Infinite options; finite resources

There is no lack of places to spend your marketing time and money. The key is to separate the productive options from the mere distractions, and then tackle the most productive options in order.

It helps to keep in mind the two most important results of your marketing efforts:

1. Drive more traffic (prospects) to your website, and

2. Turn more of that traffic into paying customers.

If you’re facing a marketing opportunity that doesn’t do one of these two things, you don’t need to give it anymore thought. Just cross it off your list.

But that still leaves a number of places to focus. How do you choose among them?

Website first

As I write this article, the website is still the heart of any good marketing effort. Most – if not all – of your leads and prospects will land on your website while they’re making a buying decision. It’s where they first get to know you. Multiple 3rd party studies have proven this to be true.

If you haven’t given much thought to your website lately, now is a good time to do it. Take a look at your bounce rate. If your website is driving most of your visitors away, fix that first.

Traffic second

Once you know your website is doing a decent job of holding your visitors, you can comfortably drive more traffic there. Work on this until you have a sufficient level of traffic to begin supporting your sales goals.

How much traffic is enough? That answer depends on how many new customers (for an ecommerce site) or new customer opportunities (for a lead generation site) you need to produce. I recently wrote a how-to article about this for the Cranking Widgets blog. You can read it for help on figuring out your traffic requirements: How to Be Certain You’re Spending Marketing Money Wisely.

Conversions third

Websites and traffic generation are the blocking and tackling of a good marketing program. Conversion optimization – moving more visitors and prospects to take the action(s) you want them to take – is where smart marketers begin to run up the score.

Once you’ve got your website and traffic generation humming along, you can focus ere. Get better at converting visitors to prospects and prospects to customers and you’ll quickly see the effect on your bottom line: more customers and lower acquisition costs.

The message: Avoid distractions

Distractions can kill your marketing budget. Few things really make a difference in getting paid. Focus on those. 1) Drive more traffic to your website and 2) Do more with the traffic you get.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about squeezing the most from your incredibly important website. More on that in the next article.

Meanwhile, how do you avoid marketing distractions?

You want to know what that number is, and you want to measure your traffic to know how much you’re getting.

But, traffic alone doesn’t accomplish much unless you are a publisher and you sell advertising based on the number of eyeballs you deliver. Let’s assume for the sake of this article that’s not your business model.

More likely you want to drive people to your website to either a) buy something now – as in an ecommerce site or b) learn more about you and your product or services or c) take some action that opens the door to nurturing the relationship until they’re ready to talk to a sales person.

If your website isn’t doing its job – turning visitors into customers or interested prospects – you can drive all the traffic you want to your site but you’re wasting money.

Sure, you can keep driving more and more visitors; and the laws of mathematics will see to it that you get more customers (unless you’re not converting anyone), but at what cost?

It’s like fishing with a broken net. You may be in the right place with the right bait but what if there are holes in your net? At some point you’ll want to change your focus from finding fish to making sure they stay in the net.

Take another look at our website traffic calculator  and play around with the conversion percentages by changing the number of new free trials, demos or valid contact requests you get in an average month. You’ll see how increasing conversion rate dramatically lowers your need for leads.

Just about any marketing pro will tell you it costs more, much more, to generate good traffic (brand new leads) than it costs to improve your ability to get that traffic to do what you want them to do.

The point of this article is to advocate net awareness. Find those holes and fix them. Then you can worry about finding more fish.

Want some help? Grab your free copy of our 18-page e-book called How to Get More Customers from Your Current Website Traffic.

Survey participants’ answers (163 in all) should serve as a wake-up call for anybody that does not believe writing errors can kill sales. As you’ll soon discover, people do care, and they will use writing to evaluate and judge a prospective company.

Download your copy of this free, 17-page report by clicking on the link below:

http://su.pr/1mlSG1

Thanks to everyone who participated in this survey and to my trusted reviewers that gave me feedback on early drafts.

Let me know if you have any comments or questions about the information contained in the report.

