Learn from Politicians!

In the UK the local elections are happening this week, so it gives us an opportunity to take a leaf out of our MPs' books and raise the profile of your business and website?

Just like our politicians, you too can build a professional online brand and profile for your business with some very simple tips; and changing the way your website portrays and promotes you could do wondered for your sales too!

The Personal Statement

Just like the political parties your business should employ a personal statement. Your personal statement and the way your present it on your web site is critical as this is one of the first ‘things’ that a visitor who doesn't know you very well will seek out (whether they are aware of it or not!), and it has the added benefit of helping them understand more about your business.

Your company's personal statement simply needs to be the top 2-3 things that you want your visitors to know about your business, they should show how you can help your prospects.

For example, you might want your visitors to be aware of your huge selection of products, the fact that you are an award winner, your customer service stats, your low prices etc – whatever it is that you think your market will go wild over and that you can satisfy.

Once you've decided on what your business personal statement should be you need to ensure that it is easily and quickly seen on your site. Are these 2-3 statements obvious on your site? Are they mentioned at all or hidden in your navigation?

Put them to your homepage and make them easily viable throughout your site.

Your Professional Profile

You only need to take a quick look at any of the political parties web sites to see what views, experience and values their leader has.
You can find out about their history, achievements, what they stand for and how they believe that they can personally help you.

Does your site portray its top Directors in the same way? Is it easy to find out about them, what skills, experience and background they have, and what they think that they can do for your prospects?

If you don’t talk about the top people in your business then you are missing a trick; research constantly shows that the “About Us” pages are usually one of the top pages that prospects visit on your site and these pages can help sell yourself and your business if done correctly.

Say what you want about our political system, the parties and politicians, they do know how to promote themselves and how to get us following them and believing in them, and by following these simple tips you will be able to better promote your site and make you more appealing to your prospects.

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POTS and PANS!

What type of site so you own or manage? Is it a Pretty Ordinary Trash Site (POTS) or a Pretty Amazing Natural Sites (PANS) site?

Obviously you don’t want to own a POTS, these tend to be trashy, thin content, poorly linked to sites, where as the more superior PANS have lots of lovely content that visitors want to read and share, their content also attracts links naturally.

A site needs to have a clear and definite purpose; if this can be portrayed successfully to visitors then half of the battle has been won.

Sleek, modern design is a winner. Visitor needs and design trends change often, sites that don’t follow these will look dated very quickly and will be an instant turn-off.

Content needs to be unique and fresh and needs to speak concisely to your target market – avoid waffle and clutter and keep the messages as simple and as concise as possible.

Ultimately for any website to be successful it needs people to use it; site design and appearance are very important, but they will never replace the need for excellent usability.

A websites navigation affects how usable it is, and when developing or redesigning an existing site then the navigation (how you visitors are doing to find the great content) should be your primary concern.

In Summary

	POTS	PANS
Site Design	Designed in the 80’s/90’s. Cluttered.	Appealing Modern – fresh, clean.
Content	SEO focused. Doesn't read well.	User focused. Clear, well-written content.
Clarity	Visitors confused. Unsure what you site is about.	Purpose clear. Visitors feel happy on your site.
Usability	Confusing leaving visitors impatient. They will leave.	Simple to use. Customers stay and look around.
Navigation	Visitors can’t find what they need. No structure to site at all.	Visitors can find what they need quickly. 1-3 clicks and they are there.

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The new Lead Generation Content Strategy

If you are responsible for sales or lead generation then you will no doubt be familiar with the classic sales funnel.

Traffic or Leads are basically thrown in at the top of the funnel and due your magnificent sales and marketing nurturing you pass these leads through the different levels of your particular sales funnel all the time attempting to create a customer at the end of the process.

It’s a classic image used in business today and it works well ….. up to a point!

You see what this model doesn't adequately explain is that THIS process is a process that converts traffic or leads that have shown an active interest in your product or service.

But there are many, many more individuals or businesses that are not yet interested in you, but you can still get them into this funnel, they might not buy yet, but they will be aware of you when they are ready to purchase and by changing the way you talk to your market will help you to become “front of mind” in their future purchase decisions.

To change this mind-set within your market all you need to do is talk about something closely related to what you sell; so for example if you sell computers, then create guides to help people use them or understand common problems and how to resolve them.

This would mean that you are then likely to attract people who (whilst not ready to purchase) use computers, and your great use of associated content means that there is now a chance that when they are ready to buy you will be “front of mind”.

This is a fundamental shift on how businesses look at content and their content strategy, but this simple tweak to make content available that is closely related (and helpful) to your core business offering can bring in more prospects.

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Inbound Marketing: The SECRETS

Actually, there was a small mistake in the subject of this blog, because there isn't really a secret in great inbound marketing – other than ensuring the right people see your content at the right time!

