Let Our Revenue Consultants Take Your Company To The Next Level

  • Best Choice of Revenue Strategies Best Choice of Revenue Strategies
  • Choose Initiatives With Best ROI Choose Initiatives With Best ROI
  • Proven Leadership and Execution Proven Leadership and Execution
Revenue Consultant

Best Practices Guide: Chapter 1

 Website Best Practices

More than 80% of the US population is online.

  • Your business should be online. Over time you will be investing time and money into your website, so treat it like an asset. You should own your company domain name (its url address), your website and all its content.

The cost of an online lead is less than 40% of the cost of a traditional lead. There’s a 2X better ROI with typical online lead generation over traditional methods.

  • You should consider allocating more of your marketing budget to online lead generation (i.e. blogs, social networks, organic search and per-per-click advertising) and allocating less of your marketing budget to traditional lead generation techniques (i.e. tradeshows, direct mail and print ads).

Over 80% of consumer product research is now done online.

  • The primary goal of your website should be to convert leads into prospects, prospects into customers, and customers into repeat customers. To do that, your website must do the following:

      – Convince them that your product or service is relevant to their need.

– Help them understand how you will solve their problem.

– Develop their trust in your company and products through case studies, customer testimonials, warranty offers, etc.

– Give them a clear call to action. Encourage them to call you or have them sign up to receive a telephone call from you. Increase their urgency by having them sign up for a trial offer or have them sign up for a time limited discount.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression

  • Pretend you are a typical prospect and do a walk-through of your website. Here is additional information on how an Owner should assess their website.
  • Does the first thing you see give the impression of an experienced, reputable business? If not, you may need a website facelift.
  • Prospects want to research and understand your capabilities before they get caught talking to a salesperson. Is there a wealth of information about your company, products, and services on your website? You can make it easy for them to learn the benefits of your product/service while also demonstrating your expertise.
  • Use your smartphone and visit your website. Do all the critical webpages work properly?

An existing customer should be more willing to buy from you than a prospect who doesn’t know you.

  • Pretend you are an existing customer and do a walk-through of your website.
  • Customers need to have a reason to return to your website and become a repeat customer. Are you engaging customers with blog posts or contests, for example?
  • Use your smartphone and visit your website. Do all the critical webpages work properly?

You don’t have to be the best (although you should always strive to be), you only need to be better than your competitors.

  • Check out the websites of your two top competitors. These are competitors that you have actually lost customers to or that your prospects have mentioned. From a prospect perspective, is your site better or worse than theirs?

Quick Actions That Could Improve Your Website Effectiveness

  • Here are a few quick and easy things you can do today to help prospects quickly understand your offer, develop trust, and be assured they will be dealing with a company with a hard-earned community/industry reputation:
    • If you have hard copy promotional materials, convert them to electronic format and add them to the website. Only use material that is factually up to date and targeted at prospects,like a recent magazine ad, a sales flyer you mailed to prospects, customer case studies, press releases, brochures and product sheets.
    • Add testimonials from real customers and case studies to your website.
    • Demonstrate that the management and employees are proud to stand behind the reputation of the business. Add the pictures and names of key management and employees on the site.
    • If your company is associated with the local chamber of commerce, or you have a good reputation with Better Business Bureau, or you are active in a social network like LinkedIn, highlight it on your website. Here are some additional quick tips.
    • Create “how to” or “product overview” videos for your website. These don’t have to be high quality (i.e. expensive) productions. They can be a 2 minute video of your PowerPoint pitch using free software like Jing, for example.They could be a two minute product demonstration using a camcorder. They’ll set you apart from your competition!
    • Read this brief case study: The Power Of Online Video

More Best Practice Actions

Marketing Outfield Marketplace

There are numerous capabilities you quickly and easily can add to your existing website to make it more effective.

There are over 80 million smartphone users in the USA.

Over 80% of users who don’t like what they find on a mobile site will go look for the information they need on another site!

Over 20% of visits to a mobile friendly business resulted in an immediate phone call to the business.

  • Make sure your prospects can navigate your website using their smartphone.
  • Since many users are using iPhone’s, iPad’s and iPod touches, you should consider creating an Apple icon of your website. By having a designer create an icon that users can download to their mobile device, users will have a quick link to your website right on the home screen of their device.

Companies that blog daily get 80% more leads than companies without blogs.

      • Add a free WordPress or other blog to your company website.
      • Add 1 to 2 blog posts, each 250 – 300 words, per week for optimal ROI. Encourage customers to participate.
      • Add an RSS feed subscription box so users can receive blog post updates automatically by email.

Over 70% of users are more likely to purchase if they received a referral via social media

      • Add social networking sharing buttons for every post so users can share with others. Tools like AddThis are easy to install for a website designer or coder. It also provides analytic tracking of user activity.
      • Outsource this work: Website Services

Given the speed that the internet is evolving, you need to keep your website up to date.

      • Plan to update the overall design of your website every 5 years.

Measure your progress and ROI

      • Use website analytic code to monitor traffic to your website.You can use free versions from Google, Bing or Piwik, for example. A webmaster can quickly add the code to your website.
        • Some key metrics to measure:
          • Total number of visitors per month. You typically want hundreds or thousands per month.
          • Bounce Rate – the percentage of visitors who enter the site and “bounce” (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site. You want a bounce rate well under 50%.
          • Percentage of new visitors versus returning visitors.Returning visitors give you another chance to convert them to a sale.
          • Goals accomplished.You want to measure how many visitors responded to your “call to action” and requested someone call them, or bought a product, or subscribed to your newsletter. From the analytics software perspective, you therefore want to measure how many visitors landed on the“Thank You” or “Confirmation” webpage.

A website is of little value if your prospects have difficulty finding you on the internet.

Chapter 2 will cover how to be found by Google, Bing, and other internet search engines. To give you time to act on the above information, the link for Chapter 2 will be emailed to subscribers in a few days.