Month: August 2021

Communicate the way your customer wants!

There is such a paradox in today’s marketing techniques. On the one hand, we have been beaten over the head with the idea that if you make a personal connection with your customer you make the sale. But we’re also bombarded with the very impersonal Internet which impacts today’s consumers in a huge way. How do you balance your need to connect with your customers and their need to check you out online before they let you invade their lives? – Yes, invade… it is an invasion until you have the chance to make that personal connection. Get the paradox yet?

I hear from businesses all the time that they would rather get a phone call from a potential customer instead of an email. Wouldn’t we all? To have someone new call us up out of the blue asking how we can help them? And we respond to their every question with the perfect answer, make that personal connection, and bingo! Money in your pocket. But the reality of today’s consumer is that the Internet and email equals “you’re lucky to be contacted at all.” Also, today’s consumer thinks differently than a decade ago. Today’s consumer wants information and truly believes they’re entitled to information. The majority of consumers use the Internet to research products and services online before they plan to buy.

The old sales routine:
1. My business spends money on advertising, direct mail, business flyers, etc. to spread the word about my products.
2. I wait for customers to call or stop in.
3. A sales person tries to make personal connection with a potential client
4. The sale – maybe.
5. Not enough sales, start over, repeat step 1, but this time get more aggressive and cold call people. They don’t know they need us, so let’s sell them on why they need my product now.

The new way
1. A consumer has a need
2. the consumer looks online for a business that can fulfill that need
3. the consumer contacts that business for more information
4. The business follows through with giving the client information in the manner received
a. If the customer inquired by email, an email response is sent
b. If the customer filled out an online form with their phone number, a call could be made
c. If the customer filled out a form to schedule a face to face meeting, the meeting is scheduled

The 21st century consumer expects businesses to behave in the manner they’ve specified, not the other way around. If you refuse to communicate through email and expect your customers to adapt to you, you will miss many opportunities to bring in new customers. But also be aware that this doesn’t mean that today’s customers don’t appreciate the phone or face to face meetings. You can get the meeting if you follow their lead. If they’ve sent you email without a phone number, don’t look up their number and call them – you’ve just turned yourself into a telemarketer.

Analyzing the effectiveness of your website.

The biggest question website owners are faced with is: Does my website work? The first thing I tell my clients is to define what “work” means to them. Usually, then they say that a high number of clicks is their definition of a website that “works”. Now I ask them to think a little more out of the box. What if a site receives 100K clicks but no new business, does that site work? Traffic alone is not an accurate measure of whether or not a website is working.

Look at Business A as a case study. Business A is a type of medical facility. As a medical facility, they need clients to be able to come into their location for service. Business A is also located in a town of about 75,000 people. Getting 100K clicks per month on their website is an unrealistic goal for Business A due to the simple fact that there isn’t even 100K people in their town. And if 100K people suddenly wanted to be their customer, they wouldn’t have the ability to service them all. A more realistic goal for Business A would be to find a “number of new clients” goal and to target their online efforts accordingly.

Business B, on the other hand is a completely web based business. They have a number of products that they sell completely online through their website. Their products are shipped anywhere in the country and require a high volume of sales each month. This type of business needs a lot of traffic to reach their sales goals, so in this case, the volume of clicks counts.

How many new clients do you expect from your site? Do you expect all of your business to come from the web? Do you need clients to physically come into your brick-and-mortar store? Do you have a territory that you cater to? All of these questions help determine what your website’s role in your business could be or should be.

Search Engine Placement
In any business’s website situation, search engine placement is a large player in getting the type of results that move you towards your individual site’s goal. If your website cannot be found in the right keywords, making efforts to correct this short-coming will be the most cost-effective move to make. In the long run it will minimize the amount of online pay-per-click, pay-per-impression, and banner ads that are needed to reach your customer/sales goal.

Converting Traffic into Sales
Click to customer conversion ratio is another number that will help you determine if your website is working. This ratio is unique to your business so there’s no magic number or chart to use to determine what’s right for your business. If you look at the number of customers you are getting through your website and the number of clicks it took to get them, you can determine if you need to improve. The most common thing we see in converting visitors to clients is having or not having the right information on the website. If you have no call to action, no sales or bargains, or no value statements, your visitors are less likely to be converted to customers. You must ask for the sale, you must ask to be contacted, you must ask your visitor to become your customer. Changing your content to turn visitors into customers is the easiest and most effective way to convert traffic into sales.

Tools
A tool that I recommend to my clients is Google Analytics, its free, user friendly, and full of information that can help you determine if your website is on the right path. Sign up for this tool with Google and have your webmaster load it onto your website. You need a base line from which to start, so after loading the analytics tool, give it a month to see where you are starting from. Each day, each week, and at the end of the month login to see where your traffic is coming from.