Inbound marketing is all about your prospects finding you, which means that it’s important that your precious and brilliant content is found when it’s needed to be found.

I’m sure we've all done the same thing at some point in our careers; we've created a brilliant piece of content (website content, video, article, blog or social media post etc) we have lined up several online channels to host and promote the piece and clicked send … then sat back ….. and waited ….. and waited some more …. but nothing happens!

No interest at all in our lovely, well crafted content, but it was perfect, what went wrong?

Well the chances are that simply your excellent message just didn't rise above the rubbish and the clutter – image this from a social media perspective, as soon as you click the send button your piece of content is the freshest and newest piece out there and it appears at the top of the stream, but second later it’s buried in a pool of noise.

As an experiment I simply tweeted the hashtag #Marketing and within just two minutes it was buried in my own twitter stream with by all the other stuff I follow, Even when I searched Twitter for my update after only 10 minutes my tweet has disappeared under 187 tweets – for all intents and purposes this post was now gone.

So what could I have done differently?

Very simply I just needed to make my post rise above the clutter and this is easiest done with my advocates – and virtually everyone and every business has some of these. These are your greatest fans, your enthusiastic followers.

These people serve two key functions:

1. They a can extend the life of any content by simply sharing it for you, but more importantly, 
2. They take on a valuable “word of mouth” presence.

What you might not realise is that a large percentage of new business comes from some sort of referral (whether these be Friends, Relatives, Acquaintances or Unknown online networks etc), and word of mouth has always been the most trusted form of advertising.

And whats even better is that these advocates are still working for you when you aren't around, constantly posting, sharing, and mentioning your brand.

How do you find your advocates?

They should be fairly obvious to spot if your close to your online marketing channels, these are the people that will readily retweet, like, favourite or share your content; they respond to your requests, they comment and talk about you (and often without being prompted).

The trick is to recognise these traits in your social networks and recognise the individuals - network with them, thank them, provide easier access to your best staff, provide extra content, training or even prizes. If your industry is suitable for it then try rewarding with gamification (providing points and badges etc).

Numerous big businesses understand the importance of their advocates and work with them – Google have supplied advocates with freebies in the past as a thank you; Samsung provide special events for their advocates and chances to get their hands on the latest devices (the recent Samsung Unpacked 2014 in Barcelona was a great example; Walmat creates specialised online communities of shoppers to help spread their messages. It is everywhere.

It’s the very importance of these advocates is the reason that I seem to find the constant need to explain to people that it’s not the number of Followers or Friends, Retweets or Likes that important, but who Follows and Likes you, who Retweets or Likes your posts.

One good advocate is worth more than 1,000 Followers that don’t listen to you.

Summary:

So listen to your channels, discover your advocates and build a relationship with them, then the life of your precious content will be lengthened allowing your important messages to reach more people.

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Online Lead Generation – Great Follow up Strategies that WILL lead to sales

OK, so your generating sales leads online, but it’s not working as well as you would have hoped! What’s going wrong?

Well if you want your lead generation efforts to generate decent sales, you need to build a robust lead follow up system.

Ideally what you want to achieve is for your lead follow up system to manage your sales leads automatically.

Here are the things that you need in place to help you towards your goal of online lead to sale.

Create a landing page

Hopefully you have taken this first very basic step in generating great sales leads.

This page should really hold two purposes:

1. Get them to buy online - if your prospect buys straight away then you don’t have to bother with any additional sales process!
2. If they fail to buy then you want to capture their details, in my last post I talked about great ways of capturing prospect details. The prospect capturing system could be part of the online sales process – start by asking for an email address on a single page, then if they leave the sales process part way through you have their email contact details to enable follow-up.

Prompt contact is key

If your lead leaves your page, then it’s possible that the left because they wanted to take a look at someone else’s offering before they make their final purchase decision - if you can get in touch with them within a couple of minutes then you're highly likely to retain the sale - the longer you leave this recontact, the less likely you are to get the sale.

What’s the Score?

If possible, ‘Score’ your lead.

If they have been on your site for a while or visited numerous pages or emailed you then they are probably more interested in what you have to offer.

Other factors like their geographic location may make them a better prospects - or in B2B sales did they leave you with a ‘real’ business email address or just an anonymous Gmail or Hotmail account?

Follow up by email

As soon as you have your contact details, it’s time to start following up with them. Email is easiest and quickest to do and you can automate the process.  But as soon as you can, you really need to get a real sales person trying to contact them.  Remember people buy off people, not off automated emails!

The initial immediate follow up will ensure that you are still very fresh in their mind.


Get them in your list

Many businesses mess about with having a separate list for prospects and one for customers, get them all in the same database, it’s much easier.

Ensure that you are able to track all the communications that you sent them or the name of any campaign that brought them into you (all very useful analysis).

