Vantivepoint

The truth of the matter is, I am just a fan of “Keep it Simple”. It holds true in my web site. It holds true in life and in inbound marketing principles.

Hold true to “What Works” and then make it better.

Think our clean designs and philosophies are our own? OK, so I have worked with SINGER and all those big brands, but where did I learn that “less is more”?

http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/basics/simplicity.php

We still have to do all the SEO that we preach, but we always have to bring the design back to simple. Google understands simple, look at their web site.

I just updated our web site’s index page and changed our whole companies focus from developing web sites to enabling Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Conversion (SEC) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

Why would I do this? We are doing more work on this subject than we are design. So I am moving the most relevant content to the front of my web site.

Throwing acronyms out there to increase the hits to this blog, is not the goal of this post. My purpose here is to discuss what your goal for a web page is, or what it should be.

• Get Found

• Convert

• Track/Optimize

Unless your educating someone, using social media to provide valuable information in exchange for contact information or establishing yourself as an expert in your industry, every page of your web site should have 3 goals in mind:

Get Found

1. Is the title of your page relevant to the key words or phrases the page is targeted to and the proper number of characters?

2. Is the description of your page relevant to the key words or phrases the page is targeted to? Are they the proper amount of characters?

3. Is the content of the page targeted to the demographic?

4. Are you using useless words?
“I have a Question for you” Why would you not just ask the question? Example: Question c: above old school or useless phrased:

“Are the pages phrased appropriately for the education level of the key demographic that the page is targeted towards?”

New School or Google Phrased:

“Is the content of the page targeted to the demographic?”

My keywords here are “Targeted Demographic”.

Convert

When a visitor lands on your page, what do you want them to do? If your a restaurant, you probably want to get them into your dining room. If your a garage, you want them to bring their car in. If your a doctor/ into your waiting room and if your a mortgage company you probably want to make them fill out an application.

What do all of these have in common? You WANT THEM TO DO SOMETHING! Then make it apparent. Maybe offer them something, a Discount, a Free Download, a Coupon, does it really matter?

INTERNET MATH

If you had zero conversions last month and 25 this month at a 10% discount and you spent $2,000 to get them there and your customers lifetime value is $10,000, your ROI is one bazillion dollars! OK, maybe not, we need to run you through an ROI calculator, (we really like the bazillion dollar calculator) but we need a true ROI analysis.

Track/Optimize

So have you really been tracking how many visitors you have on your website?

If you are, do you know where your visitors are coming from?

If you do, can you increase that? Can you develop the areas that are not the most productive?

Siebal Systems (CRM), used to have an annual rule, no matter what, the bottom 10% of the sales force was eliminated annually! You could have been an industry top performer and still have lost your job because you didn’t keep up with the thoroughbreds.

If they could do this to people, why would you not track, analyze and do it with your inbound marketing campaigns?

So your doing adwords? Working good? Why not add 10 times the amount of keywords you currently have? All Targeted and relevant. It costs you no more if no one clicks on it. So why not try 10 to 15 variations of ads? Again, costs no more. So now you could use Analytics to track which keywords are top “Bait” and which Conversion Pages are the best.

Now you should be able to take a top bait ad and send it to a best converting page. Think you could do it better? I bet you can, so test it and optimize it again.

What if your product manager brings you a great new idea, but the management or sales team just doesn’t know if it will work? Why not test it and see before investing in engineering and production?

This is the basis of an inbound marketing campaign. Invest in conversions. Invest in being reactive. It is easier to convert someone that is looking for your product or service than it is to seek, sell and then convert.

84% of Marketers to Shift Portion of Direct Marketing Budgets to Social Media

• 66% of marketers plan to invest in social media over the next 12 months, but only 36% plan to monitor and analyze the success-or failure-of their efforts
• 84% of Marketers are shifitng a portion of thier direct marketing (outbound) budgets to social media (inbound)
• Marketing Takeaway: Make sure you are re-allocating your budget and efforts regularly, based on results.

I was discussing Inbound Marketing with a Realtor the other day. He was telling me how bad his business is off and that he will have to wait until he closes 2 deals next week before he can pay to execute his Inbound Marketing program. I left it at that, and our conversation focused on the picture on his computer screen of a 1983 Turbocharged 280zx, he told me how he found it on E-Bay and flew out to pick it up.

We started wrapping up our meeting and I asked if I should follow up with him towards the end of next week.  He said unfortunately he would not be here next week, he was going to Reno and that I should follow up with him the following week.

So, as I was pulling out of the parking lot I went over the meeting in my head, in my presentation I asked him how familiar he was with Pay Per Click advertising, His head immediately started going back and forth, “I don’t want someone to be able to click on my ad over and over again and cause me to spend money!” I explained to him how he would be protected, and started walking him through the campaign ideas we had.

By the end of the session his head was nodding up and down and saying, “yep, I get it now!”.

Did he really get it? His business is down, it is a poor economy, “I need to sell some more before I can pay you, call me when I get back from Reno. Oh, while I am out there I am going to look that this” and show’s me a picture of a shiny Porsche.

Man, this sounds familiar, while working at Mediapulse during the Dot Com crash, I was hearing the same story. ‘Well I will have to get back to you next month Ricky, my investor is sending my next round of funding, so I am going to head to Mexico while the funding is taking place’, and gets into his Mercedes and drives away.

During this time in the late 90’s early 2000, my friend gave me a book “Selling the Invisible”. I have always been a “Picture This” kind of guy, but this book taught me how to sell Value.

So, did the realtor see the value in what I was presenting him? I am afraid not. His only current form of advertising is Signage in the yards of the homes he is listing, print classifieds and his MLS. His competitors are doing very low bid’s on pay per click and with the minimal budget we proposed he would crush them and more than double his current activity. Probably, for about the price of his plane ticket to Reno.