11/14/08
07:58:55 am, Categories: Welcome In our discussions with tens of local business the past few months, we've seen two ways of approaching the current economic storm: 1) wait and hope it gets better sooner than later, 2) seek out new ways to gain new customers and reward current customers.
The wait-and-see approach is often tinged with a hint of resignation. One local gift shop owner that I spoke with last week put it this way: "I know I need to step up my marketing. Yesterday I had no sales--a first since I've opened the store. I know an online store will help, but now is not the right time."
Hmmmm. I'm not sure when the right time will be. Will he just continue to open his shop, pray for customers, and hope for the best? Will his store slowly bleed until it closes?
While we would certainly love to see the number of visitors visiting the islands improve, it's not going to happen any time soon. We went from five cruise ships a week earlier this year to one on most weeks. Visitor arrivals are down 10-20% depending on the origin of the visitors.
The simple reality is, our local market is not going to be expanding any time soon. Smart businesses know that they either need to take sales away from local competitors or expand their market off island with an online store.
I can certainly understand the feeling of helplessness that many businesses are experiencing now. It's hard to see any changes in the economic situation of consumers or businesses in the near future.
At Kona Impact, we believe that action is almost always preferable to inaction. To do nothing today, is the best way to guarantee that tomorrow will be the same. Try something today, and you have a chance of effecting your future.
The clients we have that are trying new things to grow their business are generally more successful than their inactive competitors. None of them blindly throw money at every idea we come up with, but most of them are willing to try some new things. We are happy to sit down with clients, listen to their goals and challenges, and work with them to identify some solutions. We hear, "I have never thought of that" just about every day.
One business we talked to this week expanded their space, tried to expand their business and brand with a related business and was unsuccessful after a few months. Now, four months later, they realize that their existing business and brand are very strong, and they have used the extra space to focus on what they have been doing all along. Their failure, was a success, as it helped them understand what they are good at. Their new space has turned out to be moderately profitable--a success in today's market.
Here are some of the things that our clients have done recently.
1. Refreshing the design of existing website
2. Launching online store
3. Working with Kona Impact on their search engine optimization
4. Having Kona Impact setup and run a search engine marketing campaign
5. Rack cards
6. New menu with photos
7. New logo
8. Postcard marketing
9. Email marketing
10. Translating website into Japanese (15% of visitors to Hawaii are from Japan)
11/09/08
This is a story that many know. In case you don't, here it goes...
One day the king sent out one of his trusted aides to travel through the kingdom and see how everything was going. After a few months of traveling far and wide throughout the kingdom, the aide returned and told the king that the kingdom was a mess. The peasants were ready to revolt because of high taxes and not enough food.
The king knew he had to do something, so he had the aide executed. He then proclaimed that there are no longer any problems in the kingdom.
The "shoot the messenger" response to business problems is way too common.
How often do businesses blame the messenger of bad news instead of dealing with the cause of the bad news? How often is it easier to blame an employee who discovers a problem than to fix the problem?
Just this week we had a web host, Verio, threaten to cancel the account of one of our clients because the security scan that our client ran at the behest of the credit card company identified several problems with Verio's server. They were not even aware that a security scan was run until we asked them to resolve the security issues.
Instead of trying to resolve the security issues, they told our client that running security scans was against their terms of service. This is classic "shoot the messenger" customer service, and it puts our client in an impossible situation. Their security scan failed and their host won't acknowledge the issues and has threatened to cancel their account if they run another scan without jumping through a huge amount of red tape. My advice to the client was to move their website to a server that focuses on solutions instead of petty, blame the messenger customer service. There are plenty of web hosts that are customer-focused; unfortunately, Verio is not one of them.
At Kona Impact we try to work on solutions instead of avoiding problems. Unfortunately, we are sometimes the messenger of bad news. This is unavoidable as a service provider. When we do bring bad news to a client, we always try to identify solutions to the problem, instead of excuses.
11/07/08
As everyone is well aware, the business climate in the U.S. has seen significant turmoil the past few months. Our little slice of paradise in Kona, Hawaii (on the western tip of Hawaii Island) has been hit hard.
In the past few months,....
Many local restaurants have gone out of business. Among them: Domino's Pizza, Bitchin' Burritos, Rio's, Tiki Freeze and several other small restaurants.
Several retail shops have also disappeared, including Royal Hawaiian Jewelers, Big Island Surf and Pineapple Princess.
A big box chain store, Circuit City, halted operations before they started at Kona Commons, Kona's newest strip mall. The frame and most of the exterior of the building now sits at the east end of Kona Commons.
The Hawaii Superferry has postponed plans to start operations from Oahu to the Big Island indefinitely.
Hotel occupancy in the Kona and Waikoloa areas has dropped below 50%, and many of the rooms are now being filled at significant discounts.
Unemployment is creeping up on the west side of the island.
Home prices in Kona continue to slide. There are now several homes in the MLS under $400,000. Two years ago, there was little below $500,000.
This, of course is bad news for everyone in Kona.
