Small Business Online Marketing

The following suggestions for your website or landing page, are designed to produce more leads and sales for you, regardless of whether your business is geared towards products or services. The ideas shared can be implemented immediately with little or no cost.

Additionally, by following the design fundamentals indicated below, the extra leads and sales you enjoy will be a result of converting a greater number of the visitors from the traffic that you are already receiving.

So, the basics first:

1. Ensure your site is designed according to the theme of the products or services offered. I recommend your website design fall under the supervision of your marketing staff rather than your art department or IT department.
2. Secondly, design your site as an interactive lead generator, not a static brochure. Whether you are selling low-price or high-ticket products and/or services, it may be unlikely you’re going to convince your prospect to purchase your product and/or service during an initial visit to your site. Therefore, construct a site that will generate leads for you as well as sales. That way, you can follow up with these leads in order to turn them into customers in the future.

Depending on your business and types of clients, your prospects may visit your site, browse around, like what they see, but then leave the site. This does not mean that they did not like what they saw, just that they were not ready to take the next step in the purchasing process. So, one of the problems becomes, if you don’t have any way of capturing your visitors’ information, how are you going to ensure that they remember your company when they are ready to buy?

If the only way a prospect has to get in touch with you is a phone number or an email address, you are losing out on the ability to market to all of the prospects who aren’t quite ready to buy.

You’ve Worked Hard to Get That Traffic to Your Website – Don’t Go Wasting It!

Think of all of the activity you have put into attracting visitors to your site – you have either paid for the visitors via pay per click or advertising, or you have put in the time to perfect SEO, write articles, comment on forums etc. All of which are producing targeted traffic for you.

Think of the website as a funnel into which you pour the traffic. What happens to that traffic is entirely a function of the content of your website. You will either receive a sale, or a lead, with whom you can follow up later and hopefully turn into a customer.

So, what if you only get to interact with 5% of the total traffic to your site? How many of the other 95% of visitors could turn into leads and eventually sales? The rate at which you can convert your traffic into leads, will determine ultimately what revenue you can generate from your site.

So, how to do capture information from prospects who are just browsing? Simple really, but very few websites offer this kind of option:

Integrate different options onto your website with which your prospects can interact with you.

Some examples of the types of things you can incorporate are as follows:

1)    downloadable report

2)    downloadable coupon page

3)    design guide, portfolio

4)    instant chat help button

5)    free consultation

6)    newsletter mailing list

Anything that is of value to your prospective clients, but does not necessarily have to cost you much money is a good way of capturing further leads from your prospects.

A Real-World Example of The Power of This Simple Technique

I have been working with a small business involved in the service industry. Their particular market is super competitive. The company had a large Adwords spend of the order of $500/day – the leads that come from this were mostly emails and phone calls.

We set up a couple of different options on their website to attract visitors’ information:

1)    Schedule request form – to schedule a visit for the service company

2)    Contact us form – just to find out more information

3)    Downloadable coupon – offering their current special (norm for this industry)

We then tracked the traffic to the site over a 1 year period and obtained the following results:

The coupon download generated over 86% of all of the leads. Now, of course, if the coupon download was not on the site, this does not mean that this company would not have received a call or schedule request instead. However, it does illustrate that if you offer something of value to a prospect on your site, they will sign up for it. Now, this particular company has a database of over 2000 leads that he can market to whenever he likes, offering specials, etc.

In summary, you need to recognize that a prospect’s first visit is generally not going to result in a sale for you, but that you should still take the opportunity to capture the prospect’s information. All you need to do is incorporate a brief lead capture form upon your site and offer something of value to your prospects.

By following the steps outlined in our FREE CD and our Small Business Internet Marketing Course, you should be able to see exponential improvements to your bottom line.

To find out more, check out our free video which gives the #1 Secret to Marketing Your Small Business Online -Small Business Internet Marketing Secrets

Thanks,

Matt Whitworth
Principal Consultant
MW Strategic Marketing

832 289 3332

Email: info@mwstrategicmarketing.com

Web: www.MWStrategicMarketing.com

A frequent comment/concern I hear from small business owners who have had a website for some time, is that they don’t seem to receive many leads, calls or sales as a direct result of the site.

This is a function of many factors:

1. The amount of targeted traffic coming to the site. It is easy to get tons of hits to a webpage, but are they moderately interested in what you sell?
2. The content of the webpage – is it compelling enough to make a prospect want to take action?
3. Is there some form of low-risk offer on the page – e.g. free report download, coupon download, free consultation etc. or similar? Most sites include contact information such as phone or email, but no offer.
4. Are you tracking the results of the lead/sale generation back to the website – e.g. Google Adwords conversion stats or Google Analytics?
5. Are you following up with leads that take an action on your site, and give you their contact information? These warm prospects might not be ready to buy right now, but they are still probably in ‘decision making mode’ and will buy in the next few days/weeks. You need to make sure that they buy from you!

