Is there a giant hole in your online marketing?

Internet marketing has come a very long way over the more then a decade that I have been working in the field. During that time I have watched the industry mature and followed a lot of great web development companies as they have grown and matured. One thing I find very common even today from some very talented companies and people though is a giant hole in their web sites. What is this hole you ask, shocking as it may sound it is…

No Sales Process

Crazy? Yes but true none the less. I have looked at countless sites that are beautifully designed, well optimized and have exceptional traffic. Yet the site clearly does nothing to put the visitors into the “sales cycle”. There is either no call to action or you really and I mean really have to be a proactive visitor to find it.

There are several things you must ask yourself all the time about your website.

1. Do you know the primary and secondary goals of your site?

Shockingly many site owners don’t or they only have one defined goal vs. several. Such as your site goal may be simply to make a sale of a product or service but what is your secondary goal? Is it branding, lead collection or something else or all of these things. You must know those goals before you can be sure your site addressed them and you must track the results in order to improve the results.

2. Does your site “speak” to people who are at different points in their buying cycle?

Some people are in research mode (this is why you must generate leads), some are ready to buy, some need one question answered in order to buy. You must have resources for each type of visitor and said resources must be easy to find and navigate to.

3. How can you make visitors that will never ever buy from you valuable?

Look most websites will convert fraction of traffic to a lead or a sale so almost every site has what can only be considered surplus traffic. So how do you make that traffic profitable. Some examples are viral marketing or advertising revenue, both can help turn your extra traffic into something of value. You simply must be doing something with it if not you are wasting a valuable resource.

A great way to look at this is that when you create web pages you should try to line them up with sales and/or marketing positions of the off line world.

~ Some are like outside sales people. - Closing the deals.

~ Some are like inside sales people. - Answering stock pre-sales questions or just filling orders.

~ Some are like sales managers. - Linking the efforts of all the other sales people together.

~ Some are like marketing directors. Building lists of leads and pumping them into the sales cycle.

In short are you treating your sites and pages like a sales and marketing team and acting as their sales and marketing manager? If not, you may want to rethink a lot of your efforts. Then sooner you make the change the easier it will be,

~ Jack Spirko

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