In this series of articles we’re going to de-mystify website traffic and reveal how you can get more targeted customer traffic to your company’s website.

In the last article we looked at why you need to pay attention to the internet in your business marketing. In this article we look at the typical customer purchasing process and what it means for your website. This information sets the foundation for your traffic campaign.

Why do people buy?

People buy for all sorts of reasons. They are influenced by internal factors, like perceptions, attitude, knowledge, lifestyle and roles, as well as external factors like culture, group membership and the purchasing situation. Marketing – the product itself, promotion, price, distribution and service – all play an important role in the buying decision.

So,… why do people buy?

Classic marketing teaches that consumers move through an ordered, logical buying process from first Recognizing a Need, they Search for a Solution, then Evaluate Options, before finally making a Purchase and then move into Post-Purchase Evaluation (did I make a wise choice?)

Which all sounds great in theory, however…

Recent research by Martin Lindstrom (from his book “Buy-ology – How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy is Wrong”) used advanced brain-scanning techniques to uncover the real reasons behind people’s purchase decisions. And it turns out that as consumers we are a lot less logical than we like to think – something direct mail marketers and late-night TV infomercial makers have known for years!

We buy on emotion then justify our decision with logic.

So – our customers may be moving through a logical, sequential process however their actions are driven mainly by emotion (which may lead them to shortcut several steps!)

Supporting the Purchase Process

Marketers use the acronym AIDAS to describe the marketing “events” that support the purchase process.

Attention – First, we must capture the prospect’s attention – perhaps even make them aware of the need for our product.

Interest – then we raise their interest in our product or service – we want to be considered in their search for a solution.

Desire – we then increase their desire for our specific solution, highlighting benefits – particularly any emotional benefits – of owning our product or using our service, so that we stand out when they are evaluating options.

Action – the most important step! We need to get them to take action, to buy our product or register their details so that our sales team can follow up with them.

Satisfaction – finally, we ensure the customer’s satisfaction by supporting their post-purchase evaluation with access to product support and answering their questions.

What does this mean for your website?

Put simply – there is no point getting a heap of traffic to your website if your website is not set up to turn those visitors into leads, prospects and/or customers.

Your website should support your (potential) customers at all stages of their purchase.

And… we must consider the emotions we stir up in interacting with our prospective clients – either directly (through trigger phrases in our sales copy) or unintentionally (through colors, fonts and images we use).

Who are your customers?

Let’s dig a little deeper by creating a profile of your existing customers. This exercise will help you picture these people interacting with your website.

Create customer profiles (sometimes called avatars) to represent your typical clients.

To start building a customer profile, answer the following questions:

• Is this customer a business or an individual consumer?
• Where are they located – local, regional, national or international?
• What is the main buying factor – price, service, quality, convenience, other?
• How often do they buy – once? Regularly? If so, how often?
• What desire or need does your product meet for your customer? What problem do you solve?
• How do they currently fill that need?

Individual consumers:

• Male or female? How old – child, teen, student, Gen Y, baby boomer, senior?
• Disposable income – low, moderate, high
• Lifestyle – single, family-oriented, retired, other?

Businesses:

• What industries do you target?
• What size businesses – small / medium / big corporations?
• Buying decision is made by – individual / department / team / other? What job title / department?
• Purchase is typically made – directly / through wholesalers / through retailers / other?

Strange as it may sound, I find it helps to actually name your customer profiles – e.g. “Bob the accountant”, “Mary the college graduate” or “Sue the vet”

The Acid Test

Now use the profiles you created of your “typical” new prospects to take a look at your existing site. Try to see your site through their eyes – as though you are “Bob the accountant”, it’s your first ever visit to the site and you’re looking for the “best way to (… whatever it is that you do …)”.

Now consider each phase of the buying process – gathering information and evaluating options right through to “wallet out, ready to buy”.

Are you serving the information that they are looking for? Or are you droning on about the history of your company (hate to be the one to tell you, but your web visitors just don’t care!)

How well does your website support each stage of the purchase process?

What is the Purpose of Your Website?

For many businesses, their website was initially created for the same reason you have a telephone or a fax line – “you can’t be in business without one”. However, without a defined purpose, the website ends up as little more than a glossy brochure advertising the company location and phone number with a bit of self-promotional blurb about the business.

