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Webinar Library
Ecommerce
Offers Coupons and Discounts to Generate Sales
Get more people to visit, browse, and purchase from your website. Learn how you can use coupons and discounts to generate more sales online.
Aug 11 2021
Ecommerce
Ecommerce Trends To Drive Success For Your Business
Discover some of the latest eCommerce technology trends and learn out how they can drive your business forward to digital success.
Oct 14 2020
Ecommerce
Ecommerce - How to Increase Average Order, Upsells & Customer Lifetime Value
Engaging with your existing customers can increase your average order value...
Jul 1 2020
Ecommerce
Marketing Automation for eCommerce
Learn how to use marketing automation to close more new customers & clients, prevent customer churn and speed up dozens of other business, prospecting, & marketing tasks.
Jun 10 2020
Ecommerce
How to Improve Conversion on an Ecommerce Site
This webinar is a must for anyone that either has or is considering launching an eCommerce site, find out the tricks of the trade, and how you can maximise the return on every website visit. We will be exploring the following key concepts; Crafting a path to purchase, Advanced filtering, Consideration sets, Upsells & Cross-sells, and Google Analytics.
May 13 2020
Ecommerce
Running an Online store. What happens after I make a sale?
Selling online can be a daunting prospect if you are just getting started, this is a practical webinar in which we will cover how to run an online store effectively.
Learn about; Order Fulfilment (examples of 3 back systems Shopify, Woo, & Zest) Dispatch & Delivery (Common order status) Inventory Management (Manual, Spreadsheet or integratrion) Order tracking (Options, Manual Tacking code, EShip and Go Sweet Spot) Customer feedback (Survey Monkey, post sales Autoresponders)
May 1 2020
Ecommerce
Marketing an Ecommerce store
With COVID19 restricting traditional business eCommerce is more important than ever, and getting a site online is just the start.
This is a practical webinar that will cover the entry-level marketing tools you need to get selling effectively online.
Analytics and Conversion Tracking Google My Business Google Shopping Remarketing Email marketing How to promote products on facebook
Apr 24 2020
Ecommerce
Guide to setting up Ecommerce
Getting online and selling under COVID-19 restrictions can be daunting, this is a practical webinar on how you can get started. Covering: Set up of an ecommerce site, Payment gateways, deliveries, click and collect, No contact dispatch Join us to find out how you can embrace selling online
Apr 22 2020
Ecommerce
Sustainable Product Creation and Packaging
Find out how you can efficiently run your business and help save the planet at the same time. In this webinar, we're inviting Rebecca Percasky from Better Packaging to discuss how you can reduce waste, promote recycling and reduce the ecological footprint in your daily operations by using sustainable solutions for your products and packaging.
Nov 25 2020
Ecommerce
Top Ecommerce Technologies Powering Successful Businesses in 2020
The best Ecommerce technology allows you to operate online with ease. Choosing the wrong one can seriously hold you back. Join us as we uncover some of the most popular Ecommerce website technologies in 2020, as well as tips to help you identify the right technology for your business.
Oct 28 2020
Ecommerce
Evolve your Social Commerce Strategy
With the trends pointing towards the 2020s being the decade of eCommerce, brands will be working harder than ever to capitalize on e-commerce and social media, currently dubbed as "social commerce". In this webinar, we will discuss key "social commerce" strategies to help you build consumer trust and boost online sales in 2020.
Aug 12 2020
View Webinar Transcript
So let's get into it. This is what we're going to cover today. We're going to talk about digital transformation in New Zealand, why you should be online. And then we're going to go through the four key stages of digital transformation, what attributes there are for businesses that sit in these different groups, what they need to get good at, and how do they get through to that next stage? And what will it mean for them? And a little bit of information about adaptability in business digital transformation as well.
So we'll work through it, feel free to ask questions, comfortable with taking them as we go through the presentation as well. We do have that Q and a session at the end as well. So you're welcome to ask in the middle or hold them to the end. It's entirely up to you, but we do encourage that participation. We want you to get as much as you can out of today's session. And it's really nice to have you with us. So digital transformation, what is it? So yield has helped over 15,000 businesses through this process.
It is the process of adopting digital tools to improve your business processes and increased revenue during quarter 2 in 2021 online spend on New Zealand was recorded at one $5 billion. New Zealand post have been creating some amazing research on ecommerce in the last couple of years and they've got over online sales continuing to be with local retailers. So people are still buying local, but they are actually doing it online as well. So digital transformation and digital adoption is a critical factor for business continuity and scalability,especially with customers spending more time online.
