Search Marketing: Turning your Website Outside-in to Increase Sales

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Search Marketing: Turning your Website Outside-in to Increase Sales

Many companies are disappointed in the results they get from their Web site. They spent a lot of money on design and content…there may be thousands of unique visits recorded, but very few calls are resulting. Most companies have Web sites that reflect an “inside-out” orientation, what we in the search engine marketing business call “brochure ware.” The original purpose was met, to provide information, but as a result, the Web site is like a flyer that is skimmed once and then thrown away.

All the money spent on attracting interest from prospects is wasted if the interest isn’t reciprocated. Reaching far beyond a brochure, the Web provides a rich media environment and two-way data-driven communication. This should drive a Web site with an “outside-in” approach, one that is wrapped around the wants and needs of the prospect. Your web site is the most valuable real estate you own. The web provides a single point of access between you and your market–it can offer 360-degree visual tours, audio or video testimonials, brochures on demand, discount coupons, and client references–at the same time it can gather information about your prospect and deliver instantaneous, completely free follow-up.

Especially on the web, successful marketers anticipate the needs of the prospect, and they work constantly to understand “the mind of the market.” Search engine optimization helps your site focus on attracting prospects, giving them exactly what they are looking for. Once prospects get to your site, the images and words you use are important, but they have to be part of a larger sales strategy, one that incorporates powerful, motivating messages and two-way methods of communication. This “sales flow optimization” is just as important to your success as SEO.

Sales Flow: The Secret to Successful Search Engine Marketing

Historically, sales organizations have been very poor at converting leads into sales. They have asked the marketing team to give them only hot leads: prospects with budget, a timetable, and a list of people involved in the decision. Marketing was expected to “qualify” each prospect and deliver the hot leads to sales. Today, the prospect qualifies YOU, not the other way around. One of our largest clients was using a lead form with 19 fields…not just name and phone number, but size of the expected order and time-to-decision! We told the marketing team that their “sales” department ought to be renamed the “order taker” department! This form was used by prospects only 3% of the time…meaning, 97% abandoned the site rather than fill out the form. Now, this company gets the information incrementally, over a few weeks…but they are closing over 200% more business from the web.

Converting a prospect into an active lead on the web takes courtship. You are wooing, building a relationship. That takes really trying to learn what people are looking for, to get into the customer’s head. Knowing that most prospects are looking for specifications and pricing, you can make your data sheets easy to find, and maybe even have a downloadable price list. When they print out the price list or the data sheet, they get the contact information to follow up. These days, companies find out they are on the short list just a short time before the customer buys. That’s the power of effective search engine marketing, but it’s a brave new world for the sales person who thinks he or she is in control of the relationship with the prospect.

Turning a Breakthrough Concept into a Web Site

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Turning a Breakthrough Concept into a Web Site

How can a brand new concept use the Web to flesh out and attract attention to the concept? Let me share my experience in this area.

The youngest people working on the 400 Year Project (looking to describe and promote ways of making improvements 20 times faster from 2015 through 2035) assured me in 1995 that we had to have a Web site for the project. They explained that a Web site was going to be the universal medium for finding important information. Although none of us had ever been involved in creating a Web site, I was told that there was nothing to it.

I hired one staff member, Jason Breyan, to work full-time on the project, and he led the charge for developing the Web site. Fitting in with my preference for aesthetics, he located a designer who could produce intriguing looking pages.

We had a hard time figuring out what to put on the Web site. Someone had the good idea of using Tobi Kahn’s iconic paintings developed for the project to spruce up the pages. With Tobi’s kind permission, we did exactly that. This arrangement worked out well for Tobi because he didn’t have a Web site in those days, and many people came to know his work through our project’s Web site.

However, being attractive wasn’t going to be the most important factor for the Web site: We needed to decide what content to use. An early resource for helping with this thinking was our friend, Robert Metz, who had founded the Marketplace column in the business section of The New York Times and later served as New York bureau chief of Financial News Network, a cable news network that was later merged with CNBC.

From this collaboration, key concepts began to emerge. Perhaps the most important of these early ideas was that some forms of thinking and behaving delay improvements. After much discussion, we decided to call these factors “stalls” and to begin to identify the individual stalls.

We weren’t sure how to identify all of the stalls. Someone suggested we invite those who visited the Web site to share their ideas about stalls that they had observed or experienced. We decided to try that approach.

The hardest part of creating the Web site was figuring out how to describe why the project’s purpose is a reasonable one. One of the key documents we created was “Time Telescope” that considered what a company might look like in 2395 if 2 to 3 percent a year productivity gains continued.

We focused on that aspect of progress because companies have been the most effective sources of improvements for the last few centuries. The bulk of productivity improvements have come in the fields of manufacturing, farming, mining, electronics, computing, and medicine though the directions taken by the companies that wanted to expand their sales by improving products and lowering costs. Governments, by contrast, usually experience negative productivity as do many nonprofit organizations.

Here are some of the projections we shared in that section:

-A well-run manufacturing company would have sales per employee of .5 billion in constant dollars.

-New products and services would be designed and put into production in less than a day.

