effective Inbound Marketing plan. You can take the first step by testing your website’s marketing effectiveness with NLYZR.

Craig Wilson and Guy Kawasaki during SXSW 2009

This post was written by Guy Kawasaki, a US-based net entrepreneur and prolific user of Twitter. Guy uses Twitter extremely effectively as a marketing and promotions tool. Some social media purists don’t agree with his approach, but there is no denying it works for Guy and Alltop. This is a very useful guide for businesses who are looking to begin using Twitter or wish to gain more dynamic benefits from their Twitter presence.

Update: Gordon Whitehead has also posted a video interview with Guy around the same topic. Worth a look.

Way back in July of 2009, I explained how I used Twitter. Lots has changed since then, so this is an update to explain how I tweet. As a small business owner, you can adopt my techniques to use Twitter as a marketing tool.

General

Question: How can you follow more than 180,000 people?

Answer: I don’t read the timelines of all the people that I follow. Instead, I only deal with @s, direct messages, and tweets that contain “guykawasaki,” “alltop,” or “guysreplies.” I answer almost every @ and direct.

Question: Then why do you follow everyone who follows you?

Answer: I follow everyone for two reasons: first, common courtesy; second, so that people can send direct messages to me. I like direct messages because they are more efficient than email.

Question: Why do you use both @guykawasaki and @guysreplies?

Answer: Originally, I created @guysreplies to reply to @s that all my followers do not need to see. Subsequently, Twitter changed the way @s work so that only people who follow both parties will see them. However, there are ways that people can still see all the tweets from @guykawasaki, and I don’t want to waste their time.

Also, I like a high signal/noise ratio from @guykawasaki, so I don’t want a bunch of “Thanks for reading my book” in it. The downside of what I do is that people might think that @guykawasaki is not responsive and “engaged,” but I’m willing to take this risk.

Work Flow

Question: What Twitter applications do you use?

Answer: For reading, I use TweetDeck on my Macintosh and Tweetie on my iPhone.? For posting, I use Objective Marketer and Posterous.

Objective enables me to create marketing campaigns and then schedule, frame, repeat, and track tweets. (Disclosure: I am an advisor to Objective.) It is the foundation of my Twitter efforts.

Posterous powers a part of Alltop called Holy Kaw; this sub-domain is a collection of summaries of the third-party sites that I am tweeting about. (Disclosure: I am an investor in Posterous.)

Finally, I use SocialToo to automatically follow people who follow me and to kill spam direct messages. (Disclosure: I am an investor in Posterous.)

Question: How do you find so many links to tweet?

Answer: I use three principal sources: Alltop, StumbleUpon, and SmartBrief. These sites curate and aggregate information to make the hunt for quality links much, much easier.

Question: What is your workflow?

Answer: I find interesting links and write-up a short summary using BBEdit that I post to Holy Kaw, and then Objective checks the Holy Kaw RSS feed once per hour and tweets new articles.

Question: Isn’t that a long, complex process just to tweet something?

Answer: Twitter is a marketing tool for me. It’s not a “social” activity or a game. This process is what it takes to make Alltop successful.

Question: How long do you spend on Twitter every day?

Answer: Asking me this is like asking Tiger Woods how much he plays golf. “It’s what I do.” If I’m on the computer, I’m on Twitter, and I’m on a computer eight hours per day.

Question: If a company wants an active, aggressive presence on Twitter, how many people does it take?

Answer: One person working really hard, unencumbered by a clueless boss and a Luddite legal department, can do it. Certainly one person can get things going enough to prove that Twitter makes sense for a company to add more people to do it even better.

Repeat Tweets

Question: Why do you repeat your tweets from @guykawasaki?

Answer: I repeat my tweets because no one’s followers are on Twitter 24 x 7 x 365 nor do they scroll back to see what was tweeted already. This is the same reason that ESPN and CNN repeat news stories throughout the day—can you imagine a news network assuming that everyone has seen a report after running it once or that everyone has recorded the news and will look back?

I have tracked repeated tweets, and the amount of click throughs on the second and third instances of a tweet is almost as high as the first one.

Question: Do you recommend that companies repeat their tweets?

Answer: Yes, if they want to ensure that as many followers see their tweets as possible. There will be tiny number of people who will complain, but you cannot make all your followers happy.

In fact, if you’re not pissing someone off on Twitter, you’re not using it to its fullest potential. Companies should not let a few angry people dictate their marketing practices.

