8 Actionable Marketing Tips

January 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment


Actionable marketing is one of the key secrets to growing your business online.

By actionable marketing, I don’t mean the kind of creepy online marketing that gets you busted. I mean marketing that persuades visitors to your website to take a specific action.

Great copyrighting and design strategy should, as an example, result in visitors to your landing pages taking the action you want them to such as signing-up for a newsletter or trading their email address for a free ebook.

1. Target Your Audience

For your marketing to hit home you have to understand your audience inside and out. You need to know the demographics, their likes and dislikes, where they hang out online and where they don’t. In this way you can ensure that you or your team develop tailor-made content marketing for your audience. Giving visitors to your site exactly what they want or need will give you the very best chance of them completing the desired action whether it’s signing up to your newsletter or purchasing a product.

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3 Reasons Why Your Site Didn’t Generate a Single Lead Last Month

April 14, 2011 By 7 Comments

Business failure

Small businesses starting out on the road of online marketing rarely generate leads immediately. Experience has taught me, both personally and working with customers, that there are stacks of reasons why things aren’t working out in the early stages of your first online campaign.

The Good

You’ve not posted a single thing on your blog, engaged in social media channels because you’re hiding away working on an ebook and that’s taking precedence because once it’s finished you’ll be able to market it.

It’s a really cogent piece of work, offering lots of valuable insight and well-designed. Also, it should be finished the week after next and you’re concentrating all your efforts on this.

Once it’s finished you know you’ll really have something special to drive people to your website and generate leads.

You realise there’s no point in having traffic to your site without anything that will convince people to get in touch about your services.

The Bad

You’ve spent way to much time on Twitter and Facebook trying to build a following without investing anytime in content creation on your business blog.

Although social media is great for banter, networking and idle chit-chat – oh yeah, and customer service – it doesn’t build trust like the way a well-developed website / ebook / white paper, etc, does.

Once you’ve got the pillar content on your site (i.e. kick-ass resources) that benefit potential customers, it will be time to focus more on using social media to get people to your site. Wait a while before going hell for leather on social media. A trickle of participation will do whilst your developing other stuff in your valuable time. [Read more...]

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7 Reasons Why Your Website Doesn’t Generate Leads

April 5, 2011 By 9 Comments

Lead GenerationIf your B2B website isn’t generating enough leads every month you could be in trouble. But instead of panicking, take a critical eye and scrutinize your online marketing tactics.

Any of this sound familiar?

1) You’ve not bothered to create a digital product
If you haven’t got an eBook, a white paper, a video training product or a podcast for your visitors to benefit from, it’s likely you’re not doing enough to demonstrate just how trustworthy, knowledgeable or helpful you are. Customers like to know who they’re buying from and digital products given away for free go a long way to overcome this. I use a podcast to give a sense of who I am and what I know. Since introducing it to my marketing mix leads have gone up over 50 percent.

2) Your website is ugly
If you’re working with a generic WordPress theme that everyone recognizes – even if you’ve added a custom header – the likelihood is that you’re not standing out from the crowd. Lots of small businesses take this approach, trying to tweak a free or premium theme. Unfortunately, all this does is undermine a visitors confidence in your business. Maybe you could have got away with it five years ago, but now having a good website is what having an ad in the Yellow Pages was twenty five years ago. Necessary! Swallow your pride and invest in a decent custom theme or template – even if you have to eat lentil soup for a fortnight.

3) You never vary your content
Similar to 1), you need to be creating a variety of content on your site. If you look at your analytics you’ll probably see that 60-70 percent of your daily traffic is first time visitors. Some of those will respond to text, others to video, a few to audio. Are you doing enough on a weekly basis to “speak” to the different tastes of your visitors. Oh, and you do have Google Analytics don’t you? [Read more...]

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PDFs are Killing Your Online Sales

March 8, 2011 By 2 Comments

Don’t let a PDF brochure that prospective customers download from your website be the main presentation of your services or products.

I came up against this whilst auditing a site for a customer recently and figured I better mention this here as it can cause you serious problems. As in drastically limited sales!

A PD What?

Not everyone knows what a PDF is. Moreover, not everyone can find one once it’s downloaded. My father, who is well into his 70s, for instance knows all about Adobe Reader and how important it is to read a PDF on his computer. Trouble is, he often can’t find something he’s downloaded. He, like many seniors, then goes back to Google and finds a site that tells him what he wants to know without downloading anything.

