The approach required to successfully sell services online is vastly different from that needed to sell products. Since we started in 2002 we have helped dozens of service-based organisations achieve more online.

These seven tips are a selection of strategies and tactics that we apply through our standard implementation process. By following any or (ideally) all of these points you will be well on the way to transforming your website into the lead generating machine it can be.

Tip 1: Pick your ideal audience(s) and produce your content to suit just them

Let’s get the hardest task nailed first. Whilst your website’s images set the scene, it is your words (through either text or video) that move people to make a decision. Writing them with a specific person or group of people in mind is much easier than writing for a broad, nebulous group of web users.

You have probably visited websites that do this well. They may have talked about the exact problem you were experiencing or the ideal goal you were looking to achieve. The more you read, the more it felt like the service was crafted for people just like you.

Compare this to content that totally misses the mark. Then, you switched off after the first paragraph. It contained a list of features which were applied to a wide range of possible applications – all to produce nonspecific improvements. Boring, boring and more boring.

But what if your service is relevant to a wide range of customer groups? No problem – just avoid slamming them all together with the one boring, nebulous message. Do the harder work and split them into separate pages, each one written with a specific group in mind.

Let’s say you’re a smart accountant. You might write three separates pages on how your services can be customised to suit businesses in Auckland who are: 1) a small tech service start up; 2) a medium-sized manufacturing company, and 3) a company in either group who wants to trade in Australia.

Each group would have a page of 800-1000 words, say, talking about the love and attention your accountancy practice provide to solve its specific problems and opportunities.

Conversely, your not-so-smart competitor, who wants to take the easy road to website creation, produces just one page of generic copy which lists the needs all three in a page of boring, non specific “grey suit talk”. Yawn.

Do the hard work and write for each of the audiences you want to appeal to.

Tip 2: Ensure all your “content prerequisites are met” – but then go further and highlight what makes you different  

People come to your website with an existing expectation of what they’re about to or should experience. For instance, if you’re an architect, people expect your website to show beautiful pictures of finished houses complete with glowing words from happy clients. The more the merrier.

If you’re a web design company, they are looking for links to sites you have created and, again, paragraphs of praise on how delightful you are to work with.

A branding company? The natural thing would be plenty of “before and after” shots of shocking brands that have been transformed into sexy logos and type faces. A business coach? Words from happy clients and a simple way to “try before you buy” your service (more on this later).

All these I call “content prerequisites” – content that will count against you if they’re missing, and ensure you are part of the “consideration group” if they are present.

All well and good. But what moves you from mere consideration to that happy state of confirmation is content that shows how you stand out from the rest.

So what does make you different? Imagine you and your competitors are all sitting on one side of a table and the prospect is facing you all on the other – what would you say to ensure they pick you and not the rest?

Let’s tackle a short list of differences that you may think differentiate your company: great customer service, super product knowledge, excellent post-sale follow up. Unfortunately, all fall flat as bullet points on a page. All are subjective and a challenge for prospects to actually experience.

And do they really differentiate you? If I was engaging an architect, I wouldn’t want one who had great customer service skills but produced designs that left me cold. I’d be more tempted by someone who spent their life focusing on producing great design for tiny spaces of land – just like I have.

Your challenge is certainly to deliver the prerequisite content but then quickly present a point of difference that appeals to a sizeable part of the market and can be easily described and proven.

Tip 3: Make it easy for people to “experience” your knowledge

Let’s say you are looking for a lawyer to help you set up a family trust. The last time you used one was when you purchased the family home a few years back and it seems trusts is not one of their specialties. So you head over to Google and start searching.

Imagine you find three possible choices. The first two include a few pages on their trust services with nice shiny pictures of the partners who specialise in the space. They look OK. The third, however, has this stuff too but also a page of free PDF resources available for download.

You click on a PDF that catches your eye, open it up and are pleasantly surprised by its easy-to-read plain English style. This informative but short document explains what you need to do (and why) in order to set up your trust. It doesn’t solve the complete problem but it does answer many of your initial questions.

It all ends with a picture of the partner responsible, their email address and a reason to call (more on this later). “Why not?” you think, and the email is sent and the two companies that made it too hard are quickly forgotten.

See how it works? I’m not advocating you provide a complete “step by step plan on how to solve the problem that people are dealing with. Just a tidbit of advice that provides enough value to make you seem as smart as you really are. 🙂

Tip 4: Provide social proof of your abilities

So your website says you provide excellent customer service – that’s the easy part. Going ahead and proving it – now that’s a different matter!

Maybe you survey your customers each quarter on this exact metric and share the results on your site. Or your customers write in and talk about how great your staff are in dealing with them. You may even mention how smart your team is. All of that’s good stuff – but even better would be to prove what you’re saying with links to partner programs they belong to or awards they have won.

Any opportunity you have to back up your story with social proof is well worth taking. The more the merrier.

Tip 5: Make your service super easy to buy by focusing on outcomes and transforming them into products

Let’s get one thing clear: your customers are not buying the service that you provide, but the outcomes your work delivers for them. I don’t buy legal services; I buy peace of mind that my assets are properly protected. And while buying accountancy services could well put me to sleep, receiving advice on the best way to grow my business while staying onside with the IRD – now that has me hanging on the edge of my seat.

So we need to describe our services based on the great outcomes they deliver. However, this can can be a challenge (especially compared with selling products).

For instance, let’s say you want to splurge out on a new large screen LED TV for Christmas. First stop could be a local retailer to see what looks good and what makes one model better than another. Perhaps this trip is followed by a visit online to check some reviews. Then it’s back to the store and, with your masterful negotiation skills, within a few minutes you’re done and dusted.

Let’s compare this with buying legal conveyancing work to help with the purchase of a new home. You hop straight online this time, look at the websites of a few local firms that come up in Google, and start comparing.

Some make it hard by just listing the service and the name of the relevant partner and recommending you contact him or her for more information. Others tell you exactly what you get for the service – even offering three levels of cost (bronze, silver and gold) – tell you how long it will all take, and let you know what documents you need to kick the process off.

Which ones make it super easy to engage with them?

And that’s the benefit you offer – you do all the hard work by “productising”, thereby making it easy for buyers to compare and decide.

Tip 6: Sell the act of picking up the phone

So you have the right audience defined, the content is tuned just for them, and it’s littered with nice social proof of your super-talented team. Services are addressed as outcomes and packaged up as handy products that anyone in this industrial segment would be a fool not to own.

All you want them to do is pick up the phone and call you. Which is exactly what they are not doing. So what gives?

Well, my friend, you need to “sell” the act of calling you. Remember, prospects have to take their hands off the keyboard or mouse, place it on their smartphone or office phone and dial those numbers. This takes effort. Seriously.

So why should they? What’s going to happen to make their effort worthwhile? Perhaps a bribe? Like a complimentary 30 minutes of consulting. Or a chance to share their problem with an expert willing to listen.

Think what you can provide to them to make placing that single call a win in itself. Just placing the phone number at the top of the page and expecting them to call will not be effective.

Tip 7: Know what happens when they call – it’s time to script the experience!

All going well all the last six tips have been implemented (clever you!) and the phone decides to ring (good phone!).

But uh oh! You are out of the office and someone else picks it up. Then what happens? What’s that first conversation like? What questions do you or your team ask and, more importantly, which ones do you leave for later? And how do you ensure the customer’s called back anyway?

How many times have you been in this customer’s shoes and had no one call you back – or call back weeks later after you have already made a decision?

Don’t let this happen. Put a system in place to reliably manage the process from that first call through to the sale. Ideally, it should also be a system that is followed by everyone who is part of your customer-facing operation.

A good system will include somewhere for all leads to be stored, some way to track what has been said or sent to whom, and a way to define what should be said and when. It could be a simple spreadsheet or it may be one of the many sophisticated CRM applications available to small businesses.

Bonus Tip 8: Record your success

Think of all this, Grasshopper, as a journey, not a destination. At the start, you know you will be a mess across many stages of the service sales process. That’s why you are starting. But still, you will record how many people visit your site, and how of those become leads, and who then end up as clients.

The percentages could be scary at first – few conversions from prospect to client. But over time things change – perhaps on the content creation side – so the conversion rate starts to lift, little by little.

Customer testimonials are then added to your website at the same time as you productise some of your popular services. Suddenly, a big bump in lead conversion rate takes place. Then you write down the script for that first phone call, practice it, and start using it instead of your previous “wing it” non-script Sales conversion takes another lift.

On and on you go – adding a few tweaks here and there to make things even smoother than before. Until you reach that Zen like phase of having so much new business coming across your desk that you can pick and choose the projects that appeal the most.

Sound like a plan?
If you would like to learn how Ark Advance helps companies achieve such heightened states of enlightenment, contact us today here.

Yes, I know the title of this article is a tad confusing. But trust me, what’s to follow will explain a simple trick that I’ve seen work many times before for anyone wanting their website to deliver a steady stream of leads rather than actual sales.

This simple strategy doesn’t need any complex programming. It will work with anyone running the standard installation of Google Analytics. And all up, I expect it to take around 30 minutes to get up and running.

Sound too good to be true?

Well it’s not. But before I get into the specifics of what requires changing and where, let’s look at the main issue lead generation sites have to deal with – reconciling the amount spent on advertising with the amount gained in leads.

Let’s say the numbers go something like this: You spend $2,500 in online marketing and optimisation each month and receive 20 OK-quality leads. Of those, let’s assume 10% go on to become clients, each responsible for $65,000 per annum in sales. You spend $2500, you receive $130,000. Sounds like at an aggregate level the system is working well. But how do you squeeze even more goodness from a system like this at the super detailed level? For example, what keywords do we need to bid more on and, conversely, which ones are costing us too much?

The answer lies in a simple modification to how your Google Analytics (GA) account treats goal completions. A goal is an action a visitor takes on your website that you have configured to be tracked. They usually represent all the good stuff you want your visitors to do, like subscribe to your newsletter, request a contact, download a PDF, play a video and make a purchase.

For most people, setting up a GA goal is the start of achieving better results online. Now they can see, for instance, what type of traffic delivers the most goal completions – direct, organic or even paid. And for paid advertising, what click produced the most goal conversions.

The next configuration step is to assign a dollar value to each goal. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Just bash in some arbitrary amount and you are done – just something to fill up the space. Well that’s where you’re wrong. To get the most from this simple configuration you need to align the dollar amounts with reality.

Now I realise that not all goals have the same business value. For instance, someone downloading a report is more valuable than someone not; but they’re probably less valuable than a prospect completing a Contact Us form.

I advise allocating a value to the most valuable goal and working back from there. For most of us this will be a Contact Us or Quotation Request.

Now to get a number that makes sense, just work out how many of these you need to win a new customer. And then, for each new customer, how much money are you willing to allocate to their cost of sale?

Your numbers could be something like this. It takes five Quotation Requests for every new customer and each new customer is worth $200 of marketing spend. So
simple maths makes each goal completion worth $40.

For all your lesser value goals – for instance newsletter subscription, PDF download, and video plays – you can then discount from the $40 mark – say 50% for downloads and newsletter subs (depending on how good your email marketing is) and 10% for video plays.

Do this correctly and you should end up with an expected dollar of “lead value” your website has created each month. Good stuff. Now you can tap into the extra reporting GA has to offer, like the Page Value Report.

Google creates this report by tracking a visitor’s path around a website until they complete a goal conversion. Then it takes the dollar value of the conversion and shares it across all the pages that were viewed along the way.

It’s a gem of a report when you offer a range of services, each with its own web page, and when the goal completions is the simple quote request form. Without the report, all you will see are the general engagement values for each page (visits, time on page, entrance and exit rates) and goal conversions as an aggregate total for the website. There will be no way to see which web page or service is more likely to generate a quote request.

However, with the report running you have a dollar value for each page, revealing those that are more likely to provide the action you want.

Adding dollars to your goals will help improve your paid advertising too. Your Google Analytics account will, of course, follow those visits from the initial click right through to the conversion – that’s the normal stuff. But with this change, it can also grab the dollar value for each conversion and report it as an effective ROI on your ad spend. Surely this is the ultimate way to manage this channel.

There are a few more examples of how this small change can produce some powerful reporting options. But to keep things brief these two should be enough to convince you to make the change this month and begin to add dollar amounts to your conversion choices.

It should take you just a few moments. Let us know how you get on.

Imagine this scene. You have just spent the whole day walking up and down Auckland’s Queen Street trying to find those interested in learning more about your product or service. Most said no, but a few were keen to hear more. To these you handed a ticked to free show you had running at the Civic theatre, just up the road. You worked hard and by 3.00pm you had the placed full to capacity. All 2378 seats had an interested person sitting on them. This was looking good.

So come 3.01pm, the lights dim and the curtain rises. Show time. For just 15 minutes the crowd is treated to a interactive presentation on all things good about what you offer. You tell them everything new about what you do, customer videos are presented and a whole range of valuable tips imparted to help those buying for the first time.

You have their attention for the full 15 minutes as the content really hits the mark. The house lights come up and you stride onto the stage and thank everyone for coming. You close by telling group that your sales people are stationed by the exits ready to get the details of those interested in knowing more.

How many business cards would you expect your team to collect?

Now remember this is a qualified group of people. They said before that they were interested in learning more. And they had taken time out of their day to listen to what you had to say. And finally that your sales people weren’t there to take orders – just to collect their details so a conversation could happen later on.

So what would you expect?

100,250,50 or even a measly 10.

I don’t think that 10% wouldn’t be an unreasonable expectation. This would leave your team with a credible 240 prospects to follow up on. (And you with a feeling of some good work done, sore feet and a desperate need of a cup of tea and a sit down.)

But what if you only got 10, or say just 1.

Now that would be a completely different story. All that work, all those interested people and just 10 said yes. You would be left struggling with a whole host of questions. Did we bore them with the wrong message? Perhaps we don’t know our market? Or even, did I mumble my last instruction about cards by the exit rows? No doubt there would be a list of things to fix and a willingness to get them sorted asap.

Which is all very interesting especially when I expect the same result occurs each month to many websites in New Zealand with very little done to fix it.

It doesn’t take a lot to get to 2378 unique visitors each month. And of those that do very few would achieve anywhere near a 10% lead conversion rate. The difference being that a) those that do probably don’t have any analytics running off their website so they are blind to the numbers or b) they know the visitor counts and but for some reason they don’t relate this to a vision of what these figures represent.

For instance a website that attracts 6000 unique visitors seem an OK busy sort of website. That is until you sit in a packed Aotea Centre and realise that this count relates to the amount of people around you – multiplied by three. Or how about you visit Westpac stadium in Wellington on a rugby sevens event when it is also full to the brim. Think of this amount of people times two and you have a close count to the 75k of unique visitors that most medium sized websites receive. And finally my current favourite – a client website that brings in the population of Dunedin each and every month – yep around 115,000 unique.

So job #1 should be to translate these analytics figures into real world counts. Think in terms of packed nights at the Aotea Centre or Eden Park Stadiums filled with your website visitors. Then I want you to do something very simple.

Expect more from this group.

