Advertising? Forget It. Word of Mouth Reigns!

Marketing No Comments

Nielsen marketing researchers conducted a global survey recently to find out which of the advertising platforms in use today, including new media technologies, are most trusted by consumers. Since marketers have increasingly powerful tools they can utilize to reach the consumer, why not get a reading on how they are performing? Even more importantly, why not measure consumer trust in various forms of advertising media?

Nielsen does just that, twice per year, among 26,000+ consumers in 47 global consumer markets. The company’s research is well-compiled within a new and concise report, and I urge marketers to read it since Nielsen is willing to share this valuable information.

What emerged from the survey was very revealing: while traditional media still makes its mark on consumers, the most powerful determinant behind purchasing decisions for a whopping 78% of respondents is word of mouth.

Yes. Recommendations from trusted sources, such as family members and friends, carries the most weight with consumers. And while WOM and all forms of advertising media impact vary from region to region, and country to country, the aggregate totals are very telling. By the way, the report also takes pains to break down the information further, by continent and even by country.

Another important fact emerges, also: new Internet-based media platforms may still lag behind traditional advertising media, but the gap is narrowing. However, respondents clearly show that traditional advertising still retains consumer trust.

Here are the aggregate rankings among the 13 advertising categories consumers were polled about:
1. Word of mouth recommendations, 78%
2. Newspaper advertising, 63%
3. Consumer opinions posted online, 61%
4. Brand websites, 60%
5. Magazines, 56%
6. Television, 56%
7. Radio, 54%
8. E-mail, 49%
9. Brand sponsorships, 49%
10. Ads before movies, 38%
11. Search engine ads, 34%
12. Online banner ads, 26%
13. Mobile phone text ads, 18%

The most compelling statements in the report were these by David McCallum, Nielsen’s Customized Services’ global managing director, when he stated: “Furthermore, given that nothing travels faster than bad news—with estimates that reports of bad experiences outnumber good service reports by as many as 5:1—the importance of responsive, high quality customer service is yet again highlighted.”

Proof once again that advertising efforts all combine to get the consumer’s attention, but WOM, good or bad, has the power to sway and influence in a far deeper way.

So, how important is it to engage the consumer, and to deliver consistently good experiences? It might be as important as brand and corporate survival in an increasingly competitive marketplace. . . one in which consumers are increasingly exchanging information with each other.

Main10: Comprehensive Internet Marketing

Marketing No Comments

 

main10.pngMain10 is a comprehensive web development, management, and marketing company with services tailored to provide you with everything you need to turn your web presence into a powerful marketing or commerce vehicle. Marketing on the Internet encompasses a wide range of features, and trying to coordinate them all through different companies can be challenging even in the best of times. At Main10, however, they’ve collected all these services under one roof, so now the same people working on your web design are the same people developing your SEO strategies, tracking your progress, and developing any special applications you might require.

Marketing on the Internet is about making yourself available to the countless potential customers who are already searching for you. They’re out there. They just need a way to find you. And since most Internet users never look past the first three pages of search results, the key is to build search engine rankings and position your site where it can easily be found. There are a couple methods that can help you achieve these rankings, and each has its benefits and drawbacks.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of building those rankings and appearing on the first few pages of natural search results. The benefits are that most Internet users tend to trust natural results more than paid results, and it is a non-intrusive way to get noticed since the people who see your site were already looking for what you offer. The downside is that the SEO process can take time, often months, before you start seeing results. It requires patience. But with the right strategy, the right keywords, and the right marketing company, you can reach those high rankings where your customers can find you.

Now compare that to Pay-Per-Click (PPC), which is a different process entirely. In fact, PPC is less a process and more an event. The upside of PPC is that you can use it to get noticed immediately for your chosen keywords. The downside is that it can end up costing you a lot. Maybe too much. You’ll need an Internet marketing company that can run your PPC campaign and make sure that your ROI is right where it should be.

