Peter James – WSI Digital Marketing Consultant

Does your website generate business for you?  Does it pay its way by return on your investment in the form of additional customers, revenue and profits?

If your answers to these questions are both yes then that’s excellent.

However, if your website isn’t working for your business then you need to think why.  Is it shy and so doesn’t get many visitors?  Is it lazy because it’s not converting visitors into paying customers?  Is it both shy and lazy?

Maybe your website is shy and lazy because you’re not taking enough care of it.  You need to love your website.

Your website is a business investment.  It should be giving you an excellent return on that investment.  If it’s not then here are the most likely reasons why…

1. Potential customers aren’t finding it when they search for the products or services that you supply.
2. When potential customers find it on a search engine results page they don’t find the description compelling enough to click through.
3. When potential customers visit your site they don’t find what they’re looking for and go straight back to the search page.
4. Potential customers aren’t compelled to buy online or contact you.

I see these problems time and time again with my potential customers.  Fortunately for them, I know how to fix these problems but it seems like most website designers and SEO specialists don’t.

It’s not enough to simply employ a web designer to create a website and then just sit back.  You have to understand what your customers want and make sure the website gives it to them and gives them compelling reasons to buy from you.

Also, it’s not enough to simply employ an SEO company to get you good rankings in Google for some random keywords.  You have to rank in those search terms that your customers are using.  When you appear in search results the description must be compelling enough for the searchers to take that next step and visit your site.

In addition to developing new websites, a lot of the work I do is in analysing, optimising and promoting existing websites.  Often, the websites I look at have been beautifully designed but aren’t working for their business because they’re either not drawing in enough visitors or not converting enough of those visitors into customers (or both).

Good Web Design is Not Enough for Search Engine Optimisation

A good web designer will build a brilliant looking website but, in my experience, they are rarely able to optimise the website for search engines and don’t pay enough attention to calls to action for converting visitors into customers.  Optimisation is specialist work that requires special skills, experience and tools.

How an Internet Marketing Consultant Can Help Your Website

Here are the sorts of things an Internet Marketing Consultant can do for your website and your business.

Competitive Analysis

1. Conduct a full analysis of your website and your competitors’ websites to see how you rank against the competition.
2. Identify the most popular search terms used by those searching for your products and services.
3. Determine the most effective keywords to help you rise above your competition.

Search Optimisation

1. Provide instructions to your web developer on how to deploy the selected keywords in content, titles, URLs, headings, link names and alternative text.
2. Ensure that page descriptions are compelling so that they draw in visitors when they appear in search results.
3. Provide instructions to your web developer on how to improve visitor conversion.
4. Review the changes made and ensure that Analytics are set up to monitor performance.

Website Promotion

1. Use directory listings, social bookmarks and article marketing to provide valuable inward links to your website.
2. Where appropriate use online PR to build high value links to your website.
3. Use social media (e.g. Linked-in, Twitter and Facebook) to further improve your online presence.

 How Your Optimised Website Will Help Your Business

With your website optimised for the search keywords, Google will properly index it and give it a better ranking in searches.  The online promotion will build inward links and further improve rankings.  The compelling descriptions will draw visitors to your site.  The conversion improvements will help turn more of those visitors into customers.

When you do digital marketing it’s important that you do the right things to make it cost effective and to gain the maximum return on investment.  This article contains some hints and tips to help you get the best from your time and money spent on digital marketing.

Know Your Audience

You should understand your audience: visitors, customer and prospects.  You must know their needs for information and education on the areas in which you provide products and services.  You need to understand the factors which will determine whether they will buy from you, from your compeitors or not at all.

Provide Valuable Content

From your knowledge of your audience you should craft content which is of value to them (not just sales blurb).  Distribute this content over your marketing channels (website, email marketing, mobile marketing and social media).

Make Yourself Easy to Find

Use search engine optimisation, search advertising, display advertising, social media presence, mobile marketing, directories, articles and press releases to make people aware of how your products and services can help them and to draw them to your website.

Make Sure They Convert

Make sure your website is designed to convert visitors into buyers.  Don’t distract visitors from your preferred conversion funnel.

Test & Measure Incrementally

Know what your goals are and how you can measure against them.  Test everything.  Use analytics to monitor performance and tune your marketing.

I’ve written quite a bit about how to make websites work  in two previous posts (http://wsidigitaladvantage.com/2010/11/28/successful-marketing-just-do-three-things and http://wsidigitaladvantage.com/2010/12/14/is-your-website-lonely/).  Now, I’m going to write about some of the reasons that websites don’t work properly for their businesses.

One of the things I do is analyse websites using the Webscan tool (http://wsidigitaladvantage.com/services/webscan/).  This helps me determine how well a website is working for a business and what needs to be done to improve it. 

To work properly, a website needs to attract and retain visitors.  It also needs to support the conversion of those visitors into customers.  If it doesn’t do those things then it’s not working properly.

Here are the top 5 reasons I’ve found for a website not working properly for it’s business.

1. Lack of Analytics – if you don’t know how many visitors you’re getting, where they’re coming from, how they found you and what pages they visit then how can you manage your marketing?
2. Poor or Missing Titles, Headings and Descriptions – these help search engines to index you against your desired keywords and they also help visitors.
3. Content Not Regularly Updated – everybody likes fresh content, especially search engines.  Your content should be compelling enough to attract and retain visitors.
4. Lack of Inward Links – these help visitors to find you and also improve search engine rankings.  Links from social media are particularly good.  Remember to verify and develop your free Google Places listing as this is a great directory link.
5. Website not Optimised for Conversion – your website should encourage your visitors to do what you need them to do (buy, contact, download etc).  The way for them to do this should be clear, easy and free from distractions.