And what we do know is that, as we get through this level for lock down, we're going to move probably most likely into a level three environment where contact free commerce becomes very, very important. And ecommerce is a key part of that. So it's important to understand this and prepare yourself for those alert level changes. And one thing we did see last year across all organisations that we work with is that those businesses that had a strong e commerce system and processes, they were the quickest to bounce back from the lockdown.
And so that's what we hope to teach a little bit about today. So why do you need to be online? I think for a lot of people, this has already been established. There's lot of people making really great moves in the online space. But if you're new to this and you really want to understand the why behind it, creating an online store will allow you to service your customers more accurately and more often. So an e commerce stores open 24/7, just as a key example.
You can also use lots of various platforms online, such as social email, for building your community and improving your customers experience with your brand. And these things are critical, right? So they create more opportunity for you to sell it and also increases your business intelligence. That's one of the things that I enjoy most about digital marketing and websites and digital tools in general is that you can gather a huge amount of data, a gain real insights into how people are interacting with your business and what sales cycles they're going through.
And those insights allow you to create strategies that can be really, really beneficial for yourbusiness. And so data is a big part of the online space. And I touched on this just beforebusiness resilience. So those businesses that have a really strong ecommerce or just digitalfocus are able to be more resilient to changes in business operating conditions. And we'veseen that over the last year, and we're kind of going through it at the moment. Now we've got travel restrictions in place, and so businesses that can can switch their operation to more of an online focus.
They do very well in these times. In fact, during the last lockdown had some key clients that were considered an essential ecommerce service. Get in touch with me a couple of weeks in and just to help, can you make it stop? They literally needed to shut down their entire e commerce system because the number of orders they were getting was just too much. And they needed, like, a week to catch up. So it just goes to show that there are still opportunities out there.
Digital helps you take advantage of them. So this is the digital transformation model that we sealed have created. This is based on working with a large number of businesses, really understanding the dynamics behind what works online, what doesn't, and what are the key characteristics of those businesses have done incredibly well. What pathway if they've gone through, and how did they get there? And essentially, this is giving you a road map to be able to follow those people that have done really well and do well yourself. The important thing to note here is that as you go through the stages of digital, sophistication.
And we've named them the foundational piece, the intermediate stage, advanced in mastery as you increase. Sophistication with your digital adoption of tools, what happens here is that your return on investment actually dips at a certain point. So when you get to the intermediate stage and will touch on a lot of detail later on, your return on investment actually decreases as you go through this process. That is because you end up managing disparate digital. So you've got isolated silos of systems that actually create more work rather than actually improve things.
So that creating more workers, where people start to get less of a return on investment, they can get quite bogged down in the stage. So one of the things that we really want to talk about a lot today is how do you get through that stage? And to advance, we start to really solid return from your investment on digital tools. So we've got the basic piece, which is where you just want to get started. Then we've got that intermediate stage where you've adopted some tools, but they're not really working together, and you can often have a lot of additional effort and time required to manage them.
Then once you get to advance, you're looking at at least some basic level of integration and automation. And these things will allow you to start having systems work for you rather than having to work for them. And then a master, you're really leveraging integration and automation to the level where you can just scale incredibly well and be very flexible with how you respond to the data that you collect. So let's dive into each of those stages. I think there are a couple of comments there on the chat.
Someone saying they can't hear. I think it looks like they've got it cold, just wanted to cheque. They hadn't missed anything there when I saw some things on chat, so I'll move through it. So where are you at in your digital transformation journey? We're going to talk about the characteristics of each of these stages. So the foundation, intermediate, advanced, and mastery, and hopefully you can almost self diagnosed a little bit where you sit in that transformation pathway to the foundations right. So this is where you often have minimal to no online presence, but you really should have at least a couple of things working well for you in.
Some businesses can actually succeed quite well just with the foundational pieces of online, but it does. It does make them less resilient to the changes that we see happening at the moment. Right. So the foundational pieces, these are businesses that are startups. Maybe they've older businesses that have done traditionally done very, very well and haven't needed a digital presence, so they haven't taken the time to them. We also see some businesses in this foundational place where they've invested in getting a lot of digital systems, but really got stuck at that intermediate stage.
