Archive for category: Two Cents

Your Company Website and the Sales Engine

A great challenge for companies with established website traffic is to then turn those site visitors into leads, and insure those leads are dealt with in the most efficient and friendly way possible. A good company website will be a brand builder and information center, but more importantly it will work in tandem with your sales process to generate leads and help convert them to sales.

This means your company website must perform the following basic functions;

1. Generate and appeal to the right traffic – real potential customers coming to your company website.
2. Provide value to the visitor, build your credibility
3. Clearly convey your business’s points of strength or differentiators – tell the visitor why your company is not just an option but THE option.
4. Provide a compelling reason to get in touch with you – now.
5. Provide the most simple means of taking action possible.
6. Align that action (a completed web form, a call, a request for more information, the download of a white paper) with your sales process – so the new lead is immediately treated well and seriously, in a way you can trust.

I see too many company websites that either fail to generate the right traffic, fail to convert visitors into leads or fail to place the lead into an efficient sales process.

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Podio Forms – a Google Analytics and Affiliate Marketing Conversion Tracking Solution

We are a big advocate of Podio to help small to medium businesses run their companies. Podio provides an excellent, highly customizable CRM at low cost – both in license and in setup. We have used it for a range of purposes including leads tracking, operations management, project management and of course task management. In the case of one rapidly growing client, we wanted to maintain one of the very best features of podio – the ability to use podio form in our own website to allow new leads to go directly into our sales pipeline – while also implementing two new features. BIG problems lie ahead…

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The Game of Brand Positioning and Understanding your Customer

We tend to think of advertising as brand – which of course, it can be. Coke advertising is brand positioning for instance, but much advertising is more about telling a customer about what you do or who you are. The challenge with brand positioning is to not only make your customer look good – though that is often a core requirement, but to reach a certain demographic and tell them that your product is perfect for them, achieves what they need it to achieve, and gives them the emotional response they want. Read more →

WHY Social: Find the reason behind your social media marketing to find success.

Nearly all the ‘marketing theory’ I read these days is boring, regurgitated fluff, written so that social media marketers have something to push out and impress clients, or make us thing they know what they are talking about. Most of it is self serving, pointless guff. Why? Because social media strategies focus on measures that don’t required sustained relationships, nor any frank assessment of the relationship between the company and the product. The consequence is a failure to build the brand and make sales, and instead build ‘success’ that may be superficially impressive but doesn’t result in any noticeable short or long term benefit.

Social media has an application for a wide variety of companies, but should not be seen as a sure-fire requirement for every business, nor be executed as though there is a single pathway to a single goal.

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