Your website can act as a strong marketing channel for your business with a purpose that includes:

Supporting your “brand”

• This is “brand” in the sense of the collective thoughts people have about your company (“reliable”, “trustworthy”, “get things done”, etc.)

Generating leads

• Collect contact details from customers, encourage them to contact you through strong calls-to-action (e.g. “Call now for your free quote!”)

Supporting your customers

• Provide answers to common questions (FAQs) and other self-service information. Be accessible for customers who need help.

Making Sales

• If it makes sense, provide a way for customers to purchase or book services directly from your website.

Your Website = Your Marketing Machine

Statistically, only a small percentage of consumers will buy from a new company on their very first contact.

So the goal of your website is not (necessarily) to sell product to someone directly on their first visit. Your goal is start to build a relationship and establish trust with your prospective customers so that they keep coming back – and when they are ready to buy they will buy from you.

The best way to do this is through educational marketing.

Give your potential customers good, useful information. Help them to make an informed decision. Let them see that you are an authority in your field – that you know what you’re talking about. Lead them through the pros and cons of various solutions. Show them what to look out for. Help them with related areas. Basically – provide value to them and show them they can trust you. When you establish a trust relationship with a customer, they will often buy from you even in favor of other suppliers who may be less expensive and more convenient – because they trust you.

How to Automate Your Marketing Machine

With a smart business web site, you can automate these relationship-building interactions as a series of personalized emails that direct people to information that is already on your site. Every time they visit your site, they have the opportunity to buy (or contact your sales team).

To do this, you ideally need your website running on a content management system which can capture their name and email address and feed it to an auto-responder or customer relationship management system that then sends automated personalized emails in a pre-defined sequence.

Starting the Customer Relationship

With the prevalence of spam, getting someone to give you their email address is tricky. Most people won’t just sign up for a “newsletter” – you need to give them something of more value.

A common and effective strategy is to offer a free report – again with information that someone who is in the information gathering / evaluation stage will want.

Stuck for a report? Start with a title like “The Top 10 Things You Need To Know About Choosing a …(your product or service here)…” and brainstorm the top 10 things. Think of the common questions your customers ask you. Write 3-4 paragraphs on each and voila – you’ve got your report.

You can also hire specialist writers to compile the report for you – they’ll even do the research – but it’s definitely worth having a go yourself. No-one can be as authentically you as you can!

Your Action Steps Checklist

Here are the recommended actions from this article.

• Create customer profiles for your typical and ideal customer
• Review your web site using your customer profiles – are you supporting the purchase process?
• Create your “Top 10 Things” report
• Make sure your web site is collecting email addresses in exchange for your report

How many did you implement?

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Coming Up Next…

In this article we delved into the purchase cycle and the emotional nature of decision making. We created profiles of your typical customers and used them to examine your website to make sure it supports their purchase decisions. Finally, we looked at making your website an automated marketing machine for building customer relationships so you are positioned to make effective use of your web traffic.

In the next article, we look at how to research your market to find what “key words” your customers are searching for. These keywords form the target of your traffic campaign.

To find out how we can help you with your SEO, complete our survey now by clicking here

Steve Ovens is a professional search engine marketing specialist. He enjoys helping companies implement online marketing strategies and can talk for hours about web traffic, search engine optimization and internet marketing!

In this series of articles we’re going to de-mystify website traffic and reveal how you can get more targeted customer traffic to your company’s website.

First, let’s look at why you might want to pay attention to the internet…

Think back to the last time you were trying to fix a problem, or research a product you wanted to buy.

Did you start flipping through the telephone directory? Or open the local newspaper and turn to the classifieds section? Perhaps you paid a visit to your local library or drove down to the shopping mall to browse for your answer?

Or are you in the majority of people (over 80%) who turn to the internet for solutions – either contacting a friend for advice (email / Facebook), or “Google-ing it”.

Put simply, the internet is increasingly where people – including your potential customers – are turning to find information and solutions. Wouldn’t you love to catch your potential customers in the act of searching for a solution and put your product or service in front of them? DIY Web Traffic shows you exactly how you can do this.

Overview

In the DIY Web Traffic series we will cover everything you need to get more targeted customer traffic to your website. Each article will have action steps for you to implement in your traffic campaign.

