Guest Article By: Hans Reimer, President & CEO, Market Vantage

I remember when I first heard about the Internet in the early ‘90s. Being a natural skeptic, it didn’t sound like anything important to me. My first look, which consisted of a primitive browser displaying an ugly, text-heavy page over a slow and unreliable dial-up modem connection merely reinforced my cynicism.

Several “killer-aps” like the Yahoo Directory and Netscape changed my opinion. Search engines hadn’t been invented yet but Yahoo employed an army of people that curated and classified online content. The Netscape browser made everything a lot more presentable. Being able to sift through vast amounts of information, to find something you were looking for, did sound important, even to a skeptic like me.

Although I had a background in software engineering, that early career evolved into selling technology solutions. I was given a base salary and paid commissions on sales. I did OK, but some of my peers made more money than the CEO. Out of necessity, I became an effective cold caller. After all, the more calls you made, the more leads you generated, and ultimately, the more sales you closed. Cha-ching!

Cold calling, though, seemed terribly inefficient to me. I was pretty good at assessing complex customer needs, explaining how our solution would impact their business, overcoming objections and closing sales. But, most of my time and emotional energy were spent in calling people, getting rejected, picking myself up and making the next call. What would happen, I imagined, if the customers started using the Internet to find the solutions they were looking for instead of sales reps, like me, chasing after customers? I could spend my time doing higher value work and closing more sales.

Think of your organization and your website as the hub of a big wheel. The spokes of the wheel are the paths that your prospects can take to find you. Those spokes are things like search engines, referrals, social media posts, traditional media, advertisements of many types, published articles or PR. In short, anything that brings prospects, a/k/a “traffic,” to your website is part of your online marketing engine. Website traffic is the first essential component of your online marketing strategy. Without traffic, your business is as good as dead.

However, traffic alone won’t make you rich. The second component, conversions, are required for success. Think of your website as a store, and your traffic as the customers that walk in and look around. Doubling your traffic may be exciting, but if everyone that comes in leaves without buying anything, then only difference will be that you have to sweep the floor more often. We call the act of increasing the ratio of buyers to shoppers “conversion rate optimization.”

That’s where the third component, “web analytics,” can help. Part of the beauty of online marketing is that so much of it is measurable. If you’re willing to put in the time and the effort, you can see where your visitors are coming from, which pages they visit, and where they exit from. You can segment your traffic and observe different behaviors depending on the source. For example, you can tell if Google ad clicks convert into sales at a higher rate than Facebook ad clicks. Combine that with your click cost data and you’re suddenly equipped to make some great marketing decisions.

If you’re an online retailer, analytics can tell you which step in the checkout process is most prone to cart abandonment. It may sound a little creepy, but you can essentially follow your customers around your “store,” recording what they are looking at and how they are behaving. Plus, you know something about where they are geographically located and how they got to your site!

At my last corporate job, I had the opportunity to learn online marketing first-hand through experimentation. When I started Market Vantage as an online marketing consultancy in 2002, I recall that many of the people I talked to didn’t understand exactly what I did or how I would make money. Bear in mind that Google’s IPO wasn’t until August, 2004.

Today, I have a small team and can see that virtually every business is engaged in some form of online marketing. Larger organizations have teams of people that are highly skilled in this area. At the other end of the spectrum, business owners try to do the job themselves. Mid-sized organizations sometimes hire a consulting firm like ours to collaborate with their in-house marketing people, where we provide extensive expertise, implementation support and some elbow grease.

Regardless of where your organization fits in the spectrum of online marketing, you can and should always be learning and improving. The technology keeps getting better, but the competition is getting smarter too. Just remember, the Internet is not just a source of customers, it’s also a great resource for learning how to steer your business out ahead of your competition.

Guest Article By: A.G. Divers, Founder and former president, The Bank of Tampa

(Editor’s note: The Bank of Tampa currently holds over $1.2 billion in deposits and is considered the premier community bank in the Tampa-Clearwater-St. Pete market)

When I was young, the old guys would clench their teeth around their cigars and grumble “the world ain’t what it used to be.”  If I sound that way I apologize in advance.

In the mid 1950’s I attended St. Petersburg Junior College and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.  I took a course called Money and Banking and heard the professor explain that “the role of a bank is to take the surplus funds of a community and lend them wisely to local businesses to help them achieve their goals – and in the process enhance the economy of the community.”  That stuck with me (as you can tell it did if I remember it sixty years later) and I went home that day and announced that I wanted to become a banker.  I majored in banking at the University of Florida – a specialty that included only 18 students.  I was asked by one of them “Jerry, what are you doing here?  You don’t have a father, grandfather or an uncle who owns a bank!”

After serving in the United States Navy, in 1961 I began my career in Tampa at The Exchange National Bank of Tampa.  That bank was at that time seventh largest in the state with $126 million in deposits.  It was a close second to the largest bank in Tampa, and the two were by far the largest banks along the West Coast of Florida.  There were no out of state banks operating in Florida, no holding companies, no branches and no computers. Most banks were managed by families which had a large stake in their ownership.  And most of the banks in Florida at that time were survivors of the depression, and operated very conservatively.  The staffs of Florida banks considered themselves part of the “bank family” and there was negligible turnover of staff.

Banking was commonly referred to as a profession, and bankers in Tampa were part of the respected elite.

The president of my bank, whose father had preceded him in that role, told me a bank should keep one third of its assets in cash, one third in bonds and one third in loans.  Because our deposits were subject to overnight withdrawal, no loan should have a maturity of over a year, and under no circumstances were we to make a loan secured by real estate.  Not long after I started I worked with the manager of the bond portfolio, and learned that we kept 10% of the portfolio in municipal bonds, laddered over twenty years, and 90 % in treasuries, laddered over five years.  The bank was open Monday through Friday from ten to two.  The staff – including officers – were gone by three thirty.   I remember thinking “this is the life.”

Early on I was in training to become a loan officer.  I thought it a good idea to go see the customer and learn his business first hand.  I was told that was undignified and that “if someone wants a loan they can come in and ask for it.”  As my grandfather, an Indiana farmer, used to say “them was the good days.”

One message from that bank president, which I thought then was timeless, and I still do though there aren’t many like me anymore, described what were the “first two rules of banking.”  The first was “know your customer.”  The reason for this, of course, is to know the customer’s personal values – what the textbooks refer to as character; the customer’s ability; and the customer’s current financial condition and history, in order to properly assess the likelihood of the repayment of the loan.  The second rule was “know your customer’s business and financial goals so that you can help him achieve them.”  Sounds like that professor at junior college.

With all the changes which have taken place in banking, at The Bank of Tampa we have tried to live by those two rules in our relationships with our customers.  That, more than anything else, explains our success.  It explains more than anything else the need for banks like ours across the country.  We only have a small slice of the total banking market, but I read recently that community banks make more than half the loans to small business made in the United States.

Banking regulation has made it next to impossible to use our own judgment in making loans to individuals (we have to offer “products” and use standard criteria to grant them) but we still work closely with and tailor our loans to the specific needs of  our business customers to help them get where they want to go.  Let us hope with no doubt continued change in the future, those rules – and our ability to implement them – won’t change.