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LinkedIn Training Offer

Five Festive Fridays Offer Five

Find out how to harness the power of Linkedin to your business advantage with in-house LinkedIn training for your staff.

Only £95.00!

This 50% discount offer must be purchased before 11 January 2013 and redeemed by 31 March 2013.

Mobile Website Special Offer

Five Festive Fridays Offer Four

More and more web users browse the web on mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets but conventional full websites can be harder to browse on mobile devices because of the smaller screen size.

Mobile websites are the answer!

For one week only, we are offering a mobile website complete with one year hosting and Google Analytics.

For Only £550 + VAT!

This special offer  is valid only for purchases made until Friday 21 December 2012.

eCommerce Website Special Offer

Five Festive Fridays Offer Three

Sell your products online with an eCommerce Shop. A full eCommerce website with your first 30 products preloaded, training and PayPal connection in place.

Only £1495 + VAT!

This special offer  is valid only for purchases made until Friday 14 December 2012.

Three Email Newsletter Campaigns Offer

Five Festive Fridays Offer Two

Get a marketing message out quickly and effectively to your customers with our offer of three email newsletter campaigns created and sent out to your entire database.

Simply give us your contacts and content and we will do the rest.

Only £150 per campaign!

This 50% discount offer must be purchased before Friday 7th December 2012.

Once purchased, this offer must be redeemed by 31 March 2013. No changes or updates to newsletters permitted once contacts and copy are submitted. Database of up to 5000 contacts.

Keyword Rich Domain Names Offer

Five Festive Fridays Offer

Buy additional keyword rich domain names and point them to your website to boost your online presence and search results at our specially discounted rate.

Example: Toltech Internet would typically want to own internetmarketing.com, emailnewsletters.com and onlinemarketingscotland.co.uk.

.co.uk ONLY £12.50 

.com ONLY £17.50 

This 50% reduction is only valid until Friday 30 November 2012!

Toltech’s Five Fantastic Festive Offers

The Festive season is upon us once again and to celebrate we thought we could do something different this year by offering five fabulous deals over the next five weeks.

We think that these five fantastic Festive offers could help enhance your online presence and save you some money at the same time.

Each offer will be available to purchase for one week only so check Toltech on Facebook or subscribe to the Toltech Newsletter for all the details!

This week’s Offer is for Three E-mail Newsletter Campaigns at a 50% discount!

Question: What’s the cost of a good website? Answer: Nothing compared to the cost of a bad website!

I once read an article which stated “What’s the cost of a Good Education?” to which the reply was “Nothing compared to the cost of a bad one”.  The reason I raise this topic is because it’s so important to try to get a focus on like for like.

Business Prospect

This week I was contacted by a business owner from Dundee, he told me he needed help to market his business online, which is the service we supply.  Whilst talking to him I started to assess his website and asked him various questions. Who was his target audience? What was the role of the website in his business? What was it bringing to him business-wise, was it saving him time, saving him money, did it speed up processes? etc.

As I was assessing his site, I could see how many areas could be improved. I could see the focus was wrong, it didn’t attract his audience and had few chances of attracting other prospects.  The whole site was effectively written from the inside out and would never be attractive to his audience. It was also poorly coded. There was code missing which is important for the search engines and would be detrimental to being found.

Wrong Approach

Dissecting his website piece by piece, suddenly the light bulbs start to go on and he could see where his site was failing. He started to see where his site was working against him and how it lacked the ability to deliver results.

Family and Friends are great but not always best for Straight Talking Advice

This client also asked friends, employees and family what they thought of his website – “Great” they all said. What did he expect? If I want advice on a sore tooth, I’ll talk to a dentist, not friends and family.  If I want advice on building a house, I’ll talk to an architect, not friends and family.

If you are thinking of having a website built, talk to a website developer. If you want a website that will also deliver more business, talk to a website developer who also gives online business advice and strategies – don’t talk to friends and family. They are all nice people, but you need the hard business facts.

Like for Like

The reason for this blog was to try to point out like for like.  Because two people can build a website and they both look okay doesn’t mean that they are the same. I wouldn’t be able to point out good jewellery from fake, but a jeweller would. A website has many levels, the design, the words, the images and the scripts that run the forms and moving images.  Did the programmer have the expertise to write code to tell the search engines what to do with the site, how often to come back and catalogue the information and where all the information is?  How will the site work on different browsers and different platforms of Mac, PC? etc. It get’s deeper and deeper the more you look and this is the difference between knowing the right questions to ask when assessing a site, and not. Most business owners don’t know what they are buying into and sadly their site does nothing for them and they don’t have any expectations for it to do so.

