These are a couple of bad news stories that fortunately finish with happy endings and with some lessons for you. For these two new clients, March was not a good month, with each of them going through their own online marketing horror story. Fortunately, we were able to be the knights in shiny web-page armour and helped remove them as quickly as we could from the proverbial smelly stuff.
I’ll start with the worst of the two stories.
It began with the client engaging an individual on a retainer basis to help them as their online lead generation consultant. They selected this person as they had some good experience in the industry and they were also a personal friend, whom they had worked with in a prior business.
This new consultant was tasked with looking after the whole lead generation process from attracting web traffic to converting it into leads on the client’s site. The client was new to all things online so the consultant was pretty much left to their own devices. They managed the Google AdWords and Analytics account and even the system they used to collect and respond to leads. All this started to get some action as their work started to bear fruit.
As the client knew very little, the consultant chose to initiate the new account set-up process with the main vendors involved – namely Google and the lead capture software vendor. During this process, he passed subsidiary login details to the client but retained the master level account status.
Each month the client received a small report about what was going on – attached to this was a steadily growing account for the consultant’s services. The client then asked questions about what was happening and why the fees were heading north but nothing was forthcoming. The lead flow was a trickle compared with what they expected and because of this the cost per lead was a problem and not commercially viable. So they started looking further afield for advice.
They came to us during this stage of the process. As is normal for clients arriving at this stage, we offered to complete a general audit of their existing lead generation efforts. We were supplied the necessary account login details and a description of their desired objectives, and then kicked this process off.
During this assessment work we registered as leads onto their website – just to see how easy it was and to look at the messages that were being sent out. We did the same for their email newsletter sign up – in fact, for every conversion option on their website we filled in our details and sat back to experience their prospect promotion.
On first glance, it all looked quite good. Yes, there were some issues with the form design and the amount of data they were collecting (too much too early) but overall things looked reasonable. That was until the existing supplier noticed our contact details in the leads coming in. They were not happy.
Of course the client was fine during all this – they wanted some ‘warts and all’ feedback on how their website was performing. But what they didn’t expect was how the existing consultant would react.
Within a few moments of the consultant finding out that we were involved they a) shut down the client’s access to their website; b) changed the master passwords on the client’s Google AdWords and Google Analytics account and, to finish it all, c) altered the passwords for the lead capture system so all the client’s leads were now hidden to them. Nice.
The client only found this out when she noticed that it had been a few days since a sales lead had come through. And when she tried to login to her website to load up a newsletter, she found to her dismay that her access details were being denied.
Needless to say, when she contacted the consultant asking what was happening she received a barrage of complaints about why Permission were involved at all, and what right did we have to look around ‘their’ work (which, I might add, the client had already paid for in full).
Quite quickly, things became very heated and relationships fell apart. The client called me late one afternoon telling me what had happened and I couldn’t believe their story. Within minutes we had a plan to wrest back control of the site – our first priority. Fortunately, she did own the domain and the hosting account. Passwords to both these were quickly changed and then we got into doing some rather devious things to break into the site’s content management system to reset the password. Once this was achieved we focused on capturing the leads that were still flowing in.
We had the client quickly set up a new lead capture account and then ‘plumbed’ the conversion forms in to this and set up the auto-response emails as best we could. Next up was changing her Google accounts.
As luck would have it during the early stages of the review I had taken a copy of their Google AdWords account so I could best show them what was broken. This proved very helpful later on but first we had to establish a new Google Analytics account, set up all the necessary goals and then overlay this onto the new linked AdWords account. Having my copy made this last step achievable and took a few minutes as opposed to the days of work we would have faced if we had to start from scratch.
Yes, the client had ‘lost’ all their historical website analytics data and, more importantly, the leads that had not been sent through before things blew up, but at least they had wrestled back control.
Lesson No 1 – Own your Google AdWords and Google Analytics account. Each of these tools allows you to easily ‘invite’ (and de-invite if you want) others to help you manage your work. Add to this list any other application, especially a lead capture and responding tool.
All Permission clients have the master status on their accounts, with us having the necessary access to manage the content that sits within them. So they ‘own’ their Google AdWords account, their Analytics account, and any other account type we need to get their lead generation system into shape.
As an aside, only a few days after this event I was introduced to a small team within a major High street financial institution who had their advertising agency manage their Google AdWords advertising. Only recently, they found out that this agency had chosen to sub-contract another online agency (without their knowledge) to manage this work for them. Not only does this raise some rather serious ethical issues, heaven knows what will happen to any of the great marketing data that is being collated as a result of this campaign.
Lesson No 2 – At the outset of any lead generation project, set clear objectives on what the project is to achieve. These should highlight specific results you want your consultant to deliver on. Remember those rather vague responses that were attached to their invoice? There would have been a lot more transparency if both parties knew the exact results that were expected. For instance, an expected lead count per month, or maybe a search ranking figure for a certain keyword, or even a cost per lead rate from all Google AdWords traffic – all of these are good objectives.
Lesson No 3 – Treat the management of your sales leads with the same respect you would the management of your hard-earned cash. In reality they reflect your future ability to create the latter. So would you let someone else manage your cash within a process that wasn’t transparent to all? Now, I know that there are a few who have lost millions of dollars only recently by allowing this to happen to them, but you’re smarter than that – aren’t you?
As I mentioned before, this one is relatively mild compared with the previous story BUT, again, it’s a story that I had to have confirmed before I believed it actually happened. It involves a website, a developer, a client – and a dispute.
I know there are a lot of website developers out there who are good, honest people who create sites that their clients absolutely love. I’m sure of it. Fortunately, we know of a few, so when someone needs a site created we pass their details on knowing that there’s a very good chance a happy story will be the result.
But, saying all this, you would be surprised to know how many people walk through our doors with a website build story that is full of strife. Missed deadlines, poor design and all with lots of promise coupled with a paucity of delivery are just some of the stories we hear. So it was not a surprise when this client came to us with a tale of something similar.
It had all started out well – it usually does, or it doesn’t start 🙂 . Then there was a change of staff at the web design company and the ‘client facing’ person was off on maternity leave, which left the technical guru behind them to take control of the project. This staff change coincided with all future ‘client to developer’ communication now being via email. From then until now there was not one phone call made to the client. Now this is some achievement as their project went on for 2–3 months.
Email is great, but it still can’t replace the need to talk to someone sometimes and, while it wasn’t the only reason, it didn’t help matters, and the website build started to head off the tracks and into a dark place where the project just drags on – and on. This is the space where everyone involved just wants to get the project resolved as quickly as possible.
This generally means that along the way things are missed and the original scope is lost in the build process as the job gets handed from developer to developer. No surprises that this happened here and things that were expected by the client failed to materialize and what did arrive wasn’t expected. As were the contents of the final bill, which were a fair bit different from what was quoted – not a lot mind you, just enough to make it worth an email from the client. And that’s when things became rather inflamed.
The tirade that came back to the client from the developer was extreme to say the least. Things had obviously been boiling up for a while and the questioning of the account was the final straw. Apparently, the email message went on for pages (I never saw the original) but it was the final paragraphs that had the real punch. They were to the effect that if the account was not settled by a set time then the site would be taken down and not re-instated until the funds had been collected. Nice #2.
So the client had no choice but to pay the bill but, within a few minutes, was on the phone to me to see how they could extricate themselves from the situation.
Now I realise that, as a supplier, the developer has to guard themselves against customers asking them to do work and then not paying – so they need some recourse. But still, to threaten this when all the customer is doing is questioning the account? This doesn’t bode well for a mutually satisfying future relationship.
Anyway, we needed to know more before we could get this client moving again. First up was the subject of intellectual property. Who owned what – specifically to do with the site’s content and its content management system? I had the client go back and check the terms and conditions the supplier had sent them before starting the project. Guess what – there weren’t any.
Then they somehow had to gently find out if they could move the site to a different hosting account – one that they could own – as a short-term step to wrest back control. This is not a subject that is easy to broach AFTER a project has started but, nevertheless, they are making progress. The developer is playing difficult but the client is making slow, steady progress. And, yes, in the wings is a nice tame developer we have introduced them to who is able to manage things once the move takes place.
So what are the three lessons with this one?
Lesson No 1 – It’s true, only the paranoid survive. This is the title of a great business book by Andy Grove, the then CEO of Intel – but also a good mind state to be in – even if just for a short time before you start that next website build. Then you can ask yourself questions like – what happens if we end up in a dispute – who will arbitrate it? What documents show clearly who owns what? How do we protect all the work we put into this project? It doesn’t need to get into small 6 point type and fill three pages – but if you want to fall back on it then have your lawyer look over it and ask your developer to agree to it. And if they offer terms and conditions to you, check through that 6 point type to see what answers they have to questions like these.
Lesson No 2 – I was once told to never hold a credit card with the same bank I banked with. I assume the theory goes that if things get very tight financially and people are shutting accounts down left, right and centre then at least you have a piece of plastic with some credit on it to get you by. So I think the same should apply to your website hosting – that is, never host your site with the people who developed it. Some content management systems make this a challenge, but most allow it to work. Do this and you will never have some testy developer threaten to take down your site unless you pay their account.
Lesson No 3 – Generally, it takes more time to properly specify any creative work, like a website build, than the actual creative work will take. And this is one of the main reasons why so many web build projects head off the rails so quickly and so dramatically.
Most people entering into projects like this rely too much on what is said rather than what is written. So while email was the chosen mode of communication for a large part of this project – and this caused some issues – IF the project had been accurately specified at the start, it would have had a higher chance of survival.
As another aside, late last year I came across a person who does just this – specify websites for clients. He then goes a bit further and helps them engage suppliers to build them, too. Peter has been in the industry for ages, does a great job, charges reasonably for his services and guess what – his projects end in happy stories.
Now, I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to engage Peter on their next project BUT time spent documenting what needs to be done and why – as if there was little chance of verbal communication – is time well invested.
So there you have it – two horror stories and six lessons that I hope you can learn from. All I can say is that I only hope that April doesn’t bring with it any more stories like these.
For some strange reason, memories of my old physics classes seem to crop up on a regular basis within these pages. I’ve prattled on about how explosive the experiments were and how all this work was underpinned with some solid ‘problem busting’ scientific thought. Both of which I have then gone on to apply as possible solutions to the problems businesses may be facing in a down economy.
From all this you could assume – quite incorrectly I might add – that I was a bit of swot when it came to science. But I wasn’t. I struggled like the rest of them and just managed to scrape through with a B pass for my Cambridge O Level end-of-year exams. Nevertheless, I fall back to this time for content because of the most basic of reasons – I enjoyed it. You see, as a lad I was probably the same weight I am now but a good half the height. A bit of a porker was I. So sports were never my thing, English was a struggle, languages were even worse, so science was for me.