If you sort these problems out then your website is going to have more visitors and convert more of those visitors into customers.

In my last post I talked about how digital marketing can really help small and medium sized companies punch above their weight because of its cost effectiveness, reach and measurability. 

In this, and my next few posts, I’m going to give some practical tips on how to exploit digital marketing.  I’ve written quite a bit about websites in previous posts (http://wsidigitaladvantage.com/2010/11/28/successful-marketing-just-do-three-things and http://wsidigitaladvantage.com/2010/12/14/is-your-website-lonely/), so I’m going to start with Email Marketing.

Email marketing is a great way to build and maintain a relationship with both existing customers and prospective customers.  The key things to do in order for it to be successful are…

1. Build and maintain a contact database
2. Use a good email marketing solution
3. Make sure your messages are valuable to your audience
4. Integrate with other channels

Build and maintain a contact database

The most valuable contacts for your database are existing customers followed by existing prospects.  Add in new contacts whenever you have an appropriate exchange.  Make sure your website allows visitors to join your contact list. 

You can also buy contacts from marketing database companies.  Make sure you pick a reputable supplier and that contacts have opted in and have been screened against ‘do not call lists’. 

Make sure that you only buy contacts with proper named email addresses (i.e. don’t take contacts with generic addresses such as sales@ or marketing@). 

It’s best to purchase full contact data with telephone numbers and addresses as well so that you can use them for telemarketing and direct mail campaigns as well.

Make sure that all your emails contain a link for contacts to opt out of receiving further emails from you.

Use a good email marketing solution

Never send from a normal email client such as outlook.  Using a platform like WSI’s DM Pro gives you huge advantages…

• Tools to build and format your emails so that they look professional and match your branding
• A good contact database that allows you to record loads of details about your contacts, to create new attributes to suite your marketing and to segment your contacts as you wish
• Facilities to help stop you getting blacklisted and blocked for spamming
• Tools to track and report on email deliveries, opens and click-throughs

Make sure your messages are valuable to your audience

Don’t send pure sales stuff.  Make sure that the content of your marketing is interesting, informative, useful or entertaining for your audience.  Targeted offers can also be valuable to your audience.

Integrate with other channels

Don’t just do email marketing in isolation.  View it as part of your overall strategy along with your website, social media and other channels.

They say ‘content is king’.  I disagree, I think that’s an understatement.  Content is also queen, the entire royal family and just about everything!

If you don’t have great content, all your online marketing efforts are crippled.

If you have great content then people will come to your site and read your emails.  If you don’t, then they won’t.  It’s as simple as that!

To attract people to your site and to get them to pay attention to your marketing you need to give them content that they find of value.  It could be information or it could be entertainment; it doesn’t matter, but it has to be something they want and will keep on coming back for.

Also, your content has got to reflect and support your brand and values (as does the rest of your marketing).

Reflect upon the advertising campaigns that have had the greatest impression on you.  I’ll bet that humour features highly in many of them along with recognisable, consistent characters.  That’s what great content is about.

The media world is now realising that content is replacing advertising.  It’s no longer good enough just to send out sales information.

So, next time you update your website or send out a marketing email just think ‘will this be of value to my audience?’  It might be entertaining or informative but it has to have something in it for them; something to make it worth their while to read it.  If they like it then it’s odds on they’ll begin to like you and they’ll keep on coming back.

Some marketing related quotes, ideas, facts and examples that I picked up from MediaPro Expo 2010 in London last week…

1. Walkers have 1.5 Million registered consumers.
2. Content must be relevant and wanted by consumers.
3. Don’t look at mobile or digital marketing in isolation; think about it as a holistic journey for the customer.
4. NFC (Near Field Communications) will be the next big thing.
5. Smart Phone penetration will reach 70% in 2 years.
6. Will email, as we know it, die?  I’ll do a future blog entry about my thoughts on this.
7. Let your values drive your digital/social marketing strategy.
8. Always question lazy assumptions about your customers’ behaviour and thoughtfully create/target your marketing.
9. A US eCommerce site made a $50 change to their checkout process which resulted in a $200M increase in sales.  Small changes in process can lead to big changes in customer behaviour/conversion.
10. A European car manufacturer’s UK operation found that a €3,000 increase in trade-in resulted in more sales than a €3,000 discount.
11. Close to the point of buying decison, channel decision trumps any other decision.
12. It’s best to offer a choice of channels (e.g. email or phone contact) rather than just one as this results in more conversions.
13. Creating a new channel will generally result in an increase in sales.
14. We are going to see a decline in traditional push advertising.
15. Digital isn’t coming – it’s here!
16. We’re going to be dealing in content – not advertising.
17. There is value in branded content.
18. Ideas are only BIG if they’re OPEN.
19. We all have to be open to change.
20. If you don’t have great content then people won’t want to engage with you.
21. Barclaycard Waterslide Campaign
    • 1 Million YouTube views
    • 2 Million Competition Views
    • 16 Million Game App Downloads
22. Google indexes social content aggresively because it changes so quickly.
23. 24% of $500M+ companies are piloting or implementing a community platform with another 31% planning to pilot in the next 12 months.
24. You must be part of social media conversations about your company.
25. An iPhone App Event Guide was created for MediaPro with seminar schedules, exhibitor details, floor plan and other stuff.  Tactical iPhone/Android apps could well become a great marketing tool.  This wil be the subject of a future blog.