This week is all about the mobile use of our website. We used the Google Tool Mobile Friendly to get a better insight on what we should improve in order to create a better functioning website for our target audience.

The first test that we did made clear that there is a lot of work for us to do:

Our page was not user friendly for mobile devices. First of all, we needed to figure out what the most important elements were that we could improve.
Below, you can see what the two most important factors were:

We adjusted this and put certain elements on a different place on our website.
After that, we decided to do the Mobile Friendly test again:

As you can see, after we made some improvements, our website is officially Mobile Friendly according to the test of Google. We still think that our site is operating faster and more professional on desktop, but at least we have worked on the most common problems occurring.

This week is all about the different CRM-systems that there are. Which one are applicable to our company? But also, how can we make a decision in functionalities that are important to have in a CRM-system?

What is a CRM-system?
We found several explanations online on the term CRM-system and what this entails. Below, we share the most important definitions (according to us).

Customer relationship management is business strategy that combines skilled customer facing personal, optimal processes and enabling technologies to balance enterprise revenues and profits with maximum customer satisfaction (Gartner Group, 2001).

Customer relationship management is a comprehensive approach which provides seamless integration of every area of business that touches the customer – namely marketing, sales, customer service and field support – through the integration of people, process and technology, taking advantage of the revolutionairy impact of the internet (Customer Relationship Management Association, 2000).

Customer relationship management is een bedrijfsstrategie die erop gericht is om relaties met individuele klanten aan te gaan, te onderhouden en uit te bouwen op een wijze die waarde creëert voor zowel de onderneming als de klant (Beltman, Peelen & Waalewijn, 2000).

In short, we can conclude that most important advantages when having a CRM-system are the following:

-The individual customer is central.
-Profit increase through increased customer satisfaction.
-Realizing optimum and cost-efficient business processes.
-Win-win situation with mutual benefits for own organization and customer.

We have decided to use the website selectiehulp in order to get a better understanding on which CRM-systems are applicable for Waar Gaan We Eten.

First of all, we had to indicate what our main business activity is. We could choose from: Service provider, Sale of Products, Education or Government. We chose Service Provider here. We then had to make a choice after the question: What kind of product or service do you provide? The possible answers were: Business, Individuals, Both or Members. We chose Private Individuals here, because this is our main target group.
After this, we were asked how many employees are employed by us. We filled in 2-5 employees.

It worked very easily, because a special tool opened in which we could click on functionalities that are important to us. The desired functionalities that we could choose from were:
-Relation and contact management
We can use this to monitor loyal readers.

– Calendar, email and task management
This is good to use so that we can enter planned activities and send or prepare emails from the CRM system.

-Office and contract management
For now this does not seem that important, but if we enter into future partnerships with restaurants, we can store, manage and adjust it.

-Customer contact
This is good to see which questions we receive, but also, for example, to see if certain questions or comments are asked more often. We can then make adjustments to this on the website, so that it becomes easier and more user-friendly for consumers.

-Marketing Management
Marketing Management is to monitor promotions, follow offers and, in particular, to analyze the responses received.

-Project hours and administration
We could use this functionality to keep track of our administration and to enter the hours or times that we schedule for projects. This is especially useful if you also have a company where people are paid, but this is of course not necessary.

-Lead management
Lead management is a combination of tactics to turn leads into new customers by assigning them certain value, or in other words, qualifying them. This provides insight into what stage the lead is at, and how the lead can be further transformed into a customer.

With a CRM package, as a small website, we have to take into account that we do not have the budget of a large organization. Fortunately, you can make a choice: you can choose a standard CRM system or go for customization. With CRM software you can choose from a standard CRM package, customization, a hybrid solution or a software stack.

Some functionalities you use every day, others maybe never. You choose at least one CRM package in which everything is arranged.
In the past, custom software was a costly affair. Nowadays there are various solutions with which CRM functionalities can be quickly made to measure at clear costs. This can be an interesting solution if you have specific requirements that are not common in the regular CRM packages.

With the hybrid solution you build your own CRM system with the help of a platform. Examples of hybrid solutions are Force.com and Betty Blocks. Both Force.com and Betty Blocks are online Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions with which applications and websites can be developed. You do not need your own hardware and software and you can build your CRM system with teams from all over the world.

With a software stack, you consciously choose to link different applications together. For example a sales automation application from Insightly linked to a marketing automation solution from Sharpspring, a service automation solution from Zendesk and a project management tool such as Asana. That used to be very complicated, but nowadays it is often easy to link software solutions. Suppliers sometimes offer ready-made interfaces and there are also tools available to tie together software solutions.