So while I found it hard work it was the certainty of the results that really appealed. Complete the experiment in the right way – mix blue powder with hot water and ba boom – one large bright and very messy explosion for all to see. Follow the same steps and the same results occurred – every time for everyone that followed the same process. Repeatable results – yep, that seemed quite cool to me.
I thought engineering contained the same type of thinking, so on leaving school I joined up to be an apprentice technician engineer at a local factory. Then, after a fair bit of travel, a few career changes and a dabble with redundancy, I started this company in 2002. There’s been quite a bit of change along the way but the theme that underpins Permission – delivering repeatable results – is the same one that interested me as student while I worked through those experiments. Thankfully, there are no unexpected explosions this time.
Nevertheless, there are some areas we work within that create a bigger economic ‘bang’ for our client’s buck than others. However, ensuring our clients allow us to focus their efforts in this space can be a challenge. For example, while our customers come in various personality styles, they all seem to have a core desire to want more traffic to their website. It’s like an obsession for some. These people pour over their Google Analytics reports each Monday morning to see how far their traffic has risen since the week before. And if it hasn’t, then in comes an email to ask what is happening. We answer all these politely, but at the same time try to avert their laser-like focus onto another part of their site that could return them more for their consulting spend.
And what is that ideal focus point?
Yes, I have talked about this before in the newsletter but this time I’m going back to one of my old physics lectures to illustrate my point about how improvements in this space can be so lucrative. Remember fulcrums and levers?
I think it was Archimedes who said “Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the earth with a lever”. Well, I don’t think we need to move a planet, just a website’s performance, so this should be a doddle in comparison.
To help me out here, please find to follow a simple image of a classic lever / fulcrum set-up – it has a rather skinny guy trying to lift a very heavy rock.
I’m going to add in two ingredients of any website – traffic and conversions – and then a nice expected outcome – cash. Now things are getting a bit more interesting.
Hopefully, most of you have your eyes transfixed on the rock, which represents a nice heavy pile of cash. This is good. If nothing else, it has distracted you from the hard work of the person with the cap – forcing down on the pole (creating website traffic). Things are a bit blurry but I’m sure he is grimacing as he struggles away. Now the amount of swearing that is going on with Mr Lifter will depend on how effective his fulcrum is – which in my little diagram is the conversion rate of the site.
This basic physics principle highlights a few very important things. Firstly, for those obsessed with just generating traffic to their website, you will notice that without any fulcrum in place no cash will be raised. Yep, absolutely nothing – nadda. Send progressively more traffic to a website that doesn’t convert and your results remain the same – zilch.
Secondly, the work of Mr Lifter would be a lot easier if he had a better fulcrum. He could in fact use less force (need less traffic) and still lift more (generate more cash) when compared with someone who had more traffic BUT a weaker fulcrum (poorer conversion rate). Hmm, do less work and achieve more. Sound like a plan?
So how does all this semi-theoretical physics mumbo jumbo translate into tasks you can put on your to-do list next week? Well, here’s a few to consider.
First off, let’s get stuck into the hard one – changing your mindset from focusing on traffic to driving up conversions. With some luck the image of the pile of cash being lifted upwards by Mr Lifter with relative ease should help. However, I realise that making the right changes to your website to improve conversion rates is anything but easy.
It takes time to set up experiments, even with Google’s free Website Optimiser product, and then patience to let enough conversions pile up so the results are valid. All this relies on a bit of methodical thinking and a strong self-image to know that, even with all this work, your changes could be proven to either have no positive impact or to actually reduce the conversion rate of your site.
But there is always a bright side. Doesn’t knowing what doesn’t work take you one step closer to knowing what does? (I think it was Thomas Edison who mentioned this after conducting thousands of failed experiments before he settled on the winning one.) And, like Edison, once you know what works well you can mine this success for ages. More on the economic power these results can provide you later.
Nevertheless, there is sometimes a short cut to conversion rate improvement. This has you looking out for other conversion choices – think other fulcrums – for your website to lever more cash from your visitors. For instance, an e-commerce website that achieves a credible 3.5% conversion rate still has 96.5% of its visitors leaving without buying. Now, I would guess that not all of this group are totally disinterested in what the website offers – it’s just that they weren’t ready to buy just when they visited.
But 15% could be keen enough to join a newsletter list. And a further 5% may well be in love with the brand so much that they would join the site’s fan page on Facebook. So to 3.5% of core sales conversions we can now add another 20% of additional ‘contact conversions’, realising that not all of those will buy now, but a high percentage could be persuaded to buy later.
A recent conversation I had with a prospect during one of our introductory online marketing performance review sessions highlighted this exact same issue. Their website offered a small range of products via a very simple e-commerce offer. Buying these items and contacting them for assistance were the only two conversion options the site offered. What’s more, their target market was proven to devour any information they were offered on the subject area. Add to this the fact that their product offered a novel twist to solve this very common problem, coupled with a great story behind it – and there were opportunities abound to offer an email newsletter of sorts and gather many more conversions from the traffic that was currently leaving the site.
Offering information is a great option to backfill a website’s conversion choices. Some industries / products make this strategy an easy one to exploit. But even for those that may struggle there are occasionally opportunities that arise to turn a relatively dry subject into something that many are keen to learn more about. For instance, if you run an accountancy practice, the latest changes to New Zealand’s GST and PAYE rates are an actual goldmine of opportunity. Used properly, information on these subject areas is an ideal way to engage with both prospects and existing clients. I recently sat in on a presentation from one practice that took us through the GST changes from start to end in a very practical and informative manner. I had never heard of this business before I was invited, but now if I was looking for a new accountant then they would be close to the top of my list. But have I seen dozens of accountants offering complimentary courses on the changes to reap the value of this opportunity? Nope – hardly any.
Which leads me nicely back to the subject of seizing every opportunity to make your conversion rate fulcrum work as hard as it can. The numbers can be very compelling – e-commerce websites especially can reap huge gains from relatively small improvements. For instance, say you own an e-commerce website that receives 8000 unique visitors per month and converts 2.5% of this traffic with an average sale value of $80. All you need to do is move this up 0.5% and your revenue per month increases by over $3000 – for every month going forward. That’s over $100,000 in extra revenue over three years.
Getting to grips with numbers like these can be a good way to help galvanise yourself into action. This month’s customer conference call included a section where I presented an interactive PDF document that should help many. By using this you can manipulate your own visitor numbers and conversion rates to see how sensitive each of them is to your overall financial results. As a customer you would have received a copy of this document.
I suggest you spend a few moments plugging in your own details to see what they show. You should be pleasantly surprised how much extra cash your website can raise just by applying some small changes to your fulcrum of conversion. Now that should replace any grimace with a nice smile.
This week I was amazed to read that the US Air force has more pilots training to fly Drones than regular piloted aircraft. Over the last 10 years they have gone from flying less than 50 unmanned aircraft to now having over 700 Drones in service.
Earlier in the month I picked up on the video of our own Kiwi Drone in action. This time it was a $500 device purchased from a High Street store that, when properly configured, was flown into a bent and buckled Christchurch church building to assess its damage. (If you’re interested in seeing the footage, you can find the link here: www.tinyurl.com/parrot-drone-chch)
Here at Permission we’ve been testing out some Drone-like technology ourselves. No, don’t fret. There’s no need to look skyward. This is not something that will hover overhead in a menacing way. Nope, it’s sitting nicely and quietly and innocently on a few customer websites we manage – just checking what their visitors do when they next drop by.
It’s part of our “Grow Conversions – Website Optimisation” module. This module is there to do one thing and one thing only – to increase the conversion rate of your website. In its current form it has been running for a few years now and has produced some sizable jumps in performance for those that have opted to “take it on”.
And I don’t use the term “taking it on” lightly. Because, when it comes to the number and types of changes that will need to be made to your website as a result of the findings from this module, there is no stone left unturned. Altered images, re-written content, restructured navigation, complete new landing pages, and even the grandaddy of them all – replacing a whole site design. Some or all of these together have been foisted upon clients.
Imagine if you could sit behind your prospect and peer over their shoulder as they move through your website, page by page. And by doing so, notice along the way what they click on, how far they scroll down your page or even which parts of your form they have trouble completing. Well, our small but very smart Drone does all this and captures the results, replaying them to us in a series of online recordings. It works just like magic.
One of the really smart things is that there’s nothing the visitor needs to download and install for all this to happen. Clients need to make a quick update to the HTML code on our their website and bingo, the recordings begin. Then all that’s left for us to do is sit back and try not to look at the recordings before we have enough to draw some sensible conclusions. That’s the hard bit. It can get a bit addictive – looking at what the last visitor did. Nevertheless, once a week or so has passed then we can dig in and see what we have.
Here’s just a few of the things that we frequently pick up during this stage.
People clicking on things that you didn’t expect them to. The technology tracks every mouse click and boy do some people click a lot. Fortunately, there’s a way we can look at this data in an aggregate form. Then we see the trends of people clicking on pictures, faces, headings and everything else that in most cases doesn’t have anything behind them. Pictures are a classic case. Small thumbnail photos that are repeatedly clicked on reveal the visitors’ simple attempts to make them bigger. So what do we do? We give them what they want and we make them bigger plus, if we are able to, we add a few more snaps in.
People struggling to fill in forms. It’s well known that the more information you ask people to provide the lower your conversion rate will be. But what bits can you leave out? To you every field is really necessary and none can be dropped off. Nevertheless, looking at the way people complete the form can provide some insight into the problems they grapple with here.
I’ve seen recordings where people struggle with an email address, or a time to call or even a phone number. As you watch their session you can almost hear them think, “Now which one is the best one to give them?” or “ What was our personal email address again?”. They type some details, then back space across it, then type some more in, backspace a bit more and then move away from the form – never to come back. So it pays to keep the fields you want down to a minimum.
Long pages with not enough emotional momentum gained at the top. One-page sales forms can be very effective. You take your visitor from the headline, right through to capturing the lead, without them having to leave your page. That’s the theory. For it to work you need to (a) capture your visitor’s attention with the headline, (b) transfer this attention into the early stages of your copy and finally, (c) have enough emotional pulling points in your words to ensure their attention moves through the complete length of your page. There’s a lot here that can go wrong.
The most common problem is the obvious one – people deciding not to scroll. I’ve seen recordings where the % of visitor attention plummets from 100% of visitor viewing at the top of the page to barely 10% after just one scroll length down. This points to a very poor connection between the headline and early copy. Even when the connection works you still see a drop – but nowhere as severe; plus, in the recordings you see people taking time to move down and back up the form as they read through in detail what you have written.
That’s just a few of the insights we have picked up over the last few months using this Drone-like technology. Yes, it takes some time to interpret the recordings. But the additional insight you gain from walking with your visitor as they move from page to page is truly something else.
Have a chat with us today if you would like to know more about this module.
