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How To Increase Your Web Leads By Going Against Best Practices..!
In this article I wanted to share some interesting experiments we ran for a client of ours last year which, in return, brought about an amazing return on investment.
My client, who already had a website in place, was unhappy with the number of leads that were coming from his website. He had good positioning in place already and people were being referred by other social networking sites, but the number of sales were just really disappointing! Armed with this knowledge, my objective was to look at barriers that may be getting in the way of leads being generated from his site.
“The First Test Resulted In….112% More Leads!”
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Improve your website using science!
Dave here from Redcow.
It’s March already – how is your year shaping up? Is it starting to look
like “same old, same old?”
When I started off in 2012, I was determined to better the business model,
build on my knowledge, share some learning experiences and gain more sales!
As an owner of a company I don’t like the feeling of standing still. I
always want and need to feel that I am moving forward and growing
customers.
The feeling that I have when the sales and business is coming through the
door makes it all worth while. Along the way we also get to build up some
amazing relationships with clients and see the impact that comes from
helping them grow their business.
Last month I sent you an article all about trying to think outside the
square in regards to generating more conversions from your website. In fact,
my focus was on trying new things and how making changes can turn your
business upside down in regards to more leads!
The biggest lesson for me was that doing something that may be considered
radical, led to a client’s website generating 300% more leads…and that
to this very day is still an unreal outcome. So where does that leave ” best
practices”? It leaves best pracitices to those that are unwilling to test
their market place, those who don’t want more and more sales, those who want
to be the same as everyone else – which means you may never get the most out
of your website. If you think about where we have come from in regards to
advertising …from Yellow pages, shared hosting, dedicated websites, best
practice landing pages to now, landing page testing I feel we have only just
touched on the fringes of where websites and business growth can be.
This month I want to look into ways you can improve your website by
watching how visitors use your website. Watching, you say? Yes, watching!
We use software that allows us to track every activity a visitor makes on
your website. Armed with information you can see:
* Where visitors are clicking, and not clicking, on your website
* Where confusion is happening on your pages
* What friction points stop people from making contact with you
* The amount of reading people do on each page
* Where visitors are bouncing back and forth within your site
With this type of information you can study and look at ways to improve
your website by analysing and improving sticking points, catching errors and
fixing places on your site that are causing people to stop and not engage
with you.
The trick to making the most of this software is within the analysis area.
This is where having a team of analysts who study websites for improvement
purposes for a living can take your website to new levels
of satisfaction not only for the end user but also for your business sales.
Yes, once you have this information on hand you are then able to correct and
fix areas on your site that may be stopping people for making contact with
you, making a sale with you, or just engaging with your site at any level.
If you have a site now and feel that you should be getting more leads or
sales from it, maybe, just maybe there are issues with it that are stopping
the number of people coming through the site to talk with you.
This month, with my focus on watching traffic, the Redcow team are offering
a March Special Deal that allows you and your site to improve its ability
to sell. Our March deal includes a dedicated resource to watch your website
for an entire month, after the month is up my team will then analyse and
provide a report that will help your website convert more visitors into
buyers of your products and services.
We are offering this amazing service just to you because you are on my mailing list.
This one time deal will expire at the end of this month so be quick, act now! Normally $1000, yours for only $749*!
This is what you will receive with our March deal:
1. A consultation with me to discuss your website
2. Your website will be analysed for for 30 days
3. You will then be provided with a comprehensive report detailing the
areas of where your website is failing to help visitors turn into
customers
4. Along with this report will will recieve another consultation with me to
dicuss the findings and any opportunties for improvement
That’s it for me…
Have fun and don’t ever stop wanting to improve your website!
Cheers,
Dave.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
How to get more from your pay per click (PPC)!
Want a way to generate more from your pay per click spend?
Lets run through this scenario together
- You have set up a highly targeted campaign in Adwords (so that your website is listed in the search results for phrases that match your business services.
- You get clicks to your landing page or home page (generally a specific landing page) in your very competitive market place – well done all is going well
- The visitor then views your web page & takes no action, non what so ever (no lead generation or sale?)
- Visitor leaves the site – no sale and money and opportunity gone!
- Your none the wiser either! Frustrating isnt it?
OK, you have done your job, you have generated the interest, you have sent the visitor to the page, but no action is made (ie, no sale or contact made from that visitor) now what?
If the PPC is working correctly does this mean the website is broken or needs to be refined to encourage sales and leads from its PPC visitors. Chances are Yes!, Well not broken but needs work to create sales.