This is completely unacceptable to any business person. The web should be a main source of revenue. It should be a major part of your strategy. It can bring you business and this is why many traditional marketing channels are dying out, such as Yellow Pages, Thomson Local, Trade magazines, etc. It is important you fix a budget and implement a strategy in order to get a measured return.

This is our area of expertise, We can help!

Traditional ways are costing business.

There are many businesses we come across who are very good at what they do whether it is manufacturing, legal work, engineering or hospitality services. I was dismayed to read today that manufacturing output is down however not surprised as I don’t think as a nation we have educated manufacturers enough in the online market to promote themselves and their products to a bigger better audience.

A clear pattern for us over the years as to whether we think a business will adopt the latest technology when it comes to research and marketing of their business is in the dialogue we have at the first meeting.

The most common misconception we get from potential clients is that they say they are not techie, don’t know one end of a computer from the other or answers of that mind set.  What skills they generally do have however is a good understanding of how to run a business, creating product, buying and selling, what their staff are up to and how to make money.  However the web and its technologies bamboozle them and this in many ways should be to the fore in all of these businesses.

It’s very hard to convince someone to buy into an area when you know that they feel very uncomfortable doing so.  The negative impact on this is Yes they can run their business and Yes they have always done it this way and it has worked up until now, however slowly but surely others in their own field are adopting these modern ways and with these skills they can reach far further and faster into the marketplace and win business before the old school company even knew there was business to be won.

It generally starts as a flat year no growth and then they are down 4%  on last year and suddenly it’s 10% down and a very steep hill to climb as money is now tighter and even less of a chance of getting it spent on raising their visibilty.

The old school say we have a website, we’re online, we’re No1 in Google if you type our name in and they look at it once every two years to give it an update.  The new school have their website which they update weekly, they continually add case studies, news, investments, send out email newsletters, use the internet to gather information about competitors, potential clients and have a budget and a strategy of how much business they will bring in this year using the technology. They have a plan and in doing so they can measure it, market themselves far cheaper than ever before, they only need to send salespeople out when they have a positive reason and can develop more sales with less reps on the road.

It’s a fact that more businesses from far and wide are targeting your local market whatever sector you are in. And as they keep chipping away at your slice of cake it gets harder and harder each year.

You can however fight back.

If you think that having a website is what your company needs you are completely wrong. You need a plan, a strategy and a business like ours to guide you.

Social Media Accountability

Recent news that Google is beta testing a new section of their already comprehensive Analytics is good news for business.

The ability to be able to track any business that possibly came through a tweet, Facebook comment, etc, will be attractive to businesses who measure all traffic.

Hopefully it will give us real facts rather than some of the hype that can sometimes allude to business coming from one direction when in fact it is unproven.

Company directors will now be able to measure whether their spend in this arena will be justified or not.

We certainly come across many businesses who benefit from social media but we also see many who don’t and this is the beauty of this new service.

For any business unsure about Google Analytics and need to know more, we now do free training sessions on an adhoc basis every other Friday. If you want to come along just call us on 01475 746213 and arrange to come in.

Refurbishing your hotel – don’t keep it to yourself

I have talked to a number of hotel owners in recent weeks and not surprisingly at this time of year some are already giving their establishments a makeover in preparation for next season.

So far I have been told about redecorating of bedrooms and dining rooms, new kitchen installations, renewing of laundry equipment, replacement of beds and complete renovation of eight bedrooms with addition of ensuite bathrooms. All of these makeovers are important to keep the quality levels up and to give the visitors to the hotels a better experience.

I asked the question of one of these renovations which was costing in excess of £50,000 ‘what is the plan to tell the guests about the changes and timeframe to get a return’?

I was surprised that the owner said he hadn’t planned to spend any money on marketing this as he had spent his limit on the refurbishment.

It is very important when you are spending such sums to keep a budget aside to ‘shout about it from the rooftops’ and spread the word over the Internet. Does the hotel owner think it’s good to sit and look at an empty reservation book and have nice clean rooms than spend part of the budget on marketing. I mentioned I thought it best he keep one room unchanged and spend that money on the marketing to fill the rooms and then he can finish the last room later.

Within a very short period we could set up an email marketing campaign to all the previous guests to tell them about the refurbishment and give them offers to be first to stay in the new rooms. This is one simple area we could extend it by 20 other activities all equally important.

The Internet is not going away and all hotel establishments should set an annual budget to push the boundaries and get the audience they need to sell to. We have been working with many hotels over the years to help them achieve as high an occupancy level as possible with set targets and growth plans year on year.

Invest in the marketing of your hotel, no point in sitting in a nicely decorated hotel with no visitors.

Call and talk to Grahame 01475 746213