Web marketing – PPC and SEO – can open the door for your potential clients, but that alone isn’t enough to turn a casual visitor into a paying customer. There are still things that need to be done.

You also need to consider your web management, which includes making sure that the structure, usability, and aesthetics of your website all work together to present a professional site that will guide customers to the actions you’d like them to take. The entire system must be carefully managed so that all your hardware and software work together properly.

But now that all that’s in place, what is really happening on your website? Web management must also include extensive analytics, tracking, and reporting. With the right information you can see exactly where your visitors are coming from and how they behave once they get to your site. At Main10 they can eliminate the guess work and make website improvements based on real data.

But Main10 can do more than just develop a pretty website. They can develop any of the various applications or database programs you might need to power your website or add convenience for your customers. At Main10 they can create highly technical and highly specific backend support for your business.

Now imagine trying to get a marketing company, a separate management firm, and any number of different developers to work smoothly together. The developers always want to do certain things while the marketers want to do something else, and the web managers have agendas that don’t match up with anyone. Running a business is hard enough without the added problems of coordinating between so many companies.

Main10 eliminates that problem and pulls all those services together. The Internet is a wide open marketplace, and the comprehensive solutions offered by Main10 can help you be part of it.

 

Main10 is an industry partner of WebSTAT LLC. If you are interested in any of their products or services, please visit their website at http://www.main10.com/webstat/.

Disruptive Innovation

Marketing No Comments

Recently, while visiting clients and prospects in

Europe, Robert Austin, PhD. introduced me to the term, “Disruptive Technology or Innovation.”  This term was used to describe NextSTAT and the effect that this product is having in the web analytics market place.  I decided to look up the term and this is what I found in Wikipedia. A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is a technological innovation, product, or service that eventually overturns the existing dominant technology or status quo product in the market. Disruptive innovations can be broadly classified into lower-end and new-market disruptive innovations. A new-market disruptive innovation is often aimed at non-consumption, whereas a lower-end disruptive innovation is aimed at mainstream customers who were ignored by established companies. Sometimes, a disruptive technology comes to dominate an existing market by either filling a role in a new market that the older technology could not fill (as more expensive, lower capacity but smaller-sized hard disks did for newly developed notebook computers in the 1980s) or by successively moving up-market through performance improvements until finally displacing the market incumbents (as digital photography has begun to replace film photography).The concept shares many similarities with biological evolution.By contrast, “sustaining technology or innovation” improves product performance of established products. Sustaining technologies are often incremental; however, they can also be radical or discontinuous.

The term disruptive technology was coined by Clayton M. Christensen and introduced in his 1995 article Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave, which he coauthored with Joseph Bower. He describes the term further in his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. In his sequel, The Innovator’s Solution, Christensen replaced disruptive technology with the term disruptive innovation because he recognized that few technologies are intrinsically disruptive or sustaining in character. It is the strategy or business model that the technology enables that creates the disruptive impact. The concept of disruptive technology continues a long tradition of the identification of radical technical change in the study of innovation by economists, and the development of tools for its management at a firm or policy level.

Christensen distinguishes between “low-end disruption” which targets customers who do not need the full performance valued by customers at the high-end of the market and “new-market disruption” which targets customers who could previously not be served profitably by the incumbent.

“Low-end disruption” occurs when the rate at which products improve exceeds the rate at which customers can adopt the new performance. Therefore, at some point the performance of the product overshoots the needs of certain customer segments. At this point, a disruptive technology may enter the market and provide a product which has lower performance than the incumbent but which exceeds the requirements of certain segments, thereby gaining a foothold in the market.

How low-end disruption occurs over time.

In low-end disruption, the disruptor is focused initially on serving the least profitable customer, who is happy with a good enough product. This type of customer is not willing to pay premium for enhancements in product functionality. Once the disruptor has gained foothold in this customer segment, it seeks to improve its profit margin. To get higher profit margins, the disruptor needs to enter the segment where the customer is willing to pay a little more for higher quality. To ensure this quality in its product, the disruptor needs to innovate. The incumbent will not do much to retain its share in a not so profitable segment, and will move up-market and focus on its more attractive customers. After a number of such encounters, the incumbent is squeezed into smaller markets than it was previously serving. And then finally the disruptive technology meets the demands of the most profitable segment and drives the established company out of the market.