I believe that any site can gain sales, the secret ingredient however is having the entire “sales funnel” correctly aligned around “traffic-interest-activity-analysis” if any of these are failing or not in your sales funnel equation then you advertising is not working it’s potential!
Food for thought isn’t it? If you would like to know how we can help your website generate more from your PPC give me a call some time.
Dave Lemmon
Marketing Director/Owner
021 425692
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
How do you get more sales from your website?
Yeah a pretty good question, one we hear from most of our clients that come to us for help.
More and more these days, people are taking notice of what their websites are doing (or not doing) for them, 90% of business owners now see that and want their websites to generate sales for them. Where it began…?
Many sites are designed by creative teams of people whose job, as they saw it was to build websites that looked pretty, acted in some order fashion and/or mimicked client brochures. And to some degree, for the most part, followed a traditional look and feel that others had on their websites. Ok, so where to from here.
Well just lately, well in fact for the past five or so years, people have been looking at ways that they can have some business generated from their website – and this is where the whole design first and sell later comes into the forefront.
As I mentioned above, people went to website designers, the designer come up with a beautiful website which promised so much, but in reality has delivered nothing or very little in the way of business sales.
Lets review a typical website – lovely home page with pretty colours, a big “Welcome to” on the centre of the page, followed by content and links to other areas of their website…traditionally, there is an about us, what we do, our location, contact us, our services, our products…blah blah.. – sounds like a winning combination right…well…not really…lets consider a few things here…what do I want from my website, what is it that I want to achieve, and why have I gone out and spent hard earned money on my website? Do I just want a brochure but in electronic format….hmm maybe not…OK..stay with me, here I am getting to the meat and drink of what I trying to tell you…
What if I was to tell you this… if your best sales rep went to a meeting and all they talked about was what was inside your company brochure do you think that this sales rep would be successful..? – People that come to visit your website are effectively people that you are selling to…OK..we are getting closer..
Here is a typical point of difference with websites that sell and convert visitors into contacts and possible sales.
- They focus on telling people where they are
- They tell the user what they can achieve by visitors
- And they then give the visitor reasons to act
- They provide users with a clear channel of where things are located and how to access them
- They focus the content on “what’s in it for them”
- They display their USP, their “unique sales proposition” in the eye-line
- The are often a mirror image of their greatest sales reps
If we compare this list with the one from the brochure…where does your website fit?
Here are some statistics from our website tests..
- Business owners that have many websites doing specific jobs sell more
- Business owners that follow a sales process on their website sell more
- Business owners that have a 1 page website generate more sales than ones with 1 large website
- Sites that focus on lead generation verses lovely brochure sites win more sales
- Sites that are geared around helping others fix problems sell more online
Over the past decade, I have built my very own list of different types of website models (around 10 or so). Where most people go wrong is that they mix and match these different models which causes confusion, and with confusion people don’t act.
Good luck
Till next time, Dave.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
What does Redcow Marketing do for businesses?
It’s interesting to chat to a customer about what we do and why we are different to others out there in the market place.
Some people see us as SEO masters, or pay per click managers, while others think we are website designers. What is our point of difference and what makes us so much different from the others in the market is this critical point…”the end result”
This is what I mean…I try to explain it by starting off talking about what we aren’t, we aren’t just a search engine optimisation company, we are not a pay per click marketing company, we aren’t a web design team..what we are and what we do is utilise these things just mentioned but again…that’s not us either!
We are business analysts for your online business. We design strategies to help businesses grow online – full stop. How we go about doing this depends largely on where the client is in terms of its current website presence. Some clients might have a website already and want to grow, while others have no website and want to discover more customers. So back to how and what we do….
I see ourselves as marketers who are able to improve or build new business for people by designing web based models in business.
Our major offering is in the key skills of improvement. We, in a “nutshell”, design marketing programs around improvement. We design tests and conduct studies online that help us improve our clients online businesses (much like a business analyst does for any business of substance) – we in a sense become the marketing team/business analyst team that companies don’t have for their websites and let alone can generally afford. What we offer our customers is a full marketing team at a fraction of a cost that they would have to fork out if they wanted a team to grow their business.
Let me walk you through a campaign we did for a client just recently, maybe this will explain more about we do…The client wanted more sales from its current visitors.
