A GUIDE TO INCREASING SALES IN SMALL BUSINESSES THROUGH ONLINE PRESENCE

A GUIDE TO INCREASING SALES IN SMALL BUSINESSES THROUGH ONLINE PRESENCE 8 TIPS HOW TO USE A WEBSITE TO GENERATE MORE CUSTOMERS IN MALAYSIA'S CONTEXT INTRODUCTION The Internet has changed our lives in terms of how we acquire information and how we communicate with the rest of the world. People are already moving a great part of their daily tasks online. For example, people nowadays frequently search online for information they need. Finding a good place to have exotic food? Search online for thai food klang. Looking for a good travel agency? Search online for travel agency penang. You probably have done this yourself and we are telling you many people are doing this with the number increasing every year! CURRENT STATE OF SMALL BUSINESSES IN MALAYSIA Currently, small businesses in Malaysia have very low adoption in terms of making online presence using websites. According to Malaysia External Trade Development Corporation (MATRADE) in a press release dated August 2012, there were about 700,000 SMEs in the country and only 100,000 of them were registered online with a website. Put it in percentage, only about 14% of Malaysia s SMEs can be found online (click here for full news). What the number shows us is that Malaysia s businesses (small businesses in particular) either do not know the benefits a website can bring to their businesses; or they do not think that the industries they are in can gain any help from a website. Thus, this e-book is written as an introductory material to let you small business owner in Malaysia 1

know the importance of websites to your business, and to teach you how to optimize a website to create positive return on investment (ROI). We are happy that you are reading this guide because you are at least better than many other business owners in the sense that you are ready to make a jump into the online world! Kudos WHY SMALL BUSINESSES NEED WEBSITES Before answering this very question, it is important to know the current state of Internet usage in Malaysia. Through various initiatives both from the government and private sectors, the number of registered Internet users in Malaysia has reached a total of 17.7 million users as of 2011 (click here for full stats). Comparing with the total population of 28.7 million people, it shows that more than 60% of Malaysians are exploring the world using the Internet. With the advancement of information technology, people are changing their behaviours in terms of how they buy and how they search for shops for things they want to buy. BUYING THINGS ONLINE You might have known that the Internet has made shopping a lot easier. You might even be a regular online shopper yourself. As easy as it sounds, e-commerce allows customers to buy things without even have to step-out of their houses. Browsing and searching the online catalogs are so much easier than looking and filtering through display shelves. The good thing about e-commerce is that it is so easy to setup that business owners do not even need a physical shop to start selling. However, online shops are different from physical shops in the sense that generating traffic to online shops is a lot harder than physical shops. For a physical shop, you just need to find a good location that has huge traffic, and your business is automatically visible to thousands of prospective buyers. 2

Generating traffic to online shops is actually not that hard if a good strategy is applied. However, this e-book will not target this topic as it can be quite huge to cover. This e- book, however, focus on what are discussed in the following section. SEARCHING ONLINE FOR SHOPS While e-commerce is revolutionary, not every business is ready to invest in e-commerce. However, this does not mean that these businesses should let go of online presence. In fact, a business website is so important in today s business due to the change of customer behaviours in terms of how they discover businesses. Now, imagine a very real scenario so common in these days that you might be doing it most of the time. On a boring Saturday, you are suddenly inspired to learn Yoga because you are having backache recently. You go to your computer and type yoga bangsar in your favourite search engine and type enter. You browse through the websites returned from the search result and discovered a seemingly good Yoga center in Bangsar. The website is so professionally done with very nice pictures of a recent Yoga session held in the centre. You even found some good tips on the website about using Yoga to cure backache and you are totally convinced that you ll visit this Yoga centre one day! No doubt, more and more Internet users are using the power of web to make their offline time easier. Gone are the days where people hop on their cars and hang around the cities just to look for their desired shops. Instead of wasting their time and money wandering around the cities, people nowadays tend to search online for the shops that have the products and services that they are looking for. To really know how many potential customers your business can attract, let s do a simple test. Navigate to Google AdWords: Keyword Tool and enter the relevant information that describe your business. An example is shown in Figure 1. 3

Figure 1 From Figure 1, you see that there are 1,000 monthly searches of puchong spa. Imagine it represents 300 prospects (each prospects can search multiple times, so 1,000 searches doesn t mean 1,000 prospects) that means you are exposing your business to 300 potential customers just by having a website! Not bad for a small business! Thus the question now is, How do I get my business discoverable by the Internet users? There are, of course, many ways you can do this, such as Get your business listed or featured on third-party websites such as online directories, blogs, news websites, review websites and etc. Get your business on social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare and etc. 4

