Internet Trends 2010 - Profit Up for February 2010

Part 1 of Chris discussing Internet trends for 2010:


Part 2 of Chris discussing Internet trends for 2010:

Google Take a Leaf Out of Our Book

If any of you have a Google analytics account then you should have receieved an email from them today sending you seasons greetings. Well we did anyway.

We were suprised to see that Google had taken a leaf out of our book.

Here's the holiday greeting image that came embedded into the email:

The reason this made us laugh was because anyone who knows the history of Upright Solutions will also know that the name came from the fact that our services make your sales graphs go up and to the right.

I doubt Google took this from us but it's a nice little coincidence we wanted to share during the holiday season.

Business at Upright Solutions is booming so we've neglected the blog lately, you can blame than on our International clients who've been experiencing a rapid increase in demand as the economy picks up so we've been working flat out to help them capture the maximum amount of market share.

I've got a feeling 2010 is going to be the best year yet.

Video Version of Marketing Hub Article

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25FX2GZPd1U

Leveraging Your Website as the Hub of Your Marketing (Not Marketing in the Dark)

This article demonstrates that no matter what marketing medium you use, all road lead back to the web.

I’m still staggered at the numbers of companies who don’t have any tracking on their website.

The one’s that do don’t review it.

The one’s that do review it, don’t know how the information can help them make decisions.

Bottom line, your website is absolutely the hub of all your marketing. I don’t care what you do exhibitions, leaflet drops, networking, direct mail, telemarketing, advertising it doesn’t matter, guaranteed the place every prospective customer will turn next is to your website.

It’s your living connection to your prospective customers. It’s dynamic, changeable and interactive (or it should be).

If you want to maximise that marketing expenditure, don’t let people fall through the cracks.

Website visitors are GOAL DRIVEN. Once they have read your leaflet or seen your company at a trade show they go to your website FOR A SPECIFIC PURPOSE.

If your website doesn’t serve that purpose you may as well not have bothered spending the time and money going to the trade show, because you’ll have dropped the ball.

Back to the idea of website tracking.

‘Web analytics’ as it’s called isn’t just a means of segmenting website visitors into categories according to where they came from (search engine, online directory etc) but with professional help it can also track your offline marketing.

The holy grail of business has always been knowing what activity most influences or generates new business. If we could get a better idea about that we’d make a lot more money at the end of the year.

Web analytics can go a long way to helping us with this.

By default analytics systems categorise your website visitors into three major categories (visitors from search engines, visitors from other websites, visitors who knew your website address).



But there’s nothing to stop you from creating as many categories as you like, allowing you to see exactly how many people where compelled by whatever piece of marketing material they came across.

So the next time you go and exhibit at a trade show or put out an advertisement, spend £10 on a new domain name that relates to what you are advertising such as ChristmasChocolatesOffer.co.uk and then forward visitors to that address to your real website.

Because the only place people could have found out that website address is from that particular advert or trade show, later when you review your website tracking you’ll see exactly how many people wanted to know more about your offer.

You can even track how many of those people ended up making an enquiry after getting more information.

We mentioned a couple of articles ago that we do this with our email footers so even if we don’t get through to decision makers when we call them up, we at least know if people are reading our introductory letters and emails and then wanting to find out more by visiting our website.

So stop shooting in the dark with your marketing money and turn the lights on by embracing web analytics.

For more information on anything discussed in this article please contact us directly and we’ll be glad to help.

Until next time keep that Profit Up.

An Example of How Marketing Can Sell Almost Anything to Almost Anyone

Marketing is supposed to present a product, service or company to it's target market in such a way as to be appealing right?

The basic specifications of a product or service are boring and undesirable, so it's the job of marketing to tell the story of how those features become benefits and ultimate what positive difference the product or service will make.

I came across a pearl of an advert recently and had to share it.

Here it is:

The 'Axe' brand is what we call Lynx in the UK, the men's personal hygiene and deodorant lines. 'The Lynx Effect' in the UK is 'The Axe Affect' in the USA.

