So you have decided to engage an agency to transform your online marketing. Good move! But before you divert your focus to the other parts of your business, there may be two tasks to complete if you want to supercharge the results your agency is capable of delivering.

Having been engaged by hundreds of small to medium sized business owners, our Web Optimisation team have experienced all levels of client involvement. Some have promptly dashed off to the next project – leaving us to perform in isolation. Fair enough, but it doesn’t produce the best results.

Those who have remained fully engaged from the start, doing all they can to ensure above average results, get the best results.

So here are the two tasks you can do to ensure those great results.

Task #1 – Further develop the U in your USP

This makes more sense when you think of Google as a highly efficient comparison engine rather than a search engine. Your prospects pump in their question and in microseconds have a range of alternatives to research further.

Effective online marketing will get you onto their “further research” list. Perhaps beforehand you were nowhere to be seen. Now, with some optimisation, you can be found and easily compared to those around you. How well you show up at this stage depends on the strength of your USP, or Unique Selling Proposition. Your online marketing team’s work on keywords, ads and bidding strategies will get you seen. Further defining your USP will have people look at you more closely.

So what can you add to your product or service to make it stand the test of a Google comparison?

Sometimes it’s as simple as ensuring your website tells the complete story. For instance, you may have offered a Five Year Workmanship Guarantee for years – but lo and behold, this great benefit is not shown on your website for prospects to see.

Or perhaps your website says all it needs to but does little to have you stand out from your competitors. Your job may be to repackage what you offer in order to survive the Google comparison. Perhaps it’s your service – maybe you respond to quote requests faster than the rest?

Or it could be the way you present your website content. Let’s say you work in a complex area and your competitors rely on simple HTML web pages to explain what they do. You, on the other hand, invest in video to make it easy for your prospects to pick you.

The ideal product or service for online marketing is one with a large, chunky and easily understood USP that lots of people are looking for on Google. Anything you can do in this area will make your agency’s job easier and your chances of success greater.

Task #2 – Deliver more proof

We have all read so much marketing blurb that it all ends up as one big piece of “blah”. Customer focused this, service ethic that. Yawn.

Faced with that, who do we actually believe?

In order of preference, I would say our loved ones, followed by friends, colleagues, people we know, other people and, finally, the person writing about their business.

Therefore anything you do to document proof of your company’s ability is time well spent. Testimonials, awards, third party publicity – anything that has someone else saying how well you and your team perform will ensure your prospects stop and linger that little bit longer.

And if you’ve been in business for a while, reinforce those testimonials with chunky statistics. For instance, while knowing an alarm company has been in business for 32 years is nice, learning that over 12,000 homes and businesses rely on them carries even more weight.

So send your optimisation team pages of proof and statistics that make your experience seem overwhelming. You’ll make their job that little bit easier, and that will translate into better conversion for you.

So there you have it. Two things to deliver to your newly minted web optimisation partnership to improve your chances of achieving the success you both desire.

Want to know more about how Ark can help you? Contact us today and let’s chat about what success means for you.