Irish SMEs need to increase their online presence, Google Breakfast Briefings demo useful tools.

By @SimonCocking

Google Dublin Breakfast briefings, done for 2014, more due for 2015

This year, on the last Friday of the month at Google Dublin on Barrow Street, Google have hosted a series of breakfast briefings.

Topics covered included:

Creating good quality content for better rankings by search engines

Improving website usability

Adwords, basic & advanced

Google Analytics,

Google Display Network, Youtube

Sarah O’Neill, Google Sales and Events manager has mc’d these events, and also delivered the final talk too. She explained why Google chose to run these events in Dublin.

1. Ireland is in the top 10 countries in the world for the amount of time it spends on line.

2. Ireland spends between 4.6 billion and 6 billion euros online every year.

However over 3/4’s of this money goes out of the country to overseas companies. The reason for this is that only 23% of Irish SME’s (small and medium enterprises) trade online, There is a massive opportunity here for Irish businesses if they can master the tools to better promote themselves online. The Google theater holds 350 people, and tickets, though free, were booked out for each talk. Due to the popularity, and the ongoing interest O’Neill announced that the talks will be run again in 2015.

In the last talk O’Neill covered some of the latest Google Tools and Insights, including Think With Google

and Google Trends

Both of these tools are relatively new, and offer great opportunities to get more specific insights into your potential customers. As with all tools like this they will take a little time playing around with them to become familiar with what they can tell you. For an early or first mover though, they offer a fantastic, free, opportunity to see if there is an opportunity to expand the market for your own business. It is also possible to select specific industries, and get data insights into trends within those sectors.

The talk was a whistle stop tour through all of these resources, but it was definitely an eye opener into just how much you can learn from “the database of consumer intentions” which Google has already built up.

The Consumer Barometer also looks really useful too. Especially to make sure that your marketing strategy matches the behaviour of your intended customers. Apparently large numbers of consumers are ‘Ropo’s’, namely, researching on line, purchasing off line. So it can still be vital to make sure that your online presence is optimal, even if your customers ultimately buy from you offline. This becomes all the more important when 25% of people say they will go elsewhere to buy products if the online experience is below par.

Irish Tech News went to about 70% of the 2014 Breakfast Briefings, and found them really useful. We’re delighted they will be running again in 2015, and hope to see many of you there too.