Hi Alics,
Maybe one thing that might help you is to think of balancing online with offline.

It seems on a brief reading of your comments that your delivery strategy is online, your sales strategy is online, but perhaps your marketing strategy may benefit from a mix of online and offline.

Phil
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Phil Richards

Creating effective business strategy, wonderful ideas, having fun and making profits.

Hi Alics

Interesting situation. I think your business will benefit from some social media marketing. People obviously get very attached to their pets, and if you can reach out to these people and get talking within the social networks, the possibilities are endless.

Isobel, agency:2
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Isobel

agency:2 [url=http://www.socialmedia-uk.co.uk/]social media agency[/url]

Defiinately think about some off line marketing.

Maybe think about other services that your potential customers use (i.e. vets) and see if you can get some posters or flyers in to some of them.

What about spending some time on pet forums or similar to get yourself known?

Are there pet shows that you could get some afvertising into?
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Ralph

New Wavelength Coaching

I agree with all these posts.

Social media could give you some great initial traffic, but it is unlikely to convert in to many sales. I would do some keyword research and get your site in the top 10 of google.co.uk for your keywords.

Also do some cost effective offline marketing.

Hope it works out, good luck with everything

Tom
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Yoga Poses
body cleanse diet Isogenics

Ali

You have some good feedback posted already, in particular about using social marketing, but I would add that in modern business, you need to think clever to mark you out from both the competition and the general white noise of online marketing. A viral video campaign, a stunt or something even more innovative might work. I cannot noffer full comment without knowing the specifrics of what you have done so far and what might be wrong.

For your reference, I am an entrepreneur specialising in start-up and early-stage businesses, seeking ventures on which to offer incubation, business planning and investment. If you would like to talk about this venture, please feel free to contact me by phone or email.

Kind Regards

RUDI SCHOGGER
E: rudi@rudischogger.com
T: 07956 623 198
W: www.rudischogger.com

Thank you all for taking the time to provided such valuable feedback.

Incidentally, we do a reasonable amount of social media work at the moment, but it hasn't led to much conversion (as Tom predicted).

I agree with the need to rank much better organically and have already started working on the site to make it more search engine friendly.

As for offline marketing, I agree with the need to partner up with others in the industry but I'm struggling to see the benefit in things like leafleting, magazine adverts etc - not targeted enough and almost impossible to measure the return on it.

Thanks again,
Ali

If you are interested I am an online trader too, and I am testing a new idea in selling. If you google VRM Vendor Relationship Management and see my site at www.fullbe.com you can see what I am doing.

I am always seeking collaborating help. I am speaking to investors and some money may be possible to have invested.

You can contact me via merrows (google it).

Hi,
First thing I would like to ask is have you done your keyword research? That is basically finding out what your prospective customers are typing into the search engines?
Then I would suggest you get a set of articles - keyword oriented - and blast them off to a few article directories.
Are you ranking high for your keywords?
Its a massive and highly lucrative industry you are in and if you were ranking high for your keywords then you would be getting alot of traffic.

The next thing I would suggest is to to research your competition - how many backlinks have they got? Where have they been advertising?
Also you can look at the Google Adwords campaign they have setup and see how much they are spending and see the adverts they are publishing.
It will give you an idea of what is working.

Sajid
Website Marketing Consultant
http://www.websitemarketingconsultant.co.uk
sajid@websitemarketingconsultant.co.uk
07976 950 678

"How much money is your website generating for you?"
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Sajid
Website Marketing Consultant
http://www.websitemarketingconsultant.co.uk
sajid@websitemarketingconsultant.co.uk
07976 950 678

Is your website bringing in customers?

Hi there,
I've run a few online shops before in competitive markets. My advice would be of course to create an easy to use, SEO friendly site that's fast naturally. Also it's an idea to create unique articles that really go above and beyond what the consumer needs. The more information, the easier the sell plus as the content is 100% yours, should help with SEO.

Research your competitors as mentioned above and try to create your own unique selling point too. An easy to remember .co.uk name will help too.
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laptop stand

I'm picking up on one specific line in your post:
"In the past year, sales have hardly grown, while competition has steadily increased."

Okay, where did you get that info from? What is the competition doing differently to you? What do your current customers like/dislike about the service? What would make them buy greater quantities or more often or more expensive products?

There's no point flinging good money after bad. Even if you managed to create 1,000,000 click thrus tomorrow to the website, there is something there which is putting off your current customers as otherwise sales would naturally grow.

My plan would be:
1) Customer survey
2) Competitive review
3) Follow up marketing to existing customers
4) Plug any gaps!

Does that help?
Caroline
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Caroline Wylie

www.virtuallysorted.com

www.SocietyOfVirtualAssistants.co.uk

Hi is a Interesting situation, I think your business will benefit from some social media marketing... People obviously get very attached to their pets, and if you can reach out to these people and get talking within the social networks, the possibilities are endless. The next thing I would suggest is to research your competition and finally as for offline marketing, I agree with the need to partner up with others in the industry but I'm struggling to see the benefit in things like leafleting, magazine adverts etc - not targeted enough and almost impossible to measure the return on it.
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http://www.solocigars.com/cigars/index.php?cPath=30_23"

I think the trick is to find something that ppl really want but that large companies don't usually sell very often. Also find ways to boost traffic.

Hi

It sounds like you fell into the big website con ,when all you do is pay out with little return. If you have a product ,whty not sell through the big online sites like Ebay or Amazon. You pay a fee but their search engines leave anything I know.Once established on that type of site, you will soon know if you can be competition to others. Stop wasting time and money on your own website and let others work for you. It doesnt mean you give it up but see how many wed designers work for you on a commission basis only,NONE I bet.

tigeress

I´m a strong believer of AdWords so there might be something to tweak in your PPC campaign. Have a local SEO/PPC company take a look at it. We do that all the time. Another thing could be showing up in dog fares...

another article here at startups
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Tommi Heinonen
CEO of Mainostoimisto Hehkulamppu and blogger for mainontaa-blog and also a photographer for valokuvaaja website.

I would say competition has always been there even if you've got small or big business around so what you'll do to go ahead of it or line with them with rankings is to find their weaknesses. Invest time to go through a thorough research with your competitors and their standings - PPC for instance could be easily evaluated through Google Adwords or with the use of free tools such as PPC Webspy for instance. You can list on their keywords used and try reinventing your keywords again to get better results.

Another thing is creating more viral campaigns such as affiliate campaign or video marketing. This both can help in the process since not all companies have been using video as a medium to promote their products and I know you could give this a shot. You can either make some and outsource the rest, it's up to your kind of production but I could suggest you record your tutorial and strong promotional videos (of your niche) and outsource the editing, audio conversion and transcripts. You can give these as freebies to those who'll buy your products to gather big impressions.

Good luck!
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