These notes accompany an online masterclass I taught in September 2015. You can watch a recording at http://bit.ly/5WebsiteThings For more advice on growing your horse business with great digital marketing check out www.blacktypedigital.com or call +44(0)117 212 0183

1. 5 Things You Must Have On
Your Equestrian Website To
Succeed In 2015
Presented by Christina Jones
MD, Blacktype Digital

2. Introduction
These notes are designed to accompany the live masterclass I taught in
September 2015.
They will make far more sense if you watch them alongside the presentation I
gave. You can access the recording here http://bit.ly/5WebsiteThings (skip to
approx 3.30 min for the start)
If you have any questions about the content feel free to email me
christina@blacktypedigital.com
or join my Facebook group at http://bit.ly/growhorse

3. Avoiding The
Google Sin
Bin
Test yours @
www.bit.ly/horseweb

4. Is Your Website Mobile Friendly?
As of April 2015, Google is heavily penalising sites that aren’t mobile friendly in their search
engine rankings. So if your site isn’t mobile compatible you will be losing traffic to competitors
who are.
Google hasn’t done this just to be a pain in the ass for website owners – they are obsessed with
providing a great user experience for their customers, aka the general public who use their search
engine.
Web traffic is moving more & more to mobile & tablet devices. We benchmarked over 30
equestrian websites at the start of 2015 and the typical site had at least 50% of traffic coming
from mobile devices. So if your site doesn’t work on these devices, you are potentially losing half
your traffic! If you pay for digital or print advertising to promote your site, that’s 50% of your
spend totally wasted!
Want to check if your site is mobile friendly? Go to www.bit.ly/horseweb.
If it’s not & you’d like some advice on how to fix it, get in touch.

5. Old School
Lead Gen

6. Telephone
In the digital marketing arms race don’t forget that a huge % of business is still done
over the phone.
A phone number (preferably a landline) adds legitimacy to a website & makes
customers feel more secure.
Make sure it is prominently displayed – header, footer, contact us page…
Technology is available to track phone calls from ads so you know what is working
when the primary result of an ad is a phone call rather than a web click.

7. Legal Stalking
• Google
• Facebook
• 3rd Party Networks

8. In a nutshell, retargeting ads allow you to show adverts to people who have already visited your
site. Your ads seem to follow them around the web. Want to see this in action? Go look at some
products on Amazon & then start browsing other websites.
Why do it? Typically 2-4% of visitors complete a purchase/make an enquiry when they visit your
site. That leaves 96-98% of visitors who may still be very interested but are not ready to buy right
now. Retargeting allows you to stay in front of them and makes sure that when they are ready to
purchase you’re top of mind.
This can be fantastic for branding style advertising too because of the number of times you can
touch an individual.
For smaller businesses, this is an effective way to magnify your ad budget & seem much bigger
than you are in the eye of a prospect.
It works by you installing snippets of code on your website, which are triggered when someone
visits.
We’ll look at Google first.

9. Google
Retargeting is one of the multitude of options available in the Google Adwords advertising
program.
It’s free to open an account with Google Adwords (if you are a new advertiser please contact me
as I have vouchers I can provide which give you some free advertising to get started). You can
start building these lists even if you aren’t ready to advertise yet.
Your adverts are distributed across the Google Display network & show up on 3rd party websites
who have given Google access to their ad inventory (and in return Google splits the revenue it
generates from that advert).
Unlike standard Google Display ad campaigns, retargeting means that your ads will show up on a
huge variety of sites, some horsey, some very much not. The website is almost irrelevant
because what you are doing is following an individual who’s already visited your site rather than
trying to attract new visitors.
You can show ads based on people visiting certain sections of your site e.g. a feed company
would show racing product ads to people who visited that area of their site versus people
browsing the stud and youngstock product pages.

10. 3rd Party Networks
If you have a lot of traffic on your site and a healthy ad budget, you might
want to use other 3rd party networks alongside the Google network to show
your ads.
Happy to recommend if this is something of interest.