We now have contact with Ms. Verhoeven from Selectiehulp, who will send us information on how to implement a good CRM-tool on our website. She will also give advise on how to get the most out of it.

In terms of CRM, what we are already doing right now is for example:
– We let people guess where we are for a lunch or diner – to create engagement
– We let people decide where we are going to eat by asking them tips

•Describe on the weblog the actions carried out in order to optimize conversion of (existing) customers and further develop Content for website, social media and develop possible other appropriate digital platforms:
We have created more content, like our post about the NY-style bar & bistro OpZuid in Utrecht which we will also publish this weekend. Furthermore, we have made a new review about Het Gegeven Paard. This one we will publish next week.
Moreover, we also worked for the first time on Google Adwords.
Lastly, we decided to change our homepage-photo to create more synergy on the website and we also updated the text a bit in order to create engagement.
We already received a tip from a reader of our platform where we should go for dinner the next time, so that is really working. Also, two restaurants reposted our post, Hans & Frietje even put it on their Facebook page and Instagram stories as Chique o Latte used our photos and tagged us on Instagram.

•Describe on the weblog retargeting opportunities, relate to the project and apply where necessary;
Retargeting is actually making sure that a customer visits your webpage again, in order to do close that deal, buy the product, book the holiday or whatsoever. With our inspiration platform, we think that it works differently. We don’t want customers to buy something online, we just want them to get inspired. Although, we could use retargeting to make sure that people that were on our webpage before, will be reminded to visit our page again. In retargeting for us specifically, it is very important that when they visit our page for the second, third or may be fourth time that they will see and experience new information and new posts over and over again. They have to be surprised with the amount of content that we place every week and they have to know that we are on top of our game. We will use Google Adwords to help us in retargeting our customers and creating a higher conversion rate.
We found a picture that describes the retargeting principle very clear for us:

To get a better understanding on how to increase our traffic, we did an online quiz at Neil Patel where we had to share all of our information about how we are running our website and what we are doing for example on Google Analytics, SEO etc.
The results were clear:

We are going to work with the cheat sheet from Neil Platel to increase our traffic and to generate more leads and get a better engagement with our target audience.

•Create a funnel analysis of the behaviour of the visitors based on all information till now and the coming weeks;
https://datastudio.google.com/open/0B_U5RNpwhcE6dDFzTHNtMC1UZnc
We have used Data Studio from Google Analytics to get a clear funnel on how our customers are behaving and what they are actually doing on our website.

In order to make sure that we work together as a team and that our performance during this project is efficient, we have set up some basic principles. We believe that a good performance relies on a good relationship and putting time and effort to listen to each others ideas and also be critical when needed.

The first two weeks we did not produce as much as we are doing right now, and that is mainly because now we have implemented the Principe ‘Keep it Simple’. We want to keep the emphasis on development and growth (because we only have so much weeks) and we have decided to keep the process simple. If we had a nice dinner, lunch or breakfast somewhere, write about it right away and post it online!

This week, during our holiday, we also arranged a meet-up where we went to 3 different restaurants, so that is really progress for our website.
Also, a new milestone! Someone we didn’t know talked about our website to one of the owners of a restaurant where we went. The owner contacted us to tell us about it!

Another Principle that we have, is ‘Get the mix right’. We want to focus on complementary skills within our team. Canan is more technical and therefore she spends more time on advertising and the website and Nienke is feeling more comfortable with writing more articles. We have a good balance and we try to combine our strengths.

The last performance management Principe that we have implemented in our team is ‘Keep in touch’. We always let each other know what we are working on and how we are doing things. That is the basis of a solid performance, we believe.

The targets we have modified in the beginning-phase of our project were as followed:
17 February 2019 – 50 individual page visits
7 April 2019 – 200 individual page visits

What we can see from the Google Analytics page is that we have almost reached our (end) goal for 7 April 2019, while we still have one month to go!
In order to keep ourselves motivated, we have to change our goals in the individual page visits and we think we might want to try to reach to the 400 individual page visits. We think this can be realistic, because we are now also posting a lot more and we also use Advertisements. Hopefully it will pay off.

We have used the strategy map from the beginning to see whether we are making progress or not. For example: the percentage of customer retention is set at 25% as you can see below.