They've found that they haven't been able to get a return on investment from their activity and they've actually pulled back into this stage. So at this stage, you've got a GMB, which stands for Google My Business listing. You may have some social pages. You'll definitely be using online banking and voicing, maybe some simple payment systems. You'll have email systems, a smartphone, and you'll so you'll have maybe a basic website. And if you don't, that's one of the first things you really need to get to create an online presence.
So businesses at the stage aren't really utilising digital tools to their fullest potential, and they tend to be, as I said, a little bit more vulnerable to changes. If your businesses at the stage, it's critical that you move beyond the basics and explore new tools and devices. Strategy to get people working, target people towards your business. So where to start? So really need at least a simple social strategy so that you've got a presence online. What we're looking at here at the foundational piece is if people are looking for you, can they find you online?
And so we want to get these basic kind of property set up online so that people can find you. So you want to get a social pages and have a bit of a strategy to maintain them, maybe a couple of posts, and make sure that if people are asking you questions in that environment, that posting questions and asking you to your social pages, you are answering them alright. And you also want to have a Google My Business listing. This is one of the most powerful free tools, but there is available out there. This is an example of our Zeald one. You can get reviews and you've got a phone number, details and so on.
And so there's lots of ways that people can contact you from this page. If you want to know more about Google My Business listings and how to optimise them. We have done sessions on that in the past in these webinars, so feel free to go and go and cheque that out and learn more about Google My Business. It's one of my favourite online tools, especially at this foundational level. You've got to have it and then you want to be building a website. Right. So you want to get something that's going to be benefiting your sales process. So that could be a lead generation website or an ecommerce website, but ultimately it's something there that's a bit more developed. And some of the social pages and the Google My business, it allows you to tell more of a story and really articulate your Bene, the benefits of working with you and also your products and services and why people should buy them.
If you do need to get started with a website and you want to get, like move from this foundational piece into the intermediate stage, then we do have options at Zeald for free e commerce sites. You can do that throughout our gym initiative. Just go to Zeald.com for more details. I'm not going to spend too long, but today, but it is a really critical thing to get right so that you can move along this pathway into the intermediate stage.
So businesses at this stage they will have adopted multiple systems, and they will often find this, to be honest, this can be a world of pain for some businesses. If you have an accounting system, you've got an inventory management system, you may have a CRM system, you may have a website, you may have your social pages, and all of these things take time and often will require double data entry across all of these platforms.
So you update your website, then you the inventory, and then you have to the order into the accounting system. And so what you're doing is there's lots of duplication of effort. And so you've got more work to do to manage these systems rather than less.
And we see a lot of businesses get stuck here because they've invested in these systems, but then don't have maybe the additional investment to get through the stage to the point where these systems are working for them properly. So a lot of businesses get bogged down here. And this is often where our our strategy team come in and find businesses stuck in the stage and needing help to kind of get through it so that they can really start to fly as an organisation. So business at the stage, they've got a basic online presence, but they don't potentially have the right resources or time to take it further.
They may have some digital marketing going, but they often don't know really what they're getting out of it. So if this sounds like you if you're investing in your digital marketing and you're investing in your website and other items like I've mentioned there, but you don't really know what's working for you, then you're probably in this intermediate stage because you you don't really know what levers to pull to get a good return on investment because you're a little unsure of what's working for you. And often businesses in the stage, I think, stuck here and they struggle through it or they sometimes give up and start not really managing these systems.
So at this point, you want. Depending on your business type and the process that you have with retailer or ecommerce or you provide services, you may have an order fulfilment process. You may be listening on digital marketplaces like Trade Me. You may have a dispatch management system, you have some basic digital marketing, but without a lot of tracking and understanding of what works, you may have scheduling messaging systems, some online payment processing. You'll definitely have an accounting system depending on your business type, inventory and e commerce, and may even have a point of sale as well. Like I said, a lot of these not really working together and helping you.
As I said, very difficult to get a return on investment at the stage because the systems are not working together and you don't necessarily have an understanding reports working. So how to get to the next step is you really need to start making sure that your website is working well for you and is starting to actually working with other systems that you have. So at the advanced stage, we start to get some of those integrations working and some automations working as well.
