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?

Last Thursday I attended a Speed Networking function put on by the local chamber of commerce.  I was told to come armed with a stash of cards and a well polished 60 second summary of my business.  They were not wrong on both counts.

After a nerve subduing glass of wine we were set up in two circles of fifty all facing each other.  So the outer circle faced in and the inner faced out.  Allowing for about  20 cms between our knees we sat face to face and waited for instructions.

The rules were quite simple.  Once a whistle blew we had 60 seconds to give our introduction before another whistle announced it was the other person’s turn.  Then two sharp blows and the outer circle had to get up, move one place to the left and start it all over again.  I was in the outer group facing in and after going through one complete revolution I had never met so many people in such a short space of time.

At the end I finished up with a handful of cards, none of my own and a very good idea of how to effectively introduce Permission to people for the first time.  Looking back on the experience there’s a number of close similarities between effective Speed Networking and effective Online Marketing.

Firstly in both you only have a few moments to capture your prospects attention.  We had 60 seconds but I could see in the faces of the first few I spoke with that those first few sessions of mine were way off the mark.  Web optimisation, search engine marketing blah, blah, blah it was all just babble speak that only we really knew what we meant.   So I switched out some words, changed my emphasis to focus on the benefits of working with us and by the end heads were nodding and cards were being offered.

Sixty seconds could well be the average amount of time people spend on your website’s home page.  You may be surprised how short the average is.   (In Google Analytics look for the “Time on Site” and “Time on page” statistic to see what your values are.)    Which all goes to show why your home page content needs to gets to the point quickly and outline exactly what makes your business so different from the rest and why you should consider buying from it.

Getting the exact make up of this message right the first time is never an easy task.  And as I mentioned before, while working from person to person things did improve as I changed what I said.  Thankfully online marketing allows you to achieve the same type of continuous  improvement with the use of some clever software that allows you to  split test multiple versions of your website’s copy until your reports show you which one is performing the best.

Once correctly set up you can let 50% of your website visitors see the original home page while the remaining 50% see the one you want to test.   Then, once an adequate amount of data has been collected on each version, you can pick the winner and write another version to test this against.

Something I also learnt was that a message that includes specifics has greater chance of cutting through.  Being introduced to 50 businesses in 50 minutes allows anyone interested in marketing pick up on what made the good ones good and the rest just blend into a mass of sameness.

And as luck would have it this experience was helped by sitting in the inner circle (thankfully a few chairs apart) were two people representing same the mortgage loan business.   Both were vying for the same type of customer.

Each made the best use of their 60 seconds but the first told me specifics like the amount of account holders they had (I was impressed how large it was) and then the average amount of time and money they could save off a mortgage (a chunky saving).  Agent #2 covered none of this specific detail  and as a result their message sounded just like every other mortgage loan discussion – boring, boring, boring.

Others had a message that had some punch through the specifics of exactly who they worked with.   For instance I came across a guy called Grant who just services home  BBQ’s – that’s it.  He works in the Auckland region and goes from house to house ensuring the BBQ is set up, safe and ready to use.  He’s a very busy man.  In comparison there were at least four website developers in the inner circle and I managed to talk to them all.  None stood out.  They all offered the same type of service to a similar range of customers.

So there you have it.  The human version of Speed Networking was well worth the effort and I recommend it for anyone wanting to grow their business and further hone their marketing message.  Contact us today if you would like your website to experience their own version of speed networking and by doing so work that little bit harder for you this week than they did last.

Each month we invite customers along to our conference call.  This month we talked about the use of Video in your Online Marketing.  At the start of the call we run through any “new stuff” that we think is worthy of attention.  Here’s a clip of the “new stuff” we covered in July.

Let’s say you’re a large multinational operation with branches spread all over New Zealand and each and every branch manager is keen to get started with their own Google AdWords advertising campaign – all sending traffic to their part of the one website.   In a number of ways this is all good news.  However in a similar volume of reasons this could be the start of a massive headache for all – unless it is managed properly.

So with the goal of wanting to remove any undue stress from a Branch Managers life –here’s my take on the good – and not so good – parts of the opportunities that lay ahead.

So let’s tackle the good stuff first.

OK by getting this far there’s obviously some widespread belief that online advertising could well do some good.   This in itself is a major achievement.  I have been involved in situations where half of a national group are keen – a third is not and the rest are have no opinion at all.  Unfortunately in most situations like these the default status of doing nothing tends to get the vote.   It can be a lot easier to say why something shouldn’t be done than why it should.  Fortunately that hurdle has been passed.

Which leaves the final test of actually putting some money behind the idea.   And like the saying goes – talk is cheap.  Nothing tends to clarify the mind as much as allocating some hard earned marketing budget into an “idea”.   Once a group has collectively reached this stage  – especially one that spans the country – then they are a few rungs ahead of the competition.

So this leaves what may been seen as the easiest part, getting the job done and buying some Google Advertising.   This is where it all could unravel into a complicated and expensive mess.

Some see the next obvious step being for each location to set up their own Google AdWords account and begin to manage their own budget and ads.   The Google advertising system would make this a breeze to do.  Non technical people will have an account, some keywords, a few ads displaying and a credit card sending money to Google in less than 15 minutes.

And all of it will be the WRONG choice for a situation like this. Here are four reasons why this is the case. 

Reason #1.  Broad match keywords = Bidding Confusion

Before I start let me tell you that this reason is probably the most complex of the four to get your head around.  But the effort is worthwhile.  Once you understand this one then you will see why a distributed AdWords Account solution is such a problem.

OK let’s start.  Google allows you five different ways to bid on the terms prospects use when using their search engine in.  For sake of simplicity I’m just going to cover two here – exact match and broad match.  So if you have the exact match keyword of “Auckland Flower Shop” and someone types the search term “Auckland Flower Shop” and then your ad would show. And conversely if you had an exact match keyword of  “Flower Shop” without the Auckland part then the ad would not show.

Follow so far?

OK now let’s deal with the second option – broad match.   This is the type that Google has you pick by default when setting up a new account.  Most newbie AdWords advertisers have accounts full of this match type of keyword.

A broad match keyword of “Flower Shop” will show your ad for these search terms “Flower Shop Auckland”, “Flower Store, “Flower Shop Wellington” and even “Flower and Vegetable Shop”.   Think of it as Google’s way of stretching the meaning of your broad keyword to ensure your ad is shown to as many people who are searching.

Now if you are an Auckland Flower store then using this match type in your advertising account then the first two search terms are worth their click cost.  The other two – “Flower Shop Wellington” and even “Flower and Vegetable Shop”- are a waste of your money.

Now if you have a dozen flower shops around the country all running their own Google advertising within their own accounts and all using the broad match term of “Flower Shop” then you can just imagine the confusion.    The Auckland shop could be displaying advertising for the search term “Wellington Flower Shop” and the Hamilton store could have their advertising showing for those typing in “Auckland Flower Shop”.  And every store could have their ads shown for “Flower and Vegetable Shop” when none of them sell vegetables.

Fixing all this mess is made a lot easier by gathering all the keywords together into the one Google advertising account and diligently using the correct keyword match type to ensure the most relevant store’s advertising  is shown for each searcher.

Reason #2  You are only allowed to advertise your domain once for each search result.

Google makes available about 10 places for paid advertising next to its search results.    The less scrupulous advertiser may think that by setting up 10 different advertising accounts they could place ads in each space and block out their competitors.  Not so fast.   Google only allows one advert to be shown for each website domain for any one keyword result.

And in situations like I mentioned before – where multiple accounts are trying to bid on the same keyword and sending clicks through to the same web domain – guess which ad Google decides is the best one to show?

 The one that makes Google the most money.

So by bidding as separate entities for the same keyword each advertiser from the same domain is effectively bidding against themselves and by doing so increasing their advertising costs.  Not so smart.

Reason #3 Negative keywords taking longer to surface

Earlier I told you about the different match types Google lets you use mentioning two of the five that are available.  This time I need to cover one of the three left – negative match.  This is a keyword that you want to ensure your ads don’t display for.

So using the last example of the flower shop the term “Flower and Vegetable Shop” fits into this category.   In this list could also be terms like –“setting up a flower shop”, “flower shop signs”, “flower shop jobs” – all relevant search terms but highly irrelevant to a normal flower shop wanting to sell flowers.

Most new Google AdWords advertising accounts don’t have any negative keywords in them.   People just don’t think of them when starting out.  Later on – if the advertiser actually takes the time to look into their account to – they are added as they come to surface in the actual click reports Google provides.  Which is the issue – they take time to surface.    The more clicks you are buying the faster these details come to hand and therefore the quicker the account becomes optimised for the right types of keywords.

Final Reason #4 – Spreading your Google Account Love too thinly

Providing relevant advertising to searchers is a key goal for Google.  The more relevant your advertising is in the eyes of Google the greater the benefits they will provide you.  (And for “benefits” think “cheaper bid prices”.)

 You can find out how “relevant” your advertising is in the eyes of Google by looking at the Quality Score they have allocated to each of your keywords.   This is a value between 0-10  that is based on the relevance to the searcher of your ads, keywords and landing page

From what we have been told and seen, Quality Score, is also attributed at a Google Account level too.    So if you own an account that delivers a steady stream of high quality (in Google’s eyes) advertising  then some Google love in the form of rising Quality Scores for your keywords will come your way.     And obviously the more advertising you buy and properly optimise, the greater your chances of building an account like this.