Also ensure that you have an ‘opt-out’ field in case they decide that they no longer want to hear from you, but only ensure that you stop sending them communications if they ask.

Keep sending the updates and newsletter etc along with your regular customers.



These simple steps can help you put your lead follow up virtually on autopilot so you have time to work with clients and hot prospects rather than constantly prospecting for new business.

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Online Lead Generation Magnet

Why a magnet?
By its very definition, a magnet is something that attracts objects – in this case we want to attract leads.

There is a vast amount of traffic online, and what every single website wants to do is pull that traffic it into their website – but online traffic management mustn't end there!

What if someone visits a few of your pages and then leaves – you are likely to have spent time and effort (and perhaps money) in attracting that visitor in the first place, and they have leave your site without providing you with any value whatsoever!

Now the ultimate value is that they buy from you; but even if they don’t buy they could have left you with the next best thing – their contact details.

Many, many site and business owners never think about collecting visitor data to use as a remarketing tool, but it is incredibly important that you do; the more details you get about visitors who are interested in your product and service, the better, more profitable business you can generate.

So how do you generate these sales leads?

The best way is to provide some useful information.

We all love information on the internet that can help us – maybe help us do our job better, save or make us money, and your potential customers are no different.

Now they might not be willing to part with hard cash for the information you have, but they might be willing to leave you their email address at the very least!

There are numerous ways we can do this online, but the best ways are:

• eBooks - needn't be huge, a decent 20 page eBook can be a great way to establish leadership and authority in a marketplace
• A downloadable “kit” - worksheets, videos, articles etc
• Free quote or consultation - these could be delivered in person, my email or over the phone. The great thing about these is that the requester knows that they will need to part with a good amount of information to get the best advice or quote from you.
• Email course - send out a series of informative and educational emails. Over the course of a few weeks or a month you could send numerous emails automatically building authority and trust with the recipient.
• Free samples - if you are the type of business that can send out samples then they make a great lead generation tool.
• Activate a trial - software companies always collect visitor details if they want to download software and get a free trial. During the trial period ensure that you send out automated emails to encourage a conversation with them.
• Whitepapers - a white paper is basically a smaller version of an eBook – so if you find you can’t provide enough detail to make a convincing eBook, make a convincing white paper. They are inexpensive to develop and will add greatly to your credibility.
• Newsletters - do you have information that you can regularly send out as a newsletter?
• Invitation to a webinar - people love webinars, mainly because they are usually free to attend; they are a great way to delivery the same piece of information to a wide audience and they are very cost effective to do.

In Summary

As already mentioned, once you've built up a steady stream of internet traffic, your job is far from over. You now have to implement some type of lead generation magnet(s).

With the automated delivery of follow up emails you’ll start to see some great results and you’ll find that some of these prospects will start to known on your door.

Best of luck.

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LinkedIn - successful lead generation

If you have ever spoken to a B2B businesses about their online lead generation you'll find some discrepancy about how much business they get from LinkedIn, some seem to get absolutely loads of leads and traffic from this professional networking site where other get very little or none at all! If you want to be in the camp that get lots of leads, then follow these simple tips.

Create a company profile page

OK, it seems fairly logical, but still not that many smaller businesses actually have a company profile page on LinkedIn. Ensure that you complete your profile as much as possible and also ensure that all of your employees a) have a personal profile on LinkedIn and that their profile links to your company page.

Tip: Including keyword rich descriptions on your LinkedIn company page, product and services tabs . All of these elements are an essential part of the SEO approach and will help you get found from within LinkedIn's own search functionality and potentially from an external search engine too.

Promote the page 

You are still going to get businesses and individuals that find your business website first, if they do ensure that they easily find a link to your LinkedIn company profile page so that they can follow you. Only by building company followers will you add social proof and generate credibility to your company profile.

Status Updates

Having followers on LinkedIn is no use unless you engage with them; so ensure that you post regular status updates. Your followers will then see your updates and have the option to engage with you and amplify your messaging around their network.

Tip: Aim for at least two updates each week, this maximises your chance to get your status out across more of your network.

Create a Group

I also recommend that you engage with others in your target market by joining Groups that are of interest to them and contribute. BUT a more important strategy is create your own open Group. Lots of businesses still don’t understand the presence and the power of LinkedIn groups. Groups that contain lots of your potential customers/clients do not exist on Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else for that matter; Groups on LinkedIn are basically Communities of prospects for you.

My advice would be to start by making a niche Group; a software developer in Yorkshire for example might start a “Software developers in Yorkshire” group, start my inviting relevant individuals from your network to get and get the discussions started; you'll quickly find that you'll start to get lots more interested individuals to join in,

Once you have a successful Group then organise some events to get some face to face time with prospects.


There are many more ways you can get more business from social networks; if you need more customers or need help understanding how social media fits into your strategy then get in touch with me today.

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