Sue Anderson-Lenz
Marketing Lure, Inc.

But the iPad may change that. We’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Meanwhile, aren’t you curious to see how your website renders on an iPad? I was. Pad Peek is an easy tool to help you do it. Just type in your URL and that’s it.

It’s not perfect though. Flash apparently works on this tool but it doesn’t work on the real iPad. If you’re using flash on your website and you want to know exactly what visitors will see there are a couple of technical hoops to jump through. Mashable gives instructions for what to do on this post.

Or you could just buy an iPad.

I’m wrapping up results which will be published by the end of this week. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peek to whet your appetite.

First, some context.

In total, 163 people took my survey.

My target demographic was business professionals, which I found through press releases, blog posts, and social networking groups on LinkedIn, CIO.com, and BizSugar, to name a few.

The majority of respondents came from the U.S., although bit.ly tells me the survey reached folks in 16+ countries (and I can personally track some respondents back to their homes in Canada, Australia, and India).

So what did 163 business professionals say when asked if they have ever factored writing errors into a decision to NOT do business with a company?

It seems unlikely — almost crazy — that someone would dismiss a prospective company because of writing errors on their website or in company literature, right?

Well, check out the chart below:

The overwhelming majority of people that responded to this survey admit they have indeed written off a company — in part because of writing snafus. Ouch.

On April 20th, I’ll post the entire survey results in this blog. If you can’t wait until then, drop me an e-mail and I’ll let you know when the report is published on my website.

Two weeks should give you plenty of time to proofread your marketing material.

Sue Anderson-Lenz
Marketing Lure, Inc.

TechTarget & Google , in a recent report on Search Behavior of IT Buyers Online During the Purchase Process , clustered keywords into four groups: brand, issue/opportunity, solution and comparison, and studied how and when these words are used.

Like many studies, most of what they found on this subject is fairly intuitive if you take the time to think about it but it’s always good to have some solid data behind the assumptions.

Why does it matter how and when the keywords are used? Because the searchers’ choice of words can tell you where they are in the buying process. When you know that, you can craft a much more compelling offer, ad and/or landing page.

The study confirmed “Issue / Opportunity” keywords are used more in the Awareness (initial) Stage of the buying process than at any other time. This group includes:

• Issue
• Resolve
• Risks
• Upgrade
• Improve
• Optimize
• Prevent
• Troubleshoot.

When you see these words in a keyword phrase you can be fairly sure the searcher is early in the buying process – having identified a pain point – and is trying to learn more about the problem or opportunity itself.

In other words, they are unlikely to be interested in a product demo right now. But they will read eBooks, newsletters, editorial articles and whitepapers on the business issue.

“Solution” keywords are more common in the Consideration Stage. This group includes words such as:

• Provider
• Service
• Vendor
• Supplier
• Tool
• Device
• Software
• Appliance
• Solution

In the Consideration Stage, buyers are more familiar with their issue and want to know more about the kinds of solutions available to address the problem or opportunity. In this phase, according to the study, they are the most responsive to wide range of content types – everything from ebooks, whitepaper, podcasts, online videos, newsletters, and virtual tradeshows.

By the time buyers reach the Decision Stage, they are looking more for specific brands and product/solution comparisons. Brand words are obvious:

• EMC
• Microsoft
• Oracle
• Your name
• Your competitors’ names

Comparison words include

• Versus
• vs.
• Review
• Test
• Pros and cons
• Benchmarks
• Compare

When searchers use these words they are getting serious about making a decision. They’re more likely to be interested in your trial software, online demos and even product literature.

Now that you know this what do you do about it?

By clustering keywords in your PPC campaign into ad groups according to buying stage you can increase both your click-through rate and your conversion rate. That’s because you can make educated guesses about what will appeal to the searcher and produce more relevant offers.

Similarly you could create landing pages on your website that are optimized to show up in organic listings according to buying stage.