So there you have it.  Four reasons why setting up an AdWords account for each and every branch is not the best way ahead and how the one properly managed Google AdWords account by a central source, will do this job so much better for all.

Let’s imagine I had a coin-operated Gumball machine that delivered, in place of sugar-coated balls, a steady supply of OK-quality prospects. How much cash would you place in the machine to get each prospect?Now most would say “as little as possible”. This I understand; that’s normal human nature at work. But what if I told you that you are not the only person who was able to use the machine?

You see, behind you are your competitors eagerly waiting to use it once you are finished. Plus, the rules state that you pass to the person behind you when you choose not to enter any more money. So,knowing this, how much would you enter before you decided to pass it to the competitor behind you?

Got you thinking a bit more now?

Great, because the Google AdWords advertising system is very similar to that Gumball machine.And every time you launch your campaign you are figuratively lining up next to your competitors as you all try to attract the same profile of prospects.

Now,getting back to the Gumball experience, the smart person would have done their sums before their turn came up.And while the others may spend too little and miss their turn or spend too much and market themselves out of a business, the smart ones would know exactly how much to enter before they expected a prospect to arrive, and when to pass if it didn’t eventuate.

So let’s work through the steps they would have taken to make them so smart. Firstly, they would have calculated the likelihood of average quality prospects turning into clients.Then they would have a good indication of the average amount of profit (not margin) that each customer was worth.

Calculating customer worth becomes interesting when customers are retained for a long time. They can end up becoming very, very valuable.In these cases, worth can track profits for not only the first sale but right through to an expected multi-year life span.

In markets like these the Gumball machine is ravenously hungry for cash before it yields a prospect as competitors are willing to load up coin after coin to get that one prospect.The same applies when prospects have a high propensity to convert into a customer coupled with a high transaction value. In both of these cases you’d better get used to shoving in those coins to get the growth you need.

The Gumball machine concept is relatively straightforward but I would suggest that less than 10% of Google AdWords advertisers know the number at which they should buy prospects and, conversely, when they should pass to the person “behind” them. Based on my unscientific research over 10 years of online marketing experience I have only come across two clients of ours who, when asked for their “gumball number”,were able to provide it.

The first was a world leader in a very competitive health and fitness arena;the second was a highly successful one-person business in financial services. Both knew the marketing “numbers” of their business down pat. In each case it was – and still is – a pleasure to work with them. So long as we can provide them OK-quality prospect leads at a cost below their “Gumball” number then all remains well in the land of online marketing.

So why do so few advertisers know this number?

One reason could be that those selling traditional advertising never touted it as an effective way to measure performance. “Investing”$1500 on a newspaper advertisement and not being sure if the 10 leads captured that week were solely due to it makes it either a great purchase or a shocker. Whereas online there’s more measurement than you can shake a stick at and determining the exact cost for each prospect captured is possible with just a few clicks of your mouse.

Secondly,as business owners we may have found the whole financial side of measuring marketing performance a bit daunting. If you are in this camp, then this book may help̶Found Money: Simple Strategies for Uncovering the Hidden Profit and Cash Flow in Your Business by Steve Wilkinghoff. You can find it on Amazon here. As a non-financial person myself, I thought it did a great job of showing you the simple steps necessary to create some lasting financial insight with regards to your marketing spend.

Sorry, there really isn’t any good reason to not know your “Gumball number”.

The giant Gumball machine of online marketing is here to stay. And while I relate it directly to Google AdWords, in reality it signifies the complete online marketing space. Your option is to either stand in the queue armed with the right knowledge or take your chances like the rest of them. Personally I would prefer if it was the former. Why not give us a call today if you think this is a good idea too.

Checklists are powerful things. I’m reliably informed that pilots use them a fair bit – especially during that all-important phase when they are readying their plane for takeoff. Probably not a good time for human memory to be the only thing relied upon to ensure every step is taken correctly. Apparently,checklists began their life after a pilot forgot something critical. For those interested, you can find more about it here – tinyurl.com/checklist-win

Now, I know that practicing effective online marketing is nowhere near as complex as flying a plane. And likewise if you miss a step or two there’s no chance of anything fatal occurring. But nevertheless it’s a complex space to work within and there’s a lot to miss. So here’s my checklist on the basics of online marketing. Think of it as a companion document to the recent customer conference call on the same subject.

HTML Tables

Who thought you could sell water? Or charge more than $4 for a coffee? And how about offer an airline seat without any baggage allowance? For many years these products, price points and packages just didn’t exist. Everyone assumed they just would not work. That was until someone decided to test the assumption and found out that it wasn’t so – and markets were created and millions of revenue made.

Assumptions versus Facts. In what camp does your market knowledge reside? And within the assumption list, do any require the blow torch of fact-finding applied to them to discover some breakthrough outcomes for you this year?

Unfortunately, as marketers a lot of the space we deal with is cluttered with assumption after assumption. We live day-to-day, trying to understand and predict human behaviour – so there’s always a fair dollop of assumption to achieve in these spaces. Nevertheless, the good news is that the online space is littered with ways to challenge even the most hardened assumptions and turn them into facts. We just need to know how to go about it.

But before I delve into how, it’s worthwhile to spend a few moments on the reasons why only a few follow this path, because without knowing this you will fall into the common trap of dressing up a few assumptions as hardened facts.

So let’s start with a biggie – the truth could be just too hard to handle. We had an experience of this late last year. It all started with an overseas customer wanting to improve their lead conversion. We kicked off with a survey to learn more about the top problems their prospects wanted to solve when they started looking online for the product on offer. We collected over 500 responses, categorised them into sections and presented the client with the top five reasons.

They listened very politely to our presentation and then promptly went on to initially ignore the research, because it didn’t accurately reflect their thoughts on what prospects were thinking. They had operated within the market for many years and had a “feel” for what their prospects wanted. We had presented the “facts” but the “assumptions” were still living. Fortunately for both of us, we convinced them to run a split test of two versions of their landing page. The first included content that spoke to their “feel” of what prospects wanted to know about. The second used the factual research to determine which content should be presented in what order. The facts beat the assumptions by a sizable amount. This meant extra dollars in their pocket and it never ceases to amaze me how more money can change even a long-held assumption in record time!

Another reason why assumptions live on for years and years is because in some cases finding facts can take time. Something that people in a hurry don’t have much of. But then I suppose it’s not that easy to realise that you could be toiling away within a marketing strategy that is built on the shaky ground of incorrect assumptions.

Here’s an example of how the time and energy spent fact finding can bring with it many rewards. Over the recent holidays I read the story of James Dyson and his quest to build a better vacuum cleaner. He had an assumption that a cyclone design would do a much better job than the traditional option of a quick-clogging bag in front of a sucking motor. Now I forget the exact number of cyclone versions he went through to prove this assumption but it was over 2500, and took many years of pain-staking refinement to get it working. But he did and his machines now represent a multi-million dollar industry.

For my last example I head off into the land of financial services – particularly the darker side of the neighbourhood. This is where assumptions are supported by the actions of such a large proportion of the market that they make you believe they are facts. Prior to reading about James and his amazing cyclone, I had just finished a book on a certain Mr Bernie Madoff. Some of you may remember him. He was the New York financier who ran the world’s biggest Ponzi investment scheme. (That’s when you think you are investing with him but in reality he takes your money to pay the interest he owes to others and dips into what’s left of your money for himself.) He was quite a successful chap. All up they estimate he was responsible for misappropriating around USD 20 billion of actual hard cash and around 64 billion of fake profits. Just to help you put that into perspective, the last figure is roughly half of New Zealand’s total GDP for 2005. He was quite a busy boy.

Anyway, everyone “assumed” their money was being invested into legitimate stocks and bonds. And by everyone I mean huge international banks, large fund managers and even those in industry review organisations whose job it was to police the industry for such fraud. The assumption ran very deep. But because he was a man of considerable wealth and standing in the financial community no one bothered to look further for any facts to prove the investments had actually been made.

Now I hope that there is no Mr Madoff in your life but sit back and take a look at your market. Are there any assumptions that are rife that you haven’t yourself seen the facts to prove yet?

How about social media? The assumption here is that Facebook is a “must do” for nearly all marketers, and that any time spent here will be richly rewarded. Well, will it? Do the facts tell you this? If they do, then all well and good. And look – before I receive any hate email from the social media ravers – yes, there are some instances where it works. But from what I see this is not true in every case so don’t assume it will be for you. Challenge the assumption.

So by now you should be ready and willing to slay any assumptions that cross your desk. Next, let’s dig into the ways in which online marketers can make some progress in 2012. Here’s three to get your teeth into:

1) Look for facts that prove both the positive and opposite states occur.
Realise that data can be used and manipulated to support even the most wonky of assumptions. So to really challenge them look for hard data that reveals both the assumption is working and that the counter assumption is not. If you assume that the best way to deliver AdWords traffic is to a landing page rather than your home page (and let’s face it, 8/10 times it is), then do this BUT also spend some dollars sending traffic to your home page just to prove for yourself that this market assumption is a fact for you.

2) When it comes to humans, ask, watch, but still test.
Earlier I mentioned that as marketers each day we deal with human behaviour, which comes filled to the brim with assumptions that need testing. Remembering my earlier example, somehow you need to put aside your own personal opinion and dig into some fact-finding work. Research is a good way to start. It doesn’t have to be of the same ilk as the airlines that ask you for a novella of information after you have flown – just answers to a couple of well worded questions can be enough. And why not look as well as listen? I’ve covered before the tools we use each day to help our customers look over the shoulder of their website visitors to see the paths they follow as they walk through their website. Whatever tactic you follow you are looking for hard facts about what people have done or said. Collect enough of this to make it statistically significant and you are ready for my final strategy.

