And Happy Halloween from NoSpin Marketing & my son Cole (Spidy) Ranseen

Web Site Marketing: Boiling it Down

Over the last 3 years, I’ve written a lot about web site and online marketing and worked with numerous businesses to renovate and create sites that are now effective marketing vehicles. I continue to be surprised by the lack of understanding of the basics; hence I’m going to boil it down to three essential steps:

1) Get ‘em there
2) Get ‘em to act
3) Get ‘em there again

That’s it. That’s all there is to it—if you execute on those 3 steps you’ll increase your sales in 2005.

First let’s dispel a few misconceptions:

We don’t have stuff to sell directly, and so what’s the point?
It doesn’t matter. Sure, it’s even more critical for e-commerce companies to follow the 3 steps above (and amazingly, a huge number of those don’t!), but even if you have services or products that can’t be sold by credit card online—you can still generate solid prospects for your sales pipeline.

Our current site doesn’t generate much of anything now, and so what’s the point?
Hello…??? Bad sites, by definition, simply don’t generate leads or sales—and can even detract from your business. Chances are, though, that that following Steps 1-3 will pleasantly surprise even the most adamant web site marketing doubters.

If this were doable, then my Marketing department or web site designer would be handling it, and so what’s the point?
Small minorities of web site designers or marketers have the know-how to implement Steps 1-3. They can certainly learn, and/or you can get expert help. A lot of it appears on www.nospinmarketing.com and other excellent web site marketing sites.


1) Get ‘em there

That is, get the right types of visitors to your web site in volume.

Find out if enough people type “keywords”--that are relevant to your type of business--into search engines. There are tools at Wordtracker, Overture, etc to give you this information.

Not just the words that you’d like them to type in--but rather, words that they are inclined to type in when they do searches. Put yourself in their shoes, and think about what you would use (besides your company name, product name, etc) that potential prospects would use. Also, think about other words that are related to your business that your audiences might use.

Use both “sponsored” and “non-sponsored” search engine marketing (AKA SEO or search engine optimization) to get high rankings on top search engines like Google, AskJeeves, Earthlink, AOL, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, etc. There is a dizzying array of options out there to assist in moving your site up the free (or “non-sponsored”) and pay-per-click (or “sponsored”) rankings for the right keyword searches. Here are some helpful hints, and I’m going to talk more about “link programs” next month.

Make SEO part of your Sales Funnel.

If, indeed, there are very few people that are looking for your type of stuff (highly unusual) online, then you’d probably want to minimize your investment in search and your web site and stick to other marketing initiatives.  


2) Get ‘em to act

That is, get them to trade their contact information or buy your product(s) or service(s) directly via your site.

How do we do that? Put yourself again in their shoes again. What on your site would cause you to “trade” your contact information—or even go ahead and buy? The answer: compelling information about your products and services. That can be a variety of things depending on your business. Read more. It’s a complete waste of time to get people to sites (that is spend time and money on search engine optimization) that have no compelling information

And rember that your content itself (especially in your title tags and html words) dramatically impact your search engine rankings for your best keywords.

3) Get ‘em there again

That is, keep in touch with them and get them to re-visit your site.

The huge majority of web purchases (other than relatively low price, well known brand products, etc.) are NOT impulse buys on the first visit to a new web site—especially if people have never heard of you before. Visitors to your site are looking for information, probably shopping elsewhere too--and are very likely to require multiple visits to your site. Also, they may be shopping for something but not in a purchase mode right now.  If you’ve got good site content, maybe they’ll bookmark your site, but that’s not enough.

You need to continue to remind them about you. How? A good way is quality email marketing (a topic unto itself) at least every 2-4 weeks. You can also follow-up by direct mail, phone, etc, but the advantage of good email marketing is that the emails link back to your site. Give them a reason(s) to return—and then a new reason next time.

Also, update and change your web site content on a regular basis. For most businesses, that may not be daily or even weekly, but you need to keep your overall content fresh—and continue to provide new types of compelling content—to get people coming back to your site.
 
Now is a good time to get your web site ready for 2005. If you haven’t already a good starting point is a Marketing SWOT. Free tools are available from NoSpin Marketing, and if you need help, please email me or give me a call.

Tom Ranseen, Principal
NoSpin Marketing
615.661.6042