- The client had a nice website already but was not happy with the level of bookings it generated
- We started this program but designed a strategy to help the client discover how to make its website more effective
- Unlike others who might do an improvement review on a website based on just “best practices”, we start off by finding out exactly what past clients thought of their website as well as discovering what new visitors thought of their online website model
- We then went about discovering how people surfed their online pages, where people clicked, how far people scrolled on pages, what keywords brought them to site pages, we recorded people using the website and also conducted a number of user case studies to help us discover weaknesses within their websites.
- After three months of testing and discovering we were able to increase the sites performance (in regards to sales generated) by an amazing 100%
So there you go, that’s just one way we help clients grow….
So, is it clear now what we offer? Maybe a little clearer??
“We help clients grow their business by designing strategies to suit their end goals”
Can this be packaged and sold in the 1000′s, I’m not so sure… but we are giving it go!
For our clients the ultimate growth can only happen once we understand the NEEDS and because each client is unique each marketing strategy therefore must be as well!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Optimising your website is key!
As I surf around the Internet these days I see a load of sites out there that are built for the masses who all love social networks and signing up for special offers! Follow me here to twitter with me, Click me on Facebook and join me as a friend, Like me a lot and join my social scene etc…
While I don’t discount the value of these social streams for some larger businesses, I have yet to see any real business gains for clients that have a smaller catchment of visitors or small or low membership clients. Some of which are ruining their websites with these.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
How do I start marketing my business?
I often hear from clients who want a price or a quote for a pay per click campaign (Google Adwords)…they have read somewhere that if they advertise in Google they will generate more sales from their website!
Hi Dave they say… “I want to start advertising in search engines so that we can make more money using pay per click. How much do you charge for this? ”
While the simple answer to this is to give them a rough price and hope you are the lowest in the quote contest, our approach is to gain a meeting with the person interested in the quote so that we can discuss with them their goals, products and services in more detail.
What I discovered many years ago is that per per click alone will not make you rich, the only way to make it successful online is to combine a number of activities together to help you gain as many sales and customers via your web marketing. No, this isn’t a magic formula, its more about designing a strategy around making the goals for the client happen!
While it is true that you may increase your sales from some of the additional advertising you do online, the bottleneck for 90% of our clients is making that website sell for them. If your website doesn’t sell well then you are wasting your time and money.
It puzzles me that people still do not understand that the most important element of the marketing is on their website! PPC and new visitors will only take you so far… in regards to making and generating more business and sales. If your web site is converting only 1% of all visitors no matter how many come looking you will still only covert that same percentage. The objective is to help you design a website that increases this most important element – your “website”. Improving your website alone, can really increase your sales and return on investment sometimes (if you have enough traffic already) without any need for huge spends in PPC traffic.
Eh…but how do I improve my website…? What analytical data do I track, how can I track what people are doing on my website, where can I get visitors from, how can I track my online videos, how can I get my website found on search engines, where are visitors viewing, what are they typing in to find my site, and what they are thinking while they are surfing around my site…What do I have on the home site that is stopping clients from contacting me? How do I know if it is working well for people at all? All of this tracking, reviewing and analysis is what all marketing companies should offer, but little if any (apart from us) do this.
Here is my top 4 suggestions to help your business grow online!
- Use a marketing company to help you improve your website.
- Use a marketing company to help you analyse your web traffic.
- Use a marketing company to create a search engine optimisation strategy for you.
- Use a marketing company to create a pay per click strategy for you.
Don’t get lost in the crowd – grow your business with expertise behind you
Tell next time…
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Usability & search drive 70% more revenue to hotel
How Redcow Marketing helped Museum Hotel improve their conversion rate by 100% and achieve a 70% increase in online sales.
The Museum Hotel’s Challenges:
The owner of Wellington NZ’s Museum Hotel – Chris Parkin – wanted…
- More bookings through his hotel’s website, more brand awareness, and more sales.
- To increase his website’s presence and make the most of its visitors.
- To reduce the fees he pays to third party travel sites for bookings, and to encourage guests to book from his website, instead.
Dave suggested they…
- Make better use of the hotel’s booking engine.
- Address usability and testing page enhancements to improve sales.
- Add sales elements on the website to improve the sales funnel, and add new content to the homepage and other vital areas that would enhance engagement.
- Work directly with the hotel’s booking engine provider to improve features.
- Work directly with the reservation staff and manager of the hotel to increase bookings.
- Address the site’s SEO content.
- Redesign the online advertising pay-per-click campaign.
First, they accessed the website’s analytical data to determine how much traffic was coming to the site, what levels of contact were made, what and how many bookings were generated, where people went when they visited, how long they were there, and where they left. All of this information helped to paint a picture of the site’s performance.