Figure 1 DIY Web Traffic overview

Traffic Sources

There are lots of ways you can get traffic to your website:

• Offline branding and advertising
• Paid (for example Google Adwords)
• Organic (sometimes called “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization”)
• Social media such as Twitter and Facebook
• Email (NOT spam!)
• Joint Venture partners

Offline Traffic

Your website should be an integral part of your company’s branding and offline marketing and you should mention your website every chance you get. Mention your website on your “touch-points” – anywhere your potential customers come into contact with your business and your team.

Is your website name featured on…?

• your business cards, letterhead and other stationary
• your brochures
• your shop-front
• your company car or truck fleet
• your staff uniforms or company T-shirt
• your “music on hold”
• your email signature
• your corporate PowerPoint template?
• other…?

Paid Traffic

The easiest way to get traffic is to pay for it through paid advertising platforms like Google Adwords. These systems show your ads to people who are searching on relevant keywords through a bidding system where you pay for “clicks” – which bring visitors to your site.

There are many paid traffic solutions besides Google Adwords, such as Yahoo, MSN, Facebook and others.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is any type of traffic that is not paid for directly – including people typing your website URL directly into their browser.

For DIY Web Traffic though, we’ll narrow our definition to mean traffic that comes from your website appearing in the natural “organic” search engine results. Higher-ranked results typically receive more visitors – in fact the top 3 results receive over 79% of search engine visitors!

Search Engine Optimization (or “SEO”) involves optimizing your website to improve your organic search result position. Although often referred to as “free” traffic (as you don’t pay directly for clicks) SEO does involve work, so there is certainly a cost in time or money.

Organic traffic also includes “referral” traffic from other sites. For example, you might post a video on YouTube and include a reference to your website in the video description. Someone who watches the video may be interested in finding out more about your company and follow the link in the description.

Social Traffic

One of the more recent phenomena online has been the emergence and incredible popularity of online social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. These systems give you a platform for instant social interaction with other people, including potential customers (as well as a phenomenal market research tool – more on this later!).

It is generally frowned upon to use social media sites to market directly to people – it’s like walking up to someone at a party and launching straight into a sales pitch. However, you can include information about your website in your public profile, and occasionally mention your site in online conversations. Refer people to an information page rather than directly to a sales page. The information page leads to a sales page, which is referred to as “doing the two-step”.

Email Traffic

Another source of website traffic is email – and I’m not talking about SPAM here! Legitimate email to your customers is a great source of traffic to your website.

Let’s say you are sending a regular email newsletter to your customer or prospect list. Rather than putting all the information content in the newsletter email, instead put the full content on your website and email your customers / prospects a “teaser” snippet that outlines the benefits to them of the information you have to share. And then make sure that the webpage you send them to includes a “call to action” – a special offer of some kind or a link to a related product or service.

Joint Venture Traffic

Is there another company out there (not a direct competitor) who already has your potential customers on their customer database?

Could you create a joint venture proposal to offer something of value to their customers (e.g. a free or discounted product) – in a way that would also be a “win” for them (a financial reward or simply making them look good to their customers for organizing the offer)?

For example, if you are a pool cleaning company, could you create a package that the local real estate agent could offer to new home buyers who buy homes with a pool?

A good joint venture partner can drive a massive amount of extremely well-targeted traffic to your website. Plus, their endorsement will generally help improve conversions.

Another form of joint venture arrangement is affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is where you reward other people for helping to sell your products or services on a commission-only basis through an affiliate program. Amazon is generally credited with introducing this concept to the web and the Amazon Associates program is still the most popular affiliate program online. You’ve possibly seen websites with Amazon’s books listed on them.

In an affiliate program you can choose to reward people for leads or sales. An affiliate tracking system tracks sales or signups to the affiliate who made the referral, typically through a unique type of URL called “affiliate links” (e.g. an affiliate link for the Amazon Kindle would look like this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0015T963C?ie=UTF8&tag=bestdealshere-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B0015T963C).

Each affiliate can apply one or more of the traffic strategies outlined above to bring traffic to your site through their individual affiliate link. Affiliate traffic can be massive and is effectively free – affiliates are responsible for their individual traffic strategies. You only pay on actual sales or signups made.

