Think local… act local
Feb.20.2009 
The big point I want to get across with this post is to not fall in to the trap of thinking because you have a website you have to act like a global or even a national service provider.
If you want to trade on a national level it will cost a lot of money and there will be a lot of big fish out there to compete with. If you get work further afield, great, but my advice would be not to go chasing it too hard too early.
Why…
- Local advertising is significantly cheaper than their national counter parts and a lot more targeted, which leads to…
- Reduced waste. This refers to waste in terms of the people looking at the advert as well as money. If you only supply services to Yorkshire, then having the advert seen in Cornwall is a waste of your money.
- There is much less competition. For example on Google the search term “bouncy castle Nottingham” brings back 37,000 results whereas “bouncy castle” displays a massive 1.42m results.
How…
- Your local British chamber of commerce and business link organisations are gold mines for both business resources and putting you in touch with potential customers. A good idea is to find out when they have their events to put local suppliers in touch with potential customers and go along. Also research whether they send out emails to local businesses you can advertise on.
- Optimise your website’s SEO for the geographic locations you are targeting. For example instead of <title>Bouncy castle hire</title> be more specific and use <title>Bouncy castle hire Nottingham, Derby & Leicester</title>
- Directories such as the ‘ic’ or ‘touch’ networks tend to be displayed prominently in localised search engine results. Research the most popular online directories for your area and niche and submit your site.
- With relatively small geographic locations from which to report the news, many local papers are news hungry and if you have an event, promotion, new product, re-launch etc to promote you could get yourself in.
- Put an advert or at least a free entry in the Yellow Pages (both online and traditional book directory) and BT’s business phone book. A lot of buyers still use these to find business suppliers.
- Google AdWords does not have to be a national medium. Use the ‘geographic targeting’ options to only show ads to people in your target area (i.e. no ads shown in areas you can’t supply therefore no wasted clicks etc)
- Buy a list of geographically targeted email addresses from companies such as www.marketingfile.com and use a HTML mail shot to promote your services. (You can find a good article about designing HTML emails here)
- After you finish a job always post the invoice and put in a collection of business cards so they can pass them on to their contact
How important is UK support to your customers?
With more and more hosting companies outsourcing their development and support teams to outside the UK, setting up offices in countries such as Romania and the Philippines, the long term impact on their business will be detrimental.
The initial cost savings will inevitably be outweighed by a fall in customer satisfaction and service reputation within the market, which in turn will affect sales and the bottom line. As committed and as knowledgeable as they will be in the new support offices, to deal with technical issues in a foreign language without a pre-formatted and binding conversation decision tree in front of them is asking a lot.
As a customer I want to know that if I have a problem of any kind I will be able to get in contact with someone who can answer the question quickly with minimal cost and effort on their part and the perception is that the support team needs to be based in the UK to do this.
A quick search using Google’s keyword tool can show you how many people search for your service using ‘UK’ in the search phrase. For example, for ‘web hosting’ Google reports approx 300,000 searches for ‘web hosting’ in January 2009 and approx 35,000 for UK related web hosting search terms. That suggests to me that being based in the UK with UK support is important to our potential customers and we should make it clear on our website and marketing they can find that at INSTA Host. In short, if you provide UK based support make it clear on your website to let potential customers know.