Dave reviewed the site for usability issues, friction, and confusion points, then looked for gaps in the website where they could enhance value, and studied the site’s flow of information.
Their major challenge was to make the website more interactive and focused – to get people moving into the booking engine as quickly as possible from the website itself; once there, the likelihood that a booking would be made was very high.
Dave proposed a new layout for the home page, then tried and tested different versions to find which one most effectively raised guests’ engagement levels with the site and booking engine.
The next step was to address the pages that were visited the most – providing feedback to the hotel on what those pages were lacking. They also added new tracking systems to monitor visitors and conversions levels, allowing them to track which parts of the pages people were more interested in, what keyword phrases were bringing in sales and customers, and other valuable information.
Finally, they added clearer navigation to aid the user experience, including new contact forms, maps and directions.
They rolled out these changes over the course of a few months, analyzing and tweaking along the way to enhance the overall package.
Results:
In 2009 their revenue increased by 56% from 2008
In 2010 their revenue increased by 11% from 2009
This is a massive revenue increase of 73% over two years
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Improve Your Website And Sell More
Did you know that you can increase your website’s ability to sell significantly by looking at implementing small changes to pages within it.
See how we helped Museum Hotel increase their bookings 20% month on month and improve their level of conversions by 100% on their website by improving the functionality, usability and engagement levels. We tell you how in our PDF attached.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Why branding isn’t important any more
Is branding your name as important as it once was?
I say no… why? Because you can now use the Internet in some creative ways to generate sales and customers for your business.
Here’s a concept that you may have seen on the telly in marketing documents and maybe even on the radio.
Companies are now branding what they offer, what they do etc., with easy to remember domain names that are catchy and informative to the end user. The National Bank now advertises mortgage services using this methodology as do many other major brands, the brand is important it is not used in the marketing of these services.
So what are the pro’s and con’s.
Pro’s
- Easy to remember domain name, for example www.GetYourMortgage.co.nz is easier to remember and therefore it’s easier for the client to get the information they are after without having to go through the National Bank’s normal home page.
- The content is rich with information about how to get your mortgage. While the brand is tied in with the product offering it is more the fact that that site is all about mortgages that makes it a far more informative site for the end user.
- The content and the keywords in the domain name also helps the site be found in all major search engines as the words in the domain and used in the site help to determine the overall positioning within their rankings.
- It enables smaller businesses to gain a larger market share as they are able to complete against the traditional marketing media that the the major brands depend on.
- This allows smaller operators to compete for business in creative ways to create new sales and customers.
Con’s
- Another site for the bank to administrate and manage moving forward.
- The brand may be lost in the marketing mix to some that depend on that to secure business, so in this form of marketing it is important to ensure the brand is included where possible within the site.
So to summarise, while the brand is important, what the Internet allows you to do is to stand out and be counted by offering unique tailor made service- and product-focused driven websites.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Quick steps to SEO greatness
I was working with a client of mine on a project and he happened to mention that his wife was working on a website project to help families become more interested in playing golf.
His wife had being working with an website agency to promote this service and the site has just gone live. He wanted to get this site promoted in search engines such as Google. He sent me the link and asked for my help.
I asked if he would be able to give me some search phrases that his wife would like the site to be found for. He come back the next day and give me five lines of phrases. Out of these five lines the words he gave were very generic and in most cases they were just one word. I then asked him to resend me a list of search phrases that were more specific to what the site was promoting. The next thing I know a page document was sent to me with the note; ‘please take the content for phrases from this document’.
Ok, I reviewed the document and was able to determine some key phrases to focus on and then went about briefing my friend on some ways to help the site get found.
Here were my tips:
- Come up with a load of keyword rich search terms you want to be found for.
- Add these to your home page content and then start building paragraphs of text around these, making sure the content and paragraphs stay within a structure that is still well written.
- Make a headline on the home page that indicates in one good headline what this site will provide to the end users…make the headline all about what’s in it for them and if possible include some keywords that will also help your rankings.
Then I asked him to check his <title tag>, this is an area that the spiders of search engines see and report on but not normally noticed by the average user that views a website page. His title should include these same keywords separated by commas to make it more readable for the search engine spiders.
The next tag to review was the <meta-description>. This is important for rankings and clicks in search engines because this is what people see in the search results when your site comes up. In this area it is a good idea to have a call to action and to summarise what the visitor will find on your site.
Armed with these quick tips you will be on your way to SEO greatness! Good luck!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Website content for your homepage
Three things to look at on your home page.
