The internet can help you access 1.3bn potential clients and customers

The internet is invaluable; a cheap and powerful way of accessing the 1.3bn potential contacts, clients and customers already on the web worldwide. With proper utilisation it can develop new business and improve operations in a relatively simple way, providing instant answers and offering ready information and support across the world. It can also extend your business opening hours to 24/7 without a physical presence – excellent for keeping present and potential customers aware of new products and services. Chris Stening, managing director of Easynet Connect, a leading connectivity service for SMEs, believes the internet is vital to recession survival plans, ‘The critical difference between now and the recession of the early 90s is the internet, which could easily be the most important tool in helping small businesses through the current downturn,’ he says. ‘In the early 90s we were a world away from e-commerce, online marketing or having a mobile workforce, let alone using cloud computing or holding video conferences with customers on the other side of the world.’

The tangled web
Your website is a direct link for clients and customers and an essential visual representation of the ethos of you and your company. It can be difficult to get yourself noticed and recognised on the cluttered internet but a successful business will exploit all the tricks:
➢ Regular updates users soon get bored and will forget about your site if there’s nothing new each time they visit.
➢ Accurate information will ensure you can capitalise on the value and potential of your site.
➢ Offer something for free to collect customers’ email addresses for mailing lists.
➢ Newsletters differentiate you from the competition by personalising your product and ensuring you stay at the forefront of customers’ minds.
➢ Search engines register with searches such as Google, MSN or Yahoo. Search engine “spiders” regularly crawl the web to check for the most updated, visited and connected sites to push them up the rankings, so make sure you use unique key words for users to find your site and so search engines don’t reject it as spam. When you register the search engine will provide a data page offering valuable demographic information on who’s visiting your site and how they’re finding it.
➢ Networking email discussion groups, message boards, newsgroups and organisations with some affiliation to your business so your website receives targeted publicity. Exchange buttons and links reciprocally to gain more visitors, which count as “votes” to search engines to enhance your prestige.
‘It’s very important for small firms to have an online presence,’ says Sophie Kummer from The Federation of Small Businesses. ‘We surveyed 8,700 members last year and 43% reported their sales had improved by one-fifth after linking to suppliers and using their website to advertise their firm. This shows the ever-increasing value of the internet to business transactions, particularly during an economic downturn.’
If you want to master web design yourself http://www.submitit.com is a great place to start, and http://www.expressionengine.com is an easy Content Management System (CMS) to use – if you have any problems along the way both sites offer a bank of support. Or invest in a web designer to ensure an optimum online presence, try www.tincan.co.uk they can build and maintain your site with as much, or as little input as you want to give. Once your website is up and running the overheads are very cheap and it will become the most important channel for marketing, selling, managing customer relationships and directing enquiries.
But don’t just have a website for the sake of it, initially it needs a time and effort outlay to ensure it acts as an equally important extension of your business. ‘Most small businesses understand that it’s vital to have a website and are quick to get online,’ says Jerry Thompson, director of business products and online at BT Business. ‘Unfortunately, many websites are withering on the vine because customers cannot actually find them when they surf the internet.’
If you don’t have the budget, a web page is low maintenance and can just feature essential, basic information such as your mission statement, contact details and a photo. Try www.yola.com or www.weebly.com, they’ll host your page for a minimal charge.

Online reputation
According to research by web host 1&1 Internet Ltd, half of British businesses fail to check the internet for online material concerning them, yet 65 per cent of online consumers research an online retailer before committing to a purchase. ‘The average online shopper will now invest time in appraising a retailer’s online reputation as an integral part of their buying decision,’ says Oliver Mauss, CEO of 1&1 Internet Ltd. ‘Businesses must monitor for such material if they are to protect their revenues and build their brand online.’ Never undervalue the impact your online reputation can have on your sales, you may want to utilise the online reputation management tools available such as RatePoint. They’ll collect, manage and promote customer feedback as well as facilitating online dispute resolutions, visit www.ratepoint.com for a free trial. 

Making friends
Social networking sites (SNS) are now such an integral part of society, their power is impossible to ignore. Communicating with twentysomethings is crucial to your company’s success both in the long- and the short-term, but now the demographics of these sites are dispersing and Facebook report more users signing up aged 35 and over. With 200 million active users and half of these logging on at least once a day, it would be a foolish avenue to ignore, particularly considering access to all these potential customers is free with an account.
Six thousand small businesses join the microblogging site Twitter each day according to a recent survey by O2, allowing the enterprise owners to reduce marketing costs and increase communication with their customers. Nearly one in five (17%) are tweeting regularly to keep in touch with customers, suppliers and monitoring competitors and one in ten firms claim to have saved £5,000 by using the site for marketing and recruitment. Even the Federation of Small Businesses has started to “tweet” as has Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Boris Johnson.
Of course, it’s important to cultivate a professional business image at all times, and to remember anything you put on these pages can be seen by everyone. Myspace is more of a media and entertainment destination aimed at tweens and teenagers, and dependent on your business this is probably the least desirable site to use, although it does have over 262 million users. To start, you need to set up a page for your company, and post regular updates to keep people coming back. Try searching for other big companies on Facebook and Twitter to get an idea of what you need to do.
Youtube is a popular SNS with a unique selling point, you can upload company presentations or mini films about your company for consumers to view. But if you’re looking for an exclusively professional way for your staff and business members to stay in touch, the corporate SNS “Socialcast” is mature and functional. The site allows companies to build closed social networks and operates in much the same way as facebook, even NASA has one. Chief Executive Tim Young says, ‘It keeps the company connected so managers can share best practices and workers can constantly intermingle digitally instead of just annually at board meetings or expos, as is often the case. They want to have real-time information flow,’ he says, ‘rather than having it drift up through management and come back to headquarters.’
Understanding these websites is the key to working out what they can do for you and maximising your online presence. Spend time online exploring or try a consultancy such as www.pistachioconsulting.com to help work out where you and your company fit best.

Checking out
The Association for Payment Clearing Services (APACS) report internet card payments have risen nearly four-fold over the last five years, to £34bn. So make it as easy as possible for customers to pay for their goods. Set your website up to accept credit and debit card payments, if you can’t get processing directly through your business account then you will need to use an online processer such as Paypal, the preferred internet payment service in the UK. Although this should only be a temporary measure as their charges take revenue away from you; aim to have direct card processing as soon as possible. For your customers’ trust enlist the additional security of a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security certificate, purchasable from www.ssl.com, a little yellow padlock will appear in the browser to show the page is secure.

The future
There’s a wealth of enterprise opportunity for small business owners, PAs and executives on the web; it’s immediate and interactive and the potential for blogs, podcasts and webcasts is endless. You may need to be selective where you publicise yourself but don’t miss out on the opportunities the internet presents. ‘Internet marketing is very useful for small businesses,’ says Kummer. ‘Particularly during a downturn when the cost of printing and posting is just another burden. The more creative a small firm can be, linking to other useful sites, providing information their customers might want, going out of their way to provide the service that big firms can’t, or don’t, do, is going to be crucial to the success’.