Search marketing is one of very few marketing tactics where you are allowed this much understanding of what’s going on in your prospects’ minds. It would be a shame to let that go to waste. Listen carefully.

Here’re some of the most interesting points in the report:

IT buyers want to see vendor comparisons – especially in the final stage of evaluation but marketers resist offering them. When comparisons are not available IT buyers make their own. Isn’t this a great opportunity for marketers?

IT marketers are lagging behind demand in the availability of trial software. We’ve gotten better but not good enough. 35% of software companies were offering trial software in 2008; but 54% of IT buyers were looking for it. By the way, IT buyers (70%) say they spend two weeks or less evaluating trial software downloads. Does this surprise you?

Just because your product is expensive doesn’t mean buyers won’t appreciate a trial. True – most IT buyers (83%) are downloading trial software that has a final cost of less than $25,000, but some that are using it to evaluate software costing more than $500,000. 68% of all trial users are somewhat or very likely to purchase the solution after using the trial.

In the not-so-surprising category, 64% of IT buyers always use the internet to research information on technology solutions, 31% use it frequently, 5% use it sometimes (who are these people?); nobody never uses it.

While marketers tend to overrate it a little, white papers ranked the highest as the most utilized online content – used by 70% of IT buyers. Product literature came in second at 62%.

Email newsletters and e-books are useful to IT buyers during the awareness stage of the buying process. Trial software, vendor demos, case studies and comparisons are favored more towards the decision stage. This is important especially for those of you who are ignoring prospects in the early stages. Email newsletters and ebooks are a good way to hook these folks.

IT buyers prefer your videos or webcasts to be on-demand versus live. This is probably a convenience preference. The 10% who prefer a live performance do so because of the Q&A opportunities.

Search engines are the most used information source during the buying process (83%). Vendor website came in a number two (75%) followed by testimonials from peers and colleagues (65%) and IT publisher websites(64%). Interestingly online social networking groups were used by only 11% of IT buyers.

You can download a copy of the full report here: TechTarget 2009 Media Consumption Benchmark Report 2.  You’ll have to give up some contact details but the info is worth it.

Does any of this surprise you? If so, let’s hear about it here.

“The best thing is to do the right thing. The next best thing is to do the wrong thing. The worst is to do nothing.”

I have no idea who originally said that. I once had a boss who used it frequently. And boy is it true with conversion optimization.

Since our recent release of an e-book on How to Increase Profits from Current Website Traffic, we’ve received a lot of enthusiastic response – much of which can be summarized in the words of one software company owner:

“This sounds awesome! Where do I start?”

Here’s how we how we approach this question at Clicks ‘n Conversions. I’ll use a recent new client as an example. I hope this will help you get your own efforts going.

Shawn’s company has a specialized web application for a certain type of small business. He sells his application online. He came to us for help in getting more customers.

The first thing we noticed was that Shawn wasn’t using a web analytics program and we showed him how to put Google Analytics on his site. Website conversion optimization without analytics support is not impossible, but analytics makes it much easier to find and fix problems areas — especially as you get into more detailed tweaks.

Next we looked at Shawn’s marketing process, which – as is typical for web applications that don’t require a sales person – looked like this:

1. Send people to the website
2. Get them to sign up for a free 30 day trial
3. Convert them to a paying customer.

Each of these steps offers opportunities for improvement and to decide where to start we needed to answer two questions:

1. What percentage of Shawn’s trial users become paying customers?
2. What percentage of his website visitors take a free trial?

In Shawn’s company’s case, 5%  of trial users actually ended up as paying customers while less than 1% of website visitors were signing up for the trial. This information led us to focus first on getting more website visitors to try the application.

In reality, we could have chosen either place to start. The question is often which is more efficient. By doubling the visitor-to-trial ratio from 1% to 2%, we could double the number of new customers each month. To accomplish that same thing we would have to double the trial-to-customer ratio from 5% to 10%. Shawn had enough traffic to make the 1st option a better starting place.