-The cost of doing a constant computing task would decline by more than 99 percent within 20 years.

As I look back on those examples, I’m struck by how conservative they turned out to be:

-A company could already use a lot of outsourcing and reach revenues of tens of millions of dollars per employee.

-Many Internet marketers develop products and services now in less than a day and deliver those new offerings in the same day.

-At the recent rate of progress, the cost of a constant computing task usually declines by 96-98 percent in only 10 years.

We managed, however, to intrigue large numbers of people who shared good ideas with us, read excerpts from our books, and helped spread the word about the project among over a million people around the world.

What are the lessons for you?

1. Get as many people involved as possible.

2. Use as many intriguing graphics and videos as possible.

3. Create simple concepts that anyone can grasp to help understand the bigger ideas.

4. Provide lots of user-friendly features to help people find what they are looking for.

5. Make the abstract concrete by providing potential examples if you don’t yet have real ones.

Contextured Uncovers how Leading Automotive Firms are Turning to Online Marketing to Beat the Recession

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Contextured Uncovers how Leading Automotive Firms are Turning to Online Marketing to Beat the Recession

London, Farringdon,  2009 — Major car retailers no longer see a policy of injecting huge amounts of capital into traditional forms of offline advertising as the best means of promotion. Many are are now focused on an interactive web marketing strategy. This year Fords main marketing aim has been to bolstered their online presence, which has seen websites, online ads and social media meshing with their product line and positioning. Other leading automobile companies are following this trend as CMR (competitive media reporting) interactive has noted, listed Toyota, Honda and Ford amongst the top ten spenders in online marketing.

Car companies can use social media applications and blogs to move closer to customers, gain more attention and interest in their services and brand, as well as gaining a better understanding of their customers needs. Car retailers have also seen and noted the importance of an interactive engaging website. In bids to gain and retain customer attention online, motoring companies have become more creative, for example Ford have created and posted on their website a video version of the Ford story. As a result of their online marketing efforts, Ad Age ( adage) reports that the number of qualified buyers who planned to buy a Ford jumped 16% from 2008.

Why Should Auto Retailers Use Online Marketing Rather Than Offline Advertising?

“Over 75% of consumers when searching for the nearest local car retailer start their research online’”– (Jim Rucker- TK productions-chief marketing executive. July 2009)

Car retailers who are market leaders in sales generated via the Internet, share an approach that has revealed some common practices that are critical to a successful Internet strategy. Number one amongst these best practices is taking the time to develop and manage an organic strategy, information regarding how to drive organic traffic can be accessed at: http://www.contextured.com/search-engine-optimization/

Number is to invest in a paid search strategy, you can access more info on paid search marketing at: http://www.contextured.com/search-engine-marketing/. A comprehensive online marketing plan plan will be geared towards driving traffic to your website in the most cost effective manner.

“when searching for a car retailer consumers use search engines 3 times more often than TV, radio, and newspapers … combined!” (www.dealron.com-2009) It can be extremely difficult to dedicate the required marketing resources with all the demands of running a workshop, parts shop or dealership. Larger dealers and suppliers will generally employ an agency but this comes at significant cost. Using someone in-house is an option but the steep learning curve of the technologies involved can often lead to poorly performing campaigns and lower than expected returns. This is cited as the number one reason why businesses give-up on web marketing

Thankfully there are technologies readily available that can help smaller car retailers run profitable web marketing campaigns.

Website Grader is one of these technologies now readily available for free. By simply inserting your website URL and some competing websites into the text fields provided on their website the software will generate a report that measures the marketing effectiveness of your website and SEM (search engine marketing). It provides a score that incorporates factors such as website traffic, SEO (search engine optimization), social popularity. Website Grader will also provide some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective. For more information on tools and techniques available to monitor your websites performance visit: http://www.contextured.com/2009/08/how-do-i-monitor-traffic-to-my-website/

Google Analytics is another online marketing technology which is totally free offering businesses the opportunity to gain invaluable rich insight into its website traffic and online marketing effectiveness. Google has made the features of this product flexible and simple to use. This tool clearly presents the effectiveness of your PPC (pay-per-click) ads, search ranking, website content, click through rates in the form of reports, mapping and charts. Google analytics allows you to understand your website visitors, what and where they’re clicking and therefore identifying any leaks on your website resulting in a lost opportunities.

Contextured offers a full search engine marketing and optimization package for a low monthly fee. Their technology helps ensure your car retailer is ranking highly in organic search results on Google, Yahoo, and Bing for searches on words like “local garages” “Car dealers” “Motors Dealerships”. As experts in keyword optimization process they can help your website up the rankings in search engine results. For a one week free trial use the promotional code “7days” during signup. See more information at: http://www.contextured.com/?ref=4

There are no quick solutions, but by employing the best possible online marketing tools and technologies readily available on the market, motoring companies can drive increased traffic to their site resulting in more sales, quires, and leads, enjoying increasing success like many leading automotive companies are amongst the doom and gloom.

For additional information on the news that is the subject of this release contact Michael Benjamin or Visit: http://www.contextured.com/solutions/