As some of the regular readers of this newsletter will know, I did not start out as Facebook’s biggest fan. And to be fair, while I have softened my stance ever so slightly, I would hardly put myself in the rather crowded room of social media evangelists. There’s way too many uber-cool people in this space for me to feel comfortable.
I always thought that social media would really start to capture my attention when I could prove to myself that it was responsible for either my customers or, less importantly, myself gaining more customers. Well that time has come.
But first – a few very short notes on the basics of Facebook as I see them for non-social media people. Yep, the bits your teenage children will not tell you because the last thing they want is you on Facebook. Well it’s time to move over – oh yee of little faith in us grey-haired ones – now there’s some business to be done.
So, to start you need to set yourself up with a personal Facebook profile. You can’t set up your business without having one. Don’t worry, it’s easy and doesn’t require too much commitment. Just head over to the Facebook home page and register – share some of your details and you are done.
Now that you have a profile you can connect with others and ask them to be your “friends”. If they say yes, then everything you post on your “Wall” they will see within their “News Feed” and, likewise, all they post you will see in your “News Feed”.
So you can see some pics of this, below is an image of my News Feed.
When I took this snap, it included a note from my brother who lives in the UK and who had just landed in Lanzerote for a holiday – lucky him! Plus a short note from Allan Li – he used to work at Permission but has now moved to London and is working for a large corporate search optimisation company. Here is a picture of my “Wall” – that’s where I add my own new content.
This can be images, video or plain, ordinary text. You can comment on and “Like” your friends’ posts, videos and pictures.
I think the privacy settings in Facebook are adequate for most. You can configure these to limit your posts so they are just seen by your friends and not the friends of your friends.
Done this? Then you are now one of the many millions who are Facebook people. All that’s left to do is to set up a Page for your business. To start this just head over to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create and pick the option that best suits you.
Once this is registered you can invite people to “Like” your page and become your fans. When they do this they “should” see what you write on your page’s Wall within their News Feed. Now there’s a “should” there because if your posts get very little interaction (i.e no comments or likes for a reasonable period of time) then they are not shown up. So developing some interaction with your posts is important. More to come on this later.
But first let’s get back to adding in some content. This is simple – it’s done in exactly the same way as you update your personal Facebook profile. Just write, upload a photo, or even delve into the land of video. With a fan page you can control the ability for your Fans to write on your business page Wall, which may be a good or bad thing depending on how much interaction you want to get going.
So that’s it. It’s the basic basics, I know, but it moves you a bit further forward. Hopefully, you will start to appreciate that the overall goal here is to get your audience to “Like” your business page, love your content, engage with it because of this and, then, do what you want them to do.
Here are a few questions that all this may prompt.
No you don’t. You can send Facebook advertising links to your usual website. You will see this traffic as from the Facebook domain within your Google Analytics account. And if you have goals set up – please tell me you do – then you will see its conversion rate.
It depends on your true goal. If it’s all about numbers and increasing them, then competitions, draws and vouchers are a few good ways. Your Fan count will grow – however, most will be there for the draws, vouchers and free stuff – no surprises there. Once this all goes, then there’s a good chance they will too. Whereas if you want to gather around your page a reasonable number of hopefully more engaged people then it’s all about delivering them a steady stream of content that they see as being valuable. When you think about it, the concept is very similar to growing an effective email newsletter list.
As I write this note, Facebook tells me you need a group of 25 people to “Like” you. Then you can follow the help screens in Facebook and they will show you how to register your details and pick your URL. Also, as of now, once this is set up you have to live with your choice – so pick carefully.
Here’s just three that quickly come to mind. First, starting off with a page instead of a plan. Knowing who you want to talk to, what you want to say and the desired outcomes of all this work are some basic things to include in your plan It doesn’t have to be pages and pages of closely typed, small font. One or two pages will suffice. Just enough to refer back to and re-energise yourself after you grind through writing your 50th post and are wondering – Why?
Second, starting the conversation on knowledge, tips and general value-building content and then switching tracks to focus on offers, promotions and super deals. They “Liked” you so they could receive what your Wall showed them when they dropped by. Keep on message to keep their “Like”. Yes, people can “Unlike” you.
Third, not feeding the beast. It doesn’t need to be an hourly task. Some get by with just adding new content each week and responding to feedback on a daily basis. Multiple week gaps between posts is probably not such a good thing.
This follows on from the last point. It really doesn’t have to be much. I would suggest that people asking for a response by posting or commenting on your Wall shouldn’t be left longer than the time you would take to return a phone message asking the same question. For some this would be half a day at most. And if you place some new content out there each week then this is a good start.
This is the nice part. Setting up a page is free. Yep, nadda – nothing. Adding content to it may cost depending on who you get to write it. (Yes, we offer services for this at an affordable rate.) You may need someone (like us) to help customise some pages to welcome people to your page and entice them to hit the “Like” button. Or to create a page to host some video or other web page content. Fortunately, Facebook has built an environment that allows these changes in a reasonably open way so adding them is not that costly.
So there you have it. For some experienced Facebook people this content will be way too basic. But that’s fine, it wasn’t written for them anyway :). Nope, this should be enough to help the successful business owner who is considering Facebook to feel that little bit more confident about taking it on. Those teenagers can’t have all the fun and it pays to embarrass them on a frequent basis – just try and ask them to be your friend. I’ve a few stories there I can tell you. (“No Dad, that’s creepy.”)
And anyway, just let me know when your Facebook business page is ready. For reading this far, I’ll reward you with one shiny new “Like”.
One of the email marketing “silver bullet” questions I frequently get asked is – “When is the best day and time of day to send my next email campaign?” It’s a good one to ask. Just imagine all the wasted time and energy if a campaign bombs just because it was launched at the wrong time.
The common “consultant speak” answer to this is “when your audience are the most motivated to take the action you want”. No real insight there. The practical answer is “you will need to test – but it usually pays to steer clear of the very start and the very end of the week”. A better response; however, for one sizable market segment, this is still bad advice.
Want to know if you’re in this market segment? Just take a peek at your website stats.
Have a look at the visitor count graph below.
Now look at this one.
And if you are still with me – the last.
As you can see, the first two have very similar shapes even though they are from completely different companies – in even more different markets. However, the third graph has an entirely different shape from the first two. The only similarity between the three is that they are all from businesses based in Auckland – and they all work with Permission.
So what makes shape one and shape two look so similar? Well, before I answer this, have a look at this final graph to follow. (I promise there’s no more after this.)
As you can see, this is not from a website but from part of a research document from McGill University researcher, Debbie Moskowitz. This one tracks the energy levels individuals have during the week.
From her research, she has found that Monday is a great day for setting goals, organising and planning. Your energy levels are not fully back from a weekend off and these tasks are a nice fit for this space as you start to pick up speed. Whereas on Tuesday you are back into action at full steam. This is a day for taking on all those tough tasks that you have been putting off for too long. The head of steam of Tuesday carries across to Wednesday, another good day to crank into things that are really hard to do. By the time you hit Thursday, things start to slow down and energy levels begin to fade. Friday carries on this trend and after lunch is not the time to try anything too taxing.
Now, lets go back to those earlier website visitor charts and the question of why the first two are similar. Both businesses have one thing in common – they each sell their products direct to consumers and have predominantly female buyers. I’m not yet convinced that the gender skew is pushing these shapes to look the way they do. Nevertheless, in both, the early part of the week – especially Monday – is when things really start to happen.
This matches nicely with Debbie’s research. I’m taking a massive leap in logic by connecting the two but there could be a natural sequence of events playing out online. This is how it could run. During the last part of the weekend you think about what’s still on your to-do list. Perhaps you discuss it with your partner and both plan to get things underway on Monday. So you head to work and hit Google as your energy levels are still too low to do any serious work. You find what you are searching for and start browsing and picking. If time gets away on you then perhaps on Tuesday you could spare some extra time to tick this task off your list. But after that, well, then the week gets away on you and all the normal “stuff” that fills the days just takes over. That is until the weekend comes around and that “to-do” list rears its ugly head again.
The website traffic maps this behaviour. It rises sharply at the start of the week, then drops like a stone – only to come up again the following week. It’s a very choppy wave pattern. But what about the third graph? Why the stark difference between this one and the first two?
Well, this graph is from a business-to-business operation that sells a technical product that requires some careful consideration prior to purchase. This is normally a work-focused “to do” that has the whole week to be ticked off. Which means that demand rises slowly on Monday then sits up there at a relatively flat status – almost like a “table top” shape – before it gradually falls for the weekend.
So how does all this apply to your business?
Well, best you check out your website visitor graphs and see what shapes they are. Are your waves choppy or rolling with flat mid sections? If it’s the first of the two then it may pay to add these few things to your action list. (Best to nail them on Monday or Tuesday…)
Firstly, just realising that your website traffic does come in ragged weekly cycles and not flat, even streams is a good step in itself. Now you can see the need to grab as much early week traffic as you can. So if you are buying advertising – say from Google with their AdWords program – it may pay to front load your ad spend so that you free up as much budget as you can to capture the rise in early week traffic that your market presents.
Secondly, your copy may need a tweak or two. One of the great copy writers – Robert Collier – talked about entering the “conversations in their mind” of your prospects. Part of this conversation could include thoughts like “removing the task from my to-do list” or “taking the first step to getting this nailed” or maybe even ”finally making time to…” And, if you want to be really smart, you could split-test your website page so that the copy changes for those early weekdays to include text about “Starting the week with one less thing to do.”
Thirdly, don’t forget how this affects your other advertising channels too. So, placing radio advertising early on in the week rather than later would be well worth a test. The same would apply to any print media you may be running.
And finally, there’s the overall sales importance of those early days of the week. It’s a time when there’s a heightened chance that prospects are in a decision-making mindset. So releasing your email marketing on a Monday afternoon or a Tuesday morning to capture the energy here could be a good idea. And sales follow-up calls should be scheduled into this space.
It really all boils down to understanding and then capitalising on the changing energy levels of your prospect audience and how this affects your chance to present your wares online. Your website visitor graphs provide an insight into how yours operate. Why not check them out today and see what your shapes look like?
I must admit to really enjoying what I do. I think it’s the combination of melding technology with selling, all the while helping our own clients achieve more.
Most of the technology required is quite detailed – think Google Analytics tagging codes, optimised Google AdWords ad groups and multiple search engine rankings.
For the first-time website owner all this can look like one confusing mass of Google technospeak. This means that when we kick off with someone new we avoid all this stuff like the plague and start them on something quite manageable – them completing a short survey. Yep, a dreaded survey! Most visibly shudder when I ask them to fill it in, but then go on to thank me once they have answered the questions it poses. These are questions not about technology but about their prospects and how they sell to them.
Once their response has arrived at our offices I hand parts of it over to Tom for him to tackle the detailed online marketing stuff. Bits like pulling apart their site’s analytics, paid advertising and search rankings. All the necessary side of assessing how well they are performing online when compared with their competitors. Once Tom’s results are in, we schedule to meet up so I can present to them what we have found and pose them a small selection of additional questions that they would never have answered if they were included in any prior survey.