When you review your website consider this… Most people will for the most part, have never seen or know anything about your business. In fact, for the majority of websites most visitors will probably find them by chance in Google, Yahoo, MSN or by a some other form of marketing of their business.
Ok, so when someone arrives at your site what will they see? Look at your own site for about 30 seconds and answer these questions from the visitor’s perspective.
- Where am I?
- What can I do here?
- Why should I act?
While these all seem really simple questions chances are your website and many other small to medium business sites do a poor job at providing the answers to visitors.
One of the favourites you see on websites is the ‘Welcome To…’. Let’s think about this for a second, you have only a matter of seconds to grab a visitors attention before they leave your site and look elsewhere, so instead of ‘Welcome To Jim’s Shop’ why not consider telling people very clearly where they are, what they can do here and why they should act now.
Let’s consider this, pretend you own a mechanic shop in Waikanae, here is what I would have on my home page…
‘Mechanic Shop in the Waikanae‘ as the main headline on your home page. Followed by a statement such as, ‘where you can have your car, truck and van serviced by our specialised and certified auto mechanics‘. And then something like, ‘Not only do we offer free pickup and delivery of your vehicle, once serviced we offer top quality support and 24 hr assistance just in case you car breaks down in the local area when you become a customer of ours!‘
This not only defines what you do, which tells the visitor ‘where they are’, then moves on and explains ‘what you have to offer’, (specialised and certified mechanics) and then provides them with a solid reason of ‘why they should utilise your services’ (by offering pick up and delivery).
It provides the reader with motivation, clarity of your offer and incentive to take action with you, all of which all help you generate sales from your website.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
PPC vs SEO
There is a debate in the industry around the benefits of using pay-per-click (PPC) adverting instead of search engine optimisation (SEO) as your main source of website traffic. While I feel that there are many benefits of search engine optimisation to me as a business owner PPC can be rewarding in so many ways over SEO.
Here are some interesting points to be aware of;
- PPC traffic converts at 2.03% versus 1.26% for natural traffic
- PPC visitors spend about 10% more money on your site than naturally found visitors
- PPC visitors stay on your site 29% longer than naturally found website visitors
Here are my thoughts on why these stats are as they are
With PPC you control what phrases you want to appear in Google for, with natural search (SEO) you dont have the same control over these search queries. In some strange instances your site might be found for search phrases that are not related to your business at all but the search engines have tagged your website as having content relevant to this.
For example, you can state in PPC that you want to show for a phrase that directly relates to your product, for example “dog collars” and then when someone types in “looking for dog collars” your site comes up at the top of Google ready for that person to click, visit and then buy.
The reason I believe PPC visitors stay longer on your site is that they know what you have is what they have searched for and now want to know more about your website before making a commitment to buy from you. They are just checking you out more before they spend their cash with you…
The reason people spend more from you is an interesting one, is it because the PPC visitor is a more serious purchaser and hence has more to spend than the naturally found website visitor.
My final words, PPC gives you more control on who see’s your business online and where your business shows and doesn’t show. It typically gives your business an instant boost of traffic due to the fact that you can show in google today, tomorrow and the next day as long as you are willing to pay for the traffic you get. PCC also gives you the ability to test product prices, collect feedback and gather really quick information due to the ability to send alot of traffic to your site via PPC advertising. It’s all good food for thought…
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Benefits of website analytics
I often come across clients who have been given the website stats from their current web hosting company, but don’t know how to make any sense of that information. There is an amazing amount of information contained within website analysis tools that can give you insight into a few things that you might find of real value.
Here are some things that you will be able to find out once you have some simple know-how into interpreting the information at hand.
You will be able to see what areas of your website have the most interest to your visitors. This may indicate to you what people are most interested in and then you may be able to capitalise on this information by making this page more informative, more engaging and more sales orientated. For example if you sell a number of items on your website and find that 60% of your visitors go to a particular item on your site, this can indicate that this product is of real interest to most and you can work with your website designers or website marketing company to help you make the most of these visitors.
You can view what keyword search phrases people have used to find your web site. This is helpful if you want to know what people are typing in before coming to you. This can help determine what your website is not getting found for as well. For example if you sell a product or service but find very little of your visitors are finding your site using this search phrase, then it would be useful to discuss with your website search engine marketing team ways you can improve the position of your website within the major search engines to get more of the visitors you want.
You can also check out where most of your customers are leaving your site. You might ask why this matters? The reason this is very useful is it allows you think about why people might be leaving on a particular page more so than others you have. For example say you have a hotel and your rates page is the page where most people leave your site. This may indicate your rates are too high or there is another issue with this page.