Question: What if I don’t want to see the repeats?

Answer: The easiest thing to do is unfollow @guykawasaki and follow @alltop because it contains only one instance of my tweets. You can think of @alltop as @guykawasaki on Tivo.

Ghostwriters

Question: Do you use ghostwriters?

Answer: Yes, four people contribute to my tweets: Annie Colbert, Gina Ruiz, Noelle Chun, and Catherine Faas. ?I use ghostwriters because I want to provide as many interesting links as possible, and five intelligent people (assuming you think I’m intelligent) looking for interesting stuff will find more than one intelligent person. At the end of every Holy Kaw post, you can see who created it if you’re curious.

Question: Do your ghosts respond to @s and direct messages for you?

Answer: Never. They only tweet outgoing links to interesting sites and blogs. They never respond for me or as me.

Question: Why did you hide your use of ghostwriters?

Answer: I didn’t hide this fact. As soon as I started it, I disclosed it. My attitude is: “As long as the tweets are good, why does it matter who wrote them?” Do you think Ralph Lauren himself designed every article in his store?

Question: Why do some people attack you for using ghostwriters?

Answer: Because they are angry, little people who cannot generate content, so they try to generate controversy to get attention. They also assume that I have to cheat and use ghostwriters to respond to people because they are incapable of dealing with the volume of @s and direct messages that I get.

Question: Do you recommend that companies use ghostwriters?

Answer: Most companies are “brands,” so this isn’t an issue unless people are so dumb as to think that Richard Branson is @VirginAmerica. Issues arise when the Twitter account is a person’s name.

For example, should @Lancearmstrong use a ghost? For some tweets, I’d say it’s perfectly okay—tweets about cycling news and information, for example. However, if @Lancearmstrong says his bike was stolen, he pulled a hamstring, or he can’t stand the color yellow, it has to be him.

Let’s say the Twitter account is for the CEO of a company. I’d rather read the interesting tweets of a good ghost than a clueless CEO. It’s the same reason politicians have speechwriters. As my mother used to say, “Behind every successful politician is an amazed speechwriter.”

Alltop Promotion

Question: Why do you constantly promote Alltop?

Answer: Twitter is a means to an end: Alltop’s success. This is why I put so much time, energy, and money (my ghosts don’t work for free) into it. The Alltop promotion justifies and pays for the efforts all five of us. You can think of my tweets as PBS content and the accompanying Alltop promotion as the fundraising telethon.

Question: OK, but what if I don’t want to see Alltop promotions?

Answer: You can UFM (unfollow me) just like you can change the channel from PBS.

Question: How much promotion can a company get away with?

Answer: It depends on several factors: How much do your followers love the company? How good are the deals that you offer? How much “real” content and “interaction” do the company’s tweets contain? For sure, the answer is not “None.”

Twitter is far beyond Trixie telling Biff and Carly that her cat rolled over. It’s now a “platform.” As such, there is no wrong or right just as there is no wrong or right way to maintain a website or blog—Is Zappos “wrong” for using the Internet to sell shoes? Forty years ago, some Arpanet scientists might have said so.

The bottom line is that there’s only what works and what doesn’t, and you won’t know which is which until you try.

Sticky is an online marketing agency with professional search engine optimisation (SEO) experts and industry-leading search engine optimisation (SEO) tools. Our specialist services now enable advertising agencies in Sydney and Melbourne to confidently outsource SEO requirements.

Our search engine optimisation team works with leading organisations around Australia to ensure their websites are ranking at the top of Google, Bing and Yahoo for targeted keyword phrases. We have a 100% success rate in achieving first page ranking on Google for every one of our SEO clients.

SEO “experts” are dime-a-dozen these days but very few have the tools and methodologies to deliver outstanding results. Our Inbound Marketing approach delivers a holistic strategy for websites to OPTIMISE, ATTRACT & CONVERT. It is extremely effective.

NLYZR, our cutting-edge search engine optimisation tool, allows us to quickly study and report on any website to provide the appropriate strategy to achieve excellent search results. We can then provide the recommendations to you or implement them ourselves depending upon client requirements.

Read more about NLYZR….

We understand that search engine optimisation (SEO) is a highly specialised field and that its not reasonable to expect creative advertising agencies to have the in-house expertise to optimise the sites they create. That’s where NLYZR and Sticky can help. You do the amazing creative and we can provide the optimisation so that your client gets an online campaign that kicks all the goals.

Read about how advanced analytics from NLYZR can help you….

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