I came across this advert in XXL magazine, an American hip hop magazine, the perfect place to promote a product that sells itself as helping you attract women the more you use it.

This advert appears to make the assumption that you are already using Axe products, have experienced the effects and now need this product next.

Looking at it and without reading my analysis or the marketing spin you'll see that the advert has a picture of what I would have previously referred to as a 'bath or shower scrunchy'.

I.e. a delicate sponge type product for ladies to wash themselves with.

The typical representation of a scrunchy is unlikely to appeal to the core market of males Axe targets.

So what did they do? They made the scrunchy into 'The Axe Detailer Shower Tool'.

Absolutely brilliant if you ask me. And just look at it, you can see it's really just a scrunchy but they've put this rough surface on one side and made it in the most manly colour scheme imaginable (red and black).

You'll notice this same colour combination on car interiors designed to target men too.

The fact that they have used the words 'Detailer' and 'Tool' to name the product, conjure up images of polishing metal, a construction site, cranes or a car garage, all very manly.

So using the Axe Shower Tool on your body is like detailing a car or fixing some heavy machinery, again very manly indeed.

Look at the two labels pointing to either side of the product. On the right where it points to the soft scrunchy side it says 'Washes lipstick off your neck' and the other side is labeled as 'Scrubs candle wax off your chest hair'.

The advert promotes the idea that 'Axe' is effective without question and now they have come up with a product to help you deal with the aftermath.

The labels referencing lipstick on the neck and candle wax also suggest a kinky image, which if you've seen the TV adverts, fits in with the dominating sexual theme.

Finally at the bottom they top it off with those two lines of text which I (as a marketing professional) interpreted as shots aimed at personality traits.

The Axe Shower Tool is almost like the perfectly rounded guy that will have the maximum appeal to women.

It has 'a rough side for your tough guy parts', suggesting women like a man who can protect them and 'a soft side for your sensitive guy parts' suggesting that the ideal man has some sensitivity too.

I don't know if you think this is over analysing but this is what we do as marketeers, we help you sell more of your products and services by dressing them up to have the maximum appeal to the market you want to sell them to.

I just thought this was an excellent example of a product which is really just a sponge, which no one has any urgency to go out and buy, into a concept of sex appeal that has a much higher chance of attracting buyers.

Hats off to them.

Turning Google Searches into Paid Invoices

This article serves to show the often unseen connection between a search conducted on Google and that person paying the invoice you issued to them.

A person or company that has a requirement for a product or service will be placing that order with someone but there are some milestones to reach before that happens.

The Internet is nothing new really. When you boil it down, it’s just old concepts on a new medium.

So it is with generating business through the web. This short article aims to help you see the similarities between making a sale before the Internet and making a sale now that we have it.

As a guide we’ll be referring to the following document which you can download and make use of later if you like:

Download Internet Sales Funnel Diagram

You might recognise this as a traditional sales funnel. In the old days the top of the funnel would be the number of cold calls made.

The next stage down in the funnel in the old days would have been number of brochures sent out perhaps.

The next stage in the funnel in the old days would have been number of appointments made or number of quotes sent out and eventually the numbers of sales made.

Then at the end of the sales process you can work out average sale value, total value of sales brought in and then how much gross profit was made.

This is very similar to the new age, except instead of cold calls and paper brochures etc we automate the time consuming part of the process using Internet marketing and our websites.

Take a phrase like ‘internet marketing specialists’ which is one of our most important keywords, which we’re optimising our own website for.

We know this is searched around 4,000 a month overall and about 800 times a month in the UK.
So say we’re optimising our website for 9 other similar keywords with a combined total of 8,000 searches each month.

The more exposure our website has for these 10 keywords the greater share of those 8,000 searches we are going to get as visitors to our website.

If we were in the top 3 on Google for all these keywords (at time of writing we’ve moved up to 12th on Google for ‘internet marketing specialists’), then I would expect our site to attract about 20% of the searches. 20% of 8,000 is 1,600 website visitors per month.