Get your business a website to show related information such as company background, contact details, outlets location and product catalogs Fortunately, you do not need to make a choice but to embrace all the options and get the most out of every option, and this guide will show you how to maximize your opportunity using a website. But before that, let s understand a few benefits of having a website for your business. 3 BENEFITS OF HAVING A WEBSITE FOR YOUR BUSINESS Now that you have a basic understanding the impact of the change of consumer behaviour to your business, let s dig a little deeper to understand the real benefits of a website for your business. CHEAPER AND MORE FLEXIBLE THAN TRADITIONAL ADVERTISING If you are in the business for long enough, you most probably have advertised through traditional offline media such as flyers, newspaper, magazine, television or even radio. Advertising through offline media can have mixed results, but one thing for sure is they usually cost you a bomb. Take flyer for example, a set of 1000 sheets of flyers with soso graphic design usually cost you about RM300 to print (not including the distribution fees); and yet, you cannot really keep track of the real result of the campaign. You might get lucky if the flyer performs well, but you cannot really measure the effect. This makes it hard for you to improve your campaign in the following attempts. A website, on the other hand, usually requires only less than RM2000 to create and that s almost it! While you do need a few tens bucks per month to maintain the website (usually less than RM20 per month unless you have really huge traffic), it is far better than RM300 per 1000 sheets of flyers. Moreover, the maintenance fee for websites is almost static. Whether you have 100 visitors or 10,000 visitors per month visiting your website, you still pay the same monthly maintenance fee. 5

Another good point about a website is that you can update it with the most current information any time you want! Having too many good news to share with your customers? Create a News section in the website, and start updating it daily! Or you have some beautiful product photos to show off to the public? Create a Product Gallery section in the website! There are endless possibilities, all comes from a website that cost less than RM2000 to build. SIDENOTE: Scroll to the bottom if you want to find out the real cost of creating a website, and what you can get from the money you pay. EXPAND MARKET TO HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF INTERNET USERS By having a website, you also make your business searchable through various search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo and etc. As a result, you can greatly improve sales for your business (more on this in later sections)! Remember the previous section where we talked about the scenario of people looking for products and services online? This is when a website comes in handy for your business! Is your business a beauty salon located in Damansara area? Make sure it appear in the search engine when people search for beauty salon damansara. Or you sell cute puppy t-shirt in Puchong? Make your website searchable with puppy t-shirt puchong! Maybe you open a new boutique hotel in Kuala Lumpur area that is cheap but comfortable, then you certainly want to show up when people are looking for cheap hotel kuala lumpur. Of course, you need some effort in the beginning of the launch of your website to get it included in the search engine. This is what we called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). No worry, as this guide is going to layout the ways you can optimize your website to get more visitors. 6

SIDENOTE: SEO is actually a topic large enough that it can take 100 pages to write about. We are only scratching the surface of SEO in this lightweight guide. PROVE CREDIBILITY OF YOUR COMPANY AND IMPROVE BRAND TRUST Now stop reading for 1 minute, and think about the last time you tried to search about a business or company on the web, and found out that it does not actually have a website. How did you feel? Disappointed? How about another company where you tried searching and eventually found it online? Did you have more trust for the company that has a professional looking website where all the company information is presented nicely? In fact, a website in today s business is so important that it is able to prove credibility of a company and help create customer trust towards the company. Of course, we are talking about professionally-made websites, not any websites that you normally see online that is presented in an unprofessional manner. In other words, by having a nicelooking, up-to-date, information-rich and easy-to-use website, you essentially stand a better chance to win over customers than your competitors. 8 Tips to Use Websites to Generate More Customers After reading pages of introductory paragraphs, you ve finally reached the meat of this guide. Without further ado, let s discover the magic a website can do to your business to eventually generate more sales for you! Before really creating a website for your business, an essential step is to examine what your competitor is doing. Go to any search engine (Google, Bing or Yahoo) and start typing the relevant keywords in your industries. If you are in hotel and lodging business, try searching for [target location] cheap hotel or [target location] boutique hotel (make sure you replace [target location] with the location your business is targeting). 7

