August 31, 2006

Interview with Brian Turner

by Brian Turner

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Brian Turner is the director of both Britecorp Marketing, and Platinax Internet.

Key to his approach to business is a focus on strong customer care and providing real value for money.

Brian is an internationally known business consultant and SEO.

You’ve established an internet presence, and often promote the internet as a business medium. But isn’t the internet just all hype, and is there really any importance in a business have a web presence?

I’m something of an internet evangelist – I firmly believe that any business that doesn’t have a proper web presence is really missing out on lead generation opportunities.

Let’s put it this way – the internet is the most accessible medium on the planet for business. Some companies spend hundreds, thousands, or even millions of pounds trying to reach targeted market segments in print publishing, radio ads, and television. But the internet allows you to reach targeted market segments for much less cost.

Search marketing – SEO and PPC – mean that lead generation for online sales can be incredibly cost-effective compared to other advertising mediums. And with broadband penetration already at over 60% in the UK alone, you are going to see the internet play an increasing role in daily life, whatever a person’s personal circumstances. Businesses that stand on the side-lines will have to invest much more money playing catch up later on.

You say that every business should be online – but surely this isn’t the case for local companies? If I run a pizza delivery shop that only serves a 5 mile radius, surely my target market is so narrowly local that trying to gain an international internet presence is of little value?

Now, that’s the problem – the assumption that the internet is only global. The internet serves all geographical bases – local, national, and international. And, sure, a business with only a very local catchment area doesn’t need to invest in marketing themselves internationally.

But the point is that because the internet serves the local market as well – and will become increasingly targeted towards serving local markets via Google Local and similar applications – it means that even just having a website representing your area, with keywords relating to that area, means that customers can find you much more easily when they need to make a purchase. If your competitors do this instead, they’ll make the sale, not you.

Now you’ve mentioned keywords, and as you are a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) consultant, I presume you’re talking about SEO targeting for lead generation? Does this actually work, at any level of business?

Absolutely! Think about how important positioning is for a bricks and mortar business – if you’re selling to general consumers, a position on the high street is going to be a lot more lucrative that in the fields behind a village miles away from any town or city.

It’s an analogy that applies to the internet, too – get on the first page of Google for listing your products and services, and it’s like having that position on the high street. Your business has much more visibility, and is more likely to be found by those consumers looking for those products and services.

You mentioned about general consumers, but what about business to business (b2b) services? Surely industrial contractors aren’t going to see the same benefits?

Any business that needs sales leads needs visibility – the internet provides that. I was with a group of small business directors last night, some of whom were complaining about how difficult it is to tender for civil service contracts.

Yet I already have clients who provide goods and services for local civil services, simply by being found on Google. Sure, it’s not big tender contracts, but let’s put it this way – if you’ve been noticed and purchased from before by a local authority, isn’t that going to put your company in a better position to compete for a tender than a similar-sized company that is an effective unknown?

And lets put it another way – if you need to buy business services, you need to look out for suppliers of those services. Traditionally, people may look in trade books and the Yellow Pages – but the internet does that now.

I’ll underline the point – any business that needs to make sales needs visibility to make those sales. The internet is a medium brilliantly suited to provide that visibility in an extremely targeted way. Search marketing is a great way to deliver on that visibility.

You’ve mentioned the cost-effectiveness of running an online business, but how does this apply to start-up costs? Even if you don’t have the initial overheads of a bricks and mortar business, surely the start-up costs can still be large?

I really don’t think so – if you really want to, you can start-up a business on peanuts and scale up. That’s precisely what I did with my own company – I reinvested on my profits to buy software and services that would help my business deliver more.

My actual start-up costs from my own pocket at the very beginning was about £200, and that was simply to pay for a merchant gateway to take payments online. By reinvesting in my business, I’ve built that £200 start-up investment into a company that grew big enough to need to be VAT registered.

How important is a business plan when setting up online? If the costs are less, surely that means you need less planning? Or does there still need to be a lot of business planning for strategic development?

To be honest, I didn’t do any business planning. I had a try before setting up in business, but I hated the way I found myself having to guess all my figures. And you can’t simply walk up to a similar company and ask for a full outlay of their revenues and costs.

So in the end I played it by ear and attempted to be as flexible as possible. The internet is so changeable that you absolutely need that extra flexibility to cope with how the internet changes.

