Enterprise Ireland: E-marketing Workshop
Where: Crowne Plaza Hotel, Dublin on 20th of October 2011.
Today we attended an excellent event on international Web design, marketing and communication run by Enterprise Ireland in the Crowne Plaza in Blanchardstown.
The opening address was by Jennifer Condon, Divisional Manager of EI who spoke about the importance of the Web in driving Ireland’s future success.
Aileen O’Toole director of Amas spoke about the growth of the Internet and ecommerce sales for Irish companies. Some facts included:
- 72% of households access the Internet at home, a very high penetration
- Your online presence will directly impact your offline sales
- 90% of people surveyed in Europe prefer to browse websites in their local language, so translation is important
- Bad translation will lose you business and advised against using free tools like Google Translate
Next up was Gareth Dunlop who gave an amazing presentation on how content is king!
Gareth’s presentation style is very relaxed and direct to the point. Creating good content is important. He showed us an example of a stock photograph of a group of people used on 10 different websites. “Surely these people don’t work for all these companies,” he said! Creating your own photos and content shows an honesty that comes across to your customers.
In the old days, websites just had the basics — visitors to your site now demand content they can use however, as Gareth stated “Internet simplicity, is very difficult to achieve.
Ed Field from Digino Marketing | Maverick International followed with the next step, communicating your message to your target audience. I found this very thought-provoking. Ed had a slightly different spin on the classic USP. We all talk about Unique Selling Points and Elevator pitches, but at the end of the day Ed asks “what are you brilliant at?”
It’s amazing how a simple question can result in a lack of responses. We all struggled to define what our USPs, but I can tell you instantly what we are brilliant at. “We are probably the best technical translators in the world.” We are excellent at technical documents and technical marketing. Now, how do I get that message across on our website and marketing material. Certainly it’s a lot easier than defining a USP statement.
When customers visit your website you have to get their attention in 6 seconds and convince them in under 3 minutes. There is no space on your website for fluffy text. People just want answers. When was the last time you visited an airline website to see what planes they have? Never. You just want to buy a seat. Does this apply to your business?
Now, once you have all this sorted out on your website, can you now do it in 12 languages? That was John Coburn’s topic International Search Engine Marketing.
It was an excellent morning with plenty of thought-provoking ideas, and work for us to do on our own export sales.