SEARCH CLINIC

More than two thirds of people have abandoned shopping because it was taking too long to be served, a survey by a bank has found.
Barclays found 68% of people, in a survey of 2,000, had abandoned a queue at one time or another.

The places most likely to upset their customers were supermarkets and stores selling food, drink or clothes.

The main dislikes included not enough staff at the till, followed by staff taking too long chatting to customers.

Shoppers taking too long to find their cash, cards or cheque books was also an irritation, and Barclays argues “contactless” payment technology would speed things up.

“By embracing technology and installing new payments systems, such as contactless, retailers will stay ahead of the curve and limit the amount of time that people are waiting in shop queues,” said Stuart Neal at Barclaycard.

The survey revealed that long queues had also put off most people entering shops or stores, with 29% of those surveyed saying this happens to them at least once a week.

Barclays claims that a third of retailers actually move their tills to hide the queues.

Businesses need to understand that this is a lousy way of influencing how we feel about the visit to their store.

In a way it’s good to learn that it was only physical businesses that were covered by this survey- but how confident are you that your online offering is any better?

In a physical shop you can easily see people dropping your products and walking out of the door empty handed.

But when did you last look at your website stats to see how many people have left your shopping cart and product pages? And what did you actually do about it?

It’s expensive to do nothing. Just cringing behind anonymity isn’t enough.

For help building your online business- please just ask the Search Clinic now!

This video explains how to maximise your Pay Per Click (PPC) ROI with examples of Google’s AdWords PPC matching requirements to target your budget effectively- broad, exact and negative keyword bidding phrases are the key to saving your wallet from taking a battering. I have saved one client 93% of his Adwords budget- and he’s still getting the same amount of traffic. The only loser is Google.

This is the seventh part of 11 videos on how to promote your website using the most cost effective elements of the marketing mix.

This video series was made from the lecture Simon Dye Dr Search the Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic’s made at the University of Gloucestershire on online marketing to to businesses, professionals including Members of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Chartered Managers and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and students at the 5th annual Gloucestershire Professionals conference in June 2009.

More than 300 people attended the conference with over 60 attending Dr Search’s lecture on Online Marketing Tips, Strategies and how to use the most cost effective tools for your online marketing business.

Of the 12 seminars during the day Dr Search received the top rating with 93% of the attendees saying that he was relevant to their needs and 86% of attendees rated the content as highly rated.

Please have a look at the other videos as they become live on the Search Clinic YouTube Channel

Please let me know what you think of the video. Have you found it useful? Was there anything else that you would like to learn about? Please contact Dr Search by clicking here now.

Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing is often quick, lazy and expensive. This video shows you Google’s quality score requirements, explaining you how to maximise your online marketing budget and the importance of long term profits.

This is the sixth part of 11 videos on how to promote your website using the most cost effective elements of the marketing mix.

This video series was made from the lecture Simon Dye Dr Search the Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic’s made at the University of Gloucestershire on online marketing to to businesses, professionals including Members of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Chartered Managers and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and students at the 5th annual Gloucestershire Professionals conference in June 2009.

More than 300 people attended the conference with over 60 attending Dr Search’s lecture on Online Marketing Tips, Strategies and how to use the most cost effective tools for your online marketing business.

Of the 12 seminars during the day Dr Search received the top rating with 93% of the attendees saying that he was relevant to their needs and 86% of attendees rated the content as highly rated.

Please have a look at the other videos as they become live on the Search Clinic YouTube Channel

Please let me know what you think of the video. Have you found it useful? Was there anything else that you would like to learn about? Please contact Dr Search by clicking here now.

Not too long ago it was okay for the founding business person to hide behind their business brand and not be known to the public.This is because at that time the consumer didn’t care about you the owner or director, we didn’t expect you to care about the customer; we didn’t expect you to provide anything more than a product or service.

This was the old way of doing business and as sad as it is, some businesses are still operating under this cold shady theory.

However, today there is a new way to do business, one where the business owner of a company is in the front lines to find out what the customers want, interacting with them and providing something more than just a product or service.

This is the person that a customer wants to buy from, a real person who lets them know that they care, and they acknowledge us as more of a friend then just a number who puts money in their pocket every time they buy something!

This is why if you are the Owner, Director or Founder, etc… of your business you need to find a way to become the face of your business!

Here are three reasons why customers want you to become the face of the business.

1. The customer wants to buy from someone they know
It’s a fact that most consumers would rather buy for someone they know because it provides security of the purchase. So having real face to a business will help individuals trust you and your business. They will feel like they already know you and that they are dealing with a real person, that has the power to do something and someone who cares about them!

2. The customer wants to be able to hold someone accountable
Your customers want to be able to track you down if there is a problem. The customer wants to be able to communicate within multiple ways through the reach of email, twitter, Facebook, Skype so they can get what they want now.