“New market disruption” occurs when a product that is inferior by most measures of performance fits a new or emerging market segment. The Linux operating system (OS) when introduced was inferior in performance to other server operating systems like Unix and Windows NT. But the Linux OS distributed through Red Hat is supposed to be inexpensive compared to other server operating systems. After years of improvements in this easily available operating system, the functionality has improved so much that it threatens to displace the leading commercial UNIX distributions.

Not all disruptive technologies are of lower performance. There are several examples where the disruptive technology outperforms the existing technology but is not adopted by existing majors in the market. This situation occurs in industries with a high investment into the older technology. To move to the new technology, an existing player not only must invest in it but also must replace (and perhaps dispose of at high cost) the older infrastructure. It may simply be the most cost effective for the existing player to “milk” the current investment during its decline - mostly by insufficient maintenance and lack of progressive improvement to maintain the long-term utility of the existing facilities. A new player is not faced with such a balancing act.

We wish to thank Robert Austin, PhD. of  Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman for his insight.

There is no longer a place for an online presence that falls short of customer expectations

Marketing No Comments

In today’s world where the web is the heart of your business you must have a means to evaluate the metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPI)   that impact customer experience, regulatory compliance, brand awareness and marketing effectiveness.  Let’s face it, how many times have you visited a site and found a broken link?  In addition to this you must be able to compare your web quality and performance versus the websites of your competitors. The days of a simple brochure-ware site that is put together quickly and maintained easily is history.   Successful enterprises must have a comprehensive web presence consisting of:

  • Many growing interlinked sites covering individual countries, markets, products or audiences.
  • A reliance on 3rd parties in design, deployment, content creation, feeds, hosting, linking, etc.
  • A complex technical environment. RSS, Blogs, Flash, payment systems, personalization etc.
  • Ever-rising user expectation, fueled by small entrants and heavy hitters.

Companies are spending millions of dollars, building, delivering and managing…and then promoting their web presence.  This is the key battleground in the fight for market share.   Yet we all have visited websites, experienced difficulties and been frustrated by poor quality.   In general, we leave these sites for a competitor that is a click away.  This affects sales, investors, media—everyone!There is no longer a place for an online presence that falls short of customer expectations.  Everyday we see sites that fail web standards, fail legal requirements, and expose the business to reputational risk.  A poor quality sites costs sales, undermines brand value and reduces investor confidence.

Why do websites fall short?

  • Lack of clearly defined and reportable standards
  • Reliance on 3rd party content and services
  • Failure to thoroughly test
  • “Glitz” spending instead of core investment

How do you solve this problem?  You must develop a specific plan, based on the quality, performance, and compliance (web, brand, corporate and regulatory) standards you have set and then prioritize the corrective action required.  A good plan or service can help you identify the problem in detail right down to the line of code.

The benefits of doing this are enormous.

  • Reduced delivery lead times, so you can come to the market faster
  • Reduced maintenance time and cost so you are more flexible and efficient
  • Improved website perform\ance and lower site infrastructure costs from better code
  • Improved platform security and control of content.

The bottom line is improved user experience from using consistent user-oriented standards and reduced legal risk due to compliance failings.  This means happier customers and more money in your company coffers.

Getting to Know

Marketing No Comments

I have often been impressed by the commitment that companies are making towards getting to know their customers and visitors.  Organizations are spending oodles of money on Aesthetics, Analytics, SEO and Paid Listings Management and yet totally ignoring their first line of introduction…employees who meet the public.  It is easy to forget who are company is to our customers.   I am often reminded of the example of a company such as Lab Corp.  They are a sophisticated clinical laboratory.  Thy have a wonderful website, hundreds of medical research professionals, a strong customer service staff and excellent marketing.  If you have had a blood test recently, there is a good chance that the sample went to Lab Corp.  So who is Lab Corp?  Their customer is really the physician practice that orders the lab test.  To their customer Lab  Corp is the courier that picks up the samples and delivers supplies.  These people should be cleanly dressed, polite and knowledgeable.   To the customer they ARE the company!

