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Note: This is part of my speaking notes for the Women’s Small Business Program of Burlington Vermont.

Reach: how many people come into contact with your message.

Now that we know why we would want to use a consumer behavior model, let’s start understanding the RAECS model. The first phase of the RAECS model is Reach. Before you “reach” people, they don’t know about you or your message or your product or campaign or anything. You don’t have much of a chance to form a business relationship with them because they don’t know about your offer yet. Your message hasn’t reached them yet.

Read the rest of this entry »

Note: This post is part of my speaking notes for the Women’s Small Business Program in Burlington Vermont.

Getting the most from your web efforts: Understanding the RAECS behavior model

A consumer behavior model helps content producers make the right things for the right people by matching the content produced with behaviors exhibited by people coming into contact with the content. If you want to be able to measure the effectiveness of the stuff you’re making or if you want to learn from how people behave in relation to the stuff you’re making, then having a consumer behavior model is going to help. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m getting ready for a presentation on using the web to market a business to the Women’s Small Business Program in Burlington, Vermont. One of the things I’ll most certainly talk about is the “consumer behavior model” I tend to use: Reach, Acquisition, Engagement, Conversion and Satisfaction.

I first learned of the first four phases of this model from Justin Cutroni, web analyst and partner at EpikOne. I bolted on the last one, Satisfaction, because it helps with some of the media work I’m doing lately and I think it will complement the other four well.

I originally developed this slide deck to give in the hallways of BloggerConnect in New York, January 2009. I showed it to several people using my iPod Touch and they let me know that it was helpful. I’ve since revised the deck to include a slide about Satisfaction and include all the fancy links at the end.

Notes on the slides:

1. What’s a consumer behavior model? Learn why having a well-aligned consumer behavior model might provide your business with a strategic advantage.
2. Reach: how many people see your message Learn what Reach is, how to measure it and how to use it to take action.

Over the next few days I’ll be making explanatory posts for each of the slides in the deck.

Here are my presentation notes for the CEDO Home-based Business Fair.

Infrastructure

• Websites are data files stored on a server.
• The server is referred to as a “host.”
• Hosting costs tend to revolve around bandwidth usage, storage space, specialized software, CPU power, service.
• Domain Name/URL is handled by a DNS host.
• At some point your web designer/developer will forward you some emails and say: don’t lose these. Really. Don’t lose them. They probably contain all your log in info for the DNS and hosting. Changing your web host later will be much more complicated without this information.

Design and Production

• Contemporary websites use a database-driven “content management system” (CMS).
• Multimedia is easier than ever before.
• Web standards (how the code is made) makes your site easier to update, more accessible, and search-engine friendly.
• Yes, you should have a company blog.
• Good web design is a combination of information design (clear presentation) and branding (effective statement of the position of your product/service) and consumer-focused graphic design (looks appropriate for your market). There are trade-offs and decisions that need to be made by you and your designer. Furthermore, technical constraints must play a part in determining these tradeoffs.

Marketing

• Search-engine friendly requires you to think about marketing from the very beginning of your web project.
• Paid advertising is still a very good idea.
• Social networking (can be a lot of work/effort but should be done): Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Myspace, YouTube…
• Don’t be a spammer unless your list is large enough to win the numbers game.
• Marketing your website should be part of the conversation from the beginning. It should effect the code, the content, and post-launch activities. Your marketing effort is integrated (your social networking will improve your search-engine results, for example).

E-Commerce

• Shopping cart software
• Merchant bank account (your bank or other)
• Internet Gateway (connects cart and merch acct)
• PayPal
• E-Commerce solutions can be as complicated or simple as you want. Once you survive the hassle of the gateway/merchant account and so on you can get down to business

Here’s a useful article about getting your business online (and that covers a fair bit of the technical mumbo-jumbo).

The article is fairly Apple-centric. But in my experience, everything it says is pretty true. If there are similar Windows or Linux links out there please let me know and I will include them as well.

Related article

• 8 Interesting CMS for e-commerce websites (woork.blogspot.com)