Consumer decision making process

Consumer-decision-making-websites-2.pngIt takes a long time for a prospect to actually make the decision to buy a product or service. There are several processes they go through, and at each step there is a funnelling, or more correctly a loss, of prospects. This is called the consumer decision making process. If you understand your customer you can help them through each of these stages by embedding information and values that will aid a successful conversion.

Depending on who you ask there are a different number of stages, but most agree on these three main ones: Awareness, Evaluation and finally Decision. One of the goals of marketing is to make sure the input (Awareness) attracts as many as possible. Also at each step as you progress through Evaluation (does this product or service suit my needs?) and Decision (I’m going to pickup the phone right now) you want to retain as many as possible.

Pretty simple in theory. Understanding these elements and incorporating them into your website and and brand are really critical!

Shopfronts for the 21st Century

 

Brisbane websites

We are well into the 21st century now and many things have changed. One of those is the good old shop front. Once the principle way of telling people about your business, it wasn’t uncommon for shop fronts to be considerably larger than the actually business, as is the case for this little west end corner store (its still there today actually), with the business itself occupying only a small part of the building but the signage and the building itself suggesting a much bigger enterprise.

So what does todays shop front entail? Well for many, especially those without a physical shop its your website. And just like the shop fronts of old you can project a big presence, but this time its as big as you like. Here the canny sole trader can compete with much larger businesses through the presence they project.

Not Happy Jan! Remembering the Yellow Pages

Hands up if you remember this ad? Can you believe this was published in the early 2000’s. While probably most of us still have the yellow pages lying around,  when was the last time you actually used it? You see its all about convenience and a web search can reveal so much more that a single line and a phone number? You get directions, reviews and can see visually all the business you might be looking for on a map…it really appeals to the hunter gathering in all of us.

Ready, Set errr…go, maybe? NBN goes live in Mansfield, Brisbane

NBN-brisbane-technologyHooray the NBN is finally here, After years of sitting 4km from the exchange on the end of some suspect copper (and very slow ADSL to prove it) we finally have the NBN. Its not the almost unfundable fibre to the premises or even to the node instead the much derided HFC. HFC is hybrid fibre coaxial, means it pretty much runs on the Foxtel/Optus cable network which is all great in theory. There’s just one snag this network was designed around a certain set of carrier frequencies and the NBN is using a different set of frequencies. All good in theory, but in practice it means the network components may not quite be up to running at those frequencies, nor have been replaced in the arc to connect as much of Australia as possible can before the next election.

Keeping a steady eye on our NBN technician, who didn’t seem to know much beyond which end of the pliers to hold, we got to watch cables being bent well beyond minimum bed radii, attenuators put in to improve a single strength (you do now that attenuation is a negative quantity ??). Luckily with my PhD in Radio Physics (yes thats a thing) and too many support calls, we were able to have it sorted.

Fortunately a mixed mode approach to internet access, including temporarily boosting our phone data plans keeps the wheels turning

Get your business on the High Street

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Queen St. Brisbane circa 1928, Image courtesy State Library of Queensland

 

Time was that if your business wasn’t on the ‘High St.’ you didn’t get a lot of customers. I suppose this was because back in the day, passing trade in a busy shopping location was the way to attract customers with an impressive shopfront. These days with everyone looking online for where to shop, finding a business doesn’t entail a stroll down the high street.

Google, google maps, Apple Maps, Siri and Alexa are now the High St of choice so its vital that today you have a presence on the shop front. This means you need both a website (a shop front) and then you need to get it on the High St. In the trade we call this search engine optimisation. Businesses on the first page of google, and ideally listed on the map inset get the lions share of the trade. Ask me about SEO (Search engine optimisation) as well as ad campaigns on google.

Your websites most important visitor is not a person

google-logo-brisbane.jpg

Most web design starts with layout images and thinking about what your customer might be looking for and trying to provide that. However there is another regular visitor  thats far more important….google! Google decides if your website is going to be on the High St of the internet or in a backwater village somewhere. If google decides you website is relevant to what someone is searching for and places it prominently then and only then do you get a human visitor. This is the black art of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. The good news is that most small (and many large) businesses don’t even think about this  so its usually not too hard to be competitive. So if your web designer doesn’t know what SEO is or thinks its just a few keywords here and there…keep moving!