Your Action Steps Checklist

Here are the recommended actions from this article.

• Complete “Touch-points” audit
• (Plan in place to) add your website to any missing “touch point”
• Register company Facebook account at www.Facebook.com
• Register company Twitter account at www.twitter.com
• Create a list of potential JV partners
• Create a compelling JV offer

How many did you implement?

To find out how we can help you with your SEO, complete our survey now by going to http://itontaptraffic.com/

Coming Up Next…

DIY Web Traffic will examine each of these traffic techniques and how to implement them in detail.

In the next article, we look at the typical customer purchase cycle and what it means for the purpose of your website. This sets the foundation for your traffic campaign. Steve Ovens is a professional search engine marketing specialist. He enjoys helping companies implement online marketing strategies and can talk for hours about web traffic, search engine optimization and internet marketing!

To find out how we can help you with your SEO, complete our survey now by going to http://itontaptraffic.com/

So you have created your new website? Fantastic! Now we need to get as many of your target customers as possible to visit your site.

The first step is always to use Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising on Google. If you’re not sure what PPC is or why I recommend PPC before Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), please read my article on Using Paid Advertising on Google to Increase Traffic to Your Website.

Once you have your Pay Per Click in place, you should have a good idea of what keywords are driving better quality traffic to your website, which serves as a great place to start. Remember, one of the biggest keys to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is good keyword research. You want to ensure that you optimise for the “right keywords”, the keywords that your target customer group are searching for. Otherwise, you are wasting your time. Imagine you have created a website promoting holidays to Java Indonesia. And you optimise your website for “Java” and it ranks #3 on Google – on initial thoughts you have done well.

However, if the people searching for “Java” are looking for Java coffee beans, then your site is of no relevance to them. You’ve optimised for a keyword that makes sense to you, but not your customers. They are not searching for “Java”, they might be searching for “Indonesia holidays”. You are missing out on all that traffic, because of poor keyword research and you have wasted all your time optimising for “Java”. This is what I call the “SEO Sucker Punch!” You think you’re doing well but in reality you’re competitors are laughing at you. Never presume that you know what you’re customers are searching for – always ensure that you do your research or ensure that your Search Engine Optimsation (SEO) consultants are doing their research for you.

When it comes to keywords, there are lots of SEO gurus out there who recommend optimising your site for up to 5 keywords. To me, that’s the basement level of SEO. Why would you only optimise your site for 5 keywords if your customer base was searching for 25 different keywords that relate to your product offerings? You’re missing out on 80% of your potential traffic.

And what about Long Tail? Long Tail keywords often contain 3 or more keywords in their search phrase and don’t give you high search volumes every day but they are extremely targeted, have high conversions and can be quite profitable. For example, in the case of I.T. on Tap, a long tail keyword is “Customer Relationship Systems for Accountants.” Not something that is searched for in high volumes but a keyword that is highly targeted and people that are looking for something that meet their needs. If you have not optimised for these keywords (again, this should come out of your research), then you’re missing out on dollars!

Remember as well, that Google will only ever show two pages from your site for a particular keyword. So don’t get over exuberant and optimise every single page for the same bunch of keywords. Instead, you want to look at your site and each keyword (or group of keywords) and then pick the best two pages that have the most compelling content with regards to your keywords. And these are the two pages you want to optimise.

For example, one of my first clients was an insurance company that offered a range of different insurance products. We optimised their home page for such products as car insurance and home insurance, plus one other page of relevance. However, for business insurance, we created and optimised the business insurance landing page and a lower level page. Of course we then used good internal linking with quality anchor text and as a result my client ranked in the top 5 on Google for all their relevant search terms.

So you can hopefully see just how important keywords are to you in order to get large numbers of high quality, targeted customers coming to your website. Ensure that whatever agency you use to take care of your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) spends adequate time doing their research. Otherwise, you’re failing to get the maximum return on your spend. Good luck!

Internet Marketing Manager

I.T. on Tap

December 02, 2008

With Google, there are two avenues for advertising. Paid advertising on Google known as Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This paper will focus exclusively on PPC.

Once you have your website and you want to start driving traffic to it, I always recommend Pay Per Click (PPC) as the first avenue to pursue. Why PPC when Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is free and can provide loads of free traffic?