These are the answers that really matter. There’s nothing deeply personal I’m digging to uncover here, no severe psychoanalysis underway – it’s just like I’m holding up a mirror and asking them to show me what I would see when first a prospect and then their best salesperson stared into it.
First, we talk about the reflections of their customers. Are they all the same type of people or are there easily recognisable different groups? In most cases, the former is presented when the latter better reflects reality. Very few businesses have the luxury of serving just one type of customer segment.
So for these customer groups I ask about ages, genders, and even the states of mind when buying (stressed, excited) – everything and anything I can find out about them so I can form a mental picture of the types of people who visit their pages. Then I look at their current website to see if this also acts like a mirror to this audience. For instance, does it show any images or words that “reflect” the people in these segments?
Frequently, I reference the website that the Auckland team Select Cleaning use to present their business. (You can find the site here www.selectcleaningauckland.com.) The image at the top and the intro text were all crafted with some great help by the site’s owners, Graeme and Sylvia Norton.
Currently, the image at the top is of a stressed woman wanting to pass the responsibility of cleaning her home onto someone else. When we began working with Graeme and Sylvia this image was a picture of a happy, smiling franchise owner in front of his van. We ran our tests and a stressed-looking woman was clearly the winner. All this while their competitors continue to show pictures of happy franchise people and even vacuum cleaners. (Personally I’ve never seen a household appliance browse the web let alone buy home services.)
Anyway, your business may have multiple groups you sell to so one picture may be too hard to achieve. But you can still place groups of images that reflect back the main customer profiles you sell to, which then take them to the parts of your site that are just for them.
OK, so next up we need to bring their best salesperson into the room and place my Permission Mirror in front of them so they can tell their story. Questions I pose to them include:
Then I look at their website again and see how the content reflects this discussion. A business that has been in operation for 32 years and doesn’t show any reference to this on their home page is missing the mark. Likewise, one that works with well known brands like Rolls Royce and Gucci but doesn’t talk about this anywhere on their home page – well, another opportunity goes begging.
Then the task is to fix the gaps that each of these two “website reflections” reveal. In the process, we are gradually optimising the client’s website for greater conversions. The time this takes depends on a number of factors. One of the main ones is the clarity the client can offer to the visions of their customers and the most effective sales process they follow. By knowing the attributes of these in very precise details then they are able to see what is missing on their website. However, fuzzy knowledge in these two areas just translates into fuzzy results later on.
The soccer season is well underway and my Saturdays until early afternoon are spent ferrying both girls (11 and 14 years old) to their respective grounds and shouting “encouragement” from the sidelines. Both are fortunate this season to have a great bunch of girls to play with and a coach who is keen and able to help them develop.
And so, with the super mild May weather we have been experiencing in Auckland, it’s been a very pleasant start to the weekend. Even better that it extracts both of them from whatever screen is capturing their attention so I can get them out onto the green playing fields of Auckland’s inner city suburbs.
Neither of them is at the stage where their positions on the field are locked in for the season. So they alternate between goal keeper, defender and the occasional flurry at the front as a striker. Ah, the front of the pack. The place where glory can be captured with the deft touch of the ball in the right direction. I must admit that girls’ soccer has a certain grace to it when compared with boys’.
Purposeful runs down the sidelines, which are then capitalised on by team mates being in the right place at the right time. Yes, they all love playing in these forward positions and positively grimace when asked to swap to be a defender, let alone the worst of it all – playing in goal. Now there’s an “opportunity” that requires some sterling selling by the coach.
Nevertheless, even I, with my limited soccer skills, can see that the games they win are nearly always won by the hard work that occurs from the back half of the field. Hard work put in by the goal keeper, defenders and mid-field players – all build to make the task of being a striker so much easier with an increased opportunity for basking in some future forward glory.
Yep, it’s those mucky, hard and rarely recognised positions that, when working well, make the rest of the field hum along quite nicely. And guess what – the reason why I bring all this up in your newsletter this month is that the content on your website works in a very similar way.
Just replace the vision of the football “strikers” with those of the glory pages on your website that are responsible for holding the last smidgen of attention of your visitor before they convert into a lead. Commonly referred to as landing pages – pages and pages of content has been written on how to improve these parts of your website to ensure they perform to the very best of their ability.
Nevertheless, before your visitors arrive on these pages they usually visit pages that represent the “mid-field”, “defenders”, and even “goal keeper” of your site. Those pages that all need to do some solid work to ensure your visitors actually decide to journey onwards to the site’s final landing page. Pages that cover topics such as “About Us”, “Our Services”, “Our Story” and even “Customer Successes”. Places like these that come up again and again in the tracking paths that Google Analytics tells us people follow before they end up converting into a lead.
Unfortunately, most website owners ignore these areas of their website. Perhaps they see them as just showing filler content. Something to complete the story but not necessarily tasked to convert the visitor. How wrong they are. Just imagine meeting a prospect for the first time and starting your conversation by asking for an order, opportunity to quote or receive your bid. Not a good look.
So we kick off by showing interest and then slowly but gradually covering bits and pieces of the back story on the company and what it does. Basic things like what the company does, and for whom, and the types of staff it employs. It’s the back story content like this, when it is on your website and working well, that can make the task of those star landing pages so much easier to achieve.
Better educated visitors are more likely to convert when compared with those who are unsure what you do, why you do it and what makes you so different from others in your category. So it makes sense for this content to be there. Now, how do you go about judging its effectiveness and then move to improve it? Especially when any conversions – think goals – are not going to occur directly on the page but possibly a few pages forward of them.
Here’s a few pointers to help get you going.
This month’s customer call was all about website analytics and what it takes to use this knowledge to push your website into the top 10% of conversion capability. During this session I covered the different levels of competence a website owner can achieve through their understanding of this part of online marketing strategy.
During the first level I mentioned a site’s bounce rate and the visitor’s time on site. Both of these measures – especially the first one – are great to track the effectiveness of your “back field” website pages. During the early part of the call I went through both of these in detail so everyone was aware of what they meant and how valuable they are.
For instance, it pays to track the percentage of visitors who exit your website directly from your “About Us” page instead of moving forward to the “Contact us” section of the site. This stat is the bounce rate of this page. Now, some basic tricks to reduce this stat (with bounce rate the lower the number the better) include things like: a) making the next step an easy and obvious one for visitors to take; and/or b) even including content within the page’s copy to drive them forward to take the next step. For example, “you can learn more about who we have worked with by visiting our testimonials page here”.
Our customer conference calls cover a fair bit. One a few month’s ago explained the importance of placing your good content above the virtual fold of your web page. That is the part they see BEFORE they have to scroll their browser to see more. Google has a great tool to help you here – it was covered during the April Conference call – contact the office if you need more details. By using this handy tool you can see what proportion of your page 90% of the browsing audience will see and if this actually includes the bits you want them to see. Basic I know but very, very worthwhile to test.
For example, last month we worked with a customer to tweak a few of their “back field” pages with the view of just moving the content further up the page. They had all the good stuff – nice images, great content, good information – all just below the fold. Simply by taking our advice and restructuring their content upwards they experienced a 44% drop in bounce rate and a 29% increase in time on the page. More importantly, their conversion rates really kicked upwards as their “striker” landing pages started to receive some more educated visitors.
For most of us the ideal website visitor is one who arrives after finding us in Google, then heads straight for the contact us page and quickly completes the form so our sales team can start “working” on them. And this may happen. But not that often. The majority will skip wildly from page to page around your site before deciding if they should even look for your contact page, let alone complete it.
Now this wild path will be wild if you don’t try and provide clear directions for them to follow. However, you need to realise that even with these in operation people will still go where they want to. Still, some will take your advice and follow the paths you suggest. Which makes it worthwhile to invest some time and energy to map out the ideal paths that site visitors should follow and then endeavour to present your words in the best way possible to ensure a high proportion remain on track.
For instance, you may want to place your “About Us” page next to the “Customer Testimonials” section in your site’s navigation options. And perhaps at the bottom of each page you include either some clear directions on where to locate your “Contact Us” page or, even better, a quick contact form they can complete there and then.
There’s a great report in Google Analytics that can help you see if these virtual paths are being used. It reveals the pages visitors travel through before ending up on your final landing pages. You can also set up goal tracking that includes a funnel that incorporates these “back field” pages to see how many people go through them in the order you planned.
So there you have it. Like most good teams it’s a complete effort from everyone on the field that ensures the right result in the end. And while the ones that touch the ball – or the visitor – just before they score – or convert – are frequently seen as the ones solely responsible for the achievement, rarely is this the case.
Way back at the start of the play – or the visitor session – is where you will locate some quality achievements by others that made that final result almost a formality. And for you as a website owner it’s those “back field” pages that can make all the difference. So this month give them their own focus and see how well the whole website performs as a result.
I have never come across a business that has achieved that nirvana moment of reliably converting 100% of their prospects into clients. Some have come close – a few I have met are in the high 80’s – but none have hit that magic 100%. It’s probably a near impossible act to reliably achieve.
Which makes it very surprising when I come across clients who fail to operate a prospect follow-up process in even the most basic of forms. For them the ones that don’t say “yes” are never followed up and fall into a big bag of lost opportunities.
I covered this during our monthly conference call, in which I mentioned how improving your follow-up processes is one of the five fixes to implement when turning around a low converting website. Yes, this was a fix that needed to take place away from the HTML and super nice graphics and to occur AFTER the sales lead had arrived by email.
Some view all this follow-up work as just too hard and complicated to set up, as well as being filled with what they see as nothing less than “pestering” their prospects to buy. On both counts they are far from the truth. The tools you need to build a credible follow-up process are not complicated at all and you are not “pestering” – you are showing “polite persistence”.
Now, this last point will require some explanation. To help, how about I list some of the many reasons prospects could decide not to say “yes” during the time frame you would normally expect?
Now, I realise that this isn’t a complete list but in nearly all of these cases some polite dialog is required between you and your prospect to move things ahead. When this is done properly, it adds value to your proposition. Like me, you have probably been on the receiving end of the few sales people that do this. Perhaps a phone call – or an email – or even a short note in the mail. All small details that show that they are keeping in touch after the quote has gone through. Only a really pushy sales person could make the act of practicing great follow-up into something that could actually reduce the likelihood of them making the sale.
So it needs to occur. Let’s work through the tools required to operate the most basic of follow-up systems. First, you need a place to store all your customers’ details. I’m a big advocate of using online-based CRM systems – I have written about them in previous newsletters. Permission uses Highrise from 37 Signals – some of our clients use Zoho or Sugar CRM – they all do a very similar thing and allow you to rent for a pittance all the functionality to store and manage your sales leads.