In the search results, navigate to your competitors website and take note of what they are not good at. Does the website look too amateurish? Is the website not providing obvious clue of what the business is about? Or perhaps the website looks like it was last updated 2 years ago? Whatever the bad point is, note it down so that you know what to do later. On the other hand, you will also come across a few websites that look totally awesome. Also examine what they did to successfully attract your attention. It can be their beautiful photo galleries, nicely-written contents or some incredible offers. These points will come in handy when you want ideas to improve your websites. You are also encouraged to use them as a reference when we are discussing the following points. LOOK PROFESSIONAL Okay. You might be thinking this is a no brainer. But do not be surprised that this point is often given the least importance in small business websites! Now be frank to yourself, did you ever look at a website and tell yourself: Wow. This website looks terrible!? SIDENOTE: We actually wanted to show you a few examples of a badly designed website. But we dropped the idea to not hurt anyone s feeling. The first step of making a successful website is to make sure it appeals to your website visitors. Also remember to match your website design s style with your brand s overall image. Design element such as colour scheme, use of image, website structure and etc. can all dictate the overall feel of your website. Make sure the experience is aligned with your business. You want to provide the same experience to your customers whether they are visiting the physical shop or the website. PROVIDE RELEVANT & COMPLETE INFORMATION The next step of optimizing your website is to provide relevant information pertaining to your company. It can be company history, company members, founding stories, or even list of awards the company has won. Provide as much information as you can regarding your company, and present them in a nice-to-navigate and easy-to-digest way. Not only 8

do they help in building trust and customer loyalty, these information also help in SEO if done correctly. Most of the time, first time visitors to your website look for information such as company address, phone number and other contact information to confirm that the website is legitimate. Providing contact information also helps the visitor to quickly connect with your business. And again, contact information helps a lot in local SEO. SHOW OFF UNIQUENESS Other than company background and contact information, you also need to let the website visitors know what your company offers. There is usually a Product Gallery or Our Services section in most small business websites just for this purpose. You should invest prominently in this section. Don t have beautiful picture for your products? Hire a professional photographer and make sure your products look appealing to the visitors. This is especially true for business like food & beverages, clothing and etc. If you are selling services or there is not much product pictures you can show, then write effective description that captivates your visitors. Other than beautiful pictures and captivating text, you should also make sure the gallery section is easy to navigate, and that one product or service can easily leads to another. GET FOUND ON THE WEB Now that you have a professional content-rich website that is able to showcase your business, you need to get out and create traffic for your website. As explained before, a website is different from a physical shop in that, it won t be discoverable on the web if you do not make it happen. There are many ways your business can get discovered on the web. It can be through business listing website (much like the good old Yellow Pages). It can be through social sharing whereby you share with your friends, your friends share with theirs, and so on. It can be through advertisements. Most importantly, it can be through search engines (SEO). 9

Although you are recommended to hire professional on this matter especially for SEO, here are a few tasks that you can do even you are not a tech-savvy. The first task is to submit your website to popular business listings and web directories. Do a search on malaysia business listing or malaysia web directory and submit to as many of them as you can. If you are already active on social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter, also share your newly launched websites with your followers. For businesses that have much more budget, you can buy advertisements on popular websites such as Google AdWords, Facebook Ads or many other Malaysia-centric websites. If your business already has a membership system (many businesses today have member card system), you can blast out SMS or e-mails to your existing customers to inform them about the new website. ATTRACT THE CORRECT TRAFFIC Attracting traffic for your business website is important, but it is even more important to attract traffic that eventually converts into buying customers. To justify every cent you have spent on online advertising (if you choose to go for it), you must make sure you target the right group of people. To show you the importance of attracting the correct traffic, let s do a simple math below: Assuming each customer buys RM100 from your shop Assuming 10,000 viewers saw your ads Assuming 4% Click-Through-Rate (% of ads viewers clicking your ads) Case A: 2% Conversion Rate (% of website visitors converted into customers) 10000 x 4% x 2% x RM100 = RM800 Case B: 4% Conversion Rate 10000 x 4% x 2% x RM100 = RM1600 10

By attracting traffic that can converts better, you can double your sales by spending the same amount of money on advertisement. Now the question is: How do I ensure high quality traffic? Fortunately, online advertising has advantages over traditional advertising. Unlike most traditional advertising, online advertising allows you target the advertisement to a specific group of people you define. For example, Google AdWords allows you to select a list of keywords, and only show your ads when the selected keywords are searched by the users. Facebook Ads allows even greater control over your ads, where you are able to restrict your ads to be shown to people of certain age range, living in specific areas, having particular interest and etc. It is alright if you are not ready yet to use online advertising. But once you do, make sure you advertise to only those customer groups that convert well. SIDENOTE: Online advertising (or marketing in general) is often a trial and error task. Measure the effectiveness of one advertisement, make changes to improve it, test on the improved advertisement and repeat the process! INTEGRATE WITH SOCIAL MEDIA, TRADITIONAL MEDIA & PHYSICAL SHOP There are of course more than one way to market your business. Your business might have already been active on social media websites. You might have been distributing flyers and doing advertisement on newspaper. However, you might not have integrated all the medium together! It has to be acknowledged that a business requires different ways to reach out to different types of customers. Some older generation customers who do not have much experience with the IT prefer to receive flyers. Most youngster prefer electronics way of communication such as social media and websites. Some customers just prefer to hang around your shop once in a while to see what you have to offer. Thus, it is important to integrate these experiences in every communication channel you have. Firstly, make sure you display the addresses of your website (and social media pages) in an easy-to-see part of your shop (using a QR code is even better). At the 11