Use a marketing team that specialises in the analysis of web traffic so that you can gain maximum value from it. Armed with this information you can make informed changes to your website to make it work better for your business.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
More website sales tips
Credibility
Credibility is key so make sure you site conveys messages of confidence; ensure that you have testimonials from customers on your site so that you can give the people visiting your website confidence in your company’s ability to perform to their expectations.
If you don’t have any testimonials, please don’t make them up! That would be just kidding yourself and lying to your customers. Go ahead and ask your current customers for testimonials, if your products and services are really that great, your customers will be more than happy to send you some nice testimonials.
One approach I have used in the past is to send my customers an email asking them for a testimonial and giving them some lead questions like: how did you find our service? would you recommend our services to others? what benefits have you gained so far from working with us? how long have you used us? etc.
These lead questions make the testimonial easier for the customer to just fill in the gaps and send it back to you.
Everyone is busy out there, working harder than ever before in business so making this as painless as possible will give you the biggest chance of getting a response.
Once you have this information, assemble the testimonials into categories if relevant and then place them on your website. Get them on the home page so that new visitors see this information straight away!
The perfect testimonials have photos of the customer, the customer’s website if relevant, as well as a contact number. If you do place this information about the customer on your website, please ensure you seek their permission first.
What’s in it for me?
When a visitor first arrives at your website they are looking for indicators that you have what they are looking for. To ensure they can see these indicators it is really important that you make it very clear what you are selling or offering.
A lot of websites have “Welcome to” and while this is very polite, it does nothing to ensure that the client sees what you have to offer instantly. What I recommend website owners to do is to remove the “Welcome to” and replace that with a main heading.
Say for example you are offering “Walking Tours in Auckland” I would advise my customer to ensure that was the main heading and it was clear and visible to all that entered your site.
At the end of the day you have to “Scratch the itch” of visitors that come to your site, by having your main offering in big bold headings it ensures they see “What’s in it for them” straight off the bat.
Your photo is worth having a look at
Having your photo on the website works well to really personalise the website experience. It helps reinforce to visitors that there is a real person behind this website and it also indicates that you are happy to stand behind your offerings.
I also believe it helps the sale process because at the end of the day people buy from other people, not from websites!
If you can bring your photo and personal approach into the site it will bring in more sales.
People like to see who they are buying the product from.
Your location does matter
Make sure people know where you are located, if you are selling products and services, people want to know that you do actually exist, you are contactable by phone, email or even by fax. At the end of the day, people want to be able to see that you are a real company with a real person behind it. These factors go a long way to reassuring visitors your products and services are in fact real!
Bring people to your site but only when it’s ready to sell for you.
You should be marketing your website to customers as much as possible. Get in touch with a marketing company that knows how to market your brand and site effectively.
Look for a creative marketing company (like us!) that will help you not just in your marketing of your site in Google but can also help you with your website.
There are many ways to market your site but Google AdWords in my opinion is the best method to instantly have customers banging at your door; but as I said above, make sure your website is ready and armed with tools to aid your sales numbers.
There is little point in having a marketing plan with Google AdWords if your website has major selling flaws. Get your marketing company to guide you through making your website sell more. If you have a marketing company now and they don’t offer you assistance with this, then go out and find a new one!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Getting your message right
Your marketing & sales message must effectively answer the following four questions:
1. Why should I read or listen to you?
2. Why should I believe what you have to say?
3. Why should I do anything about what you’re offering?
4. Why should I act now?
These are very basic questions, but few sales people can fire back fast answers to any of them.
There are all kinds of companies in the world that can’t give you a really solid explanation of what they do or why it matters.
Your precise answer to these four questions is your Unique Selling Position. You must have this message clearly defined and focused. It must be written down and you must be able to repeat it in the middle of the night when your spouse wakes you from a deep sleep.
Everything you do should answer those questions in a consistent way, whether directly or indirectly.
This goes hand in hand with the next principle, which is:
If you sell a product or service, you should lead with information about solving problems, not information about the product or service itself.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
A quick and easy guide to help you gain more sales and customers
Here are some points to help you gain more sales from your website.
Your website headline
What you have to offer a visitor on your website should be clearly stated on your home page. More often than not websites having a headline along the lines of ‘Welcome To My Website’. Much more effective is if your headline is based on what you have to offer the visitor – think, ‘what’s in it for them?’. You only have a few seconds to get the visitor’s attention so make sure you really place focus on enticing people into your website pages by having a headline that gets to the point and promotes your offer and services.
