Get leads and orders from your website and stop wasting time on traffic

1.      Don’t assume that what you are doing is OK and it just needs improvement, step back and take a fresh look.

2.      Don’t be bullied by the “digital is different” brigade, yes, it is different, but it starts with customers and ends with profit and these two points are still the key to everything.

3.      Don’t waste any time worrying about traffic figures until there is a strong flow of revenue. Traffic is an expense unless it is converting and a valuable indicator once it is.

4.      Don’t expect winning customers to be cheap in a competitive world, build this cost into your models and compete for customers.

5.      To survive you will have to do digital better, that’s not maybe and its no longer next decade, it’s now.

Marketing strategy
Make sure you are selling the right product in the right place at the price before you focus too much attention on promotion. Changing channels or adding a channel can change everything.

Outcome:
After reviewing marketing and product strategy you will be confident that based on current market and customer knowledge, you are positioning the product right, presenting it well, pricing it right and promoting it to the best of your current ability, or you will have identified a few areas for improvement or investigation going forward.

SEO Strategy
SEO must always be informed by the Ps of marketing and thus it sits at position number 2. 

Are the pages being properly indexed and technically strong enough to reach their highest potential?

Is their sufficient off -age linking and other criteria?

Is the content relevant to identified customer segments and the product proposition?

Are we confident that the product positioning and proposition is right given the reaction of visitors to our content?

Testing may be recommended.

Does the customer see content relevant to the link he/she clicked when arriving at the site?

Is the vocabulary closely tuned to that of the visitor segment?

Other tests may be needed depending on the situation.

Outcome:

With clear confident knowledge of who the customer is and where they are coming from, you can start attracting them to your website and converting them. Before you achieve some level of confidence everything is experimentation and research. The most important thing is a learning strategy.
SEO is in two parts for most businesses:

The Search engine listings which are seen by random people and you have no control over who they are other than to focus your words on attracting the right ones.

Inbound links for partners, influencers and Social Media which can be controlled to a much greater extent by choosing your partners etc. Some of this may fall under social media strategy for some businesses.

Social MediaStrategy
This is a review of how much your social media strategy influences your customer acquisition and retention by understanding how, where and why you are getting in touch with potential customers and how they are being moved through the conversion process as well as customer support and retention activities you may be executing via social media.

Advertising on social media can fit well along with PPC and email strategies but perhaps this is best included elsewhere in the discussion

Outcome:

Social Media still has importance for influencing search engines and can provide great advertising opportunities, build a strategy to fit your offering and your audience, regardless how large or small it may be. Understanding how all of these channels and activities gel together to maximise value and minimize noise and duplication is a valuable exercise.
 

Email Marketing Strategy
Still the most effective marketing method across the board and near enough indispensable as part of the mix, everyone needs an email strategy that supports their other efforts.
A review will look at how and when customers subscribe, how campaigns are managed and how they contribute to the  mix.

Outcome:
Email marketing review will help to eliminate any data protection risks as well as identifying where email can contribute to the conversion process and how to maintain a single conversation with the customer.

Digital Advertising Strategy

PPC is for many the only real way of driving significant traffic and for most it is at least a powerful method of adding extra customers as part of the mix. PPC is especially useful for products with a large Customer Lifetime Value and is extremely useful as a way of researching new segments and new propositions by directly attracting customers and learning about their motivations and vocabulary to inform your other strategic decisions.

Outcome:
After a review you should have a better view of who you are competing with for PPC across the networks, what keywords are profitable and what new keywords might be tested.
You will have a detailed knowledge or a testing strategy to understand precisely what combination of keywords and advertising copy will deliver the best returns.
You can sometimes make parallels between successful PPC adverts and the SEO keywords to pursue and use this to improve both.