How you decide to follow them up depends on the length and complexity of the decision cycle your prospects go through. Usually a mix of phone, print and email is enough to keep the decision moving ahead. Obviously, the phone is the most direct of the options and email is the slight gentle nudge in comparison. If you are uncomfortable doing the direct work yourself then why not outsource it to others? There’s a mass of highly experienced telemarketers out there looking for work who would love the chance to follow up people on your behalf. Just find one that suits your needs.
When I’m describing the task of effective sales follow-up the image I use to illustrate my point is a big fat leaking bucket. Now I don’t expect you to plug all the holes and achieve that 100% conversion rate I mentioned at the start. Nevertheless, taking it from a struggling 50% to a credible 85% could just involve the judicious use of some smart lead collection methods and a series of carefully worded and implemented follow-up messages.
A few weeks ago I was convinced to cycle from Rotorua to Taupo with a few friends in what they loosely referred to as the “100k Flyer”. I had recently purchased a new bike – think commuter hybrid not shiny carbon road machine – and was secretly keen to see how we would go. So I was in.
My cycling buddy for the distance, Martin, is a piece of cycling human sinew. Last year he led a small team that cycled from Wellington to Auckland. Quite an amazing feat, which meant he was well used to traversing main municipal centres while I struggled to move between suburbs of Auckland.
Nevertheless, he assured me that he wasn’t the racing type and was looking forward to the scenery and some conversation along the way. Well, the good news was that he stuck to his word. We kept together for nearly 80 km, chatting away as the k’s rolled by. The bad news was that this all came to a stop when some mild discomfort in my back grew into a sharp pain that wouldn’t go away – forcing me to slow us both down while I stretched to relieve some of the strain.
I could sense Martin was itching to keep going so I wished him all the best and waved him on. He kept going at his steady methodical pace and gradually disappeared into the distance. At the end we met up again while I struggled to free myself from my bike – my lower back had slowly ground to a halt. I asked Martin if he felt any similar type of discomfort – nope, apparently nothing other than some general tiredness – his body was fine.
He pointed out that it was probably due to a bad fit between me and my bike. Later that evening he gave me the details of a guy who worked from his garage in Remuera who could help out.
The following week I found myself peddling away on a trainer in Karl’s garage on the same bike, while he stood in front of me shaking his head in disbelief. He was amazed I could cycle 5 km let alone 80 km without causing some serious long-term harm to my back. Once I hopped off my pain machine he dropped plumb lines from the tips of my knees, checked the angles of my legs with giant plastic protractors, and scribbled down a list of necessary adjustments.
Then he took his spanners to my machine and moved my seat backwards and upwards, attacked my handlebars with a hacksaw and even removed the cleats from my right shoe to add a spacer to stop it flexing too far inwards. All this took a good 45 minutes but the difference in fit was astounding. My back felt straighter, my position on the bike seemed a lot more comfortable and on the whole a lot more natural than before.
The first few rides “post fit” were a bit strange as I got used to my new position but yep – that dull back ache that had plagued me for months was gone. What a great feeling that was.
All this got me thinking about the work we do, especially when it comes to improving the conversion rate of our customers’ websites. This has been the subject of my recent customer coaching call and has featured in numerous articles before.
This work is very similar to Karl’s. The obvious differences are that first, we fit websites to people and, second, those involved are not you as a customer but your prospects. It’s that last point that makes the work a fair bit harder than Karl’s. I could tell Karl what hurt and exactly where, whereas rarely do your prospects tell you what’s wrong with your website.
Likewise, once Karl had done the job I could jump on and within a few minutes things felt much better. Oh, to find a group of prospects willing to share their unbiased views on the recent changes you put across your website. Nevertheless, having the mindset that the conversion optimisation process is really just a very special “fitting” process helps you to notice and avoid some of the common mistakes people make during this process.
Mistakes like deciding that a test isn’t worth running because someone in the management team doesn’t “think” it’s worthwhile. When really the “fitting” process is between the prospects and the website not the management team and your pages – so in a pure sense any opinions other than those of your prospects, while interesting, are not important.
This leads me nicely onto the next point. You need enough test feedback from your prospects to prove what does and doesn’t work. The most simple test is an AB split test. This is where you share your site’s traffic equally between two versions of your web page. Statistics tells us that there is a minimum number of actions required to occur across both versions before you can reliably predict all future interactions. So, even though your favourite page design of the two being tested may be responsible for the first eight of the twelve total conversions, this still may not be enough to cancel the test and announce it and yourself as the winner. Fortunately, Google makes calculating this a doddle with its Conversion Optimiser tool set.
And then there’s the realisation of what needs to change on your website to make the fit work. My back told me through the pain I experienced that there was no way it was going to mould itself nicely to fit my new bike. This left me with no choice but to get my bike altered to match my spine. Likewise, don’t expect your prospects to alter their behaviour and miraculously make your website work – you’re going to need to get down and dirty with some HTML changes to make any progress.
Which leads me to my final comment. These changes are going to be unique to you and your prospect audience. Now, I am an aging cyclist with a very average back and one leg that is longer than the other (which is apparently more common than you would imagine). This all meant that Karl had to make some rather unique adjustments to my bike to make it match my body.
The same logic will apply to your website. It too will need some unique changes and tweaks to fit your pages to your prospects. So don’t expect an alteration – or even a website design – that worked for one business selling to a different category or geographic location to work for you. It probably won’t.
So there you have it. The team here find the process of fitting a website to a prospect audience a really stimulating challenge. We don’t have the luxury of observing live prospects working through our client’s website – like Karl enjoys – but still, there’s something very satisfying in seeing the results of a test prove that those pages fit a bit better than they used to.
Know a good electrician? How about someone to help fix the rather sad roof on our bach? Or even a business who knows the best way to fix a roof rack to Claire’s car? These are just a few situations in which I needed help this month and each one had me asking people around me for some suggestions. In each case it worked. We found just the person to help fix our fuses, mend our roof and strap our bikes safely to the roof of the Mazda.
You have probably done the same yourself. I mean, how else do you tell the difference between electricians – especially when they all look the same – other than by asking others for their experience? Plus, it scared me witless just getting up on my roof to see holes where roof should be let alone spending ages up there poring over the finished product. Nope, I needed to find someone who had re-roofed and not felt the pitter patter of rain on their couch afterwards.
Sometimes, however, I have asked for feedback and got nowhere. This leads me to where most people do their hunting – Google’s search engine. Nowadays, finding a list of possible tradesmen shouldn’t be hard for most industries. I covered this last month in our customer conference call, in which I presented examples from the search term “Adelaide Electrician” – there were a few!
The problem is they all looked the same. That’s where the addition of some “social proof” in the form of a collection of customer testimonials would have been enough to make one stand out from the crowd.
If you are working through our “Grow Conversions – Website Optimisation” service module all this should sound very, very familiar. In fact, if you have been a client of Permission for any length of time then you would have heard me prattle on about this again and again. Nevertheless, for all the air I have expounded, and words I have written, I could count on one hand the number of clients who take it to heart and start to actively gather testimonials and incorporate them into their website marketing strategy.
Yep, it always sounds like a good idea. But that doesn’t mean it gets done. So we continue to politely “nag away” during our review calls, pushing for the testimonials we were promised the month before.
Customers tell us that the problem is not deciding “if” they should ask their clients for feedback – everyone agrees this is a good thing. It’s more “when” this act should occur. Ideally, you would want to pick the time that has the greatest chance of seeking an amazing result. So perhaps for the dentist this could be while the customer is in “the chair” just after their painless cavity has been completed. For the mortgage broker, maybe this occurs once the house has been settled and the client has moved in.
I suggest you trial a few different places within your own sales process and see which one provides the most reliable results. Once you have found your winner, just add the task into your sales process and ensure your team follows the process – again and again. And after make sure to implement those social proofs into your online marketing strategy.
So is all this work worth the effort? Well, I hope the screen shot below kills any doubt.
This snapshot from a client’s Google Analytics “All Traffic” report reveals a 24% increase in conversion rate for their paid advertising campaign with Google AdWords. The main difference between the two sales periods being reviewed was the addition of a steady stream of positive client testimonials. These were not long dissertations either – just two or three lines with the first name of the client and their location, e.g. Chris from Pt Chevalier, Auckland.
So how many of these do you need? I believe that in this case there is never too many. For instance, the team at Agrigarden does a great job of collecting testimonial content to help them sell their Grillo Climber Ride-on Mowers. Their sales page just keeps growing longer and longer as we add more. And as this grows, so does their conversion rate.
Recently, they have been very fortunate to receive a few unprompted video testimonials from raving fans of the product – check them out here www.rideonmowers.net.au. It really doesn’t get much better than this.
And the best place to put all this new social proof content? I suggest around the places where your visitors are considering whether to take the next step. So this could be on a form you ask them to complete, or even the order confirmation page of the e-commerce shopping cart. Wherever they could be pondering – “Now is this the best thing to do?” That’s when content like this can be used to reassure them enough to get them across the line.
We specialise in helping brick and mortar New Zealand businesses effectively market their services online. (Here are a few customer case studies.) This is one of the many articles we have written on the subject area. Complete a quote request today if you would like to know how we can help your service company achieve more online.
How much will you pay for an average quality lead? Seems like a rather innocuous detail, doesn’t it? Especially when you compare it with all the rest of the parts of the online marketing puzzle we all have to manage. However, I believe that this rather small figure is one of those relatively hidden metrics of website marketing strategy that, on first glance, looks quite minor but on further reflection really does have a major part to play in showing the true strength or relative weakness of your sales process.
Nevertheless, when I ask people new to Permission what they will pay for a lead, in nearly all cases I receive a rather blank stare. Very few have given it any thought before, let alone calculated what it could be for their business. Now for whatever reason, this month has been a month where I’ve posed this question more often than most. And as per normal, I’ve received a batch of silent responses in return. It’s made for some interesting sales presentations.
Prolonged lengths of silence are not usually the best things to occur during your first meeting with a prospect. Usually these are times for much chatter and many questions. But not much silence. Nevertheless, I’m not put off by the space this question provides, so I power on and dig into what the value “could be” if the prospect isn’t too sure.
Sometimes I rephrase the question.
“So, Mrs Prospect. If you were able to give me a certain amount of money every time I delivered to your front door a prospect of OK quality, what amount would you be willing to part with?”
“Well it depends.”
This is an answer that means we are underway. Now, we need to qualify the exact product/service this “Permission delivered” prospect is interested in purchasing and the likelihood of them purchasing it after hearing my prospect’s sales message.
This usually leads us into a discussion of future figures and stats that may have us saying, for example, that a quarter of all the leads they present to go on to buy something. And perhaps the average amount of profit per sale that they are willing to allocate to marketing may be $160. Therefore, without allowing for any repeat purchases, a feasible cost per lead could be around $40. So, if they happened to decide to spend $1000 per month with Permission then they should expect in return 25 new sales to make the transaction work. And likewise, a new customer count above this means that things are looking very good.