You are probably wondering where I am going with this?   Well, in the last couple of weeks I have seen bad examples of company representatives.   One day I was driving on the highway to a major city.  The traffic was awful and tempers were rising.  I noticed a truck weaving in and out of the HOV lane.  Not only was it illegal it was extremely dangerous.  It was a truck that would be familiar to anyone who buys anything.  When people honked at the driver he flipped them off.   Did I mention that his company name and website was clearly painted on his truck?   That morning several thousand potential customers got a new impression of his company!!!!!  By-the-way, so did the police officer who pulled him over and put him in handcuffs.  People actually cheered as they drove by.  That cost the company tens of thousands of dollars that morning…not including the traffic ticket.

The next example took place on the phone.  I received a bill from the “phone” company.  I had changed some services and there was a mistake on the bill.  I was actually charged three times for one item.  I called the “800” number and was directed to customer service.  Customer service passed me on the accounts receivable where they stated that the customer service person did everything wrong.  I was to pay the bill in full and they would credit me for the overpayment on future invoices.  If I just paid what was owed, their “system” might charge me a late fee each month until it was correctly adjusted.   Of course this would be reported to the credit bureau as well.  Gee, you would think they were the only phone company in town.  I don’t care how nice their websites are!  How many customers would not look for an alternative to their services?

The other morning on the way to the office I stopped at a convenience store for a snack.  While waiting in line at the cash register the two guys in front of me were wearing shirts from a company that we do business with.  Their shirts were torn and dirty and so were their jeans.  It appeared that they hadn’t been close to a shower for several days.  If dirty and smelly were not enough they were both talking on their cell phones and complaining to each other about a customer they had to go visit.  The customer was around the corner so I am sure that someone from that company was in line as well.  To top it off their language was full of “F-Bombs” and there were several young children in line as well.  You can’t buy negative marketing like this.

OK, I’ve vented!  The point is that you don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression.  You can spend $millions on web marketing and throw it all away because you forgot who you are to your customer.  Someone needs to take the charter of becoming the Director of First Impressions in these and your companies.  A few years ago I was involved in a Six Sigma Black Belt project for a computer company.  In this project we had to define each customer touch point.  You don’t need a Six Sigma initiative for this.  Take a look at who your customer sees first or most often in your organization.  You will be surprised.  It is not the sales force or even customer service.  It could be your receptionist, operator, elevator operator, truck driver or even the delivery company.

SpamSmack

Marketing No Comments

logo.gif SpamSmack - more than your average Spam Solution.

Wasatch Technology Group, a Springville, Utah-based technology firm, is proud to announce the release of its all-in-one spam solution, SpamSmack™.

Spam is fast reaching epidemic levels. A recent study estimated that nearly two of every three email messages are spam – and that includes results from companies that take proactive steps to combat spam.

Viruses and spyware are routinely transmitted through spam emails, which can compromise your network. Many spam messages contain graphics and pictures, which can increase your bandwidth usage – which directly impacts your bottom line.

The California legislature estimated that in the U.S. alone, the costs levied against businesses reached over $10 Billion dollars in 2004, which included the lost time, manpower, and additional equipment and software to combat the growing problem. In 2006, spam traffic nearly doubled from the fiscal year 2005.

Current data estimates that the cost to U.S. businesses alone will be upwards of $70 Billion Dollars in 2007, or a cost of nearly $712 dollars per employee, per year.

The bottom line? Spam messages are costing your company time, productivity, resources and most importantly, money.

What is the solution to this growing problem, you ask?

SpamSmack™, from Wasatch Technology Group.