Conversion funnels and journeys that cross channel boundaries

Everything we do form product development to running adverts is focused towards attracting attention, generating leads and converting them to profitable paying customers. Most companies especially in the past decade saw their website as some sort of prestige brochure and spent large sums on driving “traffic” as a sort of kudos thing. That was then.
Today the web is the only source of business for many and the main source for most and that trend continues to accelerate.  Many are already finding their customers gone irretrievably and others are finding opportunities because they have cutting edge marketing capability.
As a result Progressive Marketing businesses are helping their customers to attract the right visitors, engage with them, qualify them, create genuine lead and convert them to profitable customers.
Modern online marketing is just like it was 2o years ago only more complex because of the extra channels. A customer will look in your shop window, search you on their mobile and a week later visit your website on their PC, leave and return later and they might even walk in your shop again.
20 years ago a well trained assistant on commission would have sweet talked her into trying it on and put the cash in the till 20 minutes later. Many modern marketers annoy her with spam, try to figure out what she eat for breakfast and send her even more junk and spend a great deal of money on losing her for good.
Intelligent marketers move her gently along a conversion funnel and pick the right time to make her an offer she cant resist, or send her details to a customer service person who calls and invites her to a demonstration  or exhibition or sends a representative around.
The best approach for your product, people, culture and skillset will be unique to you, but it is critical to find it and then perfect it through trial and error.

Example steps

Attract attention from visitors

Convert some of your traffic to potentials

Qualify and nurture your potentials to create more leads

Close more of those leads.

Keeping it Omni-channel

It can be useful to drive telephone and other enquiries to the website to access extra information and become recognised by the website technology.
It is very useful to get web visits records in CRM so that call centre staff are not locked out of the online part of the journey.
Coupons and offers should be cross channel where possible and service , returns and other touchpoints should not be different nor should CRM and other systems and information sources

The review and Plan

Revisiting the sub-strategies such as product and marketing can be and often will be a very quick and painless process involving nothing more than restating the strategy as it is currently understood and executed and asking whether it still holds true and has everyone’s confidence.
Often you will find yourself briefly revisiting one or more strategies such as product more than once as, for example, you check that the newly acquired knowledge about customer need  is still being met well by the product. 
This process builds confidence and renews familiarity with work that was done in the past and it also affords an opportunity to discuss knowledge that has been acquired since the strategy was developed.

Occasionally a whole new strategy can take quite a bit of work, but if you find yourself in this situation, it is because the strategy is urgently needed and the sooner it is dealt with the better for the business.
Quickly revisiting and discussing these strategies or formalising informal strategies is a valuable way to audit your thoughts and sometimes generate new ideas and creativity as well as giving peace of mind that what you have been doing is valid.

 Digital Tools review

You wont get anywhere with digital without the right tools, not only that but plenty of tools that work well-enough alone, create a problem when combined with the wrong other tools.
While a customer journey is in principal at least, a single fairly logical thing, the digital tools to support it are a patchwork of bits and pieces that rarely speak the same language and are potential sins for energy and money in the wrong hands.

A review of the tools begins by identifying what you currently do and which tools you use, then looking at the gaps between what you want to do and what the tools ae capable of

It then looks at the revised strategies and carries out a similar gap analysis between what is recommended and what you already have.
By understanding what you plan and are likely to need to achieve over the next two to five years you will understand the strengths and weaknesses of you existing toolsets and have a good understanding of what can be improved and what needs to be replaced to meet your goals

The sort of tools you need and may well have in house:

·        Website Content Management System (CMS)

·        Blog tools

·        Social Media monitoring and publishing

·        SEO tools

·        Calls-to-Action (CTA)

·        Landing Pages including Forms, Smart Fields, Thank-You Pages, and Auto-responder emails

·        Lead Management tools

·        Email Marketing

·        Content Calendar scheduling and publishing

·        Marketing Automation

·        CRM

·        Integrated Analytics that compiles all data across all marketing channels and tools to supply actionable intelligence, not just aggregate data

·        A/B and Multi-variate testing tools

·        Polling and engagement tools

·        Heatmap tools

·        Instant chat tools

·        Customer bot tools

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