Online Marketing Helps You Find More Paying Customers
eCommerce Gets All the Press,
But the Best Way to Build
Most
Businesses Online Is to
Find Better-Qualified Leads
You've heard the hype about ecommerce. But chances are, your business doesn't sell online. So how can the web make your business more profitable?
The web is a great place to:
- Prospect Highly Qualified Leads
- Influence In-Person Purchases
Prospecting Qualified Leads Through Online Marketing
You may have the best salespeople anywhere. But without enough leads to keep them busy, you can't reach your full sales growth potential.
More importantly, you've got to provide the right leads, because a lead is far more than a contact. It's someone who has expressed interest in your product or service. Even better is when they request information about what you do.
Influencing In-Person Purchases
40% of all major off-line purchases are first researched online, according to the American Marketing Association. If your customers aren't finding the information they need on your web site, they likely look to your competitors.
If they don't find compelling reasons to contact you on your web site, you'll never even know how much income you lost.
It's unfair. Maybe it's even profiling. But recent research shows how visitors to your web site judge what they feel about it's look not in 10 seconds, as we previously thought, but in .2 seconds. If they like what they see, you've got another 3-8 seconds to convey the benefit they came for... or they're gone forever. A simple click of the browser back button is a gavel tap unfairly judging your site.
So it's critical that in those first few seconds that you catch prospective customer's attention with benefits they care about.
Build Your Business Online...
With No Hype or Empty Promises
What do online and traditional business have in common?
Almost everything! The concepts remain the same. The
methods are all that changed. For instance, every business
online or off must do the following to succeed:
- Find new clients or customers... Prospecting
- Point out the benefits of your product... Make
Your Case
- Close the sale... Conversion
Prospecting
In the offline world, you primarily prospect through
traditional advertising and word of mouth. On the Web,
you use Search Engine Marketing (SEM), including Pay-Per-Click
(PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Pay-Per-Click is the quickest way to get results. You
simply pay Google, Overture, MSN, or other search engines
to serve up text advertisements for your site. However,
you pay for every potential lead. PPC provides a great
way to quickly get your marketing efforts off the ground.
Search Engine Optimization consists of:
- Making your site
easy for the Search Engines to find
- Building great content
for Google, Yahoo, MSN and others to include in their search results
- Link
Campaigns to get others to link to you
Learn More About Online Prospecting
Make Your Case
People go online to solve problems. If they don't find them on your site, they try your competitors. So why do so many sites fail to focus on showing how their products solve problems?
I'll let you in on a little secret. Most Web site content
is created by one of two types of people:
- The technician who built the site
- The business owner
The last person who should write your online marketing
copy is your "Web guy". "Techies" make
the Web possible. They can deliver your message with
attractive presentation and colors. Just don't count
on them knowing how to write the sales copy. It's not what they do.
On the other hand, business owners knows their product,
probably better than anyone else. Often that knowledge
becomes a handicap. You may be tempted to
write your own sales copy. In the sales
classic "The Closers", the author states
that effective sales is only 10% product knowledge.
The rest is knowing step-by-step how to sell. Online, you sell with the written word as your voice.
There's a reason why direct mail copywriters make tens
and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars for the ads
they write. It's because they understand the science
of persuasive writing.
There are key ways in which copy on the Web differs from other written sales copy. We'll help you create copy that works online.
Learn More About Writing that Gets Action
Conversion
Once you make your case, move in for the close. If you've spent any time
in sales, you know the truth of Zig Ziglar's statement, "If
you don't know how to close, you don't know how to sell." He
goes on to ask, "What is the average commission
in the area you work in on the sales you almost made?"
Of course, you get nothing for the sales you didn't
quite make, no matter how close you got. You get full
commission on the ones you barely made.
Most Web sites perform miserably in converting prospects
to sales. Many online marketing "gurus" proclaim
as gospel that you can't typically convert more than 1% of
the visitors to your site into buyers.
Perhaps they are happy with
that. However, Web site owners who understand the rules
of making their case and closing the sale online may enjoy
10%+ conversion rate. That's a
1,000% performance chasm between those who understand
the online sales process and those who merely claim to.
Most Web site failures are completely avoidable. Most of the scientifically
proven direct marketing techniques that sold millions of dollars worth of products over the
last 100+ years also work on the Web. You'll find very few differences between
effective online and offline sales copy.
I'll teach you some of them on this site, and still more
in my Online Marketing Advisor Newsletter.
Learn More About Web Site Conversion
Next Steps
If you are looking for solid, measurable gains in your
Web site efforts, Online Marketing Advisor is here to help.
We limit the growth of our company so we can give you the individual one-on-one attention you deserve.
Browse this site. See if our message strikes
a chord with your way of doing business. If you feel
strongly that your online marketing dollar deserves to
be proven with measurable gains, give me a call at (801) 859-5126 to
schedule a free consultation. We'll be happy to work with you to explore how we can help grow and streamline your business.
-Steve Myers |
