eBusiness.lk

e-Business for Small Businesses in Sri Lanka

How to Promote Your “Leisure” Related Business Online

On August 5, 2010, in eMarketing, by Niro

This post is directly related to a successful marketing pitch I did for Ambalama Leisure Lounge. Lets discuss how we built the online business development formula so that we can use the learning’s for our businesses. As most of our traditional businesses – Ambalama was a reputed and stable boutique hotel who have never thought about a real online marketing strategy.

Before going forward have a look at the Promotion Page we have done for Ambalama. We thank the owner being so generous of giving such a good discount for any eBusiness.lk visitor.

Ambalama Leisure Lounge Landing Page

Planing the Online Strategy

Stage 1 – Test Run to understand if its an online worthy product.
Stage 2 – Success and We Go Online (Website Creation)
Stage 3 – Special Promotion Strategy ( Strategy formulation and reach )
Stage 4 – CRM (Customer Relationship Management System ) Implementation to organize the sales team.
Stage 5 – Team Formulation (Merging Online and Offline marketing effort to be consistent with sales.)

Stage 1 – Test Run to understand if its online worthy product.

Not every product and service can be sold online. We have to be very careful of what we select and how we go online. If we think its a good product/service to go online, then the first thing is to do a small online campaign and see if its profitable.

However even you fail in this step – do an intelligent guess if you have put good effort or not. Fortunately we at eBusiness.lk have many experiences. We use our experiences and the knowledge gained through the sample campaign to decide if it has potential.

Ambalama eMarketing Promotion Page

Above is the single landing page we did. We threw 10,000 customers to the page using FB and Google (adwords). Our Advertising was spot on and very targeted. It was our intention to understand the effectiveness and not to test variations. I stress that you should be very focused – in a test run.

AD campaign should have a good CTR and be FOCUSED ( else your sample campaign is useless)

Normally FB ad campaign should have at least 12%-20% CTR for a Leisure product that is focused on Sri lanka. On Google ad-words I would be happy 5% CTR. There is a reason for this. Anbody coming from an adwords ad is considered more qualified than a FB user – simply because they coming after a related search.

following are some display ads we used on FB : ( we did 20 different ads )

Note : When you create a campaign on FB make sure you create at least 20+ ads . Use effective image ads. But in adwords never try to have too many similer ads unless you are doing a split testing for optimization.

Now how do you consider its an online worthy, There is no clear cut – but use the following as a guide line,

Did your online campaign perform well in a CTR ( Click Through Rate) perspective ? - eg: Its good if Adwords >5% (in sl), FB >16% – in leisure related products in SL
Did you get a good Conversion Rate ? – when a visitor converts to a sale we call it a conversion. See how many visitors you got to the page and how many leads ( potential customer) you got. Make sure you have tracked the offline calls and other conversions also. ( We expect at least a >2% conversion rate in this leisure related services in SL )
Did you get a good low bounce rate ? Bounce rate will explain both effectiveness of the content and Ads quality. If an ad is good, the landing page content is focused – people will not bounce. Keep the Bounce rate at least under 60% in a leisure product/service in SL environment.
Did more customers come requesting information ? This could be good if they come to ask what the promotion is , but more often you have failed conveying your message in the landing page.

If its Yes to the 1 , 2, 3 and a good No to the last – You are Successful ! You have done a good testing campaign and found that its has potential to go online.

Note : No need to worry about CPC (Cost Per Click) or CPA (Cost Per Accusation) at this moment. We are just testing. We can optimize later.

Stage 2 – Success and We Go Online (Website Creation)

I personally recommend to have a website what ever the product/service you have. But if you think you can gain online profit – use a good eBusiness Consultation firm to advice you and build one. Many Sri Lankans build site just for the sake of building it. Eventually the Rs.40,000 – 80,00 spent is lost – no use – no customers.

Ambalama.lk

Planing is the key – if you don’t have enough money, break the site in to modules and develop it. This is how we developed the Ambalama.lk

Phase 1 : Normal Website Design ( Be consistent with your offline activities (theme) – many SL developers lazy and they don’t do this)
Phase 2 : Strategizing for eMarketing activities
- Think how you can get the people registered to an eMail List (simple email list subscriber)
- Think how the visitor can easily contact Ambalama sales persons.
- Think what are the ways you can improve effectiveness ( eg: Vacation calculator)
- Include all offline / Online promotions. Encourage the online visitor.
- Please keep Analytics on (Google Analytics) so that you know the Traffic reports.
Phase 3 : Get the eBusiness partner to do an eNews every week and send to the customers (Very effective) – this is the strategy to get a customer return.
Phase 4 : An Online Reservation System.

Stage 3 – Special Promotion Strategy ( Strategy formulation and reach )

Many lankan companies don’t do the maths. Some give discounts just for the sake of getting visitors/customers. Some promotions are utter loss. I would say have one solid promotion but do the calculations first.

eg: Think you give a Buy 1 & Get 1 free offer. This will probably lose the profit what you will have. You have to do this promotion if and only if you can get a returning customer or a referel. THINK LIKE THAT !!

We sat with the owner and brought all Offline Promotions to online. Not only that doing math we found we can give better offers to the online visitor. So we did,

This is the card we designed for the promotion -

Ambalama Offer Card Online & Offline

Stage 4 – CRM (Customer Relationship Management System ) to organize the sales team.

When doing two marketing efforts we need to consider about resource allocation a lot. Unfortunately many lankan companies don’t have marketing teams who are IT savy. We trained the Ambalama Marketing team to use a CRM.

A crm is a customer relationship management system – it can send invoices / proposals / track leads and automate the whole sales process. If you know IT, CRM installation is easy and its free.

How our CRM works,

Any online visitor filling the form will automatically added as a lead in the CRM.
We have also purchased the Lankan Company DB and added them as leads.
We give Ambalama sales persons to contact them each day and mark the progress.
We do follow-ups with the leads ( some convert to a sale later)
I know now who are contacted – and who are not / also anybody in progress.
After each 100 contacts we evaluate our strategy according to the outcome.

Believe me this is a life saver for any marketer !! So easy !! So organized !!

Stage 4 – Team Formulation (Merging Online and Offline marketing effort to be consistent.)

Once the customer is satisfied with initial results its time to pump some money for deeper eMarketing activities. Till then we were considering eMarketing as a separate team and not anymore.

Both teams are now one marketing team and – Theme building / New Promotions / New Strategies should be discussed together. Now onwards there is a need to think how to adopt any MK effort with the online environment. Also any online promotion should go hand in hand with the offline effort.

Use offline resources like leaf lets / banners / cut-outs and etc.. To get people introduced to the online resources.