But to help fund that, you really need to understand how your digital marketing is performing. And so you need to have really good analytics around your search engine optimization, your social activity, your Google ads and your email marketing. By making sure you're tracking and measuring these things, you can understand what your return on investment is, and you can really double down on those things that are working well and providing a positive return investment, which helps the fund moving through into those more advanced stages, which sometimes takes a little bit more investment. So websites integrations are really important. Sometimes customising your website so that it better supports your customers' buying process is key to every business is unique, and every business has a sales process that can be improved through the utilisation of technology. Often customising that website your website will allow you to improve that process. As a simple example of this, you could just introduce a booking system onto your website if you're a service business so that people could actually book in with you at a relevant time. And that opens up a huge new Avenue for you to generate revenue because often people that that are buying from you for services they'll be busy during the during the day at their job, then they have the kids to deal with in the evening, and then sometimes the only time, (this is for me personally), sometimes the only time I've got to work on booking things that are important to me is quite late at night. And so businesses that have a booking system that get my business, and so often that's a really great thing to invest in when it comes to customising your website because it improves the experience for your customers and helps you access for revenue. Often businesses that look to outsource at the stage can really, really get out of the stage much more quickly.
As I said, having to start digital systems means that you've got to spend more time managing them. So often outsourcing and accessing talent from around the world. It'll help improve your business productivity at a really low cost without that spending and maybe removing some of those administrative heavy administrative tasks here for business so that you can then get your team here in New Zealand working on creating a high value task to actually create more value for the business rather than getting bogged down with admin. So outsourcing certain aspects of your business really does free up the business owners time and often key staff members time as well.
And that helps grow the business quite quickly out of the intermediate stage. So if that's something you haven't considered yet, that's a really great way to get out of the intermediate stage is to access the low cost worldwide talent that is available through outsourcing and this can really improve your productivity without heavy spending. So that's the intermediate stage. As I said, that's where a lot of businesses get stuck. And there's a couple of these are the ways to get out of it. What does it look like when we get to the advanced stage?
I believe that it's really important to look at that. Right. So advanced stage, we've got basic automation and integration. So at this stage, you're actually starting to use technology to save time and money. You're increasing the accuracy of your business. You're sharing data between systems, which is allowing for real business insights. You're starting really understand the power of analytics and replicable tasks can become more automated. So you may have automated email sequences that send the information to your customers at just the right time. So someone isn't having to do that or, you know, and that could be based on when someone purchased from you.
It's just as an example, but it creates a better service for your customers, and it frees up time for you to focus on other business critical tasks. So integration is essentially getting in key tools to work together so that people are not having to double into information all the time. So that could be your accounting system often talks your point of sale and your inventory. Having those systems working in harmony with your ecommerce site is really important. You'll definitely be wanting to look at Google Analytics along with Google Tag Manager and Facebook Pixel.
These are all your standard tracking technology for websites. You can understand what your digital marketing is actually creating for you in terms of actual business outcomes, whether that sales or lead. You'll have some messaging system to make it easier to communicate and discuss things with your clients. You'll be leveraging digital marketplaces and digital marketing as well. So the basic automation of client communications is really good at this point. So you want to have if your e commerce.
You have order confirmations being sent out based on you updating the status of your order. You want to have customer loyalty programmes that re engage people and can do that on an automated basis. You can have upsell and cross sell promotions purchased the service from you and they're likely to want the service later on. That whole process can be automated just through some email sequences, and it can create real business value. When you do that, you may have a referral programme that works here as well. So you may have client. You might may start to put in customised pieces to your website that has clients self service portal.
So that could be as simple as, like an order history so that people can reorder really, really quickly from you. You may have an invoice and payment history that just stops or makes it easy for people to access that information without having to give you a call and then tie up someone in your business to answer those queries right at all there and available for them.
An accounting integrations is probably the one that most people start with when it comes to basic integration, because that creates some automated invoice saying draught invoice records from e commerce sales. And it makes it a lot easier if you don't manage the different systems that you have because the orders and information flowing through into your accounting systems. So that's kind of a summary of what happened at advanced stage. So at this point, you start to refine your technology mix and make sure that the integration between them and more seamless. You're not integrating everything, but you're getting the high priority task, the ones that you're repeating often automated and integrated. And these allow for and along with with the detailed analytics I was talking about, allow you to have much smarter sales and marketing strategies because you know what's working. And you start to build up a really good understanding of what and how to generate success online because you're measuring more than just impressions and clicks. You're measuring actual business outcomes like sales and leads generated from your activities.