What we can conclude from Google Analytics is that we can really work on the retention-numbers, because it is now somewhere around 8%. The only question is how? We will discuss this in class with our teacher, coming Wednesday.

What we can conclude from the past few days is that the key factor to our success is that we have to place a lot of content on our website.
We have received 64 new visitors to our website in the last 7 days, and it appeared that the post of Chic o Latte has been viewed a lot. We have evaluated this and besides the fact that we paid a lot of attention to taking photos in this post, we also did something else differently. What we also did differently is that we have informed the employees of Chique o Latte about our blog. A little later we saw that they had reported our message. Yes, in fact, free promotion for our website! We will certainly do this way more often! At the same time, we also tap a new target group of people who do not know us yet.

This week we have worked a lot on creating content, pictures and finally making sure that everything we want to present is presented in the right way.

Last week, we had already changed the theme of the website as it occurred to us that the old theme just did not allow to do what we wanted. The old theme limited us in many ways. At first, we were convinced that we just had to find out how the theme worked and that it would be theme same struggle we would have to go through if we chose a different one. However, things just did not seem to improve and that is how we ended up trying and experimenting with other themes. This is how we ended up with the current one.

Let’s now dive into this week. Because we had chosen a different theme last week, the task for this week was to rearrange the website and make sure all new and old content was added. Luckily, we managed to do this quite quick. The new theme also allowed us to add a gallery to our new posts, which is something we wanted to do from the beginning on. This is why we ended up adding a gallery to each review and deleting the gallery we had implemented on the homepage. On top of that, we also added captions and titles to all our picture to make sure our SEO would be more on point.

In class, we received feedback for our reviews, they were too long. Thus, we followed the advice we had gotten and shortened them by basing the reviews on our 5 star rating. We left out the table with our ratings as we already talked about this in the review. We did keep the contact details of the restaurant in the reviews and we added a gallery to each review.

Next to all of this, we managed to figure out how we could add the posts to the links in the middel of the website. For some reason, they only appeared in the menu on the right top. After a lot of searching, trying and experimenting, we finally found the solution. So, now if you go to recensies and click on for example lunch, you will see all our posts on lunches.

Furthermore, we kept our social media up to date by regularly posting something online. Through the help of the internet we found certain time frames in which you will probably receive the most likes and/or reach the most people. Next to this, some researchers had apparently researched what to post on the different types of social media platforms. This is why we started adding food related content on Instagram.

When it comes down to usability, we asked some visitors how they experience our website. Most people stated that the website is quite easy to navigate through and that the menus and links are pleasant to work with. Also, they liked the fact that we have links to our social media. Anyway, just like the feedback we got in class, most visitors think our posts are too long and that is why it came out just right that we started experimenting with shorter reviews this week. Besides all of this, they want to see more picture, not just of what we have ordered but also of the menu.

We will give an update on how we did with our KPI’s next week as the one writing this post is unable to enter this data for some unexplainable reason, still working on it!

An update about the visitors until week 5, we found out the following:

This week, we have worked on creating more content for our website. We believe that from now on we can really show relevant content to our target audience and we hope to see this through in the amount of visitors.

An assignment was given about online revenue models for our company, and we have written an essay about this topic, but besides that we also created a presentation (individually) about our opinions regarding this topic. What would be the best online revenue model for us to use for the platform http://www.waargaanweeten.nl?

We started of with various online revenue models:
Affiliate model
Brokerage model
Sales model
Advertising model
Subscription model

After discussions and evaluation of alternatives, we think that a combination of the affiliate and advertising online revenue model will fit best for our platform. For the long term, we also want to do research about the possibilities of a subscription model. We do understand that in order to do so, we really have to create added value for our customers. It has to be information, entertainment or some other value (like discount on restaurant) which has to pursue them to get a subscription.

Before we can use one of the methods to earn money and create revenue, we first have to invest. We have to create brand-awareness and leads. For example, if we want other companies / restaurants to advertise on our website, we have to show them that there is a substantial amount of visitors on our website. The same goes for the affiliate model.

We will use our investment to create a ‘buzz’ and brand-awareness via multiple channels. We will focus specifically on the target audience between 24-35 years old, living and working near Utrecht. We decided that we are going to use A/B-testing, in order to get a better insight in the customer behaviour.

A/B-testing is running a simultaneous experiment between two or more pages to see which performs or converts the best. Despite the name (A/B testing), the experiment can be conducted with as many pages as desired.

