Riding to the Rescue

If you've been following me and/or Cinnamon Edge for any length of time you probably know that we specialise in helping businesses, especially local businesses, with their marketing.

Unless you're a client of ours you probably won't know how we go about doing that, and one of the big dangers, that I warned about in a previous post, is buying marketing services from a company with something to sell.

And by 'something to sell' I mean a particular product or service that they want to sell you, rather than trying to discover what your business actually needs and even if they can really help you at all.

We have something to sell, too. But it's not so much a product or service as an end result, and that end result is success for your business.

Something else you might know about me is that I'm a keen cyclist and therefore very interested, because I'm a student of business too, in the bicycle industry and cycle retailers.

Two recent reports put the value of the UK cycle industry at between 1.5 and 6 billion pounds, so there's a lot of money to be made by people with the necessary passion and business skills.

Now, one of the great things about cycle retailers is that they're usually very enthusiastic about all things cycling. Like most people with a passion, they enjoy working in a business that reflects that passion. But that doesn't always mean they're the best business people and get the best results possible from their business.

Many keen cyclists love their 'LBS' - their local bike shop - because of the enthusiasm and expertise they get from being served by a fellow cyclist, but shop owners take that sort of loyalty for granted at their peril because their customers will be spending their money elsewhere, too.

Which is where I come in. I know for a fact that most bike shops could add about 30% to their sales by making a few small changes to the way they do business. They can probably find another 10-20% with a few other tweaks and the same again with a bit of lateral thinking and inventiveness.

Now, you may not have the time, energy or expertise to do those things for yourself, but I do. In fact, that IS what I do - help businesses add at least 10-30% to their profits by identifying their problems and missed opportunities first and then fixing them.

That, and ride my bike!

Contact me here, email me at roy@RoyEveritt.com or phone 01284 753912 in UK office hours to find out if I can help your business.

Roy

Light Haulage Company Must Go Goes Online

Must Go, the Bury St Edmunds light haulage and courier business has actually been online for a while, but their website hadn't achieved much for them until recently.

In fact they now have two sites, including this one, Must Go Couriers and Light Haulage.

Last week, however, that website site (which I created for them) brought them an enquiry from Bristol, over 200 miles from their headquarters in Thurston, just outside Bury St Edmunds. This is well outside the area they reach through any of their offline marketing channels, demonstrating the value of online marketing for a small Bury St Edmunds business like theirs.

The site I created for them is now on page one of Google for at least three valuable search terms, so it looks likely they'll get more business in the future, too.

Online marketing is just a part of the service we offer our consultancy clients, and websites and SEO are a smaller part of that, but it's always good to hear about real-world results like Must Go's.

Roy

PS. What Must Go's website also demonstrates is that you don't always need an all-singing, all-dancing website to get business online. All you need to do is tell potential customers they're in the right place, make them an offer and tell them what to do next. And you need people to find your website in the first place.

Must Go prefer contact by phone, so the site has two phone numbers, an instruction to call them, their business address, their own YouTube video, and some nifty SEO stuff to get it onto page one of Google. Job done.

You're Bigger Than This

If you own or manage a business in the 'real world' (ie, not an online or Internet business), you might be seeing an increasing number of people approaching you to help you 'get online'.

Chances are, though, that you're 'online' already. And you might be wondering what's so great about having a website and a social media 'presence' when it doesn't seem to bring you any noticeable increase in customers for your business.

The problem is, improving your business is a bigger and more complicated job than any Internet marketing services can hope to deal with. In fact, you could be doing everything right online and still be no better off. Your problems might be online, or they might not.

In that case, it's because your problems lie elsewhere, and fixing problems that don't exist won't help at all. You need to diagnose what the problems really are before you can even begin to solve them.

So when you get an Internet marketer or online marketing expert approaching you to offer you a particular service or package before they've even found out about your business, run away!

You need an in-depth consultation, a diagnostic assessment of your business - with no cure-all services for sale - to find the real cause of your business' pain before you spend any more money on marketing services. Just as a good doctor would, we run tests, consider the symptoms and assess your business' overall health before we offer you any 'medicine' at all.

Only then can you be really confident that the treatment you're offered will be the best treatment available to get your business thriving. Often, it's a complete surprise.

Contact us on 01284 753912 or via the Cinnamon Edge website to find out more and book your one to one diagnostic consultation.

Roy