Lets run through this scenario together

1. 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.
2. 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
3. The visitor then views your web page &  takes no action, non what so ever (no lead generation or sale?)
4. Visitor leaves the site – no sale and  money and opportunity gone!
5. 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

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.

1. They focus on telling people where they are
2. They tell the user what they can achieve by visitors
3. And they then give the visitor reasons to act
4. They provide users with a clear channel of where things are located and how to access them
5. They focus the content on “what’s in it for them”
6. They display their USP, their “unique sales proposition” in the eye-line
7. 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..

1. Business owners that have many websites doing specific jobs sell more
2. Business owners that follow a sales process on their website sell more
3. Business owners that have a 1 page website generate more sales than ones with 1 large website
4. Sites that focus on lead generation verses lovely brochure sites win more sales
5. 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.

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!

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.

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!

1. Use a marketing company to help you improve your website.
2. Use a marketing company to help you analyse your web traffic.
3. Use a marketing company to create a search engine optimisation strategy for you.
4. 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…

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

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.

See the case study here

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. This allows smaller operators to compete for business in creative ways to create new sales and customers.

Con’s

1. Another site for the bank to administrate and manage moving forward.
2. 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.

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:

1. Come up with a load of keyword rich search terms you want to be found for.
2. 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.
3. 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!

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.

1. Where am I?
2. What can I do here?
3. 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.