Attracting New Business In A Down Economy

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "Attracting New Business In A Down Economy"

Sherilyn Todd
6 years ago
Views:

1 Attracting New Business In A Down Economy We are going to be focusing on four major ideas to attract new business through your website. 1. Preparing your website for potential business 2. Using Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click Marketing to attract new visitors 3. Marketing your company to potential and existing clients through marketing 4. Using web analytics to understand your users (and change your business to accommodate them) 1. Preparing Your Website For Potential Business: Preparing your website for new business is much like preparing your house prior to your new neighbor's visit. It needs to be open, inviting, clean, and organized. And much like the dinner you serve, the content should be prepared for the visitors, not your family members (employees). We cover a few of the essential items in website preparation below. Creating a User Centric Design In simple terms, your website should be centered on your users. In order for your users to have a rewarding visit to your website, you'll need to know who they are, what they expect, and of course what your goals are. To get started answer the following questions: 1. What is the goal of my website? This could be anything from having qualified leads contact you, selling your products and services, or providing information about your business or an event you are promoting. 2. Who is my target audience, and what are their goals? Here are a few of the most important items to pay attention to: 1. Identify your target audiences, and speak directly to them 2. Offer a "call to action" that intends to drive your visitors to specific areas of the website. 3. Provide clear intuitive navigation 4. Content should be concise. Use lists rather than paragraphs, spacious formatting, bold callouts, and subheads for new sections.

2 Things to Avoid: 1. Splash pages 2. Excessive content 3. Industry jargon and ACRONYMS 4. Graphics that only serve as decoration 5. Do I know how to convert my visitors into sales? 1. Top level - visitors who bail within 8 seconds after glancing at the page 2. Second Level - Visitors who bail when your page does not prove compelling under closer examination 3. Third Level - visitors who are attempting to convert but fail somehow or who would convert if there was an alternate channel such as phone 4. Bottom Level - conversions Good Examples

3 Bad Examples Resources: (slide show) Set up Web Analytics

4 When users visit your website, we want to track their every move. We want to know who they are, how they found us, what pages they navigated, and how much time they spent on each page. Why? This data tells us a lot about our user's demographics and behavior, the efficiency of our website, and how effective we are in reaching our website goals. We are going to visit this topic later in the seminar, but since we were on the topic of preparation of our website, we felt it was appropriate to introduce it. Recommended Analytics Software: 1. Google Analytics Visistat - (see me if you are interested, I can provide discounted rates through a partnership with them) Optimizing Your Website Content We are going to visit this topic later in the seminar. Usability Testing Usability testing is a technique used to evaluate a product by testing it on users. This can be seen as an irreplaceable usability practice, since it gives direct input on how real users use the system (Wikipedia!!). The goals of usability testing is to improve your website by observing people using it. You measure user performance, accuracy, recall, and emotional responses. Usability tests usually involve creating a realistic situation where users perform a list of tasks using the website while observers watch. 2. Using Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click Marketing to Attract New Visitors: Search Engine Optimization Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results (More Wikipedia!). The idea is the higher your site appears in the search results, the more visitors it will receive.

5 We are going to assume that this is true, and learn how to increase the ranking of your website within the major search engines. There are many things that business owners can do to begin optimizing their websites, and improve their search engine rankings. We are going to begin with the simplest, and the most effective methods to improve your organic rankings, your content. We ll also dive into page structure and other best practices for optimizing your web pages. Basic Steps for Web Page Optimization 1. Create a keyword list for each web page - (Resource Use keywords and key phrases in your markup - Title tag Images Links Meta Headings 3. Create keyword density within your web page copy 4. Create cross-links - create links to other pages of your website, crawlers will follow these HTML links. 5. Provide a sitemap and link to it from all of your web pages (Resource - < view the SEO Checklist Document>

7 Positive Keyword Factors: Title tag Body tag Keyword density H1 tag Domain name Page URL H2, H3...tags Alt and image title tags Bold / strong tags Meta description/keywords Positive Page /Site Factors

8 Global link popularity Quality / relevance of inbound links Internal link popularity Quality / relevance of outgoing links Quality of content Organization / hierarchy of navigation Age of page/domain Frequency of updates Spelling HTML validation relevance to query Google PageRank Pay Per Click Marketing Although there are many Pay Per Click providers, we are going to focus on Google AdWords. Google AdWords operate under a bid-based model. Cost per click (CPC) varies depending on the search engine and the level of competition for a particular keyword. Google AdWords What it is The top and right column ads on Google search pages. How it works Create an ad using keywords related to your business, when keywords are searched, your ad will appear. Benefits: Expands your reach through the content network: communicating your message Target the right user in the right content: match your ad with WebPages in your content network. Google has made it much easier now to target people searching in a particular city, region, or country. You can now target online customers within 20 miles of your business. Measure and optimize your results: Placement Performance Report gives you visibility into where all your ads appear. You can review your ad s performance on a site by site basis and use that data to identify well-performing sites to target more aggressively.