11. Facebook
• Website Visitors
• Emails
• Mobile Numbers

12. Facebook
Taken the technology Google launched and improved on it, a lot!
I’m seeing amazing results with Facebook retargeting ads, typically getting 2 x the ROI
compared to advertising to a cold audience via Facebook interests or Facebook fans.
Again, you need to install a snippet of code on your site that Facebook will provide in your
Facebook ad account
Allows you to build custom audience within Facebook and show ads specifically to these
people.
There are 3 ways of doing it. The most common is website visitors, so someone who visits
your site then sees ads on Facebook. You can also make this more specific e.g. show advert
campaign to people who visit a certain page but not another. Great for people who add to
cart but don’t checkout, or people who land on an event page but don’t register

13. The other 2 ways to build custom audience lists on Facebook are by uploading
email lists or mobile phone numbers of customers, leads etc into your
Facebook ad account.
Facebook matches these to the data it holds on all of us and will show your
ads to the Facebook account holders that match your data.
This is an incredibly powerful tool – I’m amazed it’s legal to use, but it is ok to
do at present so take full advantage!

14. Flying
Blind

15. Digital marketing is like flying a plane – suicidal to fly blind. You quickly go off-
course and can waste a huge amount of money on ineffective ads.
Plus you’re missing out on the biggest advantage of digital Vs print advertising
which is how closely you can track and monitor results.
There are 100s of tools that allow you to monitor your site, social media etc
but If I had to pick 1 essential it would be Google Analytics.
It’s totally free to use and provides an enormous amount of information
I’ve pulled out a couple of standard reports which are a great place to start.

16. Google
Analytics

17. Acquisition – where is your traffic coming from?
The social section is great to see if your social media activities are driving
traffic.
Also handy for finding what causes unusual peaks (often forum or blog posts!)

18. Google Analytics

19. Google Analytics Goals
Allows you to laser focus in on the most important actions a visitor can take on your
site. For ecommerce, that’s a sale through the checkout & Google Analytics has a pre-
built section dedicated to this.
Not in ecommerce? There’s still a lot of other actions you should be tracking? E.g.
brochure requests, newsletter sign ups. You can and should create goals for these
within analytics. This allows you to monitor how often the goals are achieved (how
many brochure requests a month etc.) but more importantly, where did the traffic
originate from?
You often find that a smaller traffic source can be responsible for a big chunk of your
goals. Shows you where to focus your time & attention.

20. Lead Magnets
Lead Magnet = offering a visitor to your site something in exchange for collecting their
contact details. Allows you to market to warm leads and build a relationship with them
by pulling back the curtain and showing what you can do. This masterclass is a prime
example of a business to business lead magnet!
If what you are selling is expertise then demonstrating that upfront is a great way to
market yourself. This doesn’t just apply to service based businesses. Horse pros such as
saddle fitters, supplement manufacturers and dressage trainers could all be using this
strategy too.
In ecommerce, common to offer a monetary incentive: sign up & get % off first order
etc. You need to know your business, your margins and the lifetime value of a customer
to decide how much to give away up front.
Don’t forget that once you have an email address you can market via email but also use
Facebook custom audiences to target via Facebook ads!

21. Here’s a couple of examples in action:
www.HorseHero.com is a video training website for riders with a monthly subscription
model. If you sign up for their newsletter you receive a free training video with
Olympic Gold medalist Laura Tomlinson. Someone interested in watching the free
video offered is an ideal candidate to turn into a paying subscriber.
The second example is from one of my own ecommerce sites. This is new technology
that I’ve only been testing for the last 6-8 weeks. It detects mouse movements on the
page and when a visitor looks like they are about to exit without purchasing, a pop up
appears offering them a money off coupon to encourage them to complete their
purchase.
If you’d like some help deciding on a lead magnet for your business, come and join the
facebook group at http://bit.ly/growhorse and ask away!

22. • Insert pic HH homepage & HH newsletter (in
dropbox) on same page if possible
Horse
Hero

23. Your Gift House

24. Next Steps
Join my Facebook group http://bit.ly/growhorse
Request a free website audit
http://bit.ly/equinewebsite
Get in touch if you have any specific questions
or need help implementing what you’ve just
learnt

25. Questions?
christina@blacktypedigital.com
+44 (0)117 2120183
www.blacktypedigital.com