Soat the advanced stage, you really want to kind of continue down that path that allows you to get through the mastery. And you really want to look at much more detail about how you can deeply integrate your e commerce accounting in the momentary systems together. Once you really deeply integrate, that's when you start to create even more value. That's where technology is really, really working for you. And it's a great place to be at advanced stage. These are things you want to be working right? You want to be optimising your sales and marketing initiatives, and you want to be testing and measuring various different options. You're really trying to gather as much data as you can around what works. So you set really clear KPIs and then you're running test campaigns based on that so that you can see whether or not if there is an option to get more out of what you're doing. And often this is done through a process called AB testing or split testing. This is something Google does incredibly well. So Google is constantly running AB, our split testing experiment. Whenever you arrive on a Google search result page, approximately 25 people will see a slightly different page.
You may not even be aware of this because often it's very small changes. But what Google is looking for here is if I can send to my traffic to a page with a different variation and has has a better result than than the standard page, then as soon as they've got enough data to confirm that, they will then make that the main page that people go to and start the next test. And so it's this process of small iterative change based on data feedback that's allowed Google to grow at the rate that it has over the last couple of decades.
And the Google search was at page looks very different now to what it did when it was first launched. But you probably wouldn't have noticed much of the changes as they happen because there were small variations that improve performance for Google, and so was done based on this methodology. So to do this, you have to be measuring things accurately. So you create tests you measure and then you tune based on the the data that you get back. This helps you improve return on investment. And it's only really possible at this advanced stage where you've got the proper tracking and metrics in place and you've got this integration and sharing of data. It allows you to start working in this way and really tuning and delivering real value for the organisation.
Mastery, what does that look like? At advanced we are starting to work with these sort of tools and we're starting to get them working for us. At Mastery, we have them really well tuned and we were able to move into the next phase. So at this stage, we've got advanced integration and automation configure at our disposal and good control over the tools that govern our conversion funnel or our sales and marketing funnels. You have the ability at the stage to really set up multiple what we call sales funnels and manage them effectively. And as soon as you find those those marketing sales funnels that are working very, very well, you can scale and dial them up with real confidence that you know, the results you're going to get because of the way that you can figure them and the way that you've measured and tested in the past. This allows you to do content marketing, really advanced lead nurturing. And you can start to build much longer term sales funnels the lines of potential clients so that you are really seeding and growing the market.
You're stimulating, you're educating your customers and you're growing a customer base as opposed to just collecting them at the bottom of the funnel. When someone is searching for what your products and services, you're actually convincing them they need to buy your product much earlier on in the sales process and then keeping in touch with them until they're really to buy. So at this stage, you've built up a really powerful sales funnel or multiple sales funnels.But you've got a pipeline of potential customers that you're nurturing and working with over time until they're really to buy from you.
At this stage, you're really in a very strong position. You've got really good metrics. You understand what it means to interact with people very early on before they're even aware of your brand right through to people that highly engaged and really close to buying. You'll have some good detail on what the lifetime value of a customer. And this will allow you, along with the ecommerce and lead values, to create return on ad spend measurement. This allows you to get into the space where you can work out for every dollar I spend on on this marketing channel.
How many dollars does that return to me? As an organisation, it allows you to really clearly understand what's working for your business and what's not working. And it allows you to scale really, really quickly when you find really high return on ad spend initiatives. Alright,so you're working.You're using data really, really effectively. As an example, you may be integrating your data from your CRM system based on converted leads and customer customer lifetime value. Integrating that data through back into your Google Ads platform, which will in an automated way influence your bidding.
So Google has an artificial intelligence system running within Google Ads that you can feed with data from your CRM system and will start to work out which customers are going to be worth more to you in the long run than others. And it will actually influence your bidding methodologies on our ads so that you can actually acquire those customers that represent a much greater lifetime value. So when you're at the stage, you've got data set being shared and you're actually starting to really accelerate the rate at which you get a return from your initiatives.
I kind of actually covered a lot of this. So what does that mean for your business? It means that you have the flexibility to run multiple initiatives with really detailed measurements so that you can get consistency of outcome and also really start to dial up and scale. It will mean that you can actually start to move into different territories and do so with confidence and you essentially be getting a really good return on your investment in technology. This is the level that you really want to get to. It's difficult. It does take a processes we've talked through today, but it's worth the effort to get there because it does create a really solid business that gives you a lot of long term flexibility and control over outcomes. Often businesses at the stage, they may look at outsourcing too. Just so we're clear, you may be able to source whole business functions of sure the label you don't improve profit margins, really scale and grow your business as well.