3) Testing.
Yep, even though you have 500 survey responses and have looked at hundreds of recordings you are still going to test what all this tells you against what is there now. Once this reveals some good news, e.g. an improved conversion rate or reduced bounce count, you factually know that what you thought would work actually did.

And that’s what it’s all about – striking off one assumption and replacing it with a fact. Think of it as laying one more brick in the solid foundation of fact that supports your business. The more you lay, the stronger your business will be.

The New Year is usually the ideal time to stop and plan the next 12 months and list any changes we want to make. Change can be a difficult “thing” to deliver. We start with the enthusiasm of a recharged soul in early January and by March the business is back doing exactly what it did 12 months ago.

Earlier in 2011, I wrote about how to improve your chances of success when I took a very generic model I had stumbled upon and applied it to online marketing. You can read more about it here.

http://www.websitemarketing.co.nz/blog/simple-way-create-powerful-website-marketing-plan-2012

While writing this I had an epiphany moment. When I looked deeper I could see one part of the model that, when followed, would act as a reliable predictor of whether a particular change was going to be relatively easy or difficult to deliver. Recent events have underscored this point even more.

And the piece of the model? What’s at stake.

Yep, after you have spent all the time describing what the current situation is and followed this with the nice blue sky of what the future should look like, then you should sit down and write down what’s at stake if nothing changes. What you write here will be a very strong predictor of whether anything changes at all.

Here are a few examples of this in action.

I start with one from my own history. I can’t remember for how many years I told others I wanted to run my own business. It must have been at least 10. But still I did nothing about it. Then in mid November 2002 I was called into a meeting room and told my position was being made redundant and I was expected to leave the office in a week. Young family, young mortgage and a recruitment market that was winding down for Christmas. There was a lot at stake so I purchased some business cards from a local quick printer, borrowed a laptop from a friend and within two days the name Permission was born and I was calling on prospective customers.

Now something closer to home. There was a lot of discussion prior to the election on the suitability of Phil Goff as the Labour Party leader. Personally, I thought he did an OK job but the knives were apparently out looking for a replacement before the election campaign began. As we know nothing changed until after the result was in. I seriously doubt that the person who got the job after the election would have achieved it before.

Now something too close for comfort. I ride with a friend who has recently gone through prostate cancer and survived. He’s had one hell of a year. He rides with a bunch of us that bash our way around Woodhill Forest on our mountain bikes most Sunday mornings. Our ages range from late thirties to mid sixties. Prior to finding out about Nick, how many of us do you think had been to the doctor and inquired about checking on the health of our prostate? None. And now – all of us.

If there’s nothing or very little “at stake” then there’s very little chance the change you want will take place. So thinking back to your possible list of New Year’s resolutions – how about becoming fitter, losing weight or owning a new Ferrari. What really happens if none of these are achieved? Best way to get fit? Register yourself and your friends for an event – be it cycling or running – 6 months out and start training. Now there’s something at stake.

This is a great example of you having to actively create the “at stake” part to ensure the change occurs. Goal setting is another way to do this. Publicly stating your goals takes this one step further and is proven to increase your chances of success. All you have done is raised the “stake” one level higher.

The unfortunate thing is that sometimes life can create the “at stake” part for you if you don’t. For instance, a competitor opens up nearby and starts to entice your customers their way. A health scare makes you realise that exercise is really important or the act of having a doctor’s check-up is worthwhile.

So this January please take the time to plan where you are and where you want to go but also think through what really happens if nothing changes. Really? If there’s not a lot AND you really want the change to occur then start creating some serious down and gritty “at stake” issues.

Have fun.

The impending end of 2011 brings with it the opportunity to plan your website marketing for 2012. So how do you create a plan for something that works in an environment that seems to change on a weekly basis? Yes, it’s a challenge but not an insurmountable one. This month I offer a dead simple framework to guide you through the steps necessary to create a plan that has a strong chance of being implemented.

My suggested format is straight out of a recent read I finished last month – “The Primes” – written by Chris McGoff, founder of The Clearing Inc, a Washington DC-based strategic management consulting firm. It’s a book that, on first glance, looks rather light on content but delivers some solid practical punch with the concepts it covers. I’m going to borrow one of these for the task of website planning.

But first, a few words on the concepts themselves and the reason why they ended up in the book. Chris describes them all as “Primes”. These are proven consulting theories that need to be followed exactly as described to deliver the required outcome they promise. Personally, I really love things that do this. Here at Permission we have a number of processes we follow to help deliver email campaigns, improve search rankings and optimise websites. Each of them relies on a standard approach that, when followed, does exactly like Chris’s Primes do – produce reliable results.

The “Prime” we are going to use today covers the required process to effect change through effective strategic planning. Here’s a picture of it.

I’m going to summarise the key points of this graphic and then apply it to your website planning process for 2012. There’s much more detail in the book, so best you either get along to your local library and grab one or here’s the non-affiliate link to find it on Amazon.

Here’s how the graphic reads.

As Is

This is the state your website is in now. So, for a web plan that would be the number of visitors your website receives, its existing conversion rate, bounce rate and, say, the % of traffic from organic and paid searches. All the key stats that reflect how well or poorly you currently market your website. Then include some bits on how easy/hard it is to add new content, and the frequency new content is added. Add how testing is run across the key web pages, the suitability of the technology you use, and even how the site compares with your competitors, etc. Everything that matters about your current situation that you and your team can agree on.

Environment

These are the things that you have no control over but that can affect your plans. The economy for instance, or your competitors’ activities. Maybe how social media may grow or wane. Or even the speed at which the roll out of super-fast broadband occurs. Or perhaps closer to home – how much budget a parent company may make available to subsidiaries for marketing. All are out of your control but in their own way affect what you do to creatively capitalize on them.

To Be

This is the vision thing. The good part where most love to sit back and dream away about what could happen in 2012 if everything fell into place. Compared with the ugly reality of the “As Is” stage this is nice, comforting and comes with a paucity of facts to challenge your ideas. It’s exciting, safe and therefore where the majority of time is spent when the task of “planning” raises its head.

Now a website “To Be” plan could well do with some stats to hang our vision on. So, your future numbers could include the % change in conversion rate your site will achieve or the rise in visitor numbers or page views due to your search rankings improving. A simple spreadsheet could be produced that showed by tweaking just a few variables – such as visitor count and conversion rate – how many more leads the business could bring in. Oh, it’s a great space to be in.

Strategy

This links the harsh reality of “As Is” to the glowing blue sky visions of the “To Be”. Some may write in here one line that says something like “engage a proficient business to help us” :). But while it’s an opportunity for us it’s not the full story of what really needs to be done.

Just refer to the “Simple Conversion Principles” article mentioned earlier in this newsletter. It would be no surprise to learn that nearly all great conversion rate changes occur once web managers know more about their web visitors’ desires and their methods of traversing their website. So a strategy of research and website tracking should be somewhere in your plan. Likewise, growing traffic is all about giving Google what it wants so it can’t help but improve the website’s ranking. Creating this “stuff” takes time but it’s just work not super-technical uber-geek stuff. So, an ongoing content creation strategy should be in the plan somewhere.

Stake

This is the last and probably most important piece of the whole process. It’s the part that many miss out from their plans – me included – but contains the core driving force that decides if all your work remains stuck in a folder gathering e-dust or if it gets reviewed and applied on a regular basis.

Stake = what happens if none of this is completed?

Never underestimate the pull of remaining in the “As Is” environment – it’s very strong. To break these bonds the Stake needs to be clearly articulated and agreed on by those involved in the plan. Writing this point reminds me of a stage in our initial customer review process that we take people new to Permission through.

When I look at it, this review is really a very detailed “As Is” discovery process. We detail a ton of facts – the website’s current conversion rate, how well it performs in Google and if any advertising channels are optimised properly. After this process, I get to a stage where I’m supposed to ask the question “So what does it all mean if none of this changes?”

To be honest I’ve always felt it was a bit too slick and “salesperson-like” to ask this question every time so it hasn’t seen the light of day in every session. (Based on reading this book I can assure you this will now change.) Anyway I’ve had a mixed bag of responses. But in every case, those who have a real problem they need to solve are the ones that get stuck into their site changes with gusto and work quickly with us to achieve some fast and dramatic change. The ones who face a slight annoyance if nothing alters, well, we can spend more time motivating for change to occur than actually delivering it.

So if the stake is weak – then so is the chance that the strategy will be applied.

Now I don’t want to scare people but here are just a few items at stake in most markets advertising online. These may help start you thinking about what’s really at stake if your plan doesn’t get implemented.

Your competitors improve their search engine optimisation faster than you do so your search rankings slide downwards at a rapid pace, which in turn dramatically shrinks your visitor counts.

The cost of offline media that drives your website volume increases and with it the resulting cost per lead, so much so that the economics of your business just don’t work anymore. Meanwhile, your competitors are fine as they own websites that convert at a greater percentage than yours.

And likewise, smarter competitors drive up the cost of Google AdWords bids to a level that’s sustainable for them – as their website converts so well – whilst in the process forcing you out of the online marketing market.

Through the lack of advertiser support the local newspaper market dies a gradual death, leaving you only the online space to advertise in but, due to the previous point, you can’t afford to enter the market.

Now we see some of these changes occurring at different levels across all of the industries we work in. You will probably have more you can add to your “Stake” part of your plan. My recommendation is to get stuck in and spend as much time here as you did with your “As Is” and “To Be” stages – they all deserve the same amount of attention.