So now we have a marketing success benchmark of $40. This means that for any marketing the company produces – so long as they can track its effectiveness – if it produces leads of OK quality at sub $40 value then all is OK.
Thankfully, when it comes to tracking the effectiveness of marketing, the online marketing space does a grand job. Google Analytics in particular really simplifies the task of matching website marketing expense to sales revenue. It’s all there waiting to be found in easy-to-digest reports.
Using your new-found cost-per-lead value as a benchmark for marketing success is just one simple way to make the work required to produce the figure worthwhile. Nevertheless, the real power of this metric is when you use it to reveal the health of your sales process. This comes with the startling realization that the healthier your process is the more you will be willing to pay per lead.
Yep, moving your allowable cost per lead upwards – that’s where the real possibilities are. Increase it, say, to a place where you are able to pay twice or even three times more than your competitors can afford per lead and still make money. That’s where the marketing magic really starts to arrive.
And before you yell out “buying business is not for me, Mr Price” – be aware that I’m not condoning any short-term marketing strategies that some foolishly see as being a necessary evil to capture market share. Nope, this is about being able to operate a sales conversion process that is so much more efficient than everyone else in your market that it remains sustainable to you but economic suicide for your competitors to follow.
Now some may read this and say, “Chris, what are you talking about? Surely if you are converting leads at a three-fold higher rate than your market then you can keep spending the SAME AMOUNT as your competitors and just bank the extra sales revenue.” Or those with a particular aversion to spending any marketing budget may be considering how this strategy could even enable them to REDUCE their marketing spend by a third and still end up with the same number of leads.
So why not consider taking either of these choices instead of INCREASING your marketing spend?
Well, my answer is that all three are “valid” options for you to consider. There you go – good old-fashioned, no commitment “consultant speak”. However the “best” choice really depends on your aspirations for the future.
Because really, the first two choices are about increasing business efficiency, whilst the third option – of spending more – is all about maximizing growth opportunities. You take your pick; however, remember the first customer conference call I presented this year? The one about the expected growth – or lack of it – for the NZ economy in 2011? Now, I’m no economist, so I cribbed from the few who are and their prediction was particularly uninspiring (and that was before the events on February 22nd in Christchurch). So don’t expect much latent growth from the economy around you – so best you go and find your own.
Let’s say you can move your affordable cost per lead from $40 to $125 – not an insignificant jump but, nevertheless, not beyond the realms of possibility based on our experience. This change uncovers a few new opportunities to consider. For instance, the use of a wider range of media types that may have been out of your reach before. Maybe radio and even TV could be an option at these values. Competitors that remain at a sub $50 cost per lead just couldn’t afford to follow you into these media types without burning too much cash in the process.
And on a subject closer to our digital space, your bidding strategy with Google AdWords could be turned on its head with a change like this. Understand that your bid price is not everything that ensures your placement – our last conference call on Google AdWords shared that Google formula for us all – but still, if you push the cost per click upwards you will stretch not only yours but your competitors budgets too.
And finally, for those involved in face-to-face selling, let’s not forget about the skill set of the sales staff you can employ now. Their salaries, and the training/resources you provide them all can head upwards as you are able to “spend more” to capture each sale.
All three options are worth considering, but how do you actually go about nudging upwards your affordable cost per lead? Here are three quite generic strategies that may help (of course there’s a longer list of specific online marketing methods within our Grow Conversions – Website Optimisation Service Module).
Yes, a basic one I know, but the facts are that if you increase your sales conversion rates from 25% to 50% then you are able to effectively double your marketing spend and achieve four times more sales.
Sound interesting?
Selling is really just another business process that needs managing. Just like manufacturing, accounts and marketing. Each of these four processes contain a series of carefully crafted steps that need optimizing by those that care. But how often does this occur?
All my work experience has been in sales. I’ve sold valves, pumps, scientific equipment, printing and even outsource mail-handing services. Some deals were worth $150, others $25,000, and a few a cool $1.5 million in annual services. But in none of them was I ever sat down and shown exactly the right way to sell what I was selling.
I did have some early training in my first job with David Forman Sales Training (remember them?). But other than that, I was left to my own devices. Now, don’t get me wrong, there was some activity and result tracking throughout this. Some companies were more detailed in this regard than others. However, none of them sat me and the rest of the selling team down together and collectively pulled apart the complete process to find the best way to sell their products.
And this is not a unique situation. Based on my experiences since then, I would suggest that 90% of businesses do not apply a process to their sales methods. So the odds are in your favour that your competitors will be in this 90% group. It doesn’t mean you should be.
If you run a business with very little chance for repeat customer business then good luck – I hope your marketing is up to standard. It will need to be. Look at the industries with a low propensity for repeat sales (investment banking, high-end computer software) and within the market leaders you should see some of the best marketers working away. They are tasked with bringing in a steady supply of new leads every day, every month – all at the right cost to keep the wheels turning.
In comparison, those businesses with a strong chance of repeat sales can usually survive with less than exceptional marketing efforts. Yes, they still need a supply of leads but their repeat sales keep them going when their new prospect work drops off the boil.
For instance, a friend of mine has started a consulting business that is definitely in the low repeat group. His customers will use him once every 7 years. That’s a long time between invoices.
What he provides has some strong margins in it, but not sizable enough to ensure he can survive this length of time between drinks. And it gets worse. Unfortunately, he freely admits to not having any marketing skills whatsoever. He’s an expert technician but promoting and marketing are not part of that mix. Plus, did I mention he began the business undercapitalized so any promotion needs to be done on the cheap?
At the other end of the repeat business spectrum, another friend, whose business supplies a service in a completely different market, has an almost certain level of repeat purchase with his customers. Probably the best I have ever seen, barring electricity retailers. Once his customers buy from him they just keep on going. Marketing for him is an expense account at a local café for him to chat away with existing customers as they brief him on the next job.
I’m not going to give up on my friend for whom I have predicted a long period of struggle. Nope, I’m going to keep on pestering him with advice to ensure he makes a go of things. And at the top of my list of pestering points is the challenge for him to sell other things to his customers to help him bridge his 7-year gap.
It’s a simple strategy and one that Amazon recently used when they purchased Diapers.com and Soap.com for a reasonably massive USD 540 million. I would safely say that both soap and nappies are consumed with a higher purchase frequency than books and electronics equipment so all this must be good news for Amazon. And thankfully, my friend doesn’t need to invest the same amount as Mr Bezos but, nevertheless, adding a few higher frequency purchase items to his own basket of goods can only be a good thing.
So there you have it. A few reasons why the act of pushing upwards your affordable cost-per-lead value is a good thing, and a smattering of options to help you achieve this. If this is all new to you then I suggest you start with calculating (with a reasonable level of accuracy) your maximum affordable cost per lead. Then you can use this to gauge the effectiveness of your online marketing followed by some tactics to nudge the value upwards to further reap the marketing benefits this will bring.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your service business market online
This month it has been a pleasure to deliver some very pleasant surprises to a rather sizable cluster of clients new to Permission. Each of them ran their business in a very similar way. This I found out as they answered the questions included in our online marketing opportunity review survey.
There’s a few questions in there that are quite tricky. Questions such as the actual numbers that make up their sales process. Details like “What percentage of prospects do you convert into customers during the sales process?” Or “What is a client of average quality worth to you over their productive lifetime?”
Most clients reply with some very approximate answer. “Around 50% or between $1500 and $9000.”” But in the case of this fortunate group I received a list of exact figures – for instance 82% and $1750. This level of detail continued with their responses to all the questions that asked for some figures. These people clearly knew their numbers.
This made me grin from ear to ear when I noticed that their website was either bereft of any website analytics software or that what was there was woefully configured. I could just see that these “numbers” people were going to love the stat detail that their fresh new Google Analytics application would provide. It was going to completely change how they managed their website marketing strategy. Things would never be the same.
Over the years I’ve seen a number of ways that this could all play out. Here are just a few of the common scenarios that occur when “numbers” people are given the gift of a numbers website.
My first experience of this scenario occurred over 6 years ago with a city-based, large recruitment agency. Before we were engaged, their website was seen as a necessary part of doing business but nothing too special. They pinned their sales growth upon inspiring their recruitment consultants to open the right doors and meet the decision makers
responsible for making the next hiring decision.
So it was with some reluctance that they let me set up a Google Analytics account and convince their web developer that it was worth the effort to place the tracking code on all their web pages. I waited for three weeks of data to be gathered before I sent the first website visitor report to the CEO.
Now, this gentleman was a very hard person to track down. We rarely spoke face to face – usually the link in our communication was his very capable PA. So I emailed the report to her so she could print it out and ensure he looked at it. What a surprise when he called me 20 minutes after I sent the email – asking me to check the figures as they were
obviously wrong. The stats were way, way too high.
But they were right – the web developer had done a good job and Google rarely makes a data collection error. Yes, their website was really receiving over 10,000 visitors each month. A count that would take his army of recruitment consultants about 10 years to see. Needless to say within a few hours of me confirming the veracity of his figures, an appointment had been set for us to meet up and website marketing strategy was underway to make the very most of this traffic.
My other situation starts along very similar lines to the previous one. A rather large corporate, owning an appropriately sized website, producing a steady stream of leads. This all made their web developer look very good – even though there was no tracking installed, so “good” was very subjective.
Needless to say, I pushed for some analytics just to confirm how good the good news really was. Again, I had to convince both the web developer as well as the client. In the developer’s eyes the Google Analytics tracking code was going to cause their shopping cart to crash. Our team listened and then went on to show them other sites using a very similar code base as theirs without any problems. So they acquiesced and the code was installed.
However, this time the Google Analytics story was the opposite of scenario 1 – bad news indeed. Yes, there was a steady stream of leads but the stats showed these came with a sub 1% site conversion rate. In their industry the range was between 5% and 8%. Unfortunately, they were squandering traffic because one type of browser (which a sizable percentage of their visitors used) was failing in their shopping process.
Once we picked up the problem we immediately called their developers with some charts to prove our point. Thankfully, in a week the fix was in and with it came a sizable bump in conversion results.
This has to be my favourite of the three. Nothing too extreme. Just the general feeling of control settling over what was previously seen as something unmanageable. It’s the scenario that I predict will come to the people we started working with in April.
These were all very smart business people running very successful companies. However, when “numbers” people are tasked with managing anything that can’t easily be distilled down to a series of digits then things are usually left alone. In nearly all cases this is the wrong step to take. But if you show them how to collect and interpret the right data then their methodical and rational skills are able to capitalise on the opportunity their website represents.
Some of my greatest lessons are usually prefaced with a spectacular piece of personal failure. For instance, there was the time I installed some untested software in a mission critical application (yes, it failed beyond my wildest nightmares).
And the time when I told my mountain bike mechanic not to complete the extra repair he strongly suggested, which ensured that two weeks later said bike fell apart midway through an 80km event.
