Local Retail and the web are not friends

I spoke yesterday at the annual Photo Marketing Association (PMA) conference in Melbourne on ‘Maximising Your Business Online.’

(It was an eventful day: my first flight was cancelled, my second flight was delayed and my return flight was hit by lightning).

“Maximising Your Business Online” as a topic is a pretty vague one; it can mean anything and it is all relative. Success to you could mean poor health to me, and so forth. Are we talking about starting out online, or creating a successful FourSquare campaign? Success is high-level and granular.

Worst still, the audience were mainly SME retail and that is a bloody tough place online. In fact, I don’t think it could be tougher… I made the point as well.

Local web is the holy grail, and the fact is that if you service a small area as a retailer, the web is not currently doing much for you. Mobile web will change that, though we don’t search local.

This said, I took the middle road and presented on the 101s of a good, online strategy (with the website as its centre): defining the plan, identifying the users and building the website.

From there, I spent quite some time on traffic and why it is so important: because you certainly cannot have success without traffic.

Finally, I skimmed over social media and Facebook as avenues to consider, though be wary of. After all, if you can’t get the website right, you shouldn’t be playing with Twitter.

The presentation is below: