(As published in the Sunday Star Times, May 10,2015: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/68319798/counter-your-bounce-rate)
How about a bit of audience participation to explain how the “bounce rate” works in Google Analytics? Imagine you’ve printed off the pages of your website (your home page, About Us, Contact Us etc) and laid them out on the floor in front of you. Now sit back, look skyward and imagine your website visitors falling onto these pages.
For most websites, you’ll find people stacking up on your home page – their first port of call. Those with a highly optimised website will see people falling on a more even spread of pages. (If no one falls from the sky at all, your website is a write-off – start again.)
The pages these visitors are landing on are what Google Analytics terms – guess what – your “landing pages”.
If your home page does its job well, you should see your visitors stand up and jump from this page to another. And another. And another, as they move around your site. If they stand up and walk away from the scene, never to be seen again, your home page has problems. Those people who fall onto your home page and then walk away forever is what Google Analytics calls the “home page bounce rate”. GA shows this in a percentage form.
It’s vital to track the home page bounce rate because the home page so important to the performance of your website as a whole.
The main role of your home page is to welcome and help your visitors find what they are looking for. It’s kind of like a salesperson in a shop, meeting and greeting new customers and letting them know where things are.
A bad home page is like having a nose-picking, talking-to-their-friend-on-the-phone, swearing like a sailor salesperson – a terrible first impression that will make any new customer swiftly exit the store, never to return.
With the home page bounce rate stat, the lower, the better. Our best clients have home page bounce rates below ten percent, while others struggle with 50 per cent or higher.
Your website’s “bounce rate” is the percentage of people who leave after only viewing one page ie the page they landed on. A target value here is between 20-40 per cent.
Some visitors will fall onto one page, stand up and walk around a few other pages before they walk away. The page that they stand on before they walk away is called the “exit page”. If you look at your Google Analytics and see your Contact Us page has a very high Exit Rate, don’t worry about it: your visitor has probably found your phone details, email address or shop address before they’ve left your website.
Have a look at your Google Analytics for the month. What’s your home page bounce rate like? How does it fare when compared to your site’s average bounce rate? Too high? Focus on improving it – perhaps move some content around, add to what’s there to entice people to move deeper into your site or even look at a redesign so that it is attractive as well as easy to understand and navigate.
(As published in the Sunday Star Times, May 17, 2015: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/68483238/track-your-websites-performance)
Hopefully you now view your website as a salesperson rather than a brochure and you realise you can use Google Analytics to improve how your website is working for you. This week I want to show you how to configure your Google Analytics to track the bits that really matter. How would you measure the performance of a salesperson if you didn’t keep track of the sales they made? With a great deal of difficulty. Same goes for your website. Keep its performance on track by putting some goals in place.
Unfortunately, your Google Analytics account isn’t automatically set up to measure the sales made by your website – this is something you have to sit down and do. But it’s most definitely worth your while. How can you measure performance if you don’t track it?
Let’s cover what you may want to track.
For those with an e-commerce website, the outcomes you’ll want to track are quite straightforward. You’ll want to track how many online sales you’ve made, how many people signed up online to your newsletter (or for other bait, such as a “Cheat Sheet” or “Helpful Guide to”) and possibly how many viewed your website videos.
If your business sells services (such as accounting or cleaning), it’s a bit different. Your website is probably there to generate leads – it tells potential customers who you are and what you do, before prompting them to get in touch with one of your salespeople, who will then (hopefully) convert it into a sale. While we can’t track sales on service-focused websites, we can track interest. This includes visitors who viewed videos, downloaded PDF documents, completed quote request forms or filled in Contact Us pages. Visitors doing some or all of these actions are obviously more engaged than those that don’t – they’re showing interest.
So you want to track all the website actions that show engagement (as we’ve outlined above). To do this, head over to the “Goals” section of your Google Analytics account and work through setting them up.
Once this is completed, Google Analytics will help you create the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that will let you know if you need to make any website changes to improve each goal. For instance, your reporting may tell you that 2% of your website visitors complete your Contact Us page. Or that just 3% of visitors to your homepage play the video that’s there. Or only 0.5% of visitors buy something from your e-commerce website. All of these results are on the low end – but at least you’ve started tracking them and are now aware they need work. I’ll share how to do that next week.
The main thing is now you know where you stand. Well done for getting this far and having some Google Analytics goals set up – based on my experience of reviewing hundreds of Google Analytics accounts, just doing this puts yourself in the top 35% of website owners.
Thank you to all those who turned up for our inaugural event last month. During this session I covered “Growing your business through Google without buying them a new plane”. The content for our July 23rd session is now finalised (see below) and you can register for the event here. Customers and prospects of Ark Advance should have received a voucher code by now.
5:10pm – Understanding The Fundamentals of Online Marketing
6:20pm – How to complete a web development project and still talk to your web developer
This month I kicked off our first “Thursday” by presenting on “Growing your business through Google without buying them a new plane”. Customers who couldn’t make it will receive a pre-recorded version of this presentation. Here’s a brief synopsis.
First, I reviewed how many small businesses in New Zealand have staff (approx 97,000), and then surmised that they could also afford to advertise at approx $300 per month with Google. And allowing for 50% of this spend being wasted through poor advertising choices led to a calculation – 97,000 x $150 per month – which comes to $174 million. With a new Airbus A320a costing a piddling $123 million, I had to allow for a few “modifications” to soak up the remaining $51m. Airforce One, anybody?
Now if you design your advertising to help Google achieve the ideal user experience, you are heading along the right track and probably not helping Google fund that new Airbus. The question is, what is this supposed ideal experience? Think back to when you’ve been googling something and Google, bless its heart, did exactly the right job for you. You found just what you were after, spent a happy few minutes or more splashing about the website Google pointed you to, and didn’t go back to Google until you were ready to search for something else.
And when it fails? That’s when you search, click onto a site, realise it’s not what you’re looking for, quickly click back for another look at the search results, and then click away. Think of it as bouncing between the search results and the sites you find – hunting for that elusive prey.
Advertising that is costly and ineffective will have all the attributes of this scenario – attracting few clicks for the number of times it is shown. What’s more, those who do click bounce off the site in droves – most likely to head back to Google to continue their quest. There’s an Airbus armrest paid for, right there.
Applying poor measurement practices is another armrest – with maybe a seat belt thrown in too. Although you can’t manage what you can’t measure, it’s still common to see people buying Google Advertising with no way to determine what value they gained from it.
It’s easy to see why. Setting up a Google Adwords account is easy peasy – all you need is 20 minutes and a credit card. Just follow the prompts Google provides and your ads will be online, with money being sucked from your account, in mere moments.
Now compare that with the effort required to set up and configure your Google Analytics account. Yes you can get the code in minutes – then someone needs to add it to EVERY page of your website. What’s more, the account needs configuring to track the actions (think sales or contact form requests) that you want your advertising to drive. All going well, and with someone who knows exactly what they need, this work can done in under an hour. But ask the business owner to take on the task and it could be weeks before a web developer has done their job, leaving the marketing assistant to figure out exactly what part of Google Analytics needs customising for the goals to work properly.
So think yourself lucky if your goal tracking is working as it should, allowing you to see exactly how much each lead from your paid advertising channels is costing you. You may also notice that each month the per lead cost moves gradually northwards.
Why is that? Well, Google is the place to be for you AND your competitors. And that drives the bid price up – and with it your cost per lead. Which leaves me with the last part of this presentation summary – nurturing your leads with the care and attention they deserve.
Let’s think about the polar opposite way this could work: Aging sticky notes on computer screens containing the details of prospects who called in for help last week and still haven’t been called back yet.
Then, when they are called back, it’s from salespeople who treat them depending on how they feel that particular day. No method to track who has said what to whom. Appointments get set and people fail to turn up. Quotes are given but never followed up. And so on, and so on.
I know this happens because – as I’m sure you have – I’ve been on the receiving end of nearly all these behaviours. And while businesses can survive in the short term with systems like this, I predict they will soon find themselves priced out of online advertising because their effective cost per sale from online leads will be too high. The smart people who see selling as a “system” will bid up their advertising to grab as much traffic as they can.
Customers will have received a recording of this full presentation. If you are interested in working with us then give us a call or complete a contact request here and let’s start.
So who is on your website NOW? No need to guess – just head over to this report and all will be revealed. This is a great way to while away a few moments and look transfixed as people arrive and wander amongst your pages.
Some of the cool ways to use a report like this would be:
To validate that your tracking is working properly. Today I opened this report and picked up that a client’s mobile website wasn’t being tracked at all. I just opened up my smartphone, turned on my mobile data connection, browsed to their homepage and waited for me to turn up. I didnt.
Sit back and skite about how well your radio advertising worked as you “see” hundreds of new direct visitors arrive in abundance just minutes after your ad ran.
Double check that your Goal Tracking or Event Tracking is correctly configured. Just turn off any filters that could ignore your traffic (if, for example, you were on your work network) and then go ahead and register or complete a sale and see that the necessary Google Analytics goals are working.
Or sit back and while away the Friday afternoon as people take in all your great content.
Enjoy.
“No thanks I’m just looking.”
How many times have you said this when wandering around the shops of your favourite shopping mall? You were probably not alone. Walk around any mall and notice those holding shopping bags compared to those not, and the majority will be looking. Well, it’s the same online.
In fact the web is the first place many go when starting the research stage of any complex purchase. Knowing this, the savvy service marketer knows she needs to create a clever system to a) attract those who are just looking; and then b) nurture them gently but purposefully towards the sale. The key parts that make up this system are the subject of this article.
There are five main stages to follow when creating a “looking-to-buy” nurturing system. Let’s go through each of these in the sequence that I see them deployed.
#1 Converting Anonymous Lookers into Known Lookers
Lookers are reasonably useless in their anonymous state. Somehow you need to stop those “just looking” and convince them to raise their hand and identify themselves. Until they do this all bets are off. There’s very little you can do to nurture them.
Now I realise you can unleash some re-marketing smarts and try to promote yourself to them as they browse other sites. That’s a step further forward than doing nothing. Nevertheless, you really need their email address to start to move ahead.
Content that makes the anonymous known is the magic ingredient behind content marketing. Producing the right content and delivering it in a way that makes someone willing to give up their anonymity (ie, give you their email address) is is not easy. You will trip up along the way as you fine tune your content to make it persuasive enough make the conversion work.
Because you can’t go any further forward until this part is working, stick at it. And once these “just looking” email address leads start to arrive, it’s time to ….
#2 House them in a system that tracks what has been said to whom
You will need a CRM of sorts to hold all these new prospects, remembering that they are not ready to buy just yet. So they don’t need a salesperson calling them to take the order. Instead, they need to receive small pieces of content that slowly, but gradually, move them through the decision making process.
Life is so much easier if the system that houses leads also keeps track of what communication was sent to whom and when. Ideally, it will manage both digital and non-digital channels. So if someone receives a few emails, a direct mail piece and perhaps a check-in call from a call centre, then each and every communication is captured against the prospect’s record.
Once you have a system ready to house and monitor prospects, you can focus on what to say to them and when. Or to stage 3 where you get started on….
#3 Crafting messages that move them further along the buying process
I’m not thinking here of “are you ready to buy now?” reworked multiple ways but all with same intent.
Nope, the plan is to deliver answers to the questions people have as they work through the buying process. Questions like “who else has used your service to solve the same problems I am facing?” or “how do I compare you with others?” or even “why should I consider the premium service when the standard may do the job?”
Customer testimonials, buyer guides and product infographics could deliver answers to questions like these.
Every service business will need to answer its own set of prospect questions. Start by identifying what the common questions are and crafting initial content to answer them.
Then, once you start matching your content to your prospect audience you can begin to….
#4 Take notice of those who take notice
Once again, ideally this will be a feature of your CRM system. Here your leads are stored and your campaigns crafted. And all going well, the system will track emails that are opened, the links clicked inside them, and perhaps even the website pages browsed. All this interaction will then be neatly stored against each prospect record.
Then it will be a simple case of sorting your leads by those who interacted the most with your digital content. The more they open, click and browse, the more likely they are to be ready for the next step where you….
#5 Give people a chance to raise their hand
Those engaging most with your content could require a carefully scripted phone call from a “gently gently” salesperson. Or, if this is too much, perhaps a visit to a group event hosted at your company. Something that moves them off the digital channel into the physical space where the sale can be completed. Nurturing content that has done its job well will make this “bridging content” part of a natural next step.
There you go – my five steps to convert “those looking” to “those buying”. Yes, I admit they are very high level overviews BUT they should give you a starting template to work towards. GIve us a call today if you want help installing them into your online marketing box of tricks.
Don’t get fooled by the techie sounding name – this is a report that delivers on quite a simple need.
Let’s say you ran a marketing PR campaign that delivered 2000 visitors to your website last Monday. Fresh from reading about in you in the newspaper they came a-visiting and did stuff. Some fortunate souls would have become a lead, others perhaps bought something, and the rest meandered in and then left hopefully a lot wiser.
So what do they do next week? Or the week after? Did they just arrive for the day and never come back again or did that PR do a great job and warm them up enough to entice them to return later and turn into great customers? This report helps you answer that question.
A cohort is a group of people defined by the date they arrived at your website. Cohort Analysis allows you to see how they perform after their arrival date based on criteria like website engagement, goal completions or session duration. You can view their performance individually, as a group and also in comparison with others in the group.
Handy stuff.
Back in February Google released a note explaining that come April 21 they would take the mobile friendliness of websites as a “ranking factor”. Then in March the Sunday Star Times interviewed me on the subject. As you can imagine, I had definite opinions that I was happy to share!
So what does it all mean?
Based on emails from Google warning customers with non-mobile websites of the upcoming change, it definitely means something. But exactly what, nobody’s yet sure. We’ll be watching the keyword rank reports of our clients with keen interest to see what turns out.
For e-commerce clients in particular, buying a new mobile friendly website is a big ask. So our early advice is to take a wait-and-see approach by monitoring the amount of mobile traffic you receive and its growth curve.
If the initial percentage is low – lets say below 15% – and the growth curve is relatively flat, then your upgrade path could be a way off if – and this is the big IF – your search term rankings don’t tank in the meantime.
However, if your percentage is 35% plus, and the growth curve is steep, and your conversion rates begin to suffer for traffic hitting your non mobile website, then you might want to bite the bullet and make the upgrade.
More on this as it develops.
We’ve all read those articles on what to do to achieve unbounded success online. Well this time I thought I would go with the opposite view. What to do when it’s not going well. Maybe the order book is looking a bit light. Or you start the week with a calendar full of white space without a prospect appointment in sight.
This is the time for quick results and a solid return on any marketing investment. When prospects call us at this stage we know we have to apply proven tactics that work quickly to turn things around. All while delivering the greatest return on their money. No pressure, eh?
Here I outline five of the many tactics we apply, and why each has made the list. Note that the order in which you apply these tactics is important. If you skip one or apply a few out of sequence, our experience is that the overall result is doubtful.
So let’s get started.
Strategy #1 – Clean up your traffic
In its current form and given its current content, your website will need a certain type of traffic to make it work – that is, convert visitors into leads.
Let me explain the “current form” part a bit more. We all know that in deciding which pages to rank over others one of Google’s key criteria is page content. (If you’re not convinced, reading their guide to “Search Engine Optimisation” will remove all doubt.)
This principle also applies to your website’s ability to convert visitors into leads. Content matters. A lot. Your content will hopefully convert a certain type of visitor – perhaps not all of them, but certainly those who like what you have written.
So the task remains to find this group, show it your content, and hope they convert. And because it’s always easier to fix one thing at a time we surmise that the
content will do its job, IF we can find the right audience.
Therefore we need to “clean up” your traffic to locate this group. I define “dirty traffic” as website visitors about whom you have no idea why they came visiting. The non-paid part of the Google search engine – commonly called organic traffic – could contain these people. Google’s no help here because it doesn’t reveal the keyword search terms these visitors used to arrive at your site – so you have no idea what they were looking for. What’s more, some struggling websites struggle to rank for the terms their prospects use.
So the only reliable way forward is to buy traffic using Google AdWords for the keywords you think your prospects will use.
That’s the easy bit. Making your money deliver a really clean group of visitors is a lot harder. Fortunately, you don’t need to test hundreds of keywords at the outset – you can just start with a few.
Then, once you have tapped into some “clean” traffic, you need to decide where to send them. Which brings me to Strategy 2.
Strategy #2 – Master your first impression
So the prospect sees your ad, clicks, and is best sent where?
Anywhere but your Contact Us page. Last month we completed a website re
view for a new client and discovered that their web optimisation company had been sending all their paid advertising traffic to that page.
The client supplied a $10,000 minimum home furnishings service for the renovation market. Their website contained pages and pages of great pictures showcasing their work. But those pictures remained hidden from their paid traffic – and 85% promptly left without looking any further.
Strategy #3 – Cover all the content bases
Once you’re sending your search traffic to the right page, you need to ensure it includes the right content. Take our home furnishings client above. Their visitors clearly expect to see lovely pictures of homes that have benefitted from their service.
Don’t skimp here. Provide lots of content. Make the pictures great – poor photography hurts your brand.
Once you have included the “must have” content, add content that shows your point of difference. For instance, you may be a design agency that crafts solutions specifically for the professional services market. Or an architect who only works on build projects on Waiheke for over $5 million. Or a lawyer who works on divorce cases for professional males between 40 and 55 years old.
Our home furnishings client had a great reputation backed up by lots of testimonials. Also, their sales process was low pressure and delivered by experts. Finally, they were experts in producing custom solutions that their competitors found too hard.
Presenting this “differentiation” content can take your prospects of success to a new high. In fact, the only thing that could hold you back is not applying Strategy 4.
Strategy #4 – Ask for the “Goldilocks Commitment”
The classic sales mistake is to either ask your visitor to to commit to too much too early, or fail to ask for an
y commit at all.
Let’s go back to home furnishings. Pointing visitors at the Contact Us page was definitely asking for too much commitment too early.
But when you looked through their gallery of photos, the opposite mistake was being made. There was no reference to their smart showroom or how to book an appointment with their sales team.
Presenting the right commitment choices to your audience at the right time is an art. It’s one we’ve been practising for over 10 years now, so we know what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes, it takes two or three visits to achieve a commitment from a web visitor. Therefore, you need to…
Strategy #5 – Play the long game
Thankfully, there are are an array of smart online marketing tools to help you recycle your clean traffic enough times to ensure it converts. Remarketing and email marketing are among them.
Remarketing is an easily set up Google product that lets you “follow” your non-converted website visitors as they browse the web, presenting targeted banner ads to them. You’ll need a range of banner sizes to display and someone to help you build your target audience. You can also choose the frequency at which your banner ads are seen, allowing you to hit the sweet spot between visibility and annoyance.
Email marketing is the stalwart of online marketing. It’s been going so long that many forget the reason for its longevity – it works. The main challenge is providing content that the customer deems worthy of giving you their email address. Every year the bar is raised higher.
So there you go – my five strategies to fix a failing service marketing solution. We have seen clients use these steps to transform a system that hasn’t delivered a lead in 10 months to one that delivers every month.
Call us for more information, or if you’d like help applying these steps to your business.
This report splits your traffic based on three device types – desktop, mobile and tablet. It then shows how your website interacts with each of the three across your measures for:
– core engagement (how many visitors you have to the site via each device)
– conversion tracking metrics (how many visits become sales)
It’s important to track these trends over time, so pick a date range that extends 6 or 12 months – especially for your mobile results.
Visit any cafe and notice especially patrons who are on their own. A fair proportion will have their heads bowed, peering into their screens. Even couples do the same – no time for conversation – nope there’s stuff to be checked online that’s more important than their face-to-face relationship. So this is the report that shows you whether they are looking at your website while they sup their soy latte.
What kind of results can you expect to see? You may be surprised by a recent uptick in mobile traffic. Then you’ll wonder why their engagement is relatively low. Possibly they’re struggling to operate your desktop-centric website through their teeny tiny screens. Perhaps now is the time to look for a layout that plays well across all formats. The things we usually see in this report are:
– Mobile growth curves that have gone all steep on you over the last three months
– Lots of mobile visitors, good engagement but very few mobile conversions
– Unsustainable cost per lead values from mobile Google advertising sending traffic to a non-mobile website
– The percentage of desktop traffic a website is experiencing – sometimes as low as 20%. (Perhaps time for an app?)
Unfortunately it takes more than a few weeks to deliver a fully featured mobile website. Use this report to help get the timing right. So when all is finished you have a good chunk of tiny screen viewers ready to engage with.
And for those with more mobile and tablet traffic than desktop, perhaps it’s time to set up some Google Analytics dashboards – to pick out this traffic source and display how it engages in easy-to-read charts for your monthly reports.
Give us a call today if you would like more details on how this could work.
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.
Last month we took the plunge and set Sky up at the office while the Price family were in residence. No television during our 14 week stay was too much to ask. So I rang the call centre, took up the no-contract offer, and next day we were up and running.
I never realised how much choice we had bought. We passed on Sport but added Rialto and Soho. This gave us what seemed like hundreds of channels to pass away the winter evenings. Add this to the My Sky box that we rented, and the entertainment opportunities seemed limitless.
And that was the problem.
We had gone from having just four channels of normal TV to now having a cluttered list of many. The Sky magazine was supposed to help us pick out the gold. But have you seen the thing? It’s chocka with content that makes choosing even harder, not easier.
To get us going I navigated through a few channels and created a few “series link“ things to record. But I still think there’s more in there – I just need to find a way to find exactly what we want without it all becoming too hard.
Making the most of your online marketing can be like that. Just switch channels for keyword choices and you move from say a hundred options to thousands. How do you navigate through this?
Creating a Zappos moment
Thankfully there is a way. It’s called focusing or, as I prefer to call it, creating your own Zappos moment.
Let me tell you why.
This brilliant e-commerce site was bought by Amazon five years ago for over a billion dollars. And they achieved it by starting small – in this case selling shoes.
Only later did they expand into a wider apparel range. And when they expanded, they expanded at a feverish pace.
At the start they set out to answer a very simple question – would people buy shoes online? To do this they created a website that advertised a small range and advertised it on Google’s paid advertising network. When the first orders came in, they purchased the shoes from normal store shoe retailers, had them delivered to their factory, then forwarded them to the client.
Yes, they lost money on every order. But that wasn’t the point. They quickly learnt that people were fine with measuring their feet at home, matching it with the online sizing chart and purchasing shoes they’d never tried on from a store they have never been to.
If the strategy worked for Zappos it can work for you.
Let’s say, for example, that you sell mortgage advice in Auckland. This is a cluttered market, as you can see from the search results below.
Now there are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of keywords that you could use to market this service. Mortgage Advice, Finance Broker, Mortgage Services, and many more. But that doesn’t fit with the plan of focus. So let’s pick one – Mortgage Broker Auckland. The task is to now create an ad based on this term and get prospects clicking on it.
While this sounds simple, Google’s default bidding method will have your ad shown for a whole range of terms – for instance Mortgage Broker Advice Auckland, Mortgage Advice Brokers and even Mortgage Broker Courses Auckland. Which is great for Google – but for that last keyword option – not so good in this instance.
So we would use an option that has our ad show just for the term we want. Notice the lack of plural – we are bidding on one term and one term only. Then we would put two ads on perfect rotation (that is, 50% for each) and wait.
Is the ad clicked?
Write a boring ad, and no one will click. That’s a problem, so we write more, and more, until we tune our copy to suit the market and clicks appear.
Now we need to worry about how much action these clicks this generate? Do the clickers arrive, spend a few seconds on our page, then disappear? Or do they meander around the site for above average times then contact us for more information.
Turning clickers into leads is all about serving up the right content in the correct way. Rarely is it about writing better ad copy or choosing different keywords hoping they will convert.
This is the optimisation part – few websites are built with visitors in mind.
Most websites are “tuned” to traffic from a limited range of keywords, but rarely do they address the wide range of keywords people actually use. As a result, after spending $500 on Mortgage Broker Auckland and generating no leads, our business owner may conclude she has just blown $3500 on a website that does a rotten job of converting a highly popular and lucrative* search term.
Not so fast! Let’s tune the website so that those visitors do become leads (yes, it can be done!). Assuming the cost per conversion is palatable, this, my friends, is a Zappos moment. You have proved you can attract visitors with good ad copy, and turn those visitors into leads. The growth of your business is now linked to the growth of that keyword search term.
Let that last sentence sink in. The growth of your business is now linked to the growth of that search term.
Doesn’t that feel nice?
It should. And you can also begin to see the effort needed to get that one keyword working? Ad copy had to be written again and again.So did the web copy – in fact, it needed multiple iterations. But the outcome made the effort well worthwhile.
Each month we help dozens of clients achieve victories like this. Contact us today if you would like to join them.
* How do you know a search term is lucrative? Let’s say the average cost-per-click is a relatively high $4.00. This amount is not set by Google but by those bidding on the search term. People don’t bid that amount for long unless they can convert it into a lead at a favourable cost. If you can’t, then your conversion rate is well below the industry standard.
Here’s just a couple of the goals a good website has to achieve to pay its way for the business that owns it; be found by those looking in Google and appeal to all that decide to visit -so much so that it transforms these anonymous visitors into either live lead prospects or purchasing consumers.
Pick a simple business selling one product or service and this can be manageable. Replace this with any normal business that has multiple offerings to alternative markets and things become much more of a challenge.
If I was asked to create a list of tactics that can make this work even harder than it should be then the lack of an quality content would be #1. Yep forget about fancy design, super smart traffic building tactics or even the most detailed of analytical tracking. If a website’s content misses the mark then all the rest doesn’t matter.
Creating content is possibly the most snooze inducing subject we can talk about here at Permission. So I would not be surprised if by now if most readers are not feeling their eyelids sink lower and their breathing slowing down. No doubt soon their fingers will be twitching over a mouse button ready to move on.
Look I know that producing content is hard and therefore is the least appealing part of managing a website. Fortunately the giants of online marketing -think Google – are ready and willing to reward you for all your efforts. And when Google dishes out rewards, why not take an unfair share of what’s on offer?
Google’s engineers realise the power that a content laden website can deliver to it searchers, so much so that now they are rewarding those that follow this strategy where it matters most – in their pocket. Now don’t get too excited, there are no actual cheques being dished out. It’s more that a “bonus benefit” is being applied to those who want it.
Here’s just a few ways in which this benefit is being applied.
Many moons ago you could divide the amount of work required to improve a websites performance within Google neatly using the 80/20 principle. Twenty percent of the work applied to a websites content and how it was displayed. The remaining 80% was all about ensuring other websites linked into the site in the correct way. Nowadays it would be fair to say that the same 80/20 principle applies – instead the proportions of work are neatly reversed.
So if you want to rank for the search term of say “Spaniel Training Guides” on your dog training site then you will need a page that includes great content on exactly this subject.
This sounds super easy for product based businesses; however service suppliers have a harder job. For instance let’s say you supply domestic cleaning services. How many different ways do you think prospects would describe this service? Here’s just a few from the extensive list – domestic cleaning, house cleaning, home cleaning, cleaner Auckland and even home cleaning Sandringham. So if this was your business then somehow you need to have a piece of logical and well written content for every search term that makes sense for the reader.
Paid advertising solution – Google AdWords -is also busy rewarding with cheaper clicks those who have the best keyword to content match. So if your paid advertising keywords included the term “Spaniel Training Guides” and your clicking prospect was taken through to the product page then all is good with Google and their advertising Quality Score metric.
It’s a great thing this Quality Score thingy exists. It ensures that the Google bidding system is about providing relevant ads and not big fat advertising budgets. Without it we would be left with those with the largest budgets achieving the highest placements.
Now unfortunately Google doesn’t share all the ingredients of an advertiser’s quality score ranking with us. However the following factors are known to influence it; how long the advertiser has been buying clicks; the % of times an ad is clicked compared to how often it is seen; and the relevant one for our discussion -the ad to keyword content match.
We have all clicked on low quality score ads. You click, arrive and in seconds realise in a few seconds that what is in front of you is not what you wanted. Back you go to Google to continuing your search. The click didn’t work for you and fortunately it wasn’t the experience Google wanted for you either as they subsequently mark down the quality score of the advertiser.
In both of these instances Google is rewarding you for doing the hard work of creating great content. First up it affects your natural search ranking – which should lead to more visitors and hopefully more leads. Secondly it helps reduce the cost of your paid advertising clicks by producing a high quality score.
There you have it, two great reasons to make this next month the month of more content. Give us a call if you are not sure what type of content to create.
Like you, I also receive those emails that start with the guarantee of ensuring a top ranking inside Google. The use and style of English prompts leads you to believe they were sent from a far away land. How nice. Someone from far away who his concerned about your experience with Google. And all this for a fraction of what you would expect to pay. How could you resist?
A year ago picking a vendor this way may have had a very slight chance of working. These strategies were especially enticing as they required little involvement from you, the business owner. Vendors like these just did “stuff” on websites other than yours which would magically have an effect on your rankings.
This was a time of creating enough links to your website in whatever way they could. Let’s not worry too much about the quality of the sites those links came from – just get them and move on. I remember meeting the owner of a supposedly reputable SEO company telling me that they purchased all their links. So once their customers stopped paying their fees these links were retired and the rankings with them.
Anyway, surprise, surprise the positive effect that all this type of work used to deliver has finally come to an end. In late May Google went through quite a large update which included a change that specifically negated any positive effect strategies like these had produced.
So with this change, what’s left for Google to interpret when deciding which web page should be at the top of the results and which should sit at the bottom? Well to tell you the truth nobody exactly knows. If they say they do then beware. But all is not lost. Google widely distributes details on the over aching principles that when applied help it to find and successful rank your website. Follow this link to read one of the many documents they have published on the subject area. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35291?hl=en
One key principle they mention highlights the need of producing a steady stream of good onsite content. Links to this work will follow as people naturally find what has been produced and link to it. The last part of letting the links to your site grow naturally conflicts exactly with the previous strategy of manufacturing these links in a very unnatural manner.
Now there are still some ethical things you can do to help push along this natural link building process, but let’s talk about the first task at hand – producing great content.
Remembering that this content needs to be read by everyone – humans and those tenacious Google spiders – the task ahead can seem quite daunting. Especially when the style and quality of this work will more than likely have an effect on it converting “readers” into “sales leads”.
All of this makes the offer of effective Search Engine Optimisation from those in far away land seem even more interesting. Who would you like to produce your content? Someone who can barely produce an email describing what they offer? Or a business that can take the time to learn the business you are in and then work with you to help create a stream of quality content that your audience will want to read?
Now I understand that the road ahead looks a tad more difficult for those struggling with poor rankings. For instance a year ago a business owner could just pay someone to “do something” and their only involvement going forward was settling their account. All this has been replaced by a ongoing time commitment of them to work with a third party to not only produce content that makes sense but also place it on their website in a way that ensures it is read and has the desired effect of improving conversions.
I’m convinced that those with a half hearted level of commitment to the online space will find this all too daunting and will give up. Leaving the control of the organic results in their industry to others who can see the real payoff for their effort.
I liken this change to altering the type of work Search Engine Optimisation is for the business owner. Consider it moving from an “expense driven purchase” – where you bought it each month from someone who did “stuff” you never really understood – into one of creating “search assets”. They take time to create, and probably cost more in the process. Nevertheless, just as assets should, all this investment is rewarded with a positive return over an extended period as they sit solidly within the Google search rankings providing clicks to your website at zero marginal cost.
Last week a client summed all this up with a statement that in their opinion that if was hard to do, and still ethically fitted with what Google wanted to occur, then it was probably a good SEO strategy to embark upon. And conversely if it seemed too easy, and had question marks over the ethics – then there’s a very strong chance that Google will penalise them for using it, if not now then eventually in the near future.
Let me know if you would like to know more about how we can lighten some of the load.
In May this year, Google updated the Maps desktop version to make it easier to use. It also allows you to solve new problems like – which cafes are near my client’s office for a quick catch up? Or which of my friends has reviewed a Japanese restaurant in Auckland that will make my decision to pick one so much easier?
This is all good news for the “directionally challenged” like me. As I’m possibly one of the world’s worst navigators, Google Maps has been one of my all-time favourite applications.
The desktop addition of Google Maps was the precursor of all things mobile. It launched a whopping eight years ago, which is an eternity in Internet time when you realise that Facebook started the year prior. The “Street View” option found here is a particular favourite. Knowing what the outside of an office looks like can save precious time when struggling with Auckland’s cryptic street numbering system.
The mobile version is also a winner. I used to find it within the native mapping app on my iPhone until Apple replaced it with its own. Remember the disaster that was? (I just checked again and still Apple Maps tells me that Bondi Beach is just on the edge of Cornwall Park in Auckland.) Needless to say it was a quick rush back to Google when they launched their own iPhone app.
Changes to the desktop version
The core desktop part of Google Maps received a complete refresh in May. Thankfully what remained of the old version was the super-simple way to find where you want to go. However, Google tells us this is now achieved by using a mapping environment that’s more personalised than ever before. As you click, apparently Google learns.
As I write this, access to the new Google Maps is by invitation only. By the time this is published I expect everyone should be allowed in. Once you have access, the first obvious difference is the way in which it looks on the screen. Here’s a snapshot to follow:
Notice how the search box sits in the top left of the screen. It’s a place that works well. Just type away and see the map move before your eyes as it hones in on the location you are looking for.