Analyzing your traffic will help you form a plan.
Direct Hit – people are typing your dot com directly into their address bar or search bar This tells you that people know who you are and are probably current customers
Bounce Rate – bounces are usually when someone click on your site and stays for less than 30 seconds. This tells you that you are receiving the wrong traffic, people expected something else, your site design was repelling, or there is click fraud happening (if you are paying for ppc links)

Keywords – what keywords are people using to find you.
This can tell you if your placement is in need of work and if your keywords are in need of adjustment.
Page Views – this counts all the internal pages that visitors are looking at, so if you have 10 unique visitors and 30 page views, the average visitor is clicking through 3 pages before leaving your site. High page views can mean that people are digging into your site to learn more or shop more, or it can mean that its hard to find the information they’re looking for. Measure page views against leads or sales to figure out if you need to adjust your navigation or content.

Unique Visitors – this is the number of people who have come to your site for the first time, and if they return to your site, they’re not counted again in this number.

If you know for a fact that your site design is the problem, start with having a reputable website design company redesign your website. (Ask to see evidence of their client’s search placement for proof that they will deliver a correctly designed website.)

Do you need local marketing, regional marketing, or national marketing?

Every business has its own unique market area, and regardless if that area is local or national, every business benefits from the right online marketing strategy. What is the right strategy for your business?

Local Marketing
Businesses that need to have their customers physically walk in their door in order to complete the business transaction benefit from local online marketing. Think of dentists as a good example. A tooth cannot be filled if it’s not in the dentist’s office. Territorial businesses are also a good example of only needing local marketing. If it is not possible for someone outside of your territory to buy from you, local is your only option.

Keyword Strategy for Local Marketing
Make sure that you’re keywords are heavily targeted to your city or suburb. This includes any pay-per-click campaigns that you are using. You will get a bigger bang for your buck by adding your city, your suburb, your neighborhood, and even your local slang (if applicable) as part of your keywords. When you don’t include a localizer, you put yourself in competition with every similar business on the internet. Reducing your competition increases your chances of moving your website to the top of the list.

Regional Marketing
Businesses that have a few states in their territory would need regional marketing. Other good examples of regional marketing would be car dealerships. It is not uncommon for customers that don’t live in town to travel in to see a particular vehicle they’re interested in. It is realistic to think someone would travel a few hundred miles for a vehicle, but it’s not realistic for the average customer to come from across the country. Regional businesses don’t necessarily need their customer to step into their office, but they’re restricted in delivery area or consumer area.

Keyword Strategy for Regional Marketing
Like local marketing, when you’re customer area is a multiple city, multiple state area, you will get better traffic by geo-targeting your keywords to those areas as if you are local to each of the cities and states you target. In addition to adding keywords for those areas, your website content must also include each city or state you’ve added into your keywords. You will get better results if the search engine sees those keywords on the page, and not solely in the meta data. Adding this content can be as simple as adding an “Areas of Service” paragraph at the bottom of your home page with a list of each of the targeted cities and states. Once again, you’re narrowing your search competition and increasing your chances of moving to the top of the search.

National Marketing
Businesses that deliver anywhere in the country benefit the most from national marketing. If your product or service could be delivered anywhere, then national marketing would help you the most. A great example is software companies or retail consumer products.

Keyword Strategy for National Marketing
Believe it or not, on a national scale, geo-targeting your keywords will increase your search traffic. People search local. If you sell to consumers in Citrus County Fl, even though you are located in Wyoming, targeting your site’s keywords to include Nashville will get better results than leaving the local out of your keywords. Try searching for your product without a locator in your keywords. Look at the number of website results. Now try the same search with a locator in the keywords. The number of website results will be significantly smaller. It is easier to compete with a few hundred thousand other sites than tens of millions. You can target multiple states and multiple cities. If your website is correctly optimized, you can even change regions at will.

Pay-per-click campaigns are especially important to geo-target. You’ll pay less per click for a targeted keyword than for a general keyword. The general keywords have more people playing, so you have to bid more per click just to get placed in a decent spot. Besides, there is so much click fraud out there that it would be a shame to pay $10 for a fraudulent click on a national scale than $.50 for a localized click. You reduce budget waste by purchasing less expensive clicks.

To manage your online marketing, first, make sure you have an optimized website and great traffic analytics. Visit my website for more tips and advice.

What is mobile-friendly design

More than half of all cell phone users have a smart-phone generation phone. This means your customers are also finding products and services on the phone’s internet, not just at their computer. Does your website translate well on the mobile web? Make sure it does with either a mobile web app or a mobile website.

Think about your customer’s experience. If they’re searching on their phone, chances are they need your service or directions to your location right then. You need to make sure your information is fast, organized and designed just for the mobile internet. Remember, the mobile user is constrained by the speed of the network they are on or the strength of the wi-fi they’re using. Chances are, they’re not using a 20MB download connection, so you must give them a user-friendly option or risk their impatience and quick retreat from a slow or unusable site. Can you afford to take this chance?

Can your business benefit from a mobile app? Not every business can justify a mobile app, but for those that can, creating an app can give you recurring clients, quick response to specials, or valuable user behavior data that can help you grow and measure success.

Let our creative team help you think of an app that is beneficial to your clients. We can guide you through all the obvious cheesy app ideas that, frankly no one will download, and come up with a true tool for you and your business and your customers.