All of the above factors need to be working in concert with each other – think of the website lead generation system as a funnel – each part of the funnel has the ability to convert more prospects into leads/sales which gives a multiplication factor on the end result:

So, for an example business, the above internet marketing system is converting 100 web visitors into 1 actual sale.

Now, consider, if we improve the amount of traffic to our site – let’s say we can double the amount of targeted traffic – so 200 visitors/day.

Let’s also say that we create a more compelling webpage and that, as a result, we are able to convert 20% of visitors to leads.

Finally, consider if we could follow up with a more enticing offer and we were able to convert 20% of our leads into sales. Now, let’s see the end result:

So, you can see by improving each part of the system, we ended up with 8x the sales – it is not difficult to make these improvements to most businesses online marketing systems. By following the steps outlined in our FREE CD and our Small Business Internet Marketing Course, you should be able to see exponential improvements to your bottom line.

To find out more, check out our free video which gives the #1 Secret to Marketing Your Small Business Online -Small Business Internet Marketing Secrets

Thanks,

Matt Whitworth
Principal Consultant
MW Strategic Marketing

Email: info@mwstrategicmarketing.com

Web: www.MWStrategicMarketing.com

You probably already know the answer to this question – based on what you understand about the market in which your business operates. Most businesses these days need an online presence if they are to capitalize on the potential business that can be generated online.

If you are at all unsure, for a simple and quick test, do this: Go to Google, and search for a likely search term that a prospective client might use when trying to find a company such as yours. If you are a localized business such as a pizza restaurant, carpet cleaner etc., you will probably want to add your city name to the search term: ‘pizza restaurant Houston’, ‘carpet cleaning Detroit’ etc.

Take a look at the companies that come up in the search results. Pay attention to those that come up in the ‘sponsored links’ results – usually down the right hand side of the page. These companies should be known competitors to you. These companies are paying for the right to appear on the page in the positions shown. To do this, these companies are using Google Adwords to set up a pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement for their company. They pay every time someone clicks on their ad. In order to list your company in this section, you will need to set up a Google Adwords campaign. I’ll be talking in depth about Google Adwords advertising in a later post.

Now, take a look at the main body of the search page. On the top section of the page, you’ll see a map, on which are listed local businesses. Your company and your competitors should appear here. You will need to register your company with Google maps, if you have not already done so to appear in this section of the page – this is highly recommended and is free to do so.

If you are not sure if you have registered already, go to http://www.google.com/local/add/ where you can search for your business.

Example Google Search Results Screen

Below the map section are the organic listings – these are listings that Google has selected as being relevant to the search being performed. If your business is not listed here on the first page, you will need to focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – again this will be covered in more detail in a later post. If you are listed on first page, you will probably want to know how to improve your rankings on this page even further.

A good rule of thumb when considering whether a particular marketing medium is a potential goldmine for your company is whether you see your competition already advertising using this media. If you see multiple competitors using this form of marketing, the chances are you should be too.

Check out our free video which gives the #1 secret to marketing your small business online -Small Business Internet Marketing Secrets

Thanks,

Matt Whitworth
Principal Consultant
MW Strategic Marketing

Email: info@mwstrategicmarketing.com

Web: www.MWStrategicMarketing.com

Hi, my name’s Matt Whitworth and welcome to my blog.

A little background: I have over 20 year’s experience in sales and marketing all types of businesses both large and small. During the last 6 years I have worked with dozens of small to medium sized companies, assisting them with marketing their businesses on the internet.

When I first started to work with small businesses, it was quickly apparent that there is a large gap in experience for many business owners when they approach marketing their businesses on the internet.

Typical problems that small business owners face are:

• Limited budget to produce a professional looking website
• Inability to make changes to website without costing money with 3^rd party.
• Resorting to using an online web-builder to put their business on the net, with amateurish results.
• Spending $1,000’s on pay-per-click ads without generating a good ROI
• Having a poorly optimized pay-per-click campaign which eats cash
• Nowhere to be found on organic searches on Google or Yahoo
• Poorly set-up lead capture mechanisms on both websites and landing pages
• No use of autoresponder systems to perform follow-up with leads when they are received.
• No coordination of all of the above into a systematized lead and sales generating machine.

Over the years I have tested numerous systems, techniques and strategies, many of which did not live up to the expectation or the promises made on the various sales pages of the guru, or vendor concerned. Finally, after extensive trial and error and after investing 1000s of dollars, I have developed a toolbox of recommended strategies and 3^rd party applications which are consistently bringing my clients results, and more importantly, sales! Throughout this blog, I will be sharing with you the basic concepts of the various aspects of internet marketing that I consider to be crucial. For each element, I will be recommending further reading or 3^rd party tools which I personally use in my business every day.

We hope you will find this useful and we look forward to your comments as I add posts.

Check out our free video which gives the #1 secret to marketing your small business online – Small Business Internet Marketing Secrets

Thanks,

Matt Whitworth
Principal Consultant
MW Strategic Marketing

Email: info@mwstrategicmarketing.com

Web: www.MWStrategicMarketing.com