Say for example, you are a recruitment company in Wellington, your main headline should be based on your offering of helping people to find a job in Wellington.
Examples you could use might be:
- Wellington Recruitment Company
- A Specialised Recruitment Company That Helps People Who Want A New Job in Wellington
- Recruitment Specialist in Wellington
- Helping People To Find Jobs In Wellington
Not only will a headline like this instantly advise the visitor what your main offering is, it has a secondary benefit in that using words and phrases people will be searching with will help your website turn up in search engine results.
A good way to tell if this works is to test with new headlines to see if your website improves in leads, sales or customers with one headline over another.
Website content
The content within your website is key to creating not only more sales and leads, but what you have on your web pages can and will influence what keywords your website will be found for by search engines. Not only are you writing to entice people to buy or take action on your website, but your content is scanned by search engines so that they can rank you for certain keywords and phrases.
With this in mind, make sure the content you write about is relevant for both the end user and the search engines. The visitor to your site needs it to be clear and easy to understand, the search engines need relevant keywords and phrases they can pick up on to produce your website in a search result.
Testimonials / credibility
Testimonials can mean a lot to a small to medium sized business. Having that credibility factor is key to helping you grow your sales and customers. One of the best ways to add credibility is from your very own fan base. If you don’t have any testimonials go out and source some. Send your customers an email and ask them for feedback of your services You may like to offer a small incentive so that they are more inclined to do so.
Once you have sourced a few place them in all of your marketing documents. Get the word out that your services are highly favoured by many and that you actually do walk the talk. There are of course people who doctor up testimonials. To make your testimonials look and feel legitimate add a photo of the fan, a name, or even better the website link to their business along with a video from that fan…whatever the case start of by at least having some included in your website and all other Internet based documents.
Remember to ask your customers for feedback regularly, written if possible. The positive feedback can go on your website and other promotional material, and if there is any constructive criticism, use it to make your business even better.
Usability
Usability is a strange word that came about as websites became large and complex, not only from a managerial point of view but from a users perspective as well. When websites begin they are usually straightforward and simple to use. As time goes on and more products, services, links to third party sites are introduced, usability is critical to have sales and leads successfully generated on your site.
In the early days people believed your site shouldn’t be any deeper than three clicks away from making a sale or lead. Nowadays however after studies conducted it is the process that leads the end result that is more important than the number of clicks. Studies have shown that visitors to websites like to be guided (to have their hand held), and once you have this guidance in place it really doesn’t matter how many clicks.
So first of all make sure your visitors can surf around your site without having to second-guess what the next step is. Keep it simple. Give people a workflow and take them through the sales process step by step.
Website page names
One way to help your website increase its leads, sales and customers is obviously through search engines like Google. One of the biggest killers in this area for websites are page names. Make sure your page names are well formed with rich keyword terms, which will help in your pages being found. For example instead of having a page called /our-services, consider calling it /our-marketing-services. This way you are promoting your product offering as well as increasing the likelihood of being found for ‘marketing services’.
In this same vein, your website meta-description will aid your search engine listing if you place your websites main products and services within this area.
Call to action
Ok, so what is the ‘call to action? A call to action is a mechanism that you can have on your site to encourage visitors to act. Look to create page content that tells the user to take action either by clicking to another page, phoning your office number or contacting you for more information. Making sure your call to action clearly explains what the user will get by taking that next action will improve your response numbers. There are a few things that you can do to increase the response rates to your calls to action. Think about the use of colour to entice people in or use of space to make the next action more visible. Think about the position of where to place to the action request or just having the correct urgency of language like, ‘call now’, ‘buy today’, ’book quickly’, ‘register today’, ‘subscribe now’. Make these calls to action simple for the end user.
Contact from your website
Making contact with businesses these days is overlooked on many websites. While you might think that visitors can contact you from your contact page, think about placing your contact details into your overall website design to ensure you have the contact options throughout the site structure. That way people can chat, email, find your number and locate your business without any major work on their behalf. Look to use chat tools, for example Skype, Google Talk or even a professional chat system if you want to be able to log this chat activity so that you can see the interaction in a weekly report. There are many options available to select from.
Friction
Friction on your website is an area that makes people reconsider moving forward with you. It is either created by poor website design or by some other anxiety that is stimulated along the way. There are many ways to test for friction points on your website. One thing that I do often is to check where most people are leaving my websites. This quickly identifies areas for me to look at in more detail.