We are also thinking of inviting guest bloggers but also react on other websites and bloggers, which can be beneficial for us because it will mean that we reach a bigger network. We are trying to create really valuable content. We want to be everywhere in our niche. Providing valuable content on other sites outside of our own will build an engaged audience. Once they know, like, and trust us, we believe that we will be more able to market our product / service to them.

Above you can find our customer persona’s. These customer persona’s are based on what kind of work they do on a daily basis. We chose to look into our customer persona’s based on their work preferences and habits, because in this hectic world people are becoming more and more flexible, also within their work environment.
This means that work spaces will also differ compared to before. Nowadays, people want to work in an environment that is inspiring. Therefore, meetings will often take place in restaurant, but also just creating content or inspirational sessions can occur in a setting as a restaurant.

Of course we have also mapped out the customer journey for each of our persona’s.

Lieke

1. Awareness: we believe we can make Lieke aware by word of mouth communication since she is someone who prefers face to face communication.
2. Interest: We can make Lieke interested in us by approaching her via social media and by sending her e-mails. As we do not have a database with e-mails we will focus on online advertising and social advertising (on social media).
3. Consideration: By reading our blogs and reviews, also reviews about us she will make her decision.
4. Purchase: There is nothing to purchase from us. However, she can find us on the main social media forms: Instagram and Facebook. Also, we have a website. Last but not least we have a mobile version as well of our website which makes it handy for on the way.
5. Retention: She can reach us through either social media or through our website. On top of that, she can always e-mail us as we have set up an e-mail address for the website.
6. Advocacy: By sending out surveys and being reachable on social media we believe we can turn her into a loyal customer.

Luuk

1. Awarness: We will make Luuk the same way aware of us as we would make Lieke aware.
2. Interest: Through emails, social ads, online ads and possible SEA.
3. Consideration: By reading reviews about us but also by friends telling him about us.
4. Purchase: Mainly through social media.
5. Retention: Social media and e-mail which can be found on our social media and website.
6. Advocacy: Always reachable.

The Google-keywords that we chose are:
lekker eten, lunchen, restaurant in de buurt, romantische restaurants, onbeperkt eten, goedkoop eten, reviews restaurants, recensies restaurants, waar moeten we eten, waar gaan we eten, leuk restaurant, lekker restaurant, nieuw restaurant.

This is based on the Google Ads campaign builder that we have used in order to create these keywords.

We will use these keywords as part of our SEO approach. Using these keywords will hopefully make us rank higher in search engines like Google.

Next to this, we also have been busy with creating content for our target audience. An article about a lunch at TEDS in Utrecht is published and also a new article is online about a lunch at Metro City Kitchen in Utrecht.
We are now working on our third and fourth article, about The Golden Brown Bar in Amsterdam (diner) and Shizen in Utrecht (diner).

The first week started off well on Wednesday. Instructions were given about the weekly deliverables and about the project in general.
We formed groups and we began to brainstorm about our ideas. We set up a work blog on WordPress.com and created an account for our website.
We are both quite overwhelmed with information when we want to choose a restaurant, and websites like Iens.com are filled with both positive and negative content. We want to do it differently. We want to create a positive platform where people can directly see an overview of restaurants and decide whether they want to go there.

The criteria where we will focus on during a visit of a restaurant will be:
-Atmosphere
-Service
-Price/quality
-Instagram worthy
-Variation
-Waiting time
-Originality
Besides that, we will also mention something about the drinks, suitable occasions for the restaurants, details of the location of the restaurant and the type of kitchen.

Our objectives
17 February 2019 – 50 individual page visits
7 April 2019 – 200 individual page visits

How are we going to reach our objectives?
Our first focus is of course our family and friends, although this is a relatively small ‘group’, we think that they can help us in giving comments about the look and feel of our website and our tone-of-voice. Later in the process, when we really feel comfortable and when we created enough content, we will actively share posts and sneak-previews on our facebook and Instagram pages. To create engagement with our online audience, it seems cool to involve people in the process of picking a restaurant.
Also, we want to get in contact with the restaurants and find out if they might be interested in some form of collaboration. It seems like a win-win situation, because the restaurant will get more customers, and we as a website can promote ourselves.

Our goal is to post at least once a week a review about a restaurant that we have visited (both breakfast, lunch and dinner)
Our target group are young people who like to go out and share our love for food, a good atmosphere and great service. We will make sure that our reviews are suitable for different budgets, because we will vary in restaurants that are affordable but also visit restaurants which are more luxurious and therefore more expensive.