Now we’ve filled in the top two portions of the funnel diagram, the next thing we track is how many of those 1,600 visitors will make an enquiry to us.

Now even though those people came looking for us, they’ll all be at different stages of their decision making process. Some are conducting initial research on one end and people are ready to sign a deal on the other.

Our website is pretty good and converts an average of 4% of its search engine traffic into enquiries, which would mean 64 enquiries a month through the web using the above figures.

As it shows on the diagram, the better your website is the more visitors will convert into enquiries. Contact us for help on improving this.

So now we have 64 enquiries and say only 50% of them are serious, meaning we produce 32 proposals / quotes.

That’s the third stage dealt with.

Finally let’s say our proposals were not particularly persuasive so only 20% of the potential customers decided to go ahead with us. 20% of 32 is 6, so 6 new customers.

So there we have it. We’ve gone right through the process from someone conducting a Google search through to issuing an invoice to a new customer.

The results of this kind of process have many variables. If you are better or worse at any particular stage then that will obviously affect the amount of business that comes out of the bottom of the funnel.

Having tons of searches for your product or services is no good if your Internet marketing is poor because no one will ever find your company.

If your website is poor then the people who do find you won’t bother getting in touch.

And if you don’t present the value of your product or service properly the people that do make the enquiry won’t end up giving you an order.

Imagine what difference it makes when you improve all of these elements at the same time?

I guarantee the result would definitely be ‘Profit Up’.

For more information on anything discussed in this article please contact us directly and we’ll be glad to help.

Until next time keep that Profit Up.

How the activity of your sales force affects traffic to your website

80 to 90% of your prospective customers will visit your website before contacting you.

I would say it's highly probable that at some point during the sales process 100% of your prospective customers are going to visit your website for some reason.

It's like the Eisenberg brothers taught us in 'Waiting for your cat to bark', for organisations with multiple levels of management the decision making process goes in stages.

The procurement of office stationary for example might begin with an office junior conducting research in order to build a list of say 10 prospective suppliers which is then passed up the organisation chart to more and more senior levels.

At each level of seniority and even horizontally across the organisation chart different decision makers and influencers are going to want to pull different bits of information from your organisation, and there's no more effortless way of them getting this than from your website.

That is assuming your site has the relevant information but that's a whole other story.

We all know what prospecting is like, especially if you are a direct sales person and are reading this, there's a lot of contacting that goes on.

Often you don't get hold of the person you want to speak to but sometimes you get an email address with which to send an introduction.

Prospects will read your email and often click through to your company website to see what it's all about. They may decide they are not open to what you are offering but they will be curious enough to check out your website because we all like to make at least semi informed decisions.

This applies especially to more junior members of their team because typically (and yes this is a generalisation) people will find reasons to procrastinate and your email could be just that opportunity.

My advice would be to do what we do and tag the link in your email footer so you know how often prospective customers are checking out your website following an introductory email, rather than them just deleting it.

If I contact a prospect to offer them our search marketing services I'll always send something ahead of the phone call, that's just the way I prefer to do it.

In the footer of the email that introduces Upright Solutions there'll be a link that looks like this:

http://www.simplifyinternetmarketing.co.uk/

The actual URL it links to though is this:
http://www.simplifyinternetmarketing.co.uk/?utm_source=email-footer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email-signature

This is a URL that has a tag that informs Google analytics about the specific source of that website visitor.

So we've created a new segment for the site traffic. The result?

Well in our traffic sources report instead of the standard, direct, referral and search segments we get:



This week 15 people have received our introductory emails and clicked the website link in the footer. On average they visited 2.8 pages, so just a quick look to see what we are about.

This is a good exercise because without the link tagging all the email footer traffic would have been counted as 'direct traffic'.

The same goes for any campaign you are running, you can change the link to to segment off traffic from any source or campaign that you like.

Remember we can't improve that which we do not measure, so get tagging.

Contact us if you need help setting this kind of thing up.