Guess who makes the sale?

Don’t Make it Hard to Buy

Perhaps the worst thing about a PDF brochure, both within B2B or B2C, is that often they don’t contain links. Or to put it another way, why are you expecting your client to spend a few seconds (minutes?) downloading a file, locating it, opening it, skimming through it; then finding the product they want, then manually going back to their browser and finally clicking order or contact.

Duh!

If you’re going to use a PDF, at least be sure to include clearly marked hyperlinks in your copy so that people just have to click to get back to the conversion page on your site.

Even Better, Do This!

Kick PDF brochures into touch. Don’t bother with them. Sure, a PDF can be for an Ebook or advice you want to share. Even document templates

But in B2B and B2C sales, where you’re showing your product and then hoping to funnel the prospect to the purchase, forget about the PDF. Instead, put everything in good old-fashioned html and make it available in the browser.

Jontus Media can help

If you’d like to know more about how to improve online conversion rates for your website, why not get in touch?

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Why Your Web Designer is Ruining Your Business

February 25, 2011 By 8 Comments

As I said in yesterday’s video, I’ve been thinking about Landing Pages most of this week. The kind of page that encourages you to book an appointment, purchase a product, elicit leads for follow up or requests for more information about your services.

My concern comes from the many small businesses, in particular, that I talk to who just don’t get how important this kind of page is.

Is your funnel smoking?

Case Study

A friend worked hard to increase their overall traffic to their site. They’ve done well in a relatively short period of time, increasing unique visitors to the site by 60 percent since the autumn. They’ve achieve this primarily through content marketing: three blog posts per week, a daily presence on Twitter and the launch of a weekly podcast.

In spite of the significant increase of traffic only just under 4 percent of overall visitors are making it to the landing page – a page where the business is selling a worthwhile and extremely professionally put together product.

Although I don’t know the exact figure, I do know that conversion on the landing page itself is also poor and the business owner is beginning to wonder whether the whole venture is worth it.

Shoot the Designer

My instinctive response to this having seen the site, even though I’m not a designer myself (the other guys handle that!) is that although it’s very nice to look at with some great branding it so doesn’t work hard enough to make a sale.

The key problems are as follows:

  1. There’s no clear channel for visitors to homepage to get to the landing page. Sure, it’s there. But you need eagle eyes to spot it.
  2. The call-to-action on the homepage, despite being above the fold and smack in the middle of the screen, doesn’t have a link to the landing page! The link is one a button “hidden” underneath the call out image (Buscall exits to bash himself over the head in astonishment!)
  3. When / If you get to the landing page itself, the page doesn’t work hard enough to convince you to make the purchase. The call-out for the sale comes as a jolt immediately after you arrive on the page, without building any trust or persuading you why you need the product. You don’t even get to “see” or “demo” the product.

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Filed Under: design, marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

Are Facebook Pages Worth It?

December 9, 2010 By 25 Comments

I‘m increasingly unconvinced that Facebook is the right place for B2Bs. Especially small-medium sized businesses.

A bit bored actually

It’s purely anecdotal, I know, but I just don’t see community interaction on bazillions of pages. I don’t see (much) engagement, communication or involvement.

Sure, there are plenty of exceptions to the rule. I’ve even talked about the über-smart Gini Dietrich’s Arment Dietrich page as a successful case in point. But so many places I look there is just dross. Utterly banal blah blah blah.

Back to the Blog

There’s been so much pro-Facebook waffle in 2010 that a lot of people have forgotten just how engaging blogs can be from a business perspective. Gini’s blog, Spin Sucks has oodles of community engagement as does my friend Mark Schaefer‘s. In fact, the comments and discussion that goes on at these blogs do as much to promote each company as a Facebook Page would.

Of course, you could argue that they don’t get the general exposure that a Facebook Wall post can lead to. But again, Dr Skepticism rears his ugly head again in me and I can’t help wondering how much lead generation and ultimately sales this leads to. Or is it just about improving your brand recognition? Image?

So OK. I’m asking you guys to comment here!

Mark: Just why doesn’t Schaefer Marketing Solutions have a Facebook Page?
And Gini: What does Facebook give you that Spin Sucks doesn’t?
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