same time, feature your website on various social media pages of your business. If your business uses traditional media, put your website address anywhere around the contact information. In short, cross-promote your marketing channels among themselves. PROVIDE HELPFUL TIPS This tip perhaps is the most resource-intensive task among all, but the hard works pay off in the long run. The idea behind this is: setup a blog on your website and regularly provide helpful tips on the blog. The content can be anything related to your business. If you are in the furniture business, you can write about 10 furniture maintenance tips ; or if you sell car accessories, write about top 10 car accessories trend for 2012. It can really be any topic that aims at your business targets, just make sure you make them interesting to read. There are a few advantages to this approach. First of all, it provides your customers with a feeling that you are actually an expert in your area, and it helps in terms of increasing your business s credibility. The second advantage of this tip is that it provides you with a way to connect with your customers and nurture your relationship with them. If they are frequent readers of your tips, most probably they will choose to buy from you the next time! Writing your content also means you have something to share with in your social media pages. You ve probably used Facebook page to connect with your fans, but found that you have too little original content to share; this is a way to fix the problem! The next advantage to providing tips on your website blog is that it helps in terms of SEO since your website is now full of keywords relevant to your business. Having said that, this approach requires time and it usually does not help much in the short run. You have to be persistent on producing interesting content for your readers, connect with them, and nurture the relationship to see real effect. INVEST IN MOBILE WEBSITE You probably know that mobile technologies are the hottest topics nowadays. Malaysia alone has about than 3,720,000 3G subscribers, and the number is growing (check this 12

link for full details). With the popularity of mobile broadband, people are interacting with the online world almost anytime anywhere. Imagine a user trying to look for the best desserts in town after having an unsatisfied dinner. The user take out their mobile phones and type good desserts kelana jaya and your website appeared in the search result. You automatically earned a new customer who, after having an awesome experience at your shop, introduce your desserts to his friends. Of course, all of these awesomeness does not come for free. You have to make it happen, and that s why you should have a mobile website. Although normal website most likely works in modern mobile browsers, optimizing the mobile experience ensure a happier prospect which will then turn into an even happier customer! CONCLUSION We ve finally reached the end of this guide. Remember, having a website for your business doesn t mean it automatically brings about all the benefits. The website has to be optimized in terms of design, SEO, content and user experience for it to be useful. It s not hard to get a website created, but it is definitely not easy to make the website do the real work bring in sales to your offline business. Although this guide is by no mean exhaustive, it serves as a good starter for you to at least have a basic understanding of how the online world operates and how an optimized website can bring benefits for your business. Last but not least, we at panorazzi Sdn. Bhd. wish you success in your business. Do contact us for FREE consultation on website creation! SCROLL DOWN FOR MORE! 13

ABOUT PANORAZZI WHAT DO WE DO? panorazzi (http://panorazzi.com) is a web designing company based in Malaysia. We are interested in giving our customers more than just a beautiful website. We produce websites that will help our customers increase revenue, making their investment on the online world worthwhile. We are specialized in helping small businesses (SME) convert their ideas into concrete products so that they do not need to worry about the technical difficulties of building online presence. By utilizing the latest technologies, we make sure the end products we create are able to bring positive return on investment (ROI) to our customers. Contact us at contact@panorazzi.com for free consultation! WHAT DO WE OFFER? We basically create any kind of websites. Our popular packages include: Graphic Design HTML Websites CMS Websites E-commerce We usually recommend businesses to go for CMS websites. By using a CMS (Content Management System), our clients are able to add/edit content on their own after initial setup done by us. We help our clients do all the heavy lifting of designing, coding and setting up the website. All the things the clients need to do is content editing, which is essentially an easy task anyone who can use Microsoft Office can edit the content. Other than that, the CMS website also include: Unlimited number of pages Free e-mail account (eg: contact@yourdomain.com) Free web server to host your website (1st year free, renewable at RM5/month) Free maintenance (First 3 months free, renewable) Free training on website maintenance 14