But now that I’m trying to establish my business more, I have figures I need and can use to draw up proper marketing strategies. That’s what I’m doing at the moment – I’m ready to expand and can set up a plan on issues such as Customer Lifetime Value and offset them against estimated Customer Acquisition costs.

I’m not saying that a business plan isn’t important at the start – simply that you need a clear idea of what you expect to have to do, then adapt to what you find you need to have to do. I already had a good idea of my market and how it worked, having done hobbyist SEO for a couple of years previously, so I knew more or less what was expected of me at the start.

Even then, customers add such an extra pressure to achieve, that it still felt like I’d paddled in the little pool, and now had to swim in the big pool. I liked the challenge, though.

On good days, running an online business is one big strategy game with no clear rule book. I enjoy that challenge. On bad days it’s simply work. :)

You started up Platinax to help other businesses get online. Isn’t this a bit dumb, in that you’re helping your competitors?

The aim is that Platinax will become something like an online version of Business Link. An accessible resource like that is desperately needed, because most businesses – and business advisors – have little idea about the technicalities of using the internet for business purposes.

That’s what Platinax is for – to cover the gap, and draw on the experiences of other businesses and how they solved specific issues, whether webhosting, website accessibility, lead generation online, using ecommerce carts, and keyword targeting for search marketing.

Platinax isn’t in competition with anybody, and frankly my main business company – Britecorp Ltd – isn’t in direct competition with anybody either.

SEO is one of the least pretentious disciplines to work in. SEO’s regularly meet up and discuss SEO and business issues. As we’re helping businesses in all sectors, there’s a wide ground for discussion where we aren’t going to be in competition with one another.

You’ve mentioned about the opportunities of the internet, and how easy it can be to start-up. Do you see those opportunities continuing, and how do you see the internet changing over the next few years?

Certainly the opportunities are lessening – nowadays I very much feel like I’m one of the last ones through the door. The low-hanging fruit feel as though they are almost gone.

Yes, I can develop a business online, but it’s always the maxim that the more established a business is, the least vulnerable it may be to changes.

So now I’m developing a business online, I need to establish firmer roots. That’s why I’m at the stage where I need a marketing plan and firm drive to aggressively expand and capture that firm ground.

And the internet is changing – streaming media, such as video, music, and VoIP, as well as local search, personalised search – the whole gamut of internet sectors are growing and expanding, and you need to develop a more specialised skillset to work with them.

And that’s why any business that hasn’t established an internet presence now, is simply storing up their costs for later years when they do need it. People who intentionally wait at the back of the queue can’t complain if all they can get served is scraps.

You work from home with your business. Is this something that’s easy to get used to, or does it take time to develop a routine?

For myself, the important point you must never forget when working from home is that you are working. It’s easy to be distracted, so you need to hold yourself to targets and meet them.

Do that, and reward yourself with a half-hour discussion on forums, or read of a news portal site.

But as business develops and picks up, you really need that discipline, and the ability to idle time in online discussions becomes less and less.

That’s why SEO forums are often filled with people new to the industry – they have time to idle. The big names of the industry post little, but when they do, you pay attention.

Okay, so here’s the big question – what do you think of Google?

It’s a love-hate relationship. When it works, it’s great - when it doesn’t, you feel frustrated. Google probably feels the same about webmasters. :)

Google has a problem at the moment with being somewhat schizophrenic. On the one hand, Google Search says it wants search results that are relevant. But Google AdSense says it wants to power low quality sites to increase revenues.

So Google Search sets up filters to remove these low quality sites, but simply ends up throwing the baby out with the bath water. Google Search seems less concerned about how relevant a webpage is, as much as how important the domain is that the page is on.

And it can only get worse. A highly relevant Google Search index simply isn’t going to provide competitive revenues when almost all their income comes from AdWords/AdSense.

So the harder it is for a company to increase their presence on Google Search, the more they’ll have to spend on Google AdWords. Google’s interest in an actual relevant search index comes across as increasingly academic, rather than a practical reality.

This is such a problem in the UK as well because the search industry is completely dominated by Google. US businesses can fall back on traffic from Yahoo! and MSN, but Google UK is effectively search in the UK, or nothing.

We really need a more level playing field here, but it’s really up to Yahoo! and Microsoft to look at developing their UK base more, or else face completely losing the biggest spending market outside of the USA. And everyone loses out for that, except Google.

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