The good news is that there are many, many things businesses can do to survive and possibly thrive in today's market. Here are what a few of our clients have done recently:
1. Expand retail outlets, as several prime spaces have now become available and landlords are more willing to negotiate rent.
2. Explore new marketing avenues. We have been working with several restaurants recently. One had us make a new trilingual menu with photos of the dishes and a crisp, modern design. Another is having us work on a website, and another is working with us on some post card marketing. These restaurants are some of the most well-known in Kona.
3. Refine current marketing materials. One client in the retail sector is having us completely redo his website. The goal is to increase user-friendliness, improve the overall design, and search engine results rankings.
At Kona Impact, we are very aware of the fact that this might be a long and difficult time of economic readjustment. We also know that doing nothing is a recipe for failure. If you would like to talk about some ideas for growing your business, give us a call at 329-6077.
11/06/08
02:16:33 pm, Categories: Grow Your Business, Commentary, Kona Impact Projects, Hawaii Small Business When times get tough, some businesses try to do a lot of design work for themselves. The feel that they'll save money and have more control over the process. The reality is they will probably have greater costs, less creative control over the project, and the result will less than satisfactory.
This is almost certainly a "no" Here's are the costs for in-house design work:
1. Cost of software to do design work
2. Cost of hardware
3. Employee's proportionate cost of businesses'operating expenses
4. Time for employee to learn software
5. Profit on work that employee did not do while learning software
6. Employee's base salary
7. Employee's benefits
8. Employer's matching tax contributions
9. Time it takes employee to make initial design
10. Time to make revisions and complete design
11. Profit on work that employee did no do while making design
12. Time for employee to prepare design for print and properly archive the design
The best reason not to do work in-house, however, is the quality of the work. Just today we had a client tell us about some brochures she had an employee make that looked awful. She said that she didn't feel she could be very critical of the design because the employee just lacked the skills and design sense to make it look good. In addition, their close personal relationship made it hard to be critical of the work. In effect, in-house work often affords less control over the project due to the poor design skills of the employee and a reluctance of others in the business to criticize what is inevitably considered a creative effort.
The risk of using in-house staff for print or web design projects is even more magnified by the very real risk that your company will invest a large amount of money in items #1-#12 above and your employee is unable to complete the project. When you hire a professional, you are at very little risk of huge sunk costs if the project does not materialize. That is, if the professional does not deliver what was promised, your costs are minimal.
If you look at the cost of hiring a professional, you'll see that it is often less expensive. The design firm spreads the cost of all the software and hardware over hundreds of projects. The designers already have thousands of hours of experiences, so they are not only highly capable, but they are also very efficient. At Kona Impact, we estimate that we can accomplish a lot better results in only a fraction (probably 10%-20%) of the time of someone who has not done much design experience. This efficiency, of course, results in less time for projects, a cost savings we pass on to our clients.
So the next time you're thinking of having someone in-house (or a friend, neighbor, relative, etc.) do your print or online design work, be sure to consider the total costs involved. And, more importantly, think about the pride you'll have in having a truly professional design for your business if you hire someone with the tools and experience to get the job done right.
11/04/08
06:37:10 am, Categories: Commentary One thing that separates the United States from a lot of countries is direct presidential elections. In the U.S. we choose our president directly. Surprisingly few people in the world actually choose their president. The people in Canada, England, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Japan do not choose their top leader. The political party with the most elected members chooses the president or prime minister.
So, if you value the ability to actually choose the top leadership of the U.S., take an hour out of your day today and vote.
11/03/08
07:48:30 am, Categories: Grow Your Business, Grow Business Online, Kona Impact Projects, Hawaii Small Business One of the most common misconceptions for small and medium-size business is that if they build a website, people will automatically find it, and the business will grow. We call this the "Field of Dreams" approach to online marketing: build it and they will come. (Apologies to those who are not familiar with the movie.)
The reality is that having a website designed is only part of what needs to be done to have an effective online presence, just like opening a retail store is just part of what it takes to make a successful retail store.
At Kona Impact we always try to help our clients focus on the big picture: how to be effective online. This is quite different from being online.
Let's look at a few examples:
Rental Business: This local business spent a considerable amount of money on a website with a different provider. It looked nice at first glance. The owner of the rental business came to us after a few months and asked why he couldn't find his website on Google searches. One look at his website revealed the answer: his website had virtually no text on it!
The website home page was basically an image, a picture. It certainly looked nice, but the web developer was guilty of a cardinal sin in website development: not thinking about search engines. Google, Yahoo, and MSN are basically huge text databases. No text on your website=virtually no online visibility.
To see how Google sees your website, view the HTML code. For Internet Explorer users, go to Page menu item and chose View Source. For Firefox uses, ctrl + U or go to View>Page Source. Ignore all the code and look for words. This is what Google will index. Think of key word phrases that people would use to find your website. Are they in the text?
This business did not become our client. His website has not changed and he is still virtual invisibility online. I always wonder how many opportunities he has lost because his potential customers will find his competitors and not him online.