Just as you would feel distraught after presenting to 2378 people and receiving only 10 leads. Ask big searching questions like those I offered at the start. Does our website show that we know our market? Are we presenting what they are looking for? What can we do to turn the 10 into the 240 it should be?

You can find the latest website marketing update edition here.

Last month I finally took the plunge and upgraded my mountain bike. The maintenance bills were starting to add up plus my aging body was struggling to cope with the bike’s rather agricultural suspension system. So after some serious pondering I settled on a Specialised Stumpjumper. A name with some irony because, being a rather conservative rider, I rarely jump tree roots let alone stumps.

Anyway, my new steed is a thing of mountain biking beauty. I opted for some “clown” sized wheels (going from 26 to 29 inch) and decided on a large frame rather than the medium one of its replacement. Oh what a difference this and its other goodies all made.

I won’t bore you with the final details but suffice to say I can now finish a few hours of riding and not hobble around the car park grimacing as I stretch out my suffering back. All I need now is for it to automatically climb hills on its own and I’m sorted.  I wished I had done the upgrade years ago – mountain biking hasn’t been this easy before.All this got me thinking about online marketing. Specifically, about how some businesses we consult with just seem to have an easier time making it work than the rest.

These fortunate souls take on Google and win, plus their conversion rates are leaps ahead of others in their market. So what do they do that gives them this advantage?And, like my recent bike purchase, what havethey “upgraded” in their marketing to make this so easy when compared with the rest?

I came up with these three points,in order of priority and starting with possibly the hardest to implement first.

Upgrade #1: Marketing to an obvious and measurable point of difference

Online visitors are a fickle and ruthless bunch. They enter your website, scan your content and promptly leave in mere seconds if there’s nothing of interest.

Just imagine these same people doing this in an actual store – it would seem manic. People rushing in, racing around the isles and then rushing back out. But that’s exactly their behaviour online. Just look at your Google Analytics logs to see the average time they spend and the number of pages they look at. You may be surprised how low both counts are.

Web visitors bolt for the door when a) they can’t find what they are looking for and/or b) what they find is no different from what they have seen before. This is one reason why we delve into a customer’s point of difference during our strategy planning stage.

Earlier this month we had a client who was looking for advice to promote a part of their business that had fallen away over the last few years. For privacy sake I’ll change the category, so let’s say it was in the Party Hire area. They used to sell a lot in this space but priorities had changed and other lines had grabbed more marketing focus, so now it represented less than 20% of what it used to.

Our job was to reverse this trend. So the first question was –what makes your Party Hire service so different from everyone else in Auckland?

That got everyone thinking as nothing immediately sprang to mind, other than the usual statements of “quality product” and “great service”, both of which were plastered across most of their competitor’s websites. After a bit of a group brain storm we settled on two points that were unique to them.

Let’s say they were the types of events that were best suited to the products they had to hire and the speed at which the items were dropped off and picked up. By combining both of these differences together we created a nice marketing niche market that was a) big enough for them to market to, and b) could be found through the keywords prospects used in Google.

Now we had something to work with. The website content could be re-written to explain why this client was so good at servicing this group. Plus we didn’t need to battle it out with the rest of the market who were struggling to attract and convert those using the very generic search term “party hire”.

Upgrade #2: Knowing your website numbers

For many business owners, website marketing is a part of marketing that involves a fair bit of learning. Some find this too daunting, while others dive headlong in and reap the rewards of their new found knowledge later on.

I remember receiving my first set of accounts and having exactly no idea what it all meant. It took me four years and two accountants before I stopped asking what I thought were “dumb” questions just so I knew what had happened last financial year. It took me another two years and one more accountant before I got the answers I needed to predict,with a reasonable level of accuracy, what was likely to happen next year.

Some people struggle through the “dumb question” stage. Claire, my wife, is such a soul. Asking again and again until it is clear in her mind is not fun – it’s just frustrating. Thankfully, running a website is nowhere near as complex as understanding a balance sheet but still it requires some learning time.

