Richard Reast has been working in the advertising, marketing, and digital marketing industry for over 20
years. He’s a former business director at the international agency TBWA in London. He came to Cyprus with his wife in 2009, and started an online business with the website Exclaim Enduro Tours offering “adventure and off-road trail riding on guided motorcycle tours in sunny, scenic Cyprus.”

Building and creating the website himself, doing all the social media, Reast has established a solid, clearly branded business entirely based around his website.

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For Reast, branding it the key to success in online business.

“Branding is a big problem for many, many nascent online businesses in Cyprus. They may know how to set up a website and maybe even structure it properly, but they don’t really understand the branding concepts, the way to establish a clear identity with a well-defined offer.

What happens is an SME does a website, and they build it before sitting down and asking themselves ‘What is my brand? What’s my point of difference? What am I offering? Who am I targeting? What is the business plan? How should I translate that into communication? They just haven’t done that.”

They need to start with the Unilever Brand Key which is a brand pyramid, essentially a brand blueprint.. And if you get that right, then that translates into the website and guides you for everything you communicate.

It’s critical to make it very simple to navigate, very simple to give the information, very clear on what the viewer’s journey through that website should be to get them to contact you, which is the ultimate aim. It’s all about generating leads and then getting conversions. So out of everyone that contacts us, we convert 80 to 85 per cent of people who contact us into customers.

For example, on our website, we never talk about ourselves, we don’t use the words ‘customer or client’ — we talk about our ‘guests.’ This is an essential part of our branding; we are a personalised business, and we look after people and grow these people as our guests. We say “Welcomed here as guests, leave here as friends. We don’t actually see people as customers at all.

You’ll see that on the Facebook page, we talk about what our guests are doing, and who screwed up where, and who did well, and who were in the funny motorcycle crashes. Everything is entertainment under our branding, which makes sense because our business is a form of sports entertainment.

We use al the social media we can. We have impressive YouTube videos like this one: https://www.exclaimtours.com/kalavasos-tour .

Then, of course, there are online sites that bring in business. Let me give an example from our business. We provide guided tours on motorcycles (we don’t rent bikes). A group of four or five people come from Russia, UK, Israel, wherever. We pick them up at the airport, and we arrange the tour and the hotels. And we spend time with them, try to show them the beauty of Cyprus, and get to know them a bit.

You save the pictures of them riding, and you put them up on social media. And afterwards, you get inquiries from others asking ‘Can I do that?’ Social media and web presence also generates word-of-mouth recommendations, and these are also very important, conveying trust.

So Tripadvisor is a very important site for us. It provides recommendations which people trust. And Tripadvisor has given us a Certificate of Excellence for three years in a row. You can imagine what this means in terms of business, and referrals to the website. We’ve also got 350 reviews up around the web, and 348 are glowing.

In fact, we have a 24-hour rule. From the time a potential guest contacts us, we expect to sign him/her up within 24 hours. And it works for us. Remember that the number of people who can even ride a bike is small, so that once you get someone who can ride on the site, it’s critical to press the right buttons.

It’s true that the pandemic had stopped all that, although it is starting up again. But we were please to see that we were able to reach a large target group right here in Cyprus. That’s right, domestic tourism replaced the foreign visitors and we’ve had good business right through the whole crisis. We also provide instruction on how to ride, and people stick with us through the lessons, right until they get a bike, and then they still ride with us.

You can, of course, book right on the website or just ask for information. What’s important is to make sure you get as much online presence as you can.