Vacation Lodging Business: This company had a pre-existing website, but it was doing poorly in the search engines. A quick look at the site showed that the text was not written with key word searches in mind. There was a lot of text, but most of it was so general and unfocused that it was of little value. We also noticed that the some of the key places for search-optimized text had text that was fairly useless for key word searches.
To help this business, we identified ten key word searches that had a significant amount of volume on Google. (Note: it is very easy to get #1 Google rankings for non-competitive and low search volume phrases. The hard part is becoming #1 for high volume key word searches.) After we identified some appropriate key words, we set out to optimize the site's navigation, page structure and page content. We then created a site map and then submitted the website to numerous search engines and directories.
After three weeks, the website was in the top ten, the first page of Google results, for nine out of ten of the phrases we targeted. Website traffic is way up, as are inquiries to the business.
Kona Impact has replicated these results numerous times with website for local businesses.
At Kona Impact we believe that developing an effective online presence requires a deep understanding of how the search engines work and what web developers can do optimize websites for search engines. We are adamant in using techniques that are not quick fixes and may eventually have a website blacklisted on the search engines.
We are happy to provide prospective clients an in-depth analysis of their website at no charge. Give us a call at 329-6077 for a free evaluation of your website.
10/31/08
We have always known that for non-local information searches, the internet is used far more often than other other medium. For example, if you want to find a hotel in Waikiki, you'll go online.
Now, and for the first time, people are now using the internet more than the yellow pages for local searches. The numbers are close--31% for search engines and 30% for yellow pages. The trend is for a shrinking use of yellow pages and an expanded use of the internet.
Here are the results in full: Local Customers Use Internet More than Yellow Pages
There are numerous implications for business that primarily serve local markets:
1. If you don't have a website that has been designed with local searches in mind, get one. This is a no-brainer. What would 5-30% more inquires do for your business?
2. If you do have a website, is it optimized for local searches? By optimized we mean, has it been designed and written to be found for local searches.
3. If you're spending hundreds or thousands of dollars a year on yellow pages ads with only mediocre results, don't hesitate to cut this amount. The way people search for local information has changed.
4. If your website content is outdated or if it was made more than a few years ago, it's time to update it.
The design and programming team at Kona Impact works on website every day for businesses that are targeting local, regional, U.S., and international customers. We have been very successful at helping businesses design high impact website that look great, perform well, and are found easily online. Many business owners are surprised that the cost of a great website is less than a big yellow pages ad.
We welcome inquires, even if you are just seeking some information. Our consultations are cost and pressure free. Kona Impact 329-6077
10/26/08
03:11:07 pm, Categories: Welcome We understand that times are tough for a lot of businesses in Hawaii. We also know that a lot of smart businesses see now as a time to strengthen their business and explore new opportunities.
To lend a helping hand and a little incentive to local businesses, we are offering 15% off all projects that start between 10/27 and 11/15. If you have some ideas you'd like to talk about, give us a call at 329-6077.
10/24/08
Some of Kona's coolest shops are located in areas where many locals don't often go: the area between Hualalai Road and the pier. We wish that more locals and tourists would spend some time in this area, as almost all the shops are locally owned and operated. There is truly a wonderful variety of items on sale.
Today I'd like to draw some attention to Pikake Beads (http://www.pikake-beads.com). It's located across from the Fun Factory on the mauka side of Alii Drive.
Although I am not a "beader", it is easy to see that this store is a beader's heaven. The store has a huge selection of beads and beading materials. It's also a very tastefully-designed retail space. It's certainly artsy, but not too intimidating for novices.
They now have a schedule of their classes online at http://www.pikake-beads.com/classes.html.
They also have a fun and informative newsletter: http://www.pikake-beads.com/newsletter.php
Check them out online at: http://www.pikake-beads.com/index.html
10/21/08
I had to pick up a few cables for some of our office equipment, so I thought that I would give the Office Max in Kona Commons a try. I also had a small list of things I wanted to check the prices on for comparison purposes.
While the selection at the Office Max was pretty good, their prices were all over the place and for the most part, a lot higher than other sources in Kailua-Kona.
Here's what I did buy:
USB printer cable, 10 feet = $31.99
Bubble mailers (CD size), 8 pack = $7.49
Monitor power cord = $12.99
These prices seemed about what I would expect at the locally. (Remember we're on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean: everything costs more here!)
What surprised me the most, however, was the prices Office Max had for envelopes. I bought 500 peel to seal, security lined envelopes at Costco two days ago for around $12. The cost for same number and type of envelopes at Office Max was $41.99, more than 300% the price of Costco! I also saw ten reams of paper for $42 at Office Max and 10 reams at Costco for $32.
So, based on one trip to Office Max, I'd say buyer beware--you may be paying way too much for your office supplies. Just because they are big, doesn't mean they have the best prices.
At Kona Impact, we're big proponents of buying local, whenever possible and practical. We are also keenly focused on our bottom line, so we have to balance cost, convenience, and service options, which means we do shop online and at the big box stores. If you do want to shop locally for office supplies, try Kona Coast Office Supply in the Old Industrial area. For computer parts, you might find Island Tech (Old Industrial) or Falcon Computers (corner of Palani & Kuakini) to have what you need.
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