On a technical level, SpamSmack™ is a hosted “Scan and Forward” email filtering service that leverages 26 distinct layers of defense to shield your company email from spam, viruses, spoofing, phishing, and spyware attacks.

To identify unknown and new spam, SpamSmack™ uses a powerful, predictive technology which incorporates thousands of heuristics rules, Bayesian learning, smart signatures, fuzzy fingerprinting, dynamic header analysis, and optical scanning of images. SpamSmack™ learns from each message it sees, evolving and updating in real-time to actively protect against the latest spam techniques while providing leading filtering accuracy to virtually eliminate false positives. Because updates are handled continuously, SpamSmack™ evolves as fast as the threats to ensure the latest spam and virus protection.

Also incorporating the tried-and-true system of black and white listing, SpamSmack™ allows your protection from spam to be completely customizable. Best of all, SpamSmack™ is compatible with all email servers across all operating systems and platforms, so you can continue to use your preferred email server while we handle the spam.

On a non-technical level, SpamSmack™ means fast and accurate filtering that catches over 99% of incoming spam email. With no changes necessary to existing email systems, implementation of SpamSmack™ is fast and easy. The SpamSmack™ service requires no expensive hardware to buy, no messy network setup or unwieldy software to install - you can literally be up and running in five minutes or less.

SpamSmack™ is ideal for small and large enterprises alike. You don’t have to be an IT guru or a systems administrator to use SpamSmack™ - once activated, a clean and intuitive administrative interface allows customization of the filtering technology to meet the needs of any organization.

With spam protection starting at $22.50/month for up to 10 email addresses, you can’t afford to let this problem continue to plague your organization.

Please visit spamsmack.com for more information, and sign up for your free 1-month trial.

AFFILIATES: SpamSmack is currently recruiting affiliate vendors and resellers. Please visit www.spamsmack.com for more information.

Web Marketing

Marketing No Comments

webmark.jpgWeb Marketing…Why do we do it? It is all about getting into the mind of the prospect!

“In the book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” The authors, Al Ries and Jack Trout stated:
“The easy way to get into a person’s mind is to be first. You can demonstrate the validity of this principle by asking yourself a few simple questions.”

What’s the name of the first person to fly solo across the North Atlantic? Charles Lindbergh, right? Now, what’s the name of the second person to fly solo across the North Atlantic?

What’s the name of the first person to walk on the moon? Neil Armstrong, of course. What’s the name of the second?

What’s the name of the highest mountains in the world? Mount Everest in the Himalayas, right? What’s the name of the second highest mountains in the world?

“The first person, the first mountain, the first company to occupy the position in the mind is going to be awfully hard to dislodge.” This doesn’t mean if you entered the market later that someone else you are doomed. We live in a dramatically over communicated society. For a company to succeed today you must create a position in the mind of your prospects. This position should demonstrate your strengths and weaknesses and those of your competition. For you old timers (like me) and history buffs, Sperry Rand invented the computer…Not IBM. However IBM was the first company to build a computer position in the mind of the prospect. Now it is your turn! How can you take your products and services and etch them into the minds of your customers?

My wife and I got a couple of Yellow Labs a couple of years ago. We met with them every day from the day they were born to the day we took them home. To these dogs their mother is my wife. We have even had “puppy reunions’ and they would rather be around us than their natural parents. It is this kind of imprinting that we need to do with our prospects and customers.

To do this imprinting we need to know our prospects and they need to know us. This is what web marketing is all about.

Lead Response Management—The Next Frontier in Internet Marketing

Marketing, Web Marketing No Comments

gloss_phone.jpgQUESTION: What do you do with leads once you have generated them?

This important question is overlooked by almost everyone. It is almost always the cause of failure in what would otherwise be powerful web marketing campaigns. But the obvious answer is easier said than done:

ANSWER: You respond to them immediately and often to qualify them into prospects.