9 Costs: Set your budget: no minimum spending requirement, you can set a daily budget for each click on your ad. Avoid guesswork: Google provides keyword traffic and cost estimates so you can make informed decisions about choosing keywords and maximizing your budget. Pay only for results: You are charged only if someone clicks your ad, not when your ad is displayed. (adwords.google.com)

10 3. Marketing your company to potential and existing clients through marketing: marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating your organizations messages to your target audience. We'll be looking at the following elements to marketing: sending s with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business, sending s with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, marketing works, because these guys said so: According to research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, marketing generated an ROI of $48.34 for every dollar spent on it in The expected figure for 2008 is $45.06, and the prediction for 2009 is $ As such, it outperforms all the other direct marketing channels examined, such as print catalogs (reference). The Ad Effectiveness Survey commissioned by Forbes Media in Feb/March 2009 revealed that and e-newsletter marketing are considered the second-most effective tool for generating conversions, just behind SEO (reference). In Datran Media's 2009 Annual Marketing & Media Survey, 80.4% of industry executives said the channel performed strongly for their company. This was the top result (reference). A December 2008 survey of hundreds of marketers by MarketingSherpa saw pay-per-click search ads rank top for ROI, followed by marketing to house lists in second place. There was a lot more to see, visit: Why does marketing work? A mailing list provides the ability to distribute information to a wide range of specific, potential customers at a relatively low cost.

11 Compared to other media investments such as direct mail or printed newsletters, is less expensive. An exact return on investment can be tracked ("track to basket") and has proven to be high when done properly. marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.[2] The delivery time for an message is short (i.e., seconds or minutes) as compared to a mailed advertisement (i.e., one or more days). An advertiser is able to "push" the message to its audience, as opposed to website-based advertising, which relies on a customer to visit that website. messages are easy to track. An advertiser can track users via autoresponders, web bugs, bounce messages, unsubscribe requests, read receipts, click-throughs, etc. These mechanisms can be used to measure open rates, positive or negative responses, and to correlate sales with marketing. Advertisers can generate repeat business affordably and automatically. Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of subscribers who have opted in (i.e., consented) to receive communications on subjects of interest to them. Over half of Internet users check or send on a typical day. Specific types of interaction with messages can trigger (1) other messages to be delivered automatically, or (2) other events, such as updating the profile of the recipient to indicate a specific interest category. marketing is paper-free (i.e., "green"). Tracking and response metrics enables tuning and optimization of the marketing channel by a process of testing different variants and calculation of statistically significant results. Recommended Marketing Software: 1. icontact - (see me if you are interested, I can provide you with a 15 day free trial, no credit card needed) 4. Using web analytics to understand your users (and change your business to accommodate them):

12 Web analytics is basically the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. Web analytics are important because they tell you a lot of information about who is coming to your site, what they are doing when they get there, and where they left your site (with or without a conversion). Business owners can analyze a lot of data provided by your web analytic tools. We're going to focus on a few key data points. Visitor Overview Popular Pages Entry / Exit Pages Referrals Search Engines A Couple of Key Questions and Actions (mostly written by Jeff Sexton) 1) Where are they entering? Most analytics packages (including Google Analytics) make it easy to view your top landing pages. If you haven t checked this before you might be surprised at the number of visitors who aren t entering your site through the home page. That can be crucial information. Maybe your PPC landing pages don t provide all the information visitors need and you re not giving visitors clear links back to your main site. Maybe your UVP is only clearly explained on the home page, so that someone landing on your services (or a product category) page wouldn t get that info. But more than all of that, you re trying to get an understanding of how visitors move through your site and why they take the actions they do, so you ll need to know visitor entry points. 2) How are they entering? Your analytics package should let you analyze traffic, breaking visitors down by source: organic search traffic, paid ads, direct traffic, etc. And for organic and paid search, you should be able to see what keywords brought the majority of your visitors to your website. From this information, you should be able to get a sense of the following: What are their expectations? Given your visitors traffic source and keywords, what are they looking for? What would they most expect to find when they land on your website? What scent are they following?

13 What are their likely goals? The same key word search could easily be used by people with differing goals. Chances are you might be ignoring all but one of them. For instance, I could be searching on Pensacola Day Spas because I wanted to buy a gift certificate for my wife. Whereas my wife might search the same term to see if they take last-minute or walk-in appointments. Or maybe she s searching to see if they have a specific treatment? The point is, it helps to mentally force yourself to brainstorm as many real-world behind the search terms as possible. What do they already know? Someone searching on your name or on the name of a specific service or product line obviously knows more than a visitor entering from a general search term. Use your keyword knowledge to get a sense of visitors differing stages of the buying process? Are they just starting out and searching for general info? Do they already know exactly what they want? Or are they somewhere in between? How well is your landing page matching up with visitor expectations and goals? Would visitors find their keywords on their entrance pages? Would they know that they are in the right place, based on a 7-second scan of the page? Do your entry pages have high bounce rates? What is the average time spent on the page? 3) Next-page navigation where are they going when they first hit your Website? Now that you know where visitors are entering your site and you have a sense of their motivation upon arriving at your site, take a look at where they navigate to upon their arrival. What are the most popular next pages? Look at this information while looking at the actual landing page. Are the most popular next pages the same ones you would have guessed? Are they pages linked to by prominent calls to action or embedded links placed within the active window? Or are they pages only accessible through your top or side navigation? What questions would those pages answer for the visitor? Why do you think the visitor is moving to those pages? Is that action congruent with what you ve seen of visitor motivation from their keywords/scent? After you see what those most popular next pages are, click through to them within your analytics package and see where visitors are going from that next page. If the majority of entering traffic (for a given page) is clicking through to a couple of different pages, you ll often find that visitors navigate to the remaining popular pages following their first click. You should start to see patterns forming key, or most navigated to, pages will stand out. Watch out for situations where your most persuasive content is NOT one of those most navigated pages; you can t persuade visitors with content they never see. Also, watch out for situations where one of your most navigated pages are also exit points, in those cases the visitor either lost confidence or didn t find what they were looking for.