When I look back at my own experience with business planning – both on the creating and implementing side – a lot of what Chris’s diagram and his additional commentary covers seems to ring true.

For instance, I once worked for a firm that had as its goal to achieve a specific turnover value – I forget the exact amount they were shooting for but say it was $200 million, up from the $50 million in revenue they were already at. It was a sizable step upwards. We were all told that for some reason $200 million was the magic number and we all had to work hard to aspire to reach it.

Now, producing a four-fold improvement in top line revenue is never going to be easy. And while they purchased some companies along the way to get closer to the goal, there were never any transformational changes made in their product selection and sales approach. The pull of doing what had always been done was just too inviting not to keep doing it.

So what was really at stake here? Now when I look back I can never remember the discussion of what would happen if we missed this number. And likewise, there wasn’t much comment on how things worked currently – the good and the bad (As Is) and what it would look like when we got to where we needed to get to (To Be), other than a line item on a set of financial accounts. Needless to say, the strategy failed to shift peoples’ behaviour and, other than a few blips of revenue through the consolidation of purchased businesses, the company stalled and ended up going backwards.

Then there was the opposite situation I was involved in when things really fired. This goes back to my experience selling business forms printing for a company that had just purchased a bright, shiny Japanese printing press that sat idle waiting for work. Our sales office was on the second floor, looking down at the very quiet machine.

The owners of the business sat down and spelled out the Stake part of the strategy while we all sat looking down through a window at a very quiet, very inactive and very expensive printing press. They told the whole company that if the press wasn’t kept busy through both the day and most of the night then this business would fail and with it so would our jobs. You couldn’t get much clearer than that.

With that simple but powerful statement we had the “As Is”, “To Be” and “Stake” parts our process nailed – all we needed was the strategy. We bumped away refining this part over the next 3-4 months but always motivated by the view of the rather sedentary machine below. Well it worked. The sales began to take shape and the revenue started rolling, as did that Japanese machine.

Funnily enough once the stake is clear, motivating and agreed by everyone then the rest just starts to follow. Perhaps that’s the secret right there for you on how to end 2012 so much further ahead than 2011?

Google AdWords – Speed isn’t always your Friend

Google makes starting a new AdWords campaign a very easy task indeed. Within minutes you can gather together a selection of keywords, write an small text ad, load up your credit card details, and “baboom” – start sending them money and your website traffic. Most should achieve this in 30 minutes or less. At first this seems like good news for the time-starved executive. You are now advertising online on the country’s most visited search engine. Time to sit back, relax and just wait for the phone to ring or the email inbox to fill up with contact requests. Ideally both.

 This must happen for a few. Otherwise, those happy images of satisfied customers Google portrays on its AdWords home page would be false. Nevertheless, the Google advertisers who walk through our doors for the first time rarely share stories of drowning under a torrent of leads as a result of their 20 minutes of campaign set-up.

A few turned up at Permission with different stories last month. Well established and successful business people who were spending hundreds of dollars a day with Google and were a) not seeing much benefit from it, and b) not sure if this was typical of the experience of others.

Fortunately, each of them had agreed to complete our initial online marketing review process and because of this we had the necessary time to take them through their AdWords account, pointing out the good and not so good parts. The bits that were great for them and Google and likewise the bits that were not so friendly to their wallet.

Now, I firmly believe that Google has the interests of the advertiser at heart when they designed their account set-up process. They had to allow for a time-starved user with limited attention and, based on the complexity involved, the process does a great job. So all the big things – like keywords, budgets and ads – decisions the advertiser HAS TO IN­CLUDE to get going are covered in an easy to understand way. Meanwhile, what seem to be relatively small things – like keyword match types, choice of advertising networks and optimal account structure – well, Gooogle decided that these are best done AFTER the account was live.

Unfortunately, it’s these AFTER bits that can make all the difference. Which was why I found myself and my client peer­ing into a web browser at an AdWords campaign, picking over a campaign that had been removing thousands of dollars from his bank account each week and providing very, very little in return. Fortunately, we had this under control after a days work, but still, the money that was already spent was wasted.

So, in the interests of ensuring readers of this newsletter avoid such a situation, here are some of the fundamental AdWords Campaign Set-Up basics that apply to any campaign that is successful (for both Google and the advertiser).

Fundamental basic #1: Take control of your keywords

The underlying resource of any AdWords campaign is the keywords you chose to bid on. The Google Keyword tool is a free resource (just Google it) that will help you see which keywords attract the highest search volume for the regions you want to advertise within. So if you are an Auckland-based mortgage broker, after you have used this tool you may find that “Mortgage Brokers Auckland” is a keyword worth bidding on.

Google enables you to bid on this keyword in four different ways. These are called match types. There is broad match, modified broad match, phrase match and exact match. (For the sake of accuracy there’s a fifth type called negative match that I’ll cover later on.)

When you set up your account for the first time, broad match is the default option. Remember the set-up process is all about speed. So the time taken to educate you on the other match options and then let you pick which suits is put in the AFTER bucket. This is a shame because the default option can cause a lot of problems.

You see, broad match allows Google to present your ad for terms like these:

Mortgage Brokers Auckland
Home Mortgage Brokers Auckland
Mortgage Refinance Brokers
Finance Brokers
Reviews Mortgage Brokers Auckland
Mortgage Brokers Auckland Business Set Up

Some of these are good, a few not so. The other three match types help you refine the way in which your keywords match against what the searcher types in. It starts with the highly refined exact match. Then it gradually becomes more flexible – as each match type is used – until you arrive at the last option, the broad match choice, which opens your keyword up to a mass of terms that may or may not suit your business.

To follow is an image from Google that helps to show you all this in a friendly graphic for the search term formal shoes.

Fundamental basic #2: Know your negatives

The fifth keyword match type is a negative match. This is for keywords that people may use within the phrases you want to bid on but by doing so automatically discount them from being valid search terms. So in the previous graphic from Google, perhaps you didn’t sell any black shoes, or your shoes were just for men. In these cases, the terms “black” and “women” would be in your list of negative keywords.

These types of keywords can be applied to your whole campaign or to just one Ad Group. So when we see a campaign that only uses broad match terms and has no negative keywords then there are problems ahead.

Fundamental basic #3: Don’t mix networks or regions

Google can place your advertising next to their search results and also on websites that host their advertising. One key difference between the two is that one audience is actively searching for what you offer, while the other is passively reading about it. These are two very different environments to advertise within.

Nevertheless, when setting up your account (again, in the interests of time) your Google AdWords campaign is set up to run in both. This is usually not the best option for those starting. Our recommendation is to always focus on search­ers first and then, once you have figured out how to make this traffic stream work, begin work on convincing passive readers to click your ads. Trying to do both will muddy your results and make what is already a hard task even harder.

Fundamental basic #4: Carry on the conversation, deliver people to the optimal page

This brings me nicely into how the underlying structure of your account can either work for or against you. Think of it like the commonly used “house foundation” analogy – build on solid foundations and you improve your chances of future success. The foundation for an AdWords campaign is the ease with which it allows you to carry on the question raised by the searcher.

For instance, say they type in the keyword “black formal shoes male”. Just by chance they see your text ad that includes text like their keyword term. And, when they click on it, they are taken to the page on your website that presents them with your full range of black formal shoes for guys. So easy for them – a bit of work for you.

To achieve this experience your campaign needs to contain a lot of Ad Groups. An Ad Group is a Google term for a distinct collection of keywords and the text ads that work for them. Most new campaigns set up at speed have just the one. This will be filled with lots of keywords and perhaps only one or, if we are lucky, maybe two ads. When clicked, these will most likely take you to the home page.

If you run this type of campaign and the searcher types in “black formal shoes male” or even “brown formal shoes female” or possibly “white formal dance shoes male”, they are shown the one ad that talks generically about formal shoes. If they click this ad they will arrive on the home page of the website and have to find the right shoes for them­selves. People rarely do.

Fundamental basic #5: Track how well your money is being spent

My final fundamental basic. The online marketing space is littered with opportunities to track and measure. The prob­lem is usually the vast amount of data available, not the lack of it. The Google AdWords system is no different. And while, once again, setting up “conversion tracking” is something missing during the speedy sign-up process, it’s in your account waiting to be turned on.

Once engaged you will be able to see how much money you spent to achieve whatever conversion you want to mea­sure. This could be newsletter sign-ups, e-commerce sales or contact requests – they can all be counted. Some of the data may make you smile, others may not – but at least you will know what does and doesn’t work.

So there you have it. Five fundamentals that are missed during any super speedy new account set-up. Yes, it will take you time to do all five BUT, once done, your account will work so much harder for you.  Speed isn’t always your friend. Look here for more on our Google AdWords Campaign Management  Services.

“So Chris, any ideas on how important video is going to be for online marketing?”

This question was raised during the Practical Email Marketing course last month. It had me scurrying for a quick response. From memory I came back with a comment that I think was valuable but afterwards it got me thinking. So, how have our expectations changed regarding when video should be used? And where are the hot spot places for it to to be used to help you achieve more online? These are two reasonably chunky questions that I’ll try to begin to answer with these four points.

Point 1 – Video doesn’t have to be a “talking head” to work well.

It can sometimes be a struggle to explain complex products or services by words alone. Adding some pictures can help but still it could take way more time to consume this content than the average “time-starved” prospect is willing to offer.