3. The customer likes to deal with the boss
Since the customer wants answers now and is able to get them now, the person in charge better be using the social platforms to get the customers a response now, otherwise they will go somewhere else because I bet your competitor will be able to please your customer misfortunes to deliver answers they want and make themselves available.

Here is why you, the entrepreneur, needs to be so connected and interactive because you are the person a consumer wants the answer from because the answer you provide should be the right one.

Two simple ways to begin being the face of your business

• The power of images
Find a way to place your face anywhere you can that is business appropriate. Start with your website. Don’t just be on the about us page of your site, be on the home page. That is where viewers of your website want to be able to find you and know who is running the show.

Have pictures of your interactions with co-workers and customers from events than share the spotlight and use social media to tag and show those individuals in the pictures, this is a great way to connect.

• Use the power of video
Video is quickly becoming more and more popular for businesses to use because it shows the real you. Within a couple of seconds of watching a video of you, we can see if you are passionate, knowledgeable, and caring or if you are someone who is putting on a show and is not being genuine.

Please, if you are going to do video don’t fake who you are and if video is not your thing then don’t do it. Be the face of your business through pictures and image, do what best suits you!

This post was inspired by a post from Online Marketing Today- become the face of your business to succeed.

Organic search engine ranking- how to achieve great results pt5- 1 min 2 secsTopics covered in this video include the importance of not just being ranked on search engines, but the need to top search engine free results listings.

This is the fifth part of 11 videos on how to promote your website using the most cost effective elements of the marketing mix.

This video series was made from the lecture Simon Dye Dr Search the Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic’s made at the University of Gloucestershire on online marketing to to businesses, professionals including Members of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Chartered Managers and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and students at the 5th annual Gloucestershire Professionals conference in June 2009.

More than 300 people attended the conference with over 60 attending Dr Search’s lecture on Online Marketing Tips, Strategies and how to use the most cost effective tools for your online marketing business.

Of the 12 seminars during the day Dr Search received the top rating with 93% of the attendees saying that he was relevant to their needs and 86% of attendees rated the content as highly rated.

Please have a look at the other videos as they become live on the Search Clinic YouTube Channel

Please let me know what you think of the video. Have you found it useful? Was there anything else that you would like to learn about? Please contact Dr Search by clicking here now.

Optimisation Explained- seo Google requirements YouTube Video PT4 6mins 36 secsTopics covered in this video are  more information on current google optimisation requirements, the importance of text and headers and the fundamentals underlying the need for links popularity.

This is the fourth part of 11 videos on how to promote your website using the most cost effective elements of the marketing mix.

This video series was made from the lecture Simon Dye Dr Search the Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic’s made at the University of Gloucestershire on online marketing to to businesses, professionals including Members of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Chartered Managers and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and students at the 5th annual Gloucestershire Professionals conference in June 2009.

More than 300 people attended the conference with over 60 attending Dr Search’s lecture on Online Marketing Tips, Strategies and how to use the most cost effective tools for your online marketing business.

Of the 12 seminars during the day Dr Search received the top rating with 93% of the attendees saying that he was relevant to their needs and 86% of attendees rated the content as highly rated.

Please have a look at the other videos as they become live on the Search Clinic YouTube Channel

Please let me know what you think of the video. Have you found it useful? Was there anything else that you would like to learn about? Please contact Dr Search by clicking here now.

Dr Search the principal consultant at the Search Clinic abhores the way labour wasted taxpayers money building up useless databases so yesterday’s leading article in the Independent-”Database of distrust” deserves a wider airing:
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
The vetting and barring scheme represented the worst instincts of Labour in office: the assumption of guilt, the love of bureaucracy, the obsession with databases, the reflexive statism. The labour government did scale back the scheme last year.

But the new Home Secretary, Theresa May, is right to go a step further and call a halt altogether.

No sensible person disputes that some form of vetting procedure is needed for those who are employed to work closely with children. Recent revelations of sickening abuse by paedophile priests remind us why there need to be special safeguards.

But Ms May is right when she argues that the previous administration’s vetting and barring scheme, even in scaled-back form, was wholly disproportionate.

It would have required virtually every adult who wanted to work with children, from full-time teachers to occasional volunteers at the local scout group, to register. It would have affected around nine million people.

There was every reason to believe that volunteers would have been put off by the bureaucracy involved. One does not have to be a fully paid-up subscriber to the Conservatives’ vision of “The Big Society” to grasp why this would have been undesirable.

Children would have been the ones to suffer under such circumstances.

The previous Government’s stubbornness in pushing through this unwieldy project was especially maddening because the existing screening methods for those working with children are adequate. Employees must already go through criminal record checks to work in schools. And there are official lists of individuals barred from working with children and vulnerable adults. There is a case for combining these procedures, which the review announced by Ms May yesterday should look into.