All this doesn’t have to take too long. I remember chatting with one prospect who didn’t know any stats of their website. That in itself wasn’t surprising because it had no analytics running on it. Nevertheless,we got that sorted and took them through the tool. Then, after many questions over a two-month period, they had it sorted. Now they know their conversion rate to two decimal places and can tell you how much revenue they make each month from each stream of traffic their website receives. They are in total control.

Upgrade #3: Unleashing a testing mindset

This can be the secret sauce that makes all the difference. That last customer I mentioned – the two decimal place person – went ballistic when we tried to run a test on their home page using an imagethat, in their view, wasn’t part of their brand message.

I went onto explain that while I understood their concerns, if this small change increased their conversion rate by an extra 10% then they would make an extra gazillion dollars in profit. Plus, it’s really not how they think it looks, or even whatour team thinks, it’s how their own prospects think it looks. Now if they like it there, in that colour and written that way, then that’s what matters.

Begrudgingly they let the test run and no, it didn’t bring absolutely super-duper amazing results, but there was enough data to prove it helped conversions – so the change stayed.

This brings me back to my idea of a motorized mountain bike just zooming up hills without any effort on my part. Effort is still required. Yes, even with implementing these three business upgrades I mention here there’s still some focused work ahead. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. It’s just that bit more comfortable with them than without them

Unlike employees your web site is best treated as a number.

So forget the nice graphics and the soft comfortable design influence, it’s time take your web site and distil it down to the cold hard facts of a percentage conversion rate. (That is its ability to create prospect leads as a percentage of the total Internet traffic it receives.)

Hard clinical numbers tell you whether all the bright lights and fancy colours of web design are making a difference to convince those itinerant web browsers to start tapping away on their keyboards to become prospects of note.

Here are four points to help you begin to view your web site in this new light.

Firstly the old saying holds true online, you can only manage what you measure, so start to investigate what web tracking tools you have to see if they provide you with the numbers you need. Most will provide visits – hits and top pages. What you really want is a tool that shows you all this plus the ability to track actual visitor actions. If what you have comes up short, don’t worry. There’s no need to invest much to get what you need. Google even provides a tool free of charge in their Google Analytics package that does a basic but solid job of showing you what you need to know.

Second, once you know your stats you need to plan their improvement. You can do this by viewing your web site not as a publisher but as a prospect visitor. (Some tools can help you alter your perspective by showing you in real time the live paths people actually take as they click through your site.)

There will probably be a few different groups of prospects and customers that work through your site. Your task is to map out the characteristics and content demands of each group and then to see how your site performs.

For instance one of your predominant groups could be quite analytical in nature, arriving at your site on a fact finding mission whereas others could be more interested in the “feel” of the business – its owners and customers. Somehow your content will need to appeal to both of these quite different prospect groups.

Thirdly after matching the right content to the correct profile then you need to present it in the correct way. Just like a poorly tied fly can ruin a good day’s trout fishing – web content poorly presented will fail to trigger the registration response you desire.

For example Permission started working with a client’s web site that was converting just 2.5% of its web site traffic into prospect leads. By altering the way the exact same content was presented we managed to increase this to a credible 25%. (The industry conversion rate for offering free content is 10%.)

And finally by taking on the goal of wanting to view your web site as a number you need to know there is no finally. There are always ways to make some incremental improvement on what you have done before.
Even our customer experiencing a solid 25% conversion rate has us working away each month to tweak things further to crack the 30% barrier we have broken with others in different industries.

MarketingSherpa has unleashed some great content for those interested in Business to Business lead generation ideas – there’s a MP3 of the presentation and a PDF of slides – on initial look it seems good stuff – go here for stuff

MarketingSherpa has unleashed some great content for those interested in Business to Business lead generation ideas – there’s a MP3 of the presentation and a PDF of slides – on initial look it seems good stuff – go here for stuff