You could replace all this with a person speaking to the camera – but still that will take too long. All they are doing is reading the mass of words you wrote previously. That’s where some cool animation can work wonders.

Here are some examples. First, look at the way Dropbox explain the features and benefits of their cloud-based storage solution. Visit them here: www.dropbox.com. The picture below of their home page shows their reliance on the animation.

It’s the only way they choose to get their message across. It must work – tens of millions of customers use Dropbox. Google is a great fan of this method of communication, too. Look how they decided to introduce a recent addition to Google Analytics – Advanced Funnel Tracking – see here for this animation clip: http://www.google.com/analytics/analytics-funnels.html

Both examples use animation in a way that is smart, fast flowing and packed with information that quickly imparts the message they need delivered. We have developed similar solutions for a few clients in some of the Adobe Flash game work we have created. Let me know if you would like to see some examples.

Point 2 – If a talking face is required you don’t need CNN production values to make it work.

Zappos is a reasonably sizable North American e-commerce store owned by Amazon that sells clothes, bags, beauty products, in fact a whole lot of stuff catering to the shopping desires of men, women and even those buying for their children.

Browse through their products and you start to see that most now include a short video description. This is hosted by a Zappos staff member, takes just a few minutes and comes across as the ideal conversation you would get from a super-knowledgable staff member in any competing “bricks and mortar” store. Which is quite a challenge to find. Not the competing bit – the knowledgeable staff part!

As an example, here’s a link to some “Ocean Minded Dune Rider Shoes”: http://tinyurl.com/dune-raider. Look just down the screen and there’s the link to the video Zappos have done on them. It’s just 51 seconds long but boy does this guy get through the content in a professional way: http://tinyurl.com/dune-raider-preview.

I read recently that each year Zappos are loading up tens of thousands of videos just like this one onto their e-commerce website. There’s only one reason why they would go to all the hassle of producing, editing and then loading them onto the site – they must improve conversion rates.

Point 3 – Don’t forget your mobile audience – video works well there.

Recently, I co-presented a 50-minute workshop at a customer’s two-day conference on the subject of the growing smart phone market in New Zealand and its relevance for email marketers. We kicked off the talk with an open admission that neither of us had all the answers. But one thing we did know was that times were a-changing – faster for some in the room than for others – and with it their email formats will need to change as well.

This brings me back to smart phones and their ease of consuming video. Just by the nature of full-screen playback on a screen that fits into your palm, video content is a great fit for this market. So, while text and image content struggles with the restrictions of a single-column width format, full-screen video could be a winner.

Whether the mobile space is an urgent or a long-term decision is something your Google Analytics account can help you determine. Just peek into the special “Mobile” section of Version 5 (we covered it during our conference call this month) and there you will see the percentage of visitors that use mobiles and the top-line stats – bounce rate, time on site – on how your existing site serves them.

Point 4 – If you go long with your content, go long with your tracking too.

While on the subject of Google Analytics, why not call on its event-tracking abilities in Version 5 to see if people are really watching the full 40 minutes of the video you may put up? One of our clients uses video really well in their selling process. Nevertheless, a 45-minute video for an area of their website that targets prospects – well, I thought that could be a bit long. So we set up some tracking to let Google Analytics tell us a) if the video was being played and b) if so, how long people were looking at it.

The results were interesting. Yes, there were some people who did look at the whole video, and they did go on to convert quite well for the next steps of the sales process. Nevertheless, there was a larger group that quit after just 10 minutes of video and never went back to see more. So the video’s content was re-sorted to make it more engaging and to do a better job of “selling” them on the next stage.

There you go – four points that I hope make you want to reconsider how video content can be used in your online marketing.

Have fun.

Attracting a thousand visitors during a month is a reasonable target for most company websites. This allows for a fair dollop of traffic from Google’s search engine, perhaps a smattering from paid advertising and the rest made up from those who know the businesses’ url and arrive as direct traffic. A thousand visits breaks down to approximately 50 each working day – or an even more approximately one every 10 minutes.

Just imagine that amount of real person traffic walking around your offices. Six every hour moving around you and your team, wandering from room to room. It would be quite a fast “wander“ though. Expect some speed in their steps as they take less than a few minutes for their visit, before leaving through the nearest window. Then there will be those who just “bounce” into the first room they find and then leave – never to be seen again.

Very occasionally you may have one who will raise his/her hand and ask for some help. Perhaps they might complete a form or even use their mobile phone to ring your office. Nevertheless, the vast majority will just hang around, look, read and then move on. A silent ongoing procession of reasonably inactive people.

Just image if you owned a retail store and your actual shop visitors acted in this way. Lines of them entering your store, looking around, picking up product – not asking any questions – and then promptly leaving without saying a word. Now there would be some who would purchase and, if we use some standard credible online e-commerce conversion rates, they should represent between 3 and 4% of the total crowd.

Online these percentages work but offline – in the world of real leases and staffing costs – these figures are a fast track to financial ruin. Here, a retail operator needs to hit conversion rates of 5 to 6 times these figures to make things pay.

Anyway, back to the hoards of people walking around and doing very little. So what would the smart retailers do in a situation like this? Well, the last thing I would expect is for them to sit back and do nothing and let all their hard work just fail in front of them. Nope, they would go through a long list of things to try and entice these visitors to release the grip on their wallets. Ideas like a) laying out the store differently to make some stock easier to get to, or b) reworking their range to better appeal to their visitors, and perhaps even c) improving the lighting so the darker areas at the back of the store are now a breeze to fossick around in.

I’ll give you an example of the smarts that can be applied in the retail space to extract as much money as possible from your wallet. A friend of mine owns the local pharmacy. He is a very smart operator and recently decided to grow his business by taking over the shop next door. This meant he had the opportunity to completely re-design the shelving and stock layout for the whole store. So because he knows what he doesn’t know, instead of sitting down with a piece of A4 paper and a cup of coffee and figuring it all out over a lunch break he spent the money and brought in a retail expert.

This person analysed the floor area and the types of products shown and then drew up a complete map of where to place what product – even down to the height they were to be placed on the shelving. For instance, the more profitable lines were placed at eye level in easy-to-spot locations. The spacing between the shelves was fixed too – just so two people could bend over and look at each shelf and not touch bums. Yep, making people go bum to bum is a definite no no. Anyway, the upshot of all this work was that his business grew in floor area by say 20% but his sales grew by an even larger amount.

Here’s another example – this one is from my history of selling business form printing way back in time. I joined the company the same week they had taken delivery of a new fandangled printing press from Japan. This was able to produce very specialised business forms – think invoices and packing slips – that combined a piece of paper on one side and an adhesive label on the other. Now it was possible to print both a packing slip and the delivery label all in the one place.

My job was to visit businesses in Auckland promoting this solution. It was a job that the directors of the company told me in the interview was the easiest in the whole company. Such was the obvious and immediate value this solution offered.

The only problem was that no one wanted to hear my story. They all thought it was too hard to alter what they were doing and, what’s more, nobody wanted to be the first to tackle this new technology. I probably presented my story to over 50 companies and they all said NO. Some quite forcibly.

I was a reasonably thick-skinned sales person but still, once I reached a month with no sales after 50 presentations under my belt, things were looking grim. Even the directors were starting to question the merits of the expensive piece of Japanese Iron they had sitting idle in their warehouse. So we all sat down and, in a caffeine-induced haze, decided that the sales message needed some serious changes and with it the inclusion of just one happy customer to give it some credibility.

So my job changed to finding not a list of customers but just one who would take this product on for FREE for two months and only continue to use it if it cost them less than their existing product. Fortunately for me, Kodak Auckland were keen to take the “no risk” option and within two months they were happily churning through their own forms with no desire to let them go. Once we had one well known customer, then doors started to open and the product started to take off.

Both of these examples support the case that when problems or opportunities are right in front of our faces we generally do the right thing and a) call on help to fix it, or b) get together as a group and find a way to wade through the mess to find a solution.

However, when it comes to matters online the story is very, very different. Here, where the action is hidden, any such failings in the vast majority of cases are left to fester away, causing a steady stream of harm.

So how do you avoid this occurring for your website?

Well, first you need to correctly configure your website tracking to make what lays hidden more obvious, so that you too can “see web people” and the problems they are having. One of our customer coaching calls a few months ago discussed the selection of tools you can pick from. Google’s Analytics product is a good one to start with. Once set up, this will allow you to see the web pages (think aisles of your shop or parts of your sales message) that either assist or inhibit your sales process. For instance, problems may occur when visitors are unable to find the product they want or perhaps locate the answer to a question they may have. Or your website navigation could be so poor that visitors arrive and leave after just seeing a very small number of the pages you would like them to.

Some smart tools even allow you to virtually follow your visitors as they click through your pages and skip from page to page. I talked about this in last month’s newsletter. By using these tools you really do feel like you are wandering the halls of your website with your prospects.

Secondly, once you have all the recordings you want and more Google Analytics data than you know what to do with, then you will need to call on some independent advice to tell you what is and isn’t working. This requires some specialised skills and there are a few companies that offer this service. You should be able to find a business that can sell you a small “tasting plate” of consultancy to point out a few good and not so good parts of your online presence.

For instance, here at Permission we offer an Online Marketing Business Opportunity Review. This costs less than $500 and includes some service guarantees that should make even the most tentative of buyers feel comfortable to proceed.

After this short engagement you should have a better feel for the size of the challenge ahead. For instance, do 100% of your visitors fail to engage with your online sales presentation – as was the case with my printing story? Or are your e-commerce sales so bad because visitors are struggling to navigate through your virtual aisles – as could have been the case with my retail friend if he didn’t call in the experts when setting out his new space.