Or, if you don’t know where you want to go BUT do know what you want, then you can use the map to help as it suggests a range of options nearby. For instance, type in “cafes near Jervois Road, Auckland” and ba-boom – cafes and their location are shown directly on the map.
All of this relies on businesses having previously registered their location with Google. This is not an obvious process to follow for most business owners – which is probably why I only see four cafes suggested for the full length of the latte-rich area of Ponsonby’s Jervois Road.
Anyway, once you find the place you want to visit it’s a piece of cake to learn how best to get there. Just pick where you are leaving from, “home” or “work” (both are configured settings) and Google will plot the best route for your pick of transport options – walking, driving or taking public transport.
The opportunity for business
The new opportunity for business owners is to advertise to a new set of potential customers – i.e. those who know what they want, but not where to find it. In this new version you now have two options available to achieve this task. The first involves placing your paid advertisement below the search box AND on the location of your business directly on the map – as bold as brass. Below is a snapshot of a business doing both.
The second option is a relatively plain alternative where your ad sits just below the search result. However, it isn’t that much more complex to do the first, so that’s our suggestion for those of you wanting to give it a try.
I’m picking that the “search within the map” interface is one that will catch on with many. It just seems to work well. This will drive traffic, which drives clicks, which should drive conversions.
The only thing that could spoil all this fun is the content that people see when they find the location they want and click to read more about it. Think of this as a mini Google website that you populate describing your business. Google calls it your Google Plus Local page. Born of Google’s social media tool, Google Plus, this naturally includes a space for people to place reviews. You cannot disable this feature, so it pays to regularly monitor what people are saying.
Other benefits for personal use
If you are a Google Plus user with a bunch of Google Plus friends, then these reviews become even more relevant. Now you can filter the results you see on the map by those reviewed by people in your “circles”. Or you can pick a rather nebulous category, “Top Reviewers”. See the screenshot below which shows how I can filter my options when searching for a Japanese Restaurant in Auckland.
Tips for getting started
If you’d like help with any of this, then give us a call at the office and one of our team will help you move forward. Happy Mapping!
Last month I met a marketer who works for a New Zealand company that spent $10 million on Google AdWords in 2012. What made this even more fascinating for me was that I had never heard of the company name and I would pretty much guarantee for 99% of you the same would apply.
She told me all of the industries that they operated within and all were legitimate business categories that were quite boring. No exotic borderline operation here. Just a worldwide network of normal businesses that run on the strength of their ability to optimise their spend with Google.
At first I was just shell-shocked by the amount they were spending. I mean just thinking through the actual mechanics of managing something like this was hard to comprehend. For instance, just getting the money to Google each month would be on a whole different level from charging a Visa card. I half jokingly suggested that the Google people must be waiting outside their office ready to collect the next suitcase of cash. Apparently the truth is very boring – automatic bank transfers on a daily basis.
Nevertheless, they must be on a Google Advertising short dial with this spend? Yes they have dedicated account management but only see people who come across from Sydney once or twice a year. (Don’t expect a sales call for your $50k per annum spend.)
Fortunately we were able to chat for a while before the next session of the conference we were both attending began its next session. So what did I learn that I can share with those with a fraction of this spend? Well from what I learnt, here are a few principles that I can share as working well for those keen to squeeze more value from their Google clicks.
Firstly – It all starts with a sound understanding of your “AdWords Numbers”
Now when you are spending over $800,000 on clicks each month you would assume there was some wastage factored in when it came to analysing the effect that the clicks caused. Not in this case. Each and every click was accounted for in precise detail.
So while this company operated a number of websites – think more than 100 – each and everyone used a well tuned Google Analytics account to reveal exactly how much each sale cost in clicks. This was compared to the acceptable marketing spend for the margin they spent. If the sums made sense then they just kept on buying those clicks.
It’s a simple math problem really that was asked every minute of every day. Were they “buying” the sale from Google for the right amount to enable them and Google to remain in business?
Secondly – Once the math is solved then the world is your playground.
This company is based in Auckland but has offices in Australia, the UK and North America. But it all started from solving a very simple problem in Auckland. Could they make the math work selling one service to one set of buyers? Then, once the this was completed they looked for the same buyers in Australia, from there North America and finally the UK.
We have a Google Adwords optimisation client who has done something very similar, all be it on a much smaller scale. Like our $10 million friends they started in Auckland, then moved to Wellington and wrapped up their New Zealand journey with Christchurch before crossing the ditch into Australia via Adelaide to Melbourne and finally Sydney. The core principles we applied together to make Auckland work and have so far successfully been translated as we move around the globe together.
And finally – to wrap up our learning’s from this conversation, don’t think that just because you spent $100,000 with Google last year that you deserve any special treatment. I asked them what they received for Christmas from the search giant (expecting something nice for such a relationship). It was nothing special.
In fact, if you were a customer who came along to our office warming party last year then you left with a gift that cost more. And rest assured we don’t have any online marketing clients spending $10 million per annum with Permission.
Not yet anyway 🙂