Say for example you notice a large percentage of your visitors are leaving your website at the checkout area. Look to see if there are things that need to be moved, removed or added to try to stop this from happening. For example it may be due to the large shipping costs, or due to the form on the checkout being too long, or that maybe the form is broken for some users so that they cannot purchase anything even if they have tried.
The next step would be to test separate elements on this page to see what changes if any make a difference to that area of your website. There are also companies that can offer you advice into friction points. Look at usertesting.com or userfly.com. They do cost money to report back to you but if you are selling your services and products from your website it might just be worth the cost of around $120.00 to get some testing for friction on your website.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Car Rental Marketing Online
Here is a really simple marketing plan for any car rental business to follow.
We have a number of clients who have been growing using this Internet plan.
Step 1
Design your website so that your home page is designed to meet your main objectives. Break your objectives down into main areas and ensure these are placed on your websites home page in a clear, well thought-out layout.
Step 2
Have a page for each objective, for example if you have trucks to rent then have a page entirely dedicated to trucks. Discuss the benefits and features, include the sizes available, have a video showing how easy it is to drive, park, load furniture, include testimonials on the page to add creditability. Don’t be afraid to include a lot of information about the trucks. People can elect to read it or not. Let people know if you include free kms, trolleys and/or blankets. In this case more information is better.
Step 3
Make sure you have your websites set up for search engine optimisation. This is still key to driving visitors to your front door and into your wallet! Make sure you look at other companies that have worked with rental car companies as this will give you an advantage as these search optimisers will know how to attract more customers to your site having worked in this area in the past. Make sure you ask for evidence that they know what to do for your business to help make it grow.
Look at how we have generated leads for a client over the course of the last three years.
Step 4
Include an advertising campaign – look to use Google, Yahoo and MSN to drive more business your way.
So, there are four steps to get your website working for you. It’s marketing for car rentals 101. Start today and build more customers, sales and leads tomorrow.
If you want a tailor made marketing plan for your car rental business or for any business please give me a bell, I am happy to assist you.
Take care…Cheers.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
The importance of Google Analytics
Many website owners do not make use of the amazing tool that is Google Analytics, either because they don’t know about it, or they find it too daunting. If you are in either of these two categories, it is a good idea to give the job to the professionals and employ someone to do it for you.
With Analytics you can see how many hits your website is getting, which allows you to determine if you are getting any value from your website.
It also gives you information on where visitors are coming from, ie if they are coming directly to it, or from one of your partnership sites or from search engines. This way you can see who is generating the most traffic to your website. For example, you may be paying to advertise in the Yellowpages online. Analytics will show you how many visitors found your site via Yellowpages, and you can determine whether that listing is working for you or not.
You can see what countries the visitors are from. If for example, the greater percentage of your visitors and customers are from Spain or South America, you could look at having a Spanish language translation of your website available.
You can see where people are leaving your site - if people are visiting your ‘price’ page, or your ‘product’ page and then leaving, you know there is probably something that you can improve on these pages.
If you are also using Google Adwords, you can combine the information with Analytics to find out exactly how much each lead is costing you.
Analytics helps you see what you are doing right, and what you can improve – an invaluable tool to increase the effectiveness of your website. If you want to learn more about what is happening on your website, let us know.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
How to set up Google Website Optimiser
How to set up Google Website Optimiser (Part 1.)
We have been using Google Website Optimiser to help our customers gain more. If you have always wanted to know more about how to set up a simple test using Google Optimiser then here are a few tips on how to do so.
Step 1: Click on the Website Optimiser from within your AdWords account.
Website Optimiser
Once you have selected this you will be asked to select an A/B experiment or a Multivariate one. If you want to split test one page over another you can select the A/B experiment, if you want to test changes to elements of the same page design and get 1000 visits a week you can select the latter option.
Choose the page you would like to test with (examples of potential test pages could be your home page or a product detail page).
Create alternate versions of your test page. Create and publish different versions of your test page at unique URLs so that Website Optimiser can randomly display different versions to your users.
Identify your conversion page. This is an existing page on your website that users reach after they’ve completed a successful conversion. For example, this might be the page that is displayed after a user completes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter or fills in a contact form. Once you identify the conversion page, you are then asked to enter in a name for your original site and then to enter in the website page names that you are going to test against it with.
Where to enter your pages for the Optimiser to test with
Once you have done this you then enter in the website page that advises the Optimiser that a completed goal has taken place (known as a conversion).
Part 2 will follow shortly…
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