Fortunately, every website will have its own collection of problems to work on. Its just that some are more severe than others. Knowing which ones you have to battle with all depends on your desire and willingness to “see your web people”.

Before I started Permission I was the general manager of a smallsoft ware company whose website was in desperate need of some search engine optimization. We were nowhere to be seen in any of the results we should have been.

This was in late 1999, a time when there were only a few companies that provided search engine optimization services but somehow I managed to locate a company keen to help us out. I told them what I wanted to achieve and enquired how all this SEO ‘stuff ’ worked. Just the normal nosey Chris Price way of doing business as well as me being interested in knowing exactly what work was going to occur in exchange for my money.

Well, the salesperson then decided to throw every piece of technical web-like jargon they could muster at me, achieving their desired goal of making me feel totally confused. They then went on to tell me it was indeed a very complex area of specialization and way beyond the scope of being explained within this meeting and, anyway, I shouldn’t worry about the detail – they would manage this for me – and all for a very ‘reasonable’ fee of $2500 – per quarter over two years.

Back then I had no idea what was what, so I signed on and for two years we were ranked reasonably well for our brand name. Yep that’s all – no ranking for the generic term for the service we provided – just the brand name (which, I might add, was in the URL of our domain name). Now I know that this was something that should have taken someone about 5-10 hours to achieve. And for this I paid about $20,000 all up. Not good, and something that to this day still makes me angry.

Personally, I find the business ethics behind ensuring the prospect remains in the dark so as to ruthlessly maximize your gain to be abhorrent but, unfortunately, it is still quite apparent in the online optimization marketplace. It’s one of the reasons why we have a strategy of educating all those customers (who want to learn) on what will be done and why to achieve their goals online. And so I personally spend over 15 hours each month producing both this newsletter and the content for our monthly customer conference call.

To push this education theme even more for search optimization, I thought this month I would slay some of the many myths from this area of online marketing. I have settled on the top five I come across most often.

Myth No 1 – Search engine optimization is a mish mash of ‘black box’ techniques that only a highly skilled and technical
person can understand.

Rubbish. While Google must be one of the world’s most complex software applications to do what it does, the theory behind helping it index and rank your site for the keywords you want it to are relatively straightforward and what’s more can be explained in a few pages. Google does a good job itself on this page here:

Search Engine Optimisation by Google

There are no complex formulas or new pieces of jargon to learn. Just follow the steps and you will see results. And, as I have mentioned before, as a business owner if you can understand how New Zealand’s provisional and terminal tax works then I’m sure you can master all of the complexity that online marketing has to offer – including search engine work. But, that said, it still requires work. (Now that part you may not want to do yourself.) And the amount of work required will depend on the competitive nature of your market and style and size of your website.

Myth No 2 – Your rank is determined by the volume of traffic your website receives.

Nope – not true either. There is no correlation between your visitor count going up and your rankings moving in the same direction. It would be nice but if this was the case then all the top rankings would be filled with high-traffic brand name sites – which is definitely not the case and therein lays the opportunity for the small business wanting to level the marketing playing field online.

I see Google’s goal being to deliver highly relevant results to its searchers. And relevance is all about content and its apparent reputation online – definitely not visitor volume.

Myth No 3 – If you advertise with Google your search rankings will rise.

Sorry, a ‘no’ again. And I’m thankful this is the case, too. Now, I admit that your site may get indexed quite soon after your ads start appearing but unless something has changed since the last indexing run then this shouldn’t alter your ranking. The separation between paid and organic advertising is similar to that you experience between the editorial and advertising content in a hard copy magazine.

Myth No 4 – Every place in the search rankings has the ability to attract a similar volume of traffic.

So, if you rank No 3, then the clicks your ranking could achieve are close (but perhaps a smidgen down) on those that would come if you achieved a ranking of No 1. While this sounds like a highly logical supposition, it’s not true. That first ranking can collect an obscenely unfair amount of traffic. See the graphic to follow from Seobook.com. Notice the super slice of traffic a top No 1 ranking achieves and how it quickly drops down for ranking 2 and again for 3 as the law of diminishing returns carries on as the rankings drop down the page.

Now knowing this you can see that optimization eff orts need to be focused on achieving No 1 rankings for as many keywords as you can sustain. Like most areas of online marketing there are limited resources to apply so trade-offs have to happen. Therefore, it may be better to apply your efforts to achieve a No 1 ranking on a lesser searched term for which you are currently recording a No 3 rank than to move your ranking up from No 11 (top of page 2) to the bottom of page one for a higher volume and more competitive term.

Likewise, if you are already No 1 for a keyword it would make sense to see if you can get another page ranked below it by moving it into the first page results, which can let Google automatically bring it up below your No 1 rank – so now you have both a No 1 and No 2 presence. See the pic to follow that shows this in action for one of our clients, Boston Wardrobes.

Myth No 5 – The content in the Keyword META tag on your web pages positively affects how they are ranked.

I once had a client call me up in a very annoyed state because he had been told (apparently by a friend of his brother) that this was the case. He promptly demanded to know why we hadn’t entered much detail in this field on his site. This told me two things. First, I hadn’t done a good enough job of telling him what did and didn’t work – so my education was off the mark. Second, that I was charging him too little as he thought his friend (who was not in the industry, I might add) knew more than me. I provided a fix for both problems and everyone was happy – eventually.

Anyway, it didn’t take long for me to show him that top-ranking pages on his site were there with absolutely no content in this field, which supported the theory that Google, and most other search engines, ignored this field when deciding who should rank where.

So there you have it, my top five search engine optimization myths debunked with a short comment on why, for you to ponder. I hope that this has gone some way to dispel any confusion you may have had about this fascinating area. It’s one we certainly enjoy working in. The challenge of facing off against your competitor in the search results is something we relish. Let us know if you would like to know more and I, or one of our team, will help out.

These are a couple of bad news stories that fortunately finish with happy endings and with some lessons for you. For these two new clients, March was not a good month, with each of them going through their own online marketing horror story. Fortunately, we were able to be the knights in shiny web-page armour and helped remove them as quickly as we could from the proverbial smelly stuff.

I’ll start with the worst of the two stories.

It began with the client engaging an individual on a retainer basis to help them as their online lead generation consultant. They selected this person as they had some good experience in the industry and they were also a personal friend, whom they had worked with in a prior business.

This new consultant was tasked with looking after the whole lead generation process from attracting web traffic to converting it into leads on the client’s site. The client was new to all things online so the consultant was pretty much left to their own devices. They managed the Google AdWords and Analytics account and even the system they used to collect and respond to leads. All this started to get some action as their work started to bear fruit.

As the client knew very little, the consultant chose to initiate the new account set-up process with the main vendors involved – namely Google and the lead capture software vendor. During this process, he passed subsidiary login details to the client but retained the master level account status.

Each month the client received a small report about what was going on – attached to this was a steadily growing account for the consultant’s services. The client then asked questions about what was happening and why the fees were heading north but nothing was forthcoming. The lead flow was a trickle compared with what they expected and because of this the cost per lead was a problem and not commercially viable. So they started looking further afield for advice.

They came to us during this stage of the process. As is normal for clients arriving at this stage, we offered to complete a general audit of their existing lead generation efforts. We were supplied the necessary account login details and a description of their desired objectives, and then kicked this process off.

During this assessment work we registered as leads onto their website – just to see how easy it was and to look at the messages that were being sent out. We did the same for their email newsletter sign up – in fact, for every conversion option on their website we filled in our details and sat back to experience their prospect promotion.

On first glance, it all looked quite good. Yes, there were some issues with the form design and the amount of data they were collecting (too much too early) but overall things looked reasonable. That was until the existing supplier noticed our contact details in the leads coming in. They were not happy.

Of course the client was fine during all this – they wanted some ‘warts and all’ feedback on how their website was performing. But what they didn’t expect was how the existing consultant would react.

Within a few moments of the consultant finding out that we were involved they a) shut down the client’s access to their website; b) changed the master passwords on the client’s Google AdWords and Google Analytics account and, to finish it all, c) altered the passwords for the lead capture system so all the client’s leads were now hidden to them. Nice.

The client only found this out when she noticed that it had been a few days since a sales lead had come through. And when she tried to login to her website to load up a newsletter, she found to her dismay that her access details were being denied.

Needless to say, when she contacted the consultant asking what was happening she received a barrage of complaints about why Permission were involved at all, and what right did we have to look around ‘their’ work (which, I might add, the client had already paid for in full).

Quite quickly, things became very heated and relationships fell apart. The client called me late one afternoon telling me what had happened and I couldn’t believe their story. Within minutes we had a plan to wrest back control of the site – our first priority. Fortunately, she did own the domain and the hosting account. Passwords to both these were quickly changed and then we got into doing some rather devious things to break into the site’s content management system to reset the password. Once this was achieved we focused on capturing the leads that were still flowing in.

We had the client quickly set up a new lead capture account and then ‘plumbed’ the conversion forms in to this and set up the auto-response emails as best we could. Next up was changing her Google accounts.

As luck would have it during the early stages of the review I had taken a copy of their Google AdWords account so I could best show them what was broken. This proved very helpful later on but first we had to establish a new Google Analytics account, set up all the necessary goals and then overlay this onto the new linked AdWords account. Having my copy made this last step achievable and took a few minutes as opposed to the days of work we would have faced if we had to start from scratch.