14 4) Where (and Why) are they leaving? First, let s talk about the difference between bounce rate and exit rate. A bounce is sort of like it sounds, someone came in on a given page and left on that same page without going anywhere else on the site. Unless visitors are also converting on that same page, bouncing is bad. It means visitors are rejecting you either because you are attracting the wrong visitors, or because your landing pages are not reassuring them that they are in the right place to find what they came looking for. An exit rate simply tells you how many of the people who came to that page also left your site from that page, including both people entering the site on that page AND people navigating to that page from somewhere else on your website. Planned and unplanned exits. Some exits are good. You expect people to leave your site after buying something/filling in a lead form. Customers who log-into a registered user domain from your home page will likely show up in your analytics as a bounce. Etc. But you obviously don t want customers to leave before reaching their goal or your goal. Often you ll find visitors exiting from pages containing your conversion beacons product pages containing the add to cart button, service pages containing your lead form, etc. Or you ll see cart/form abandonment, where visitors start to convert and then back out. Take a look at time on page for the conversion beacons. Abandoning a page after a few seconds isn t the same as dropping it after a few minutes. A few seconds means it was the wrong product or service for them. Someone leaving your page after a few minutes engaged with your content and never got the answers to their questions and/or simply didn t have the confidence to buy. Take a look at the page itself, what information are you not giving them? Are you using great photos, persuasive copy, points of action assurances, risk reversals, etc. in order to instill buyer confidence? What about shipping information? Most of the exits on both this page and the cart page are caused by inadequate information and content on these conversion beacon pages. Page prior and broken scent? If you find a high exit rate page, look at the most popular entry paths to that page. Look for mismatches between expectations in moving from the prior page to the exit page. What were visitors hoping to find on that exit page and what did they actually find? Was the hyperlink misleading or was the content simply anemic? Try to figure out the Piss-Off Factor. 5) Form a hypothesis and test Completing steps 1-4 should have shown you several mismatches between what you and/or your visitor expected and wanted to happen vs. what actually happened. You should also be able to come up with some pretty good theories for why these mismatches are happening and what might fix them. Even better, you should have a strong idea about what success would look like if your tested theory proves

15 true. In other words, you know what metrics are indicating a problem, so you know what metrics you should see change. Congratulations, you ve now made your analytics actionable. Here are some further tips to help keep you going down the right path: Don t test randomly - always test with a hypothesis regarding visitor motivation/behavior. You re after insight as much as lift a negative test that gives you a better idea of what motivates your visitor is actually better for your long-term success than a positive test that provides little or no new insight. The difference between micro-conversion vs. macro-conversion. Testing a page variable that reduces bounce rate and/or moves more people to a key persuasive page may or may not immediately impact your conversion rate, as you may be moving people down a funnel that s leaking somewhere else. Or maybe you re engaging early stage buyers that won t convert for another month or so. Know when to test for micro-conversions, such as moving from one page to the next; when to test for macro-conversions, as in how much bottom-line impact this change made; and when to set-up a secondary, earlier-stage conversion, such as signing for the newsletter or downloading a white paper vs. buying or filling out a lead form. Bonus step answer their questions, manage their anxiety, stoke their imagination. When looking at a page in terms of visitor behavior and motivation, always ask yourself how well that page is answering visitor questions, how well it is re-assuring them emotionally that they are in the right place and on the right track to accomplish their goal, and finally how well it is appealing to their real desires. P.S. A quick note on how to integrate best practices into your optimization efforts. Rather than blindly testing best practices, allow your knowledge of them to help you form theories about why visitors are or are not taking a certain action. For instance, it s a best practice to place your calls to action within the active window. If your main call to action is in a side-bar and almost no visitors are taking that action, you might test moving your CTA into the active window. For some fabulous books on best practices and testing, take a look at Call to Action and Always Be Testing. Recommended Analytics Software: 1. Google Analytics Visistat - (see me if you are interested, I can provide discounted rates through a partnership with them)

16 Please contact Mark Cyphers , mark@dcwebdesigners.com to discuss any information in this document.

A Beginner s Guide to Successful Marketing

You ve got mail. A Beginner s Guide to Successful Email Marketing We believe that building successful email marketing campaigns has never been more important than it is now. But there s a problem; most