I briefly touched on some of our web and SEO (search engine optimization) services in a prior post. Today I thought I would wet business owners’ appetites a bit more by discussing one facet of our web services in a little more detail. It’s actually a combination of several actions we take, when used together, that make a huge difference for our clients. These are: 1. building effective custom landing pages (sometimes referred to as “squeeze” pages); 2. tracking valuable contacts, goals and conversions; and 3. fine-tuning the marketing campaign.
First, a few important points about marketing:
1. As a business owner, if you don’t know which marketing is working and which is not, you are wasting tons of time, energy and, most importantly, money.
2. Successful marketing is all about experimentation and fine-tuning. It’s rare to get it perfect the first time.
3. Since you’re going to change your marketing a bit over time, you need to be able to accurately track the effectiveness of your campaign changes.
You’re in business to make money, and if your website is going to help this cause it needs to make your potential clients do something “valuable.” Depending on your business, “valuable” could be any one of a number of things. Yes, an order is great but other things have value too. A visitor might subscribe to or make a comment on your blog, join your mailing list, request a quote for your services, or even make that easy online order. They might also bookmark your site for later use, share a page with a friend, or even better, share your link on a social network. Or, they could do something crazy (!) like pick up the phone and call you or visit your business in person. These are all valuable contacts, and it’s important to figure out what caused them. We help businesses by identifying the source of each valuable business contact, giving credit where credit is due, and using this information to fine-tune future marketing.
But wait… I got ahead of myself. Let’s back up and talk for a minute about landing pages. A website isn’t limited to having a single “homepage”. It can have an infinite number of pages that visitors find first when searching the web, visiting your site as a result of receiving a postcard, or following a URL. What we do is help you create and structure your landing pages so that once someone does find you, they are directed (or squeezed) down the desired funnel. This isn’t particularly easy! More about that later but do you know what is easy? Pressing the “Back” button! So the landing pages we create must catch the attention of your visitor, send the right message to the visitor and provide an appropriate call to action. Once we (yes, we’ll actually work with you to get things working right) are all satisfied with how the landing pages look and behave, then we’ll monitor what works and what doesn’t. This is done on the “front end” through customized URLs and on the “back end” using analytics. We’ll track which landing pages are leading to which actions by your visitors. This is incredibly valuable data. This is the stuff we’ll be using to fine-tune your marketing efforts over time.
If you’re new to some of these concepts, it all might sound a bit complicated. But don’t worry. When you entrust your web and SEO projects to us you can just keep doing what you’re doing…. running a successful business!