Yes, the client had ‘lost’ all their historical website analytics data and, more importantly, the leads that had not been sent through before things blew up, but at least they had wrestled back control.

So here are the three lessons you can take away from my Horror Story No 1.

Lesson No 1 – Own your Google AdWords and Google Analytics account. Each of these tools allows you to easily ‘invite’ (and de-invite if you want) others to help you manage your work. Add to this list any other application, especially a lead capture and responding tool.

All Permission clients have the master status on their accounts, with us having the necessary access to manage the content that sits within them. So they ‘own’ their Google AdWords account, their Analytics account, and any other account type we need to get their lead generation system into shape.

As an aside, only a few days after this event I was introduced to a small team within a major High street financial institution who had their advertising agency manage their Google AdWords advertising. Only recently, they found out that this agency had chosen to sub-contract another online agency (without their knowledge) to manage this work for them. Not only does this raise some rather serious ethical issues, heaven knows what will happen to any of the great marketing data that is being collated as a result of this campaign.

Lesson No 2 – At the outset of any lead generation project, set clear objectives on what the project is to achieve. These should highlight specific results you want your consultant to deliver on. Remember those rather vague responses that were attached to their invoice? There would have been a lot more transparency if both parties knew the exact results that were expected. For instance, an expected lead count per month, or maybe a search ranking figure for a certain keyword, or even a cost per lead rate from all Google AdWords traffic – all of these are good objectives.

Lesson No 3 – Treat the management of your sales leads with the same respect you would the management of your hard-earned cash. In reality they reflect your future ability to create the latter. So would you let someone else manage your cash within a process that wasn’t transparent to all? Now, I know that there are a few who have lost millions of dollars only recently by allowing this to happen to them, but you’re smarter than that – aren’t you?

Horror Story No 2

As I mentioned before, this one is relatively mild compared with the previous story BUT, again, it’s a story that I had to have confirmed before I believed it actually happened. It involves a website, a developer, a client – and a dispute.

I know there are a lot of website developers out there who are good, honest people who create sites that their clients absolutely love. I’m sure of it. Fortunately, we know of a few, so when someone needs a site created we pass their details on knowing that there’s a very good chance a happy story will be the result.

But, saying all this, you would be surprised to know how many people walk through our doors with a website build story that is full of strife. Missed deadlines, poor design and all with lots of promise coupled with a paucity of delivery are just some of the stories we hear. So it was not a surprise when this client came to us with a tale of something similar.

It had all started out well – it usually does, or it doesn’t start 🙂 . Then there was a change of staff at the web design company and the ‘client facing’ person was off on maternity leave, which left the technical guru behind them to take control of the project. This staff change coincided with all future ‘client to developer’ communication now being via email. From then until now there was not one phone call made to the client. Now this is some achievement as their project went on for 2–3 months.

Email is great, but it still can’t replace the need to talk to someone sometimes and, while it wasn’t the only reason, it didn’t help matters, and the website build started to head off the tracks and into a dark place where the project just drags on – and on. This is the space where everyone involved just wants to get the project resolved as quickly as possible.

This generally means that along the way things are missed and the original scope is lost in the build process as the job gets handed from developer to developer. No surprises that this happened here and things that were expected by the client failed to materialize and what did arrive wasn’t expected. As were the contents of the final bill, which were a fair bit different from what was quoted – not a lot mind you, just enough to make it worth an email from the client. And that’s when things became rather inflamed.

The tirade that came back to the client from the developer was extreme to say the least. Things had obviously been boiling up for a while and the questioning of the account was the final straw. Apparently, the email message went on for pages (I never saw the original) but it was the final paragraphs that had the real punch. They were to the effect that if the account was not settled by a set time then the site would be taken down and not re-instated until the funds had been collected. Nice #2.

So the client had no choice but to pay the bill but, within a few minutes, was on the phone to me to see how they could extricate themselves from the situation.

Now I realise that, as a supplier, the developer has to guard themselves against customers asking them to do work and then not paying – so they need some recourse. But still, to threaten this when all the customer is doing is questioning the account? This doesn’t bode well for a mutually satisfying future relationship.

Anyway, we needed to know more before we could get this client moving again. First up was the subject of intellectual property. Who owned what – specifically to do with the site’s content and its content management system? I had the client go back and check the terms and conditions the supplier had sent them before starting the project. Guess what – there weren’t any.

Then they somehow had to gently find out if they could move the site to a different hosting account – one that they could own – as a short-term step to wrest back control. This is not a subject that is easy to broach AFTER a project has started but, nevertheless, they are making progress. The developer is playing difficult but the client is making slow, steady progress. And, yes, in the wings is a nice tame developer we have introduced them to who is able to manage things once the move takes place.

So what are the three lessons with this one?

Lesson No 1 – It’s true, only the paranoid survive. This is the title of a great business book by Andy Grove, the then CEO of Intel – but also a good mind state to be in – even if just for a short time before you start that next website build. Then you can ask yourself questions like – what happens if we end up in a dispute – who will arbitrate it? What documents show clearly who owns what? How do we protect all the work we put into this project? It doesn’t need to get into small 6 point type and fill three pages – but if you want to fall back on it then have your lawyer look over it and ask your developer to agree to it. And if they offer terms and conditions to you, check through that 6 point type to see what answers they have to questions like these.

Lesson No 2 – I was once told to never hold a credit card with the same bank I banked with. I assume the theory goes that if things get very tight financially and people are shutting accounts down left, right and centre then at least you have a piece of plastic with some credit on it to get you by. So I think the same should apply to your website hosting – that is, never host your site with the people who developed it. Some content management systems make this a challenge, but most allow it to work. Do this and you will never have some testy developer threaten to take down your site unless you pay their account.

Lesson No 3 – Generally, it takes more time to properly specify any creative work, like a website build, than the actual creative work will take. And this is one of the main reasons why so many web build projects head off the rails so quickly and so dramatically.

Most people entering into projects like this rely too much on what is said rather than what is written. So while email was the chosen mode of communication for a large part of this project – and this caused some issues – IF the project had been accurately specified at the start, it would have had a higher chance of survival.

As another aside, late last year I came across a person who does just this – specify websites for clients. He then goes a bit further and helps them engage suppliers to build them, too. Peter has been in the industry for ages, does a great job, charges reasonably for his services and guess what – his projects end in happy stories.

Now, I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to engage Peter on their next project BUT time spent documenting what needs to be done and why – as if there was little chance of verbal communication – is time well invested.

So there you have it – two horror stories and six lessons that I hope you can learn from. All I can say is that I only hope that April doesn’t bring with it any more stories like these.

Know a good electrician? How about someone to help fix the rather sad roof on our bach? Or even a business who knows the best way to fix a roof rack to Claire’s car? These are just a few situations in which I needed help this month and each one had me asking people around me for some suggestions. In each case it worked. We found just the person to help fix our fuses, mend our roof and strap our bikes safely to the roof of the Mazda.

You have probably done the same yourself. I mean, how else do you tell the difference between electricians – especially when they all look the same – other than by asking others for their experience? Plus, it scared me witless just getting up on my roof to see holes where roof should be let alone spending ages up there poring over the finished product. Nope, I needed to find someone who had re-roofed and not felt the pitter patter of rain on their couch afterwards.

Sometimes, however, I have asked for feedback and got nowhere. This leads me to where most people do their hunting – Google’s search engine. Nowadays, finding a list of possible tradesmen shouldn’t be hard for most industries. I covered this last month in our customer conference call, in which I presented examples from the search term “Adelaide Electrician” – there were a few!

The problem is they all looked the same. That’s where the addition of some “social proof” in the form of a collection of customer testimonials would have been enough to make one stand out from the crowd.

If you are working through our “Grow Conversions – Website Optimisation” service module all this should sound very, very familiar. In fact, if you have been a client of Permission for any length of time then you would have heard me prattle on about this again and again. Nevertheless, for all the air I have expounded, and words I have written, I could count on one hand the number of clients who take it to heart and start to actively gather testimonials and incorporate them into their website marketing strategy.

Yep, it always sounds like a good idea. But that doesn’t mean it gets done. So we continue to politely “nag away” during our review calls, pushing for the testimonials we were promised the month before.

Customers tell us that the problem is not deciding “if” they should ask their clients for feedback – everyone agrees this is a good thing. It’s more “when” this act should occur. Ideally, you would want to pick the time that has the greatest chance of seeking an amazing result. So perhaps for the dentist this could be while the customer is in “the chair” just after their painless cavity has been completed. For the mortgage broker, maybe this occurs once the house has been settled and the client has moved in.

I suggest you trial a few different places within your own sales process and see which one provides the most reliable results. Once you have found your winner, just add the task into your sales process and ensure your team follows the process – again and again. And after make sure to implement those social proofs into your online marketing strategy.

So is all this work worth the effort? Well, I hope the screen shot below kills any doubt.

This snapshot from a client’s Google Analytics “All Traffic” report reveals a 24% increase in conversion rate for their paid advertising campaign with Google AdWords. The main difference between the two sales periods being reviewed was the addition of a steady stream of positive client testimonials. These were not long dissertations either – just two or three lines with the first name of the client and their location, e.g. Chris from Pt Chevalier, Auckland.

So how many of these do you need? I believe that in this case there is never too many. For instance, the team at Agrigarden does a great job of collecting testimonial content to help them sell their Grillo Climber Ride-on Mowers. Their sales page just keeps growing longer and longer as we add more. And as this grows, so does their conversion rate.

