Award winners use the Internet to drive significant business results!

Issue 19, September 2007 - Enterprise North Shore magazine

Zeald and RAD9 have recognised that the Internet has changed the way that the world does business.

Award winners David Kelly, CEO of Zeald and Stu Lees, Director of RAD9.

Zeald (www.zeald.com) are winners of the Excellence in Marketing award at the 2007 Westpac Enterprise North Shore Business Excellence Awards and Stu Lees (www.rad9.com) has earned the title of “Entrepreneur Marketer of the Year” in the Sales & Marketing Institute of New Zealand Awards.

These two highly successful companies have seized the opportunity to use online marketing as an extremely powerful, efficient and cost-effective way of achieving significant results for their businesses.

Zeald’s unrelenting focus on results

Zeald, formed by three bright, innovative young businessmen in 2000, is one of the largest and fastest growing website design and e-business consultancy companies in New Zealand.

Their vision is to help small to medium sized businesses generate ‘amazing’ results online. They have worked with and advised over one thousand companies – including fellow award winner RAD9 - on how to use the Internet as a powerful sales and marketing tool.

Zeald also ‘walk the talk’! They have used their considerable expertise to create a highly informative and persuasive website of their own. Not only have they had a 69% increase in website generated sales in the last year, but their website accounts for nearly one third of company turnover.

RAD9 increases business by $100,000 through online marketing

Since 2004, RAD9 Computer Services has focused on developing the world’s best computer service and support solution. RAD9 supports small businesses and residential computer consumers with onsite, remote and workshop computer services.

With exceptional growth since the brand’s inception, RAD9 is poised to become a dominant player in the New Zealand market.

Initially RAD9 was a small IT firm who did almost anything from computer support, software development, consulting and even developing websites for customers. Their own website was developed in-house and delivered virtually no new business leads and results.

In 2005, after much research, RAD9 made a strategic decision to work with industry leader Zeald, primarily because of their ‘results based philosophy’.

Along with their newly created website, RAD9 received a large amount of educational material from Zeald, including their book, the “Secrets of Website Success”. RAD9’s business took off.

NZ Director, Stu Lees, explains: “I totally changed my view on how our website could deliver actual business results. I was amazed that, for years, I had totally ignored something that could provide massive bottom line impact to my business.”

RAD9 followed Zeald’s advice on website promotion, tracking, measuring and tweaking. Within six months, the pay-offs were clear. “We actually had days where we would get over a dozen new leads phone in”, continues Lees. “It really was a turning point for our business and for our perception of marketing.”

In just twelve months, RAD9 have increased their business by over 100% and obtained website generated sales leads of over $100,000.

Knowledge is the key

One of the most powerful aspects of a good website, is that you can test different aspects of your website and online marketing and then measure the results. What’s more, this can be done at a fraction of the cost and much faster than with more traditional methods of marketing.

The RAD9 case study, is a great example of using well targeted online marketing to achieve a measurable business return.

Zeald CEO, David Kelly maintains that “the number one difference between websites that achieve rampant growth and the poor performers, is the knowledge of the business owner/manager!”

By gaining a clear understanding of the key factors that determine website success, business owners can drastically improve their online results and gain a significant competitive advantage.

Some Key Success Factors Include:

• Know what your website objectives are & develop a powerful website strategy

• Have a professional website design that meets international standards

• Plan your website carefully and have clear & persuasive ‘conversion pathways’

• Develop compelling sales copy & informative content

• Build trust and credibility and remove risk

• Understand & have strategies to improve the key success metrics: website visitors, website conversion rate and average sale value

• Continually test, measure and tweak to improve the key metrics