Nevertheless, not wanting to endure the same pain twice, I am now super-cautious when it comes to any new software installation, and whatever the bike mechanic suggests gets done quick smart.
A few of my clients have shared their own personal painful business experiences, which like mine led to some interesting ‘learning experiences’. And, like me, they didn’t want to go through the same discomfort twice so they implemented the necessary change and moved on.
Making the decision to change is not always easy. For instance, last year I read a case by Andy Grove (the then CEO of Intel) that spoke about the resistance of the Mini Mainframe computer manufacturers to capitalize on the opportunity presented to them by PC technology. Their choice was to either change or remain the same. Change meant supporting a new machine that sold for less than their current offering, with its commensurate reduction in margin. It also came with such ease of use that there was little hope of bundling with each sale lucrative service contracts to support them. Needless to say they didn’t change. The net effect was that the PC server market grew quickly in sophistication, so much so that it eventually replaced the whole Mini Mainframe market they operated within, forcing them all to shut down their operations.
Thankfully, the changes that most of us are presented with are nowhere near as severe as this. And in most cases, we are able to flex our change muscles and move on. Nevertheless, last year I witnessed a selection of businesses, for whatever reason, sit back and decide not to alter their course. And guess what, in each case the pain has not gone away.
In fact, the change they now need to make is greater than the one first presented to them. In each case, the change they had to make was quite generic and as such could present itself to all of us. And so, based upon the lines of forewarned is the same as forearmed, here are some details of just three of these instances.
Now the smart ones among you will see two sets of benefits in here when reading through these notes. First, there is the obvious one of having the opportunity to plan ahead and decide how you could react if these challenges came your way. And then there’s the counter-situation for the more aggressive marketers amongst us. For this group, the list offers a few ideas worth pondering when considering how to inflict similar discomforts on your own competitors.
As per usual, commercial sensitivity means that for each example I have had to change bits to protect those concerned but I’ve done this in such a way as to still make the tale useful.
So let’s kick off with pain and change situation No 1.
I’ll start with the most difficult of changes to face. Difficult because it requires the most change and as such leaves the majority dumbfounded and unsure where to start. All this occurs when the fundamental economics of marketing your service to your customers is turned upside down by a dastardly competitor who approaches the market in a very different way than the rest.
The company on the receiving end of this change operated within the health and beauty sector. They were locally owned and operate solely online. The range they sold was extensive, offered to the mid to low end of the market and, due to some very smart product sourcing arrangements, offered at the lower end price point. Their pain arrived with the entry of an overseas competitor offering like for like products. The competitor’s pricing strategy was similar or only slightly below their own. So, at the start is seemed that the market would be won in the online marketing area with similar budgets going head to head. Whoever implemented the right messages in the correct way would win.
But then the new arrival changed the game. As if overnight they seemed to dramatically overspend on new customer acquisition. Our client was willing to spend up to $25 to acquire a new customer. The competitor was marketing way above that – with estimated costs of up to $100 per sale. All for an initial gross order value that was, at a rough guess, at best 50% of this cost. $100 to receive gross sales of $50, with at best a 45% margin on this value! It just didn’t make sense.
Nevertheless, they continued spending marketing budget like this for a few months. Somehow they had configured their business to ensure it worked profitably while also spending four times more per customer than our client was.
Fortunately, I was lucky and found a few friends who were customers of this new operation and were willing to share with me the marketing they received during and after the sales process. It was quite impressive. To start, their website offered numerous up-sell options during the sales process to help squeeze as much profit as possible from each transaction. And then, once that first sale had occurred, customers received a steady stream of email and print-based marketing offering them a range of options to entice them to make their second and subsequent purchases. It was a profit-producing machine that let them push margins skywards. The net effect was that they were able to overspend others in the market by a factor of four and still make money.
To counter this strategy, I suggested to my customer a long list of changes. This started with their website, and then moved onto order processing and, finally, client follow-up. Now, of course, all this meant work and quite a bit of it too. It also required some cash, which was slowly diminishing as the full effects of this new competitor were starting to bite.
I shared with them all of the insights I had from seeing their competitors marketing first-hand but all to no avail. They thought their competitor would run out of money – they didn’t. And I could see the writing on the wall so we parted company. And so, six months later I see their competitor high up on the sponsored listings in Google while my ex-client is nowhere to be seen. Their market size has shrunk so much that even their AdWords campaign seems to have disappeared. All because they refused to accept that the pain wasn’t going to go away and that it was time to act and act fast.
The Internet is a cruel space for those that offer ‘me to’ services or products. Prospects can react in split-second timeframes – all it takes is a quick click of the browser’s back button and BAM they are back to the search results screen.
The ‘pain’ experienced here comes from sending high-priced traffic to a website producing below-average conversion rates. In this example, we started with a client early last year who should have expected a one in ten conversion rate but was struggling with the reality of a one in twenty result.
When I printed out their sales page and compared it with their competitors – other than the colours and images – they told a very similar story. Each one stood for good service, great value and flawless execution. There was nothing obvious to help you compare one against the other. This leaves Mr. and Mrs. Consumer one option to guide their choice – price – a core reason why most in this market make below-par returns.
Anyway, I took my printouts and set them down on the customer’s desk, pointing out the landscape of sameness in front of us. And, unlike my previous tale of woe where the client refused to alter track, this time there was a willingness to change the website marketing strategy. My client looked at each page in detail and admitted there was a problem that needed fixing fast. The wider business team was involved as together they brainstormed how to alter their service to make it stand out from the competition.
It wasn’t a quick fix, but once done they had something that made them stand out from the crowd. So much so that once the site was updated with this new content, then conversation rates started to climb.
My last example highlights how the size of a company can affect (negatively) its ability to react to pain and change. Bad news if you are this size or rapidly growing towards it BUT good news if you are a minnow trying to market against giants.
The story starts with a single web page whose sole purpose was to produce a steady stream of sales leads for a particular service the company offered. It did this with a credible result of being five times more effective when compared with what the company had previously done. So everyone was happy with their online marketing strategy.
Then the market changed in two main areas. (Fortunately, there was a gold mine of survey information collected within the landing page data that quickly revealed this happening.) Firstly, the types of problems that prospects needed to solve had shifted. Over time, the market these prospects operated within had seen a sizable drop in overall demand. This meant that price was more of an issue than before.
The symptom of all this was similar to the previous example – falling conversion rates and a need to re-write the landing page copy. But no one seemed to care. The business was very successful in other areas and as a whole was growing like a weed. Roles were shifting almost on a quarterly basis and new staff were coming and going. It was hard enough to find someone who was now responsible for this part of the site, let alone convince them there was a problem to be fixed.
And as the days ticked by, their selling message became further off-market, pushing downwards the weekly lead counts. All this was occurring while their competitors (who, by the way, were smaller operations) were changing their content almost on a weekly basis. It was frustrating to watch such success slowly fall away but in the end I let it slide. There really wasn’t much else I could do. Their smaller competitors were slowly but surely ‘eating their lunch’ as they actively tuned their prospect sales funnels
to better suit the changed market.
OK, so where does this leave us?
Well, during the next 6 months of 2011 your business will be presented with a few market changes that may or may not fit within the realms of the ones mentioned here. Some of them will be preceded with some market ‘pain’ that may be more obvious than others. However, in each case there will be two options presented to you to fix this pain – either change or remain the same. Please be very careful when deciding which ‘pain’ deserves no reaction on your part.
And for those wanting to drive the market rather than have it drive you, then please take your pick from the three presented here or add your own. Just ensure your own pace of change is faster than your competitors and you will be the cause of some angst in 2011.
Sometimes there is a short way to achieve a great result. For instance, you may not need a website packed with pages of content and landing pages hanging off every navigation bar.
Success could be achieved with just one or two well written pages, a mean way of attracting prospect-laden traffic, and you are done. Situations that suit this minimalist approach are usually those in which you are trying to attract prospects who are making quick-fire decisions about who to choose. In this case, it’s all about ensuring you are easy to find and meet the minimum level of standards they have. Achieve these criteria, and things can come together quite quickly and quite nicely, thank you very much.
In this month’s client reviews I came across a range of success stories from people achieving great results in situations just like these. Each is “kicking butt” against their competitors in such a comprehensive way that they are struggling to keep up.
Anyway, when I looked deeper at how they got to where they are now I could see four smart moves they all made that had a big effect on their success. But before I share these four nuggets of success, here are a few short notes on each business.
The first is a home equipment distributor who operates in both NZ and Australia. They represent a high-end European manufacturer whose competitors are 30% cheaper but, fortunately,
come with a similar reduction in product quality.
They started with a limited budget, so decided on marketing just one product from the many on offer from the factory. For this product they settled on a customer niche for whom this was an ideal solution. And when I say niche, don’t think 10 or 50 possible installations – there are thousands of people in Australia who qualify as valid customers.
So, rather than try to spread their limited online marketing money across every product on offer, they focused on just the one and the particular juicy benefits it could offer for those hunting it out. Carrying on with this theme of “focus”, they contracted us to create a website just for this product. One page was all we started with – later we added a blog
to bolster up the site’s content. But responsibility for all the “selling” fell to a single page of HTML.
Now, most would load up this page with a barrage of alternative product pictures, add in some pricing and a means of contact and be done with it. But not in this case. First, we sat down and worked through the particular problems that ideal prospects would be facing and kicked off the page with a headline that spoke to this position.
Fortunately, these marketers were also very smart when it came to gathering customer testimonials. So, a few lines below the headline and introduction copy we added a section on customer stories.
Their market segment to product match was spot on. Those who bought the product were raving about how much safer it was compared with what they had used before. Customers made videos showing them using the product, complete with happy, smiling faces. It was a pleasure to see. Every time a new testimonial came in we added it to the page and conversion rates nudged up a bit further.
And the upshot of all this? Well, the last two containers of product shipped in from Europe are now all pre-sold and the task has moved from generating leads to having to negotiate with the manufacturers to get more in the next shipment. Quite a nice problem to have.
Our second story is closer to home and in a completely different market – professional services. This client came to us wanting more leads from their website – no surprises there. But in this case it wasn’t that they had no business leads coming through their site, it was just that the nature of the work this led to was wrong.
Yes, it paid the bills but it also came with a great deal of administration headache, which made it barely profitable to retain. But, as it was the only type of business that their existing lead generation could provide, they took it. However, it wasn’t the right mix of work to build the business in the direction they wanted, so they needed things to change.
Like most customers that come our way, they already had a website that required some renovation rather than replacement. We tweaked some pages, altered the structure of its navigation, and put more emphasis on places we thought prospects would find more interesting than others.
As was the case with the previous example, this client had gone through some market segmentation work themselves and knew exactly what type of customer they were looking for. We optimised the site for a range of search terms that Google’s keyword research told us suited this profile and we were away.