Recently, they have been very fortunate to receive a few unprompted video testimonials from raving fans of the product – check them out here www.rideonmowers.net.au. It really doesn’t get much better than this.

And the best place to put all this new social proof content? I suggest around the places where your visitors are considering whether to take the next step. So this could be on a form you ask them to complete, or even the order confirmation page of the e-commerce shopping cart. Wherever they could be pondering – “Now is this the best thing to do?” That’s when content like this can be used to reassure them enough to get them across the line.

We specialise in helping brick and mortar New Zealand businesses effectively market their services online.  (Here are a few customer case studies.)   This is one of the many articles we have written on the subject area.  Complete a quote request today if you would like to know how we can help your service company achieve more online.

The Power of Increasing Your Maximum Cost per Lead

How much will you pay for an average quality lead? Seems like a rather innocuous detail, doesn’t it? Especially when you compare it with all the rest of the parts of the online marketing puzzle we all have to manage.  However, I believe that this rather small figure is one of those relatively hidden metrics of website marketing strategy that, on first glance, looks quite minor but on further reflection really does have a major part to play in showing the true strength or relative weakness of your sales process.

Nevertheless, when I ask people new to Permission what they will pay for a lead, in nearly all cases I receive a rather blank stare. Very few have given it any thought before, let alone calculated what it could be for their business.  Now for whatever reason, this month has been a month where I’ve posed this question more often than most. And as per normal, I’ve received a batch of silent responses in return. It’s made for some interesting sales presentations.

Prolonged lengths of silence are not usually the best things to occur during your first meeting with a prospect. Usually these are times for much chatter and many questions. But not much silence. Nevertheless, I’m not put off by the space this question provides, so I power on and dig into what the value “could be” if the prospect isn’t too sure.

Sometimes I rephrase the question.

“So, Mrs Prospect. If you were able to give me a certain amount of money every time I delivered to your front door a prospect of OK quality, what amount would you be willing to part with?”

“Well it depends.”

This is an answer that means we are underway. Now, we need to qualify the exact product/service this “Permission delivered” prospect is interested in purchasing and the likelihood of them purchasing it after hearing my prospect’s sales message.

This usually leads us into a discussion of future figures and stats that may have us saying, for example, that a quarter of all the leads they present to go on to buy something. And perhaps the average amount of profit per sale that they are willing to allocate to marketing may be $160. Therefore, without allowing for any repeat purchases, a feasible cost per lead could be around $40. So, if they happened to decide to spend $1000 per month with Permission then they should expect in return 25 new sales to make the transaction work. And likewise, a new customer count above this means that things are looking very good.

So now we have a marketing success benchmark of $40. This means that for any marketing the company produces – so long as they can track its effectiveness – if it produces leads of OK quality at sub $40 value then all is OK.

Thankfully, when it comes to tracking the effectiveness of marketing, the online marketing space does a grand job. Google Analytics in particular really simplifies the task of matching website marketing expense to sales revenue. It’s all there waiting to be found in easy-to-digest reports.

Using your new-found cost-per-lead value as a benchmark for marketing success is just one simple way to make the work required to produce the figure worthwhile. Nevertheless, the real power of this metric is when you use it to reveal the health of your sales process. This comes with the startling realization that the healthier your process is the more you will be willing to pay per lead.

Yep, moving your allowable cost per lead upwards – that’s where the real possibilities are. Increase it, say, to a place where you are able to pay twice or even three times more than your competitors can afford per lead and still make money. That’s where the marketing magic really starts to arrive.

And before you yell out “buying business is not for me, Mr Price” – be aware that I’m not condoning any short-term marketing strategies that some foolishly see as being a necessary evil to capture market share. Nope, this is about being able to operate a sales conversion process that is so much more efficient than everyone else in your market that it remains sustainable to you but economic suicide for your competitors to follow.

Now some may read this and say, “Chris, what are you talking about? Surely if you are converting leads at a three-fold higher rate than your market then you can keep spending the SAME AMOUNT as your competitors and just bank the extra sales revenue.” Or those with a particular aversion to spending any marketing budget may be considering how this strategy could even enable them to REDUCE their marketing spend by a third and still end up with the same number of leads.

So why not consider taking either of these choices instead of INCREASING your marketing spend?

Well, my answer is that all three are “valid” options for you to consider. There you go – good old-fashioned, no commitment “consultant speak”. However the “best” choice really depends on your aspirations for the future.

Because really, the first two choices are about increasing business efficiency, whilst the third option – of spending more – is all about maximizing growth opportunities. You take your pick; however, remember the first customer conference call I presented this year? The one about the expected growth – or lack of it – for the NZ economy in 2011? Now, I’m no economist, so I cribbed from the few who are and their prediction was particularly uninspiring (and that was before the events on February 22nd in Christchurch). So don’t expect much latent growth from the economy around you – so best you go and find your own.

Let’s say you can move your affordable cost per lead from $40 to $125 – not an insignificant jump but, nevertheless, not beyond the realms of possibility based on our experience. This change uncovers a few new opportunities to consider. For instance, the use of a wider range of media types that may have been out of your reach before. Maybe radio and even TV could be an option at these values. Competitors that remain at a sub $50 cost per lead just couldn’t afford to follow you into these media types without burning too much cash in the process.

And on a subject closer to our digital space, your bidding strategy with Google AdWords could be turned on its head with a change like this. Understand that your bid price is not everything that ensures your placement – our last conference call on Google AdWords shared that Google formula for us all – but still, if you push the cost per click upwards you will stretch not only yours but your competitors budgets too.

And finally, for those involved in face-to-face selling, let’s not forget about the skill set of the sales staff you can employ now. Their salaries, and the training/resources you provide them all can head upwards as you are able to “spend more” to capture each sale.

All three options are worth considering, but how do you actually go about nudging upwards your affordable cost per lead? Here are three quite generic strategies that may help (of course there’s a longer list of specific online marketing methods within our Grow Conversions – Website Optimisation Service Module).

Strategy #1– Optimise your sales process

Yes, a basic one I know, but the facts are that if you increase your sales conversion rates from 25% to 50% then you are able to effectively double your marketing spend and achieve four times more sales.

Sound interesting?

Selling is really just another business process that needs managing. Just like manufacturing, accounts and marketing. Each of these four processes contain a series of carefully crafted steps that need optimizing by those that care. But how often does this occur?

All my work experience has been in sales. I’ve sold valves, pumps, scientific equipment, printing and even outsource mail-handing services. Some deals were worth $150, others $25,000, and a few a cool $1.5 million in annual services. But in none of them was I ever sat down and shown exactly the right way to sell what I was selling.

I did have some early training in my first job with David Forman Sales Training (remember them?). But other than that, I was left to my own devices. Now, don’t get me wrong, there was some activity and result tracking throughout this. Some companies were more detailed in this regard than others. However, none of them sat me and the rest of the selling team down together and collectively pulled apart the complete process to find the best way to sell their products.

And this is not a unique situation. Based on my experiences since then, I would suggest that 90% of businesses do not apply a process to their sales methods. So the odds are in your favour that your competitors will be in this 90% group. It doesn’t mean you should be.

Strategy #2– Improve your opportunity for repeat business

If you run a business with very little chance for repeat customer business then good luck – I hope your marketing is up to standard. It will need to be. Look at the industries with a low propensity for repeat sales (investment banking, high-end computer software) and within the market leaders you should see some of the best marketers working away. They are tasked with bringing in a steady supply of new leads every day, every month – all at the right cost to keep the wheels turning.

In comparison, those businesses with a strong chance of repeat sales can usually survive with less than exceptional marketing efforts. Yes, they still need a supply of leads but their repeat sales keep them going when their new prospect work drops off the boil.

For instance, a friend of mine has started a consulting business that is definitely in the low repeat group. His customers will use him once every 7 years.  That’s a long time between invoices.

What he provides has some strong margins in it, but not sizable enough to ensure he can survive this length of time between drinks. And it gets worse. Unfortunately, he freely admits to not having any marketing skills whatsoever. He’s an expert technician but promoting and marketing are not part of that mix. Plus, did I mention he began the business undercapitalized so any promotion needs to be done on the cheap?

At the other end of the repeat business spectrum, another friend, whose business supplies a service in a completely different market, has an almost certain level of repeat purchase with his customers. Probably the best I have ever seen, barring electricity retailers. Once his customers buy from him they just keep on going. Marketing for him is an expense account at a local café for him to chat away with existing customers as they brief him on the next job.

Strategy #3 – Increase the expected margin from each new customer

I’m not going to give up on my friend for whom I have predicted a long period of struggle. Nope, I’m going to keep on pestering him with advice to ensure he makes a go of things. And at the top of my list of pestering points is the challenge for him to sell other things to his customers to help him bridge his 7-year gap.

It’s a simple strategy and one that Amazon recently used when they purchased Diapers.com and Soap.com for a reasonably massive USD 540 million. I would safely say that both soap and nappies are consumed with a higher purchase frequency than books and electronics equipment so all this must be good news for Amazon. And thankfully, my friend doesn’t need to invest the same amount as Mr Bezos but, nevertheless, adding a few higher frequency purchase items to his own basket of goods can only be a good thing.

So there you have it. A few reasons why the act of pushing upwards your affordable cost-per-lead value is a good thing, and a smattering of options to help you achieve this. If this is all new to you then I suggest you start with calculating (with a reasonable level of accuracy) your maximum affordable cost per lead. Then you can use this to gauge the effectiveness of your online marketing followed by some tactics to nudge the value upwards to further reap the marketing benefits this will bring.

Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your service business market online