But it is important that there is room for some discretion in the system too. If the Independent Safeguarding Authority, which was established to oversee the vetting and barring scheme, is to survive it needs to avoid making snap judgements based on potentially malicious allegations or unsubstantiated pieces of gossip.

The core problem with the vetting and barring scheme was that it threatened to inject a hysterical level of distrust into all relations between adults and children. Now that the scheme itself has been halted, the Government’s task is to make sure that this counter-productive mentality goes too.

From:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-database-of-distrust-2001516.html

The third part of Dr Search’s lecture focused on  Website Focus= Customer Focus

The content of the third video explains why brand names aren’t enough, Keyword phrases explained, Tips to find where your customers are, why optimisation is at heart of online marketing,
What’s Good for your customers=good for search engines=good for social media=>profits
Similarities between icebergs and websites and Google’s UK database current key optimisation requirements

Dr Search the Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic’s lecture at the University of Gloucestershire on online marketing to to businesses, professionals and students at the 5th annual Gloucestershire Professionals conference in June 2009.

More than 300 people attended the conference with over 60 attending Dr Search’s lecture on Online Marketing Tips, Strategies and how to use the most cost effective tools for your online marketing business.

Of the 12 seminars during the day Dr Search received the top rating with 93% of the attendees saying that he was relevant to their needs and 86% of attendees rated the content as highly rated.

Please let me know what you think of the video. Have you found it useful? Was there anything else that you would like to learn about? Please contact Dr Search by clicking here now.

Please have a look at the other videos as they become live on the Search Clinic YouTube Channel

Search Engine Optimisation SEO tips, tools, tutorials guide and techniques Part 2 YouTube VideosContinuing the series on online marketing today Dr Search publishes his second video on search engine optimisation (SEO) tips explaining organic listings and guiding the pros and cons of organic listing- a long term great value but seldom instant results process.

Second part of Dr Search the Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic’s lecture at the University of Gloucestershire on online marketing to to businesses, professionals and students at the 5th annual Gloucestershire Professionals conference in June 2009.

More than 300 people attended the conference with over 60 attending Dr Search’s lecture on Online Marketing Tips, Strategies and plan the most cost effective tools for online marketing business.

Of the 12 seminars during the day Dr Search received the top rating with 93% of the attendees saying that he was relevant to their needs and 86% of attendees rated the content as highly rated.

Please let me know what you think of the video. Have you found it useful? Was there anything else that you would like to learn about? Please contact Dr Search by clicking here now.

Please have a look at the other videos as they become live on the Search Clinic YouTube Channel.

As more marketing and communications professionals use social media channels for UK brands, new research by McCann Erickson shows that many agencies and consultants are not providing enough guidance to help their clients with social media.Almost half of those surveyed (48%) said they still don’t feel they have adequate knowledge on how best to use social media channels effectively for marketing purposes.

Although this is down by over 16% from 64% last year the figure is still surprisingly high.

Nearly a quarter of respondents (23.4%) admitted that advances in social media are difficult to keep up with and almost the same proportion (22.4%) said they would like to understand social media more but that it is not easy to find genuine ‘experts’ in the field.

Interestingly, in just 12 months since the last survey there has been a marked increase in general social media usage for communications activities.

On average, usage for each of the main social networks (facebook, twitter and LinkedIn) is up by around 22% from last year. Twitter has shown the most increased usage (+28.2% since 2009) with 61% of those surveyed now saying that Twitter is regularly used as a way of distributing news stories.

It seems that IT departments are now more willing to let their marketing teams have access to social networks at work.

Last year’s results showed that 46% of respondents were unable to get access at work and although this figure has come down to 24.3% it still shows that nearly a quarter of UK marketers and communications practitioners are not granted workplace access to social networks, making monitoring and campaign execution impossible.

Social media monitoring for brands is now a key area for marketers who need to demonstrate effectiveness of activity, ROI and target audience usage of social networks. By far the most popular way of brand monitoring online is through Google Alerts with 45.5% using this free tool.

Radian 6 has emerged as the most widely used paid-for tool with 14.3% usage followed by PR Newswire’s monitoring tool Social Media Metrics at 10.4%. 11% of those surveyed said they relied on their retained PR agency to monitor social media brand activity and 37% said they conducted ‘ad hoc’ monitoring in house.

Asked where they think the responsibility for social media communications should reside, 50% said it came under a combination of disciplines; 23% said it was best managed by public relations professionals and 11% said it should sit with digital experts.

Additional results at a glance:
• 59.8% respondents said that social media communications is now part of their day jobs
• 29% think there are now too many social media networks
• 12.1% think social media networks are becoming too commercial
• 16.8% said they are interested in using social media more within their daily role but do not
currently use it

Dr Search reviewed the research from: McCann Erickson Social Media Index 2010