Many organizations spend lots of money each month with MSN, Yahoo and especially Google to lure visitors to their website. These same companies invest significant amounts up front in building beautiful web sites to attract clicks. They even use analytical or testing tools like WebSTAT, WebTrends or Omniture to analyze how to turn these clicks to leads.

The issue comes when they let those leads sit in the sales managers’ inbox for 48 to 72 hours. This is still the average response time to leads.

Leads are most often manually routed and typed by hand into a customer database like InsideSales.com, RightNow Technologies or Salesforce.com before the correct sales representative gets back with them.

Our research shows that the average salesperson only tries 4 to 5 times to contact them within the first week or two. That means only one-half (55%) of a company’s expensive web leads will actually get contacted.

By the time they get contacted (if they get called back) a competitor has often reached them first and is well on their way to another customer, your customer.

Why? Because they called them back immediately, and followed up often enough to make contact.

Just how quickly do they follow up? Within minutes and seconds, not days and hours. And they keep making attempts, often at different times of day and different days of the week until they can begin the sales process.

Why spend thousands of dollars on generating clicks, well designed websites, and powerful analytics if you are going to let your leads sit for nearly 3 days and contact roughly half of your potential prospects? The thought is almost insulting, yet that is what happens most of the time.

There are solutions just coming out that trigger callback attempts within seconds of entering lead data in a web form. The technology prompts a sales rep to continue to make dozens or more attempts at different times of the day and different days of the week to boost contact rates above 85%. Also, these solutions can automatically market to leads and continue to generate prospects every 3-4 weeks for many years or more.

We at InsideSales.com call this ‘Lead Response Management’, responding immediately and touching a lead many more times. This assists in wringing every last bit of value out of your costly leads and tracking a true return from your lead sources.

This overlooked oasis of opportunity may just be the next key to search marketing. It lies hidden somewhere between Lead Generation and the Sales Process or right where the handoff commonly occurs between the Marketing Department and Sales. It’s the pain that everyone feels but no one is doing anything about, until now.

Kenneth D. Krogue is the Co-Founder of InsideSales.com, the first internet-based lead response management CRM database solution with built in dialer and voice messaging technologies. InsideSales.com is in the process of integration as a partner with WebSTAT in helping companies convert and qualify leads better.

Ken has nearly 20 years experience in building and management of teams and technologies for remote selling capabilities. He built the fastest growing department at Franklin Qwest (Now Franklin Covey) and was a co-founder of UCN, Inc. a leading hosted contact center solutions provider. Ken can be reached at 801-853-4090 and the solutions he discusses are now in production to try for yourself by going to www.insidesales.com.

Don’t Forget the Up Sale / Cross Sale

Marketing No Comments

When you walk into the local shoe store to buy a pair of dress shoes, you usually walk out with a few extras. Why? Because the salesman talks you into buying an extra set of shoelaces, shoe shine, a horse-hair shoe buffer (only the finest!), and so on. That’s called cross selling and is something all good sales people do.

Furthermore, the pair of shoes you originally looked at isn’t the pair you walked out with. Again, the salesman talked you into purchasing the much more expensive shoes, convincing you that you had a need for the space-aged polymer material that does amazing things to your feet. That’s called an up sale.

Up selling and cross selling work well in the world of brick and mortar retail stores where a high-pressure salesman can convince just about anybody into buying stuff they originally didn’t want. But how do we take advantage of this well known tactic online? While you won’t ever be able to slam a super high-pressure pitch to shoppers online (the lack of pressure from salespeople is just one of many reasons why consumers choose to shop online), there are several things you can do to increase your per-order revenues.

Show similar items on each product page

This is a way to both up sell as well as cross sell. Visit the website of any large online retailer and you’ll quickly see what I’m talking about. At the bottom of each product page, you’ll often see a list of recommended accessories or similar items.

This gives the buyer an opportunity to see what else is available, and shows them accessories they may want, but might not buy if they weren’t reminded that they’re available.