A few weeks later, and leads began to flow in from people looking for the type of work this client wanted. Things were looking good, so we decided to grab even more traffic for this market with a highly segmented Google AdWords campaign and the lead count bumped up even higher. All this started mid last year and in late January we all sat down to review progress. Good website marketing strategy paid off and it was all good news.
The low-margin work that used to fill up their workload now represented a minority of their work and was steadily shrinking even more. Replacing it were the high-margin engagements they had been wanting. The business had grown to a size they were happy with and now they had the luxury of becoming even more fussy about the type of engagements they accepted.
The last story is one of my favourites as it shows the global marketing opportunity available to some of us when things go well. This company operates in the home services market and originally came to us wanting help to grow the lead volume for just the Auckland business. Like the last two examples, they had settled on a particular market niche they were going after. In this case they didn’t have a website or any copy so, like the first example, we helped them here. It all started with just a few pages and a form. Nothing too extravagant.
The first few iterations of selling words were OK but not that amazing. So some market research was conducted and, within a month or two of the research feedback, we better understood the needs and desires of the market. With this new-found knowledge we altered the words on the site and the conversion rates started to rise.
The business grew and the client was able to collect a good selection of customer testimonials. These were sprinkled around the sales copy and conversion rates nudged even higher. Within a few months the lead flow from the site had reached a promising level – enough to support the needs of the Auckland operation.
Now that we were confident of our lead conversion capability we turned Google AdWords on – still just for this one region – and a tide of new traffic and new conversions started to come in. Now the wider growth plan started to roll out. Other New Zealand regions were established, each with their own new business, new website and new Google AdWords campaign. Other than a few regional tweaks, these were extensively copies of the original content. The success found with Auckland’s website marketing strategy seemed to transfer nicely into these new regions and leads flowed and the regions grew.
Australia was the next target. And guess what, the same process that made Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch a success was rolled out across cities like Sydney and Perth. Would the copy that talked to the needs and problems of New Zealanders transfer successfully across the Tasman?
Yes, was the resounding answer that the first month of conversion data revealed. The only difference was the volume – there was a ton more than we had originally envisaged.
So, what are the common themes of success that these stories demonstrate?
Define your niche. The speed at which prospects browse the Internet makes it a ruthless place to market within. Present a “me too” product and/or service and you can expect prospects to click that “back” button in a nano-second. You can avoid falling into this trap by picking a niche and creating a website with the sole task of attracting and
converting people within this space.
So naturally, when you attract this market segment to your site, they will experience a message tailored just for them – a striking difference to competitor sites that are struggling to appeal to everyone and by doing so appealing to no one. (Following this strategy also makes the process of optimising your site for a smattering of keywords so much easier when you know the specific types of prospects you are after and their possible search terms.)
Market to the needs of the audience. It’s not what your product is that matters – its what it does. And what it “does” is usually purchased because it solves a particular problem your prospect has. In most cases they are looking to solve a problem – which they have been forced into translating in their own mind as requiring a product they are now looking for.
By talking to the problems your product/service helps to solve, you in effect remove this “translation” step and, by doing so, leave them the relatively easy task of noting if the problems you mention are the same as the ones they have. Which, if you have done your keyword research well enough, should be very likely and therefore should lead to a mutually satisfying ending.
Serve your sales copy with dollops of social proof. A website containing just your copy that says how you solve a certain type of problem is a good step. But supplement this with some customer stories that support this position – now that’s even better. And best of all? A regular stream of recent customer stories that are added into your pages – making your site carry more content from your customers than from yourself. Then things really start to soar.
Make yourself easy to be found. None of these success stories would be on this list if no one had found them in Google. And, yes, Google is still the big Gorilla here and in Australia and in fact across any market you want to promote online. So you need to be found. And not for the name of your business but for the search terms your prospects will use when looking for solutions to their problems. If they are more akin to visiting a website hosted in Australia with an Australian domain name rather than a New Zealand version, then that’s what you need to get ranked well for.
So IF you have a prospect audience that makes quick-fast decisions like these, then why not take these points as a simple summary of things you need to focus on in your online marketing strategy for 2011. If not, then there are other ways to build success – just call and I’ll take you through your road map to achievement.
Online Marketing
Martin, the very tanned ski instructor, told us before we went up that when we got off the top of the T-Bar and looked down, we would be wondering why he had brought us up this far. He was not wrong. It seemed impossibly steep for us intermediate/beginner-level skiers. My wife, Claire, just couldn't bring herself to look down, glancing across to the edges of the run instead. Madeleine, my eldest at 13, who I had bribed to even get onto the T-Bar, was very quiet. Which left Annabel, at 10, who was looking up at me with a very angry scowl on her face. I was going to pay for what happened next in so many ways from so many people.
Just getting to this stage had been a test of our endurance. While the first two days of skiing on the beginner slopes had gone without a hitch, this last day was lining up to be a doozey. It started with waking up and finding out that the frost was so hard that the water pipes had frozen in the bach we were staying in. So, no tea or shower. Looking outside I could see our car resembled an ice cube with wheels.
Minus six degree temperatures were the norm as we drove over the mountain pass to the start of the ski field where we met a nice friendly mountain man who told us with a smile that chains were required. Great! Both Claire and I were 'wheel chain virgins' so off I went with the rental car instructions, which told us to tie the red chain to the yellow hook. My hands were numb and so I thought was my brain as I struggled – until I realized that THERE WERE NO RED CHAINS ON THE DAMN THING. And before I get a barrage of comments that, as a colour-blind individual, any normal person could have figured it out, I can confirm that Claire – who is not afflicted as I am – can vouch for me. But we endured and fixed the Mensa puzzle that was the car chains to get our front tyres wrapped in steel and were able to rattle our way up the mountain. So far so good.
As it was the third day on the mountain, we were experienced in where to go to vacuum our wallet for ski-lift tickets and, likewise, how to leverage our feet into the rental boots without destroying a tendon or two. So, hot, tired and rather frazzled, we made it onto the snow only to find Annabel's ski bindings were not working. Claire and Madeleine were fine, so they disappeared in a daze of snow ploughs leaving me with a very upset girl and skis that didn't fit.
Three times I went back and forth from the snow to the rental shop to get these bindings to work. By the end, I must admit to being a tad short with my comments to Clarke from Canada who was working on the bindings – sorry Clarke.
Anyway, we eventually had a good morning on the easy beginner slopes and then decided to head up – with help from instructor Martin – to the upper climes of the mountain and the first T-Bar station. Once up there the view was amazing. You looked through the range of snow-covered mountains across the Canterbury plains to a rather smoggy Christchurch in the far distance. But, unfortunately, this brief moment of tranquillity was quickly destroyed as a gaggle of groovy snow boarders flew across the tips of our skis. It was time to get serious and make it down the mountain.
Martin told us we would take it really slowly and just do one turn across the side of the slope and then wait at the other end. He went first and made it look effortless. Claire was next and promptly nosedived into the edge of the mountain. Now, before I present my reaction, I must add that in the two days prior she was the only person who hadn't fallen over, at all, even on the really slippery icy parts – and she had a slight smugness about the fact, too. So I admit I may have yelled out some 'encouragement' that could have been taken the wrong way.
Anyway, the girls were next and they coped, and I brought up the rear and managed not to bowl them all over. We then snaked our way very gradually down the slope with many a small mishap along the way. The extra speed from the steeper slope made everything seem to come at you in one big white rush.
There was so much to remember – lean forward, put your weight on the downhill ski, look ahead of you, keep relaxed (yeah right!), bend your knees, hands out in front. Halfway down, Martin stopped and let us get our breath back. With the wind chill, the temperature must have been a small minus figure but we were all hot from the work.
Then as we gathered our thoughts he did something really smart – he went round each of us and told us to focus on just one specific thing (unique for each of us) for the next few turns. Forget the list of eight or so we needed to do – it was just one from Martin's list.
I was told to remember to keep my hands out in front of me. That's all. Try it yourself as you are sitting down. Move both your hands so they are in front of you and parallel with your shoulders and see what happens. You should naturally lean forward. Once I did this my weight moved onto the front of my skis and gave me slightly more control over my turns. Now, it was still very messy I admit, but it felt like progress was being made.
Madeleine had to weight her downhill ski more, Annabel to look further ahead and Claire to bend her knees more. We all made it to the very end and the start of the T-Bar queue. And then it was back up to do it all again – with no change of instruction – just focus on that one thing Martin had told us. And, by George, we started to make some progress. Slowly, I must admit, and not without some snow carnage along the way but by the end of the last run we were better than when we had started.
This all got me thinking on the drive back to the bach. I remembered how this strategy was similar to something I had read in a book on the flight down (REWORK by the founders of 37 Signals, it gets a quick review later in this month's newsletter). It mentioned the power of doing a few things very well rather than trying to spread your attention across many and achieving little success in any of them.
Gordon Ramsey, the celebrity chef, is a proponent of this strategy too. When sent in to fix an ailing restaurant his first task is frequently to cull the menu down. It allows for less waste and lets the chef focus on improving the quality of what's left. Most online marketers could do with their own Gordon Ramsey experience, too.
We often come across people who are trying to spread their efforts across too wide a 'menu' of online marketing tactics. Search, social, email marketing and even affiliate marketing are all on their weekly list of things to do, none being completed with much level of proficiency.
This month's customer coaching call talked to this point, with my rant early on in the discussion about the difference between being effective and being efficient. I laboured the point a bit to get the message home but nevertheless knowing 'what' to do is obviously more valuable – and is a sign of being effective – instead of just being efficient at getting 'things done'.
Being a father of a teenage daughter, I see this whole effective vs efficient theory playing out with the amount of time Madeleine spends on Facebook, MSN chat and text, all to ensure she remains connected with her group of friends. Each of these is a highly efficient communication tool, but are they effective? Do they bring her any closer to her friends?
I used to meet up with my mates for an hour or so each week to walk around the village and chat (grunt) like teenage boys did back then and we still managed to create quite close friendships. I'm not that convinced that all this barrage of banal e-gossip actually does bring people closer together.
Now, I know that all this discussion of 'focusing on the few' will make those with a perfectionist personality feel very, very uncomfortable. Because no doubt as I barrelled through the white stuff with my hands duly out in front, I was probably committing a mass of ski posture sins along the way. But it didn't matter – I was making progress. That's the fallacy of a perfection culture. By following its path you never give yourself the right to really focus on the few and perfect these whilst letting the others remain very rough around the edges.
And so, while you may cringe when you see the layout of your email marketing campaign – it may not matter a dot. Because for your industry, knowing how to attract your type of prospects, the focus should be on organic search and growing your exposure through Google, something that you do very well indeed. And likewise, I have seen many a business 'hidden' to Google searches that was successfully built on very solid ground with good old-fashioned direct-mail promotional flyers being mailed out once a month, supplemented every other week with an email message.