Posted by: Will – Priority Juggler on August 9th, 2007

This year has been a real roller coaster at Arena already. The first three months of the year for any florist are consumed by Valentine’s day and Mother’s day, with all florists living in mortal terror of getting it wrong and losing a lot of money. In order to get through such mega days, Valentine’s day in particular, the whole business has to be reorganised and made to operate totally differently from normal. That’s a subject for another post and another day.

After the all consuming mega day adventures of the start of the year, our focus shifted to areas of the business that we’d been neglecting. One area to which we were able to give more attention was the conundrum of how to escape the clutches of Google. We spend a lot of money with Google, for clicks, and we’d really rather not. So we dived head first into ideas for getting people to our website without paying for clicks. Consequently, the last few months have been an education for us all in the lesser spotted (and less measurable) tactics of web marketing, including blogging, social bookmarking and, more recently, the internet’s latest hot topic, social networking (mainly Facebook – move over myspace/youtube/eBay, your time in the PR hotseat is over!).

So, in no particular order, here are some of the things that we’ve been up to / thinking about / forgotten to do and / or messed up in the vain hope of uncoupling our business’s fortunes from the whims of Google.

Blogging – inhouse
You know already that we’ve got a blog. It’s currently being read to you by that funny voice inside your head. :) Setting up the blog was a great idea and not too hard to do (thanks, Adrian!). The blog gives us a great place to talk about what’s under the skin of Arena, who we are as people and how we run the business. We can’t really do that elsewhere:

• Our about Arena Flowers page has most of the key information about us as an organisation and what we stand for but not much about how we run the business;
• Our homepage has one main job – to convert visitors to sales as effectively as possible so no space for our ramblings;
• Our news page talks about articles and press, but doesn’t give much context or background – just the story.

So, the blog gives us an opportunity to communicate in a different way with our customers and visitors. Great, but so what? It does take a fair bit of time, but that’s fine…writing it is fun and doesn’t really feel like work. The key thing is that 1. it’s had a lot of visits (thousands, if you believe Google Analytics), so someone’s reading and 2. the clear feedback we’ve had is that it does indeed give people greater confidence in Arena and that can only be a good thing. Oh, plus we’ve had a nice write up from Microsoft, which was a bit of a surprise but very welcome.

Blogging – inbound
A more vexed issue is that of inviting bloggers to write about Arena (preferably without sounding like a used car salesman). There a few reasons we were thinking about doing this:

1. Blogs have good “google juice” – they’re written by real people who choose what to write about and they have lots of content, so, unsurprisingly, Google likes them – the logic being that if bloggers are writing about a website then it may be okay. So the blogger is effectively giving Google a leg up in deciding whether a site is any good. Thus links from blogs are valuable in terms of going up in Google’s search results. I’m not going to lie and pretend that’s not one of the reasons for doing this.
2. Good bloggers have a big audience – impress a blogger, you might impress their readers.
3. Bloggers are often early adopters – the right bloggers know good web, so we felt we could get some valuable input on how they felt our site worked for them.

The above is all good (for us), but what’s in it for the blogger? It feels a bit cheeky to go and ask a random stranger “Please put your credibility at risk by writing about us”. Fortunately, friend of Arena Adrian, who blogs both personally and professionally, was able to put me in touch with bloggers he knows well, so I wouldn’t effectively be cold-calling. He recommended five eminent bloggers and suggested we contact them and ask them to undertake a free trial of our service, or, if they felt uncomfortable, to suggest a charity we could give our money to instead. Obviously, the scary thing about doing this is that we could mess it up and then get hammered – we would have no control over what was written about us.

Of the five gurus we contacted, we had one non responder plus four differing responses:

• Gordon had previously used Arena, and he took us up on the offer, though not without questioning whether he should. He then did a really interesting write up, with lots of useful suggestions for areas we could improve. Partly as a result of his input we’ll be rolling out a new checkout soon, to coincide with the launch of new websites later in the year (more to come on that in another post). We’d also like to simplify our homepage, but haven’t yet had the time to sit down and work out how to remove some of the buttons without reducing the effectiveness. But we will!

• Anna noted on her blog that she was considering selling her soul for a bunch of flowers :) but we never heard any more. Still..she only has one soul so we don’t blame her for not taking us up on our cheeky offer.

• Meg emailed me to say that she had been considering writing something about us but that she’d then received a marketing email from us, unsolicited. Therefore she felt that she probably wouldn’t do a write up. I could understand exactly why – spam is incredibly annoying and is certainly something we don’t condone and we sent her the email by mistake. Meg’s input was in fact extremely helpful, as it helped us find a glitch in our system so that such issues can’t happen again.

• Finally, Zoe took us up on the offer of sending £50 to a charity of her choice rather than send flowers. Naturally, we were more than happy to oblige, sending £50 to Connah’s Appeal and having a great email exchange into the bargain. Ironically, having decided today as I rode to work that I would write up this post, this was the day that Zoe said hello on Facebook. Co-incidental timing or what?!

Clearly this post is already too long, so I’ll talk about the rest of what we got up to and learnt in a later instalment. But in terms of the blogging side of things – doing it for ourselves was a no brainer, hence we continue doing it. We really think it serves a purpose as a business and is worth the considerable time investment that it takes. Plus it has generated us a fair few PR leads to boot (though I’m very reluctant to be painted as an authority – I’m not).

In terms of inviting others to review our site, that was more scary but also proved to be very fruitful. We haven’t had an abundance of inbound links as a result, but we have had some great interactions with influential members of the online community; we have fixed some bugs in our site (always good!), we changed our cart development roadmap a little, and we learnt a lot in the process. All extremely valuable input.

In summary: A good start!

In the next instalment: Arena Flower’s BT Tradespace, Flowers & Fun Facebook app, and why the screengrab below is just another bit of evidence that social bookmarking is now just a spamfest:

So until then, erm, maybe you’d like to buy your loved one the finest flowers in the UK? They really are the best flowers out there and I had to get something about flowers in!

 

Filed under: Marketing, Matters Webby on August 9th, 2007

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