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?

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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/