Time is money. Fail fast.
All your efforts should be directed at your shoppers. Content marketing to improve SEO is a complete waste of time and resources. You’ll end up attracting heaps of traffic that are seeking information, not products to purchase. This will kill your organic ECR. Everything you add to your site should be in the best interests of your shoppers.
What I learned
- Why some clients just don’t fit.
- Big corporates aren’t our thing.
- How everyday business can block revenue.
- Why delays can be very costly!
- A bloated site can stop the cash.
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers, how you going? It looks like a beautiful sunny day outside. It’s nine degrees. It’s freezing out there. Looks lovely, though. Lovely sunny day in Melbourne.
Why we reject potential clients
I want to talk to you a little bit today about clients we can’t work with. It may seem odd, but when you get to a certain age, you kind of work out the clients that you work well with and what works well with your business and how you can add value. And the clients that you can work better with, typically the more value that you’re adding.
Over the years, one of the things that we learned was that corporates were the wrong clients to work with for this sort of model. Fine for doing consulting work and that sort of stuff. But for doing a revenue-based model where you’re setting revenue goals every month and you need to achieve those, you can’t do that, in our experience anyway, with a corporate client.
Case in point. Recently, someone came to us, I think they’ve got about 200 outlets around Australia, bricks and mortar, big website, lots of traffic, and I just rejected them and just said no. I said my staff would kill me if I brought you on as a client, because there’s just going to be a lot of banging our heads against the wall to try to get things done for the way that we work. Because we are trying to get things done quickly, because we’ve got a budget to hit that month, in a large organisation, it’s almost impossible because there are just too many vested interests in the website.
If you’re a business owner, if you’ve got an eCommerce store, just try to stay close to the people who are making decisions at the store level. For us, we have to work directly with a business owner. At least once a month, we’ve got to see them. We can be talking to a 2IC or something like that, chief of operations, but we need to understand the goals of the business owner. Because the business owner typically knows there’s things wrong with the site or knows that they should be doing more revenue and so they’ll be looking for things to do as well.
Sometimes that can have a detrimental effect because they might decide to do something like Facebook ads. Now, unless you have a giant following on Facebook or where most of your audience is on Facebook, it’s probably not the best medium to be advertising on for you because it’s going to slow down every other channel on the site. Soon as you add that Facebook pixel, you are slowing everything down to some extent. Usually what will happen is the organic traffic is going to get hit the most in a lower conversion rates because organic traffic is more sensitive.
One of the clients we’ve been working with for a couple of years now has recently gone through staff changes and we’ve been trying to get things done, and it’s just been difficult. We wanted to get some changes done back in March, and they only went live at the end of May. That wasn’t because we weren’t ready to do them. It was because organizationally it was just difficult to get done. I know there’s a lot of agencies out there that experience this on a daily basis. We tend not to because we tend to pick our clients well, and we usually have good communications where we can get things done quickly, and they understand the importance of it. The reason that it’s important is because if you’re looking to hit a budget that month and you plan out certain things, so you know that these things will impact positively that number, you want to get those things done as quickly as possible.
Time is money!
The changes that we rolled out on this latest client that had a few staff changes and we eventually got them live; it looks like they’re worth about five grand a week right now. Now, of course, the business owner is very happy and he knew. He said he knew these things had to be done, but his focus, staff focus, getting new people on board, who knows where, who’s responsible, all that sort of stuff, just delays it. So that’s about 60 grand we could have had in the kit because we’ve lost 12 weeks getting these changes live. Time costs money or money costs time. What is it, time is money? But the changes that we’re making, too, they’re not sort of monumentally, structural, groundbreaking things. We just know that they make a site work better.
Like, look at this one. It’s one I’ve just taken at random. I don’t know these guys. I’ve just Googled power tools and I’ve just brought up the first unknown brand. This may not be an issue on actual mobile. I’m just using an emulator. But how hard is it to get? Where are my products? Where is the shop? There’s no shop there. I’ve got a shop window. I’ve got a phone number. Do you want me to call you? Do you want me to buy something? How do I find anything? Where’s search? It’s probably there somewhere, but if I can’t see it, it’s not there. So it was just those sorts of changes. Getting those done, five grand a week, it’s not nothing.
So if you are setting up an eCommerce store or if you have an eCommerce store, just be aware that every little thing that you add, every plugin you add is going to add some sort of load time because you’re getting extra DNS calls, extra SSL calls, usually. When that slows the site down, it’s going to bring everything else down. So it’s best to have a focus on what we think works well for us and our clients is having a revenue goal, having some metrics around the return that you want to get on your ad spend. If you’ve got stuff to move, let’s focus on that. But it’s important with an eCommerce store to get things done quickly so you can see if something works, or fail fast and move onto the next thing.
If you’d like a second opinion on your website simply send me an email at [email protected]. Or you can contact us through the site at www.stewartmedia.com.au. Please like, share, subscribe and tell your friends if you find our content interesting. Hopefully, that’s helpful and hopefully you are having a great end-of-financial year and we’ll see you next week, hopefully. Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