At the mastery level, you're running monthly SEO and advertising campaigns and all of this scale to your market potential because you know the outcomes of what you're doing. So you can use a blend of different traditional marketing and digital marketing techniques, and it will still be able to get a really good understanding of whether or not you're getting that return. So maintaining those robust integrations is critical, and that data sharing and automation. You might want to look at automated chatbots as well that can actually start to have the kind of conversations you might have on a one on one basis.
Now you can have on a one to many basis through those sort of tools. You'll definitely be looking at content and developing content that helps educate people so that they know the benefits of buying from you, from your products and services. And those chat bots will really, really help you convert as well.
Taking the next step on your digital journey, hopefully, we've only got so much time on a session like this today. Hopefully that's given you some really good understanding of the different stages that people, the businesses go through and what you need to get good at at the stage that you're in at the moment. So it does sometimes require some quite massive changes within your organisation and a bit of adaptability because you need to often not just try and get technology to work for you, but often change the way that your business operates so that it can really leverage that technology properly.
But adapting and changing like that is far better than staying still and getting left behind because we are seeing those businesses that have adopted these sort of techniques accelerating far more quickly than other businesses. And so it is kind of our mission here at Zeald to help as many businesses as possible take advantage of the digital economy and get connected. We want to see New Zealand as one of the most connected countries in the world, and that's part of why we do these webinars and why we create these sort of models to help people.
If you are interested in understanding more about this process, we can connect you with one of our digital strategists who are experts and understanding where businesses at right now and how they can, what they can adopt to take the step towards the next level. So if you're interested in that, and we do have the ability to connect you with one of our strategists, if you wish. Yeah. That's session for today open to questions, really keen to hear thoughts and feedback and help clarify anything, if I can. Also, that was such great information. Thank you, too. I have a question to start it off with until we get some more coming through. So that is one thing that a business in the intermediate stage can do to transition forward is something that's really effective.
And I can do some that's probably getting right to the crux of this discussion today is really that intermediate stages is the one where a lot of businesses find themselves get stuck. If business different is kind of quite hard to go. Like, this is the one thing that's going to work for you. But there's a range of things that you probably should be looking at and deciding on what's the right one for your business. So that would be either getting some integration between core systems because you find that you're really getting stuck working on them yourselves or looking at outsourcing essentially some of those admin functions so that you don't have resource tied up, entering data into multiple systems.
So that latter one often is a better place to start for most businesses, because by getting a low cost offshore resource to manage that sort of administrative task, you get a really good understanding of how much workers involved there. And from there you can maybe integrate later on. But what that does is that frees up resource within your business to be able to focus on much higher value tasks, like running more sales and initiatives, improving business processes to improve customer satisfaction, and helping grow or increase customer attention.
So looking at what you're doing is thing to bring up resource to focus on those tasks. It's about resource allocation at that stage. So, yeah, it's not a specific one thing, but that's really what you've got to try and look at at that intermediate stage to get through to advanced.
And I think also sing is something that might seem like a daunting task initially, but it's actually such a bad thing for businesses to to be able to focus on the really important things in order to move forward within their digital journey. So, yeah, absolutely agree. We have some questions is going to say it's really common to like it's way more common than most people realise. As we have a question, can you outline Tag Manager? And okay. So Tag Tag Manager as Google, one of Google's tracking tools, it works in conjunction with Google Analytics, and it allows you to measure interactions with elements on your website. So let's say someone arrives on your website and they're on a mobile phone and they click on a phone number and they go through their dialer and they phone you. Right. If you're just running standard analytics, you can't really measure that. With Tag Manager, you can track that interactional. That button click and set it up as a goal with an analytics.
So Tag Manager essentially allows you to track outcomes on your website or business critical or important activities on the website. So that's what that's used. And Facebook Pixel is as Facebook's version of analytics, and it allows you to track and measure more accurately the impact of your social activities. So it measures what happens and who interacts with your content on Facebook and then what they do once they get through your website. Those are really critical things to understand because it allows you to track outcomes at the end of the day. Just getting people through to your website or viewing content that you produce is all well and good, but it's not not a business outcome. The business outcome should be someone giving you a call, filling out a form, buying something online, signing up for your use database. These are all things that have value to an organisation. And so Pixel and Take Manager allow you to track.