SEO is fantastic and I am a big proponent of it. If you want to find out more about my thoughts on SEO, please read my article on Search Engine Optimisation: The Importance of Quality Keyword Research. However, PPC has the following advantages:

1. Instant results and feedback. Within 24 hours of implementing a PPC campaign, we can see what keywords are converting, how successful our sites are etc.
2. We can tweak our campaigns and within 24 hours see the effect of the change that has been made.

With SEO, changes can take as long as two weeks if not longer before we see results. And the ‘refresh time’ is not constant. Google can take two weeks to spider us and then after our next change take up to 4 weeks. Also, with PPC we can immediately see which keywords convert the best. Once we determine this, we can then apply SEO to our website for these very same keywords.

The other challenge is that Google is constantly tweaking its algorithm. So you could easily find yourself in a situation where one day you are ranking quite highly and the next day you check out your ranking and you are ranked on page 37. So yes SEO is an essential part of your online lead generation strategy but it should come second after PPC. For instant feedback, results and to keep building momentum, I recommend a PPC campaign across your websites as the first course of action.

The challenge will be finding the “right keywords”. As small business owners, we don’t have infinite pockets – so how do we find out what our customers are looking for. Well, firstly, ask them!! Ask your existing customer base what keywords they associate with your business. And don’t be surprised if they are completely different to what you thought. It has amazed me time and time again how often a business owner’s impression of his / her business is quite different to a customer’s impression of the business. I’m not talking about quality of service but the range of services.

Secondly, TEST! TEST! TEST! Just like your existing customers may have a different association to your business, so do your prospects. A classic example is with our company “IT on Tap”. We provide a range of secure, hosted computer solutions for small business. So when we started advertising on Google, we thought we’d get great results for such keywords as “Customer Relationship Management”, “CRM”, “Cloud Computing” and “Sales Force Automation”. Yet, I’m glad we tested because we found that our best converting keywords were “IT for Small Business” and “Starting up a business?” It is these keywords that have given us a much greater number of click thrus.

So once you have determined your keywords, what are the Critical Success Factors for your campaign? The success of PPC comes down to the following:

1. Budget: How much can you afford to spend per click and your total daily budget vs that of your competitors. This is why testing becomes so important because you only want to advertise in areas where your targeted customers are.
2. Targeted Ad Groups and Ad words: Regardless of whether you are going to use your own PPC or engage an external agency, make sure you have as many different targeted Ad Groups as possible, each with several Ad Words (keywords) in each Ad Group. An example of an Ad Group for the IT on Tap website is “Start a Business” and within it we have nearly 30 keywords associated with “Start a Business”. The advantage of having different Ad Groups is that you can now write a targeted advert for each Ad Group (rather than trying to target several different groups with one advert). Of course, this will lead to more people clicking through to your website.
3. Targeted copy and continual split testing: Split testing simply refers to having two or more (although we only recommend two) different adverts running at the same time. Google serves up these adverts and then tells you which one receives a higher click through rate.
4. Quality of targeted landing pages. Common errors (often due to time and resource constraints) are:Having one landing page that tries to incorporate too many customer groups. This results in the landing page not being targeted enough and a reduced ROI.No separate landing pages, forcing the user to surf around the site themselves. This results in a very poor ROI. We must remember that people browsing online will decide on average within 1.8seconds whether the site they are on is of relevance to them. So we want to create landing pages that are as easy as possible for customers to achieve their outcome (and ours), especially as we have paid for them to arrive at our page.Creating stand alone landing pages with no navigation to other parts of the site. There are still some “web experts” that suggest this is the way to go as users can get distracted when there are other links on the page, which is true. However, latest reports from Google show that the ‘Quality Score’ is reduced (increasing cost per click) when this happens. So what’s the answer? Create landing pages with a clear and easy way for the customer to provide email address while still having links to other pages in the footer of the page.

So is Google Pay Per Click an efficient and profitable way to increase leads, customers and business? Absolutely! There are some key factors that need to be taken into consideration to ensure the highest return on your spend and to maximise profitability.For more information on how I.T. on tap can help grow your business revenue and customer base, visit the Internet Marketing section of our site.

Internet Marketing Manager

I.T. on Tap

December 05, 2008