Imagine that you sell two different models of automotive GPS units. They are identical, but the more expensive model is Bluetooth capable. On the product page for the less expensive model, including a small image next to a line such as, “Try it with Bluetooth for hands free calling!” or something similar is a good example of an up-sell attempt.

Links to accessories, such as a windshield mounting device, additional map software, extended warranty, and so forth are examples of cross selling.

Recommend accessories on the shopping cart or checkout page

The perfect opportunity to recommend additional items to a customer is when they add an item to their shopping cart. By taking this action, the shopper is showing that they intend to make a purchase. While they are in the buying mindset, you’ll want to take the opportunity to make recommendations on additional related items.

For example, if a shopper adds a camping tent to their shopping cart, provide links on the shopping cart page to tent stakes, waterproofing spray, sleeping bags, and so on. In addition to potentially increasing your sales, you’ll also be doing your customer a huge service. There’s nothing worse than forgetting to order an important accessory, especially when you’re buying online.

Capture their contact information

During the checkout process, ask for your customer’s email address. This should always be done so you can email order confirmation information anyway, and is something online consumers expect. However, it also gives you the opportunity to market to that person in the future. Doing so helps keep your company name in the minds of your customers, vastly improving the odds that they’ll return to you again for future purchases.

Cross selling and up selling is something that many small internet retailers fail to do. Some just don’t believe there is any effective way to do it online. But by implementing these three quick and simple tactics you’ll see a rise in your overall sales, dispelling the myth about the impossibility of an online up sale/cross sale.

Short Version

Up selling and cross selling is a vital part of increasing store revenues for any retailer. But how does this method translate onto the World Wide Web?Without the advantage of a salesperson that can interact with your customer, the online up sale / cross sale happens a little differently Link to similar items on each product page Recommend accessories on the shopping cart or checkout page Capture their contact information for email marketing Read the full article…

Doubling your web ROI strategically

Marketing, Web Marketing 1 Comment

nwl_stats.jpgHave you wondered, as I have, on how to get the traffic to your web site to turn to sales? Or, at least convince them to do what you want them to do? After all the monthly fees allocated to pay per click ad fees, and organic search word investments, wouldn’t it be nice to have the conversion rate at least click upwards by 1% more? One of the keys that I have discovered is that most web sites for small businesses is very heavily focused on what you want to say versus what the reader came to the web site searching for.

For example, here is an example of a marketing copy that misses the mark (names have been removed to protect the guilty):

“At XYZ, we understand that wealth management is as much an art as it is a science. On the one hand, we have a deep pool of talented experts who are among the nation’s top financial planners, portfolio managers, securities analysts, economists, attorneys, and accountants and who are leaders in their respective wealth managementdisciplines. XYZ also offers an impressive breadth of capabilities including . . . etc.”

Yawning yet? Notice the self-focused “At XYZ, we understand…” and the general ‘how great we are’ words used just in the opening few sentences. But words like these are used on web sites and direct mailers all the time. They don’t help communicate to the reader what you can do for them. How could this be better? Make it personal, simple and benefit orientated. I don’t have time to write all the details, but here is one example that you can judge for yourself:

“With so many companies wanting to help you manage your financial future, aren’t you confused? I know I was when I first started. I didn’t know who to ask, what to ask, and more importantly, I didn’t know where to start. Luckily, I had a neighbor who had made a lot of money, and he started me on the right path. Through a lot of trial and error (and boy, did I make some a lot of errors), and understanding what options were out there, I came to create a program that is absolutely the best in the industry. Hi – my name is Bill Anderson, President and Founder of XYZ, and my company’s entire goal is focused on helping you increase your wealth through knowledge and service. I hope you will read the rest of our web site to see how we fulfill this goal.”

I hope you can see the difference. Focus a little on how you write the words and you will make a huge difference on your web traffic results. Remember, it is not about what you want to say – it’s about what the web visitor needs to hear and learn about your product or service offering.

Much success, Benoy Tamang

President HookSell.com

(A strategic partner of NextStat)

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