Absolutely. And just in general, understanding where your traffic is coming from is such a valuable insight and you can really help you make changes where necessary to improve your processes. A great question. Thank you. And then Robin asks Facebook Ads versus Google Ads, which is the best for small business. Robin, if you'd like to maybe also comment in what stage within the digital transformation journey your business in just for a little bit more insight. Facebook Ads versus Google Ads, I think.
Robin, I think it's the Robin Parker. I think it has been. Helloalle. Good question. So it's there's a simple decision making process you can go through determine if Google Ads or Facebook Ads are right for you. If your customers are generally aware of your products and services right, they will be searching for what your products and services are. And so therefore, Google Ads is generally a better option. So if your product is known and there is a captive market for that product, then you want to be directing them through to you with Google Ads.
If people are not aware of your business, your brand, your product, or they don't even really know about what your product is, then you want to be looking at something like Facebook Ads. And there's a range of different kind of as that you can run that are called display ads, either on Facebook or other platforms, but they're designed to stimulate the market. They're designed to reach new people that aren't aware of your products and services and educate them a little bit and get them into a buying process. So your decision around whether or not use Google Ads or Facebook as a small business is generally do people know about my products and services or did they not? And that's generally a simple way that's general how I look at great.
Thank you. And we have another question for home service business with only a technician with a static frame website fire. Or should we invest in a website with CMS like WordPress? Right question. So I think if you're going to be looking at a website, I think in all cases you should be looking at one that has a powerful and flexible content management systems. Cms, the reason being is that it will allow you to more easily update and change the website and will allow the website to grow with you as an organisation and not necessarily in terms of size, but in terms of complexity so that it can be to support your customers buying process. So without knowing all of the detail around your organisation, you know there's likely to be processes that can be done on your website that will support the business goals and the wider way that the business interacts with its customers.
So having a content management system like WordPress and there's a range of other ones out there that have got some great tools that you can integrate, that's a far better option to invest in something like that that's going to be able to grow with you over time. Then we have another Facebook related question from Teresa. Is Facebook Pixel only available through the Facebook business site? You're going to need to have a Facebook page set up and you're going to need to have the Facebook business manager configured to get the Pixel otherwise wouldn't have things to track specifically. So I believe that's the case.
And then we have another question for a company with no previous internet marketing experience, would you recommend starting with social media marketing? So, for example, Facebook, or would you recommend Google Ads to be more effective? I think I kind of covered this a little bit before and just in terms of you really need to understand who your customers are. So it's not really a one size fits all, and every business should start with Ads will start with social media marketing comes down to who your customers are. That's the most important decision making in this. Who are your customers? How much do they understand about your products and services? Where are they spending their time and how do we reach them effectively so that they look to buy from you? And so if you understand that buying process that your customers go through, then you can understand which tactic there you should be using. If you still unsure. And it's pretty hard when I just give general answers like this without knowing the detail, then we do offer a free before a free strategy service where we can actually help you evaluate your customers and look at the buying process and make some recommendations around what's the right option for you.
Great. So if there's any other question. Sorry. Just one thing, one thing on that last one, just one thing. It's probably with mentioning. Generally, if people do know about your product and service and they are searching for products and services, then looking at Google Ads and search engine optimization does generally return the more to start with than what Facebook will. And that's because people are actively searching for your products and services. And if you can get in front of them. At that stage, they're closer to buying. And so that's generally it's likely to get you a better return on investment if you do know that people are looking.
So let's say you sell a widget. I think if we go back to Robert, if you sell sewing machines, people are looking for sewing machines. So if you can get in front of people looking for sewing machines, you're likely to get a bit of return on investment. Then if you go into Facebook and try and convince them that they need to buy a sewing machine. So if you can use Google Ads, it generally works. It often works really, really well and much more effectively than Facebook ads. If you can try and try and get some budget for both and test and work out what works for you.
Yeah, I agree with that. I think testing and especially if you're testing something and you find that it doesn't work, it actually gives a lot of insight as well. And then that way you can adjust what you do doing and reason forward. They specifically when you test something that is very similar, it has slight differences, I think works really well as well. To find out what works for you and what doesn't, I think there's no other questions. Share my screen the second great. So I just wanted to give you a a quick overview of is the old company and a bit more about what it is that we do.
The 4 Digital transformation stages and how to utilise them to scale your business - Transcript
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