But the bottom line really is that it’s impossible to start at the wrong place. Just by taking action and improving something, you will improve your sales – assuming of course that all else remains the same.

If I could get you to do one single marketing-related thing in 2010 it would be to start actively measuring – and acting on – the performance of your marketing program. If you’re already measuring, start holding people accountable. And if you’re already doing that, call me. We probably have some valuable data to share.

It doesn’t matter what size company you are. Setting objectives, measuring progress and holding yourself – or someone else – accountable may not be sexy, but it will make a huge difference in where you are this time next year.

I’ll admit my interest in getting you to start measuring is not without a self-serving factor. I know you and your company will get great benefit from it, and I also know the more aware you are of your marketing programs’ performance the more likely you are to turn to Clicks ‘n Conversions for help when the time comes.

You don’t have to take my word for the power of measuring. Just try it for yourself.

Over the next few articles, I’ll give you a little peak into how we measure things at Clicks ‘n Conversions.

What we measure

At the highest level, we track our progress with a weekly report that shows us the following:

• Deals in progress. Chances are good many of you already track this metric. We define a deal being in progress when an opportunity has been defined and we can put a potential revenue number to it. Ours is a complex sale and our website is a lead generation site. For those of you with a simpler (I didn’t say easier) sale and an e-commerce site, this metric might be something like free product trials.
• Warm prospects in the pipeline. This metric separates the casual inquires or simple website visitors from the people who really may have a need for our services and the resources to work with us. If you have a conversation with us by phone or by email and we agree there is something worth pursuing then you become a warm prospect.
• New business secured. This one is easy. It’s a sale. Who doesn’t track that?
• Website Visitors. This metric is important to me because I know how much traffic we need to be driving to our website under our current conversion efficiency to ensure we’ll have enough opportunities to hit our sales objectives. You can figure this out too (if you haven’t already done so) by using our Website Traffic Calculator.
• Current conversion rates. There are a bunch of these. At the top, we look at the percentage of website visitors who eventually step forward and want to communicate directly with me. You might call this a sales-ready lead. For an ecommerce site, this metric would be the percentage of website visitors who become paying customers.

There are also multiple sub-conversion rates we pay attention to. These metrics track how many people took the action(s) we wanted them to take – such as downloading a report or whitepaper, subscribing to a newsletter or contacting us.

• Deals lost. A sad metric but an important one as well. This tells us how well we’re doing at closing deals. We track not only those we lost to a competitor (fortunately a consistently low number) but also deals that were lost for lack of a decision (much more common in our world).
• Performance of individual marketing programs. At a more tactical level we also track how each of our marketing programs is performing.

Lots of companies track at least some of the information listed above – especially the ones that are closer to the point of sale. But most companies I’ve been exposed to fail to do the one thing that makes all of this meaningful In my next post – next Wednesday – I’ll reveal the secret.

See you then.

Recently I sat in on a presentation by Ronny Kohavi, GM for Microsoft’s Experimentation Platform. The talk was called Top Seven Testing Pitfalls.  Among other things, it gave me some good ammo to share with you on the subject of why constant testing is so critical.

As a lifelong marketer, I am thrilled – thrilled – that we can now track, test and measure visitor movement through a website and use that data to improve how well a site turns visitors into paying customers or sales-ready leads. And we get to do this without even once having to sit through a 3-hour meeting to discuss the color of the logo or where it should go on the webpage.

But then I’ve spent most of my career working with engineers, scientists and other logical thinkers for whom statistically significant data ranks right up there with oxygen. The need to quantify decisions rather than going with mere opinions has rubbed off on me. I also like being able to prove that our work produces good results.

I admit, though, when faced with the opinions of a room full of “experts” – especially if you’re one of them – it’s tempting to make decisions based on intuition, instinct or experience. That’s okay as long as it’s just a starting point. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my decades of marketing it’s that you just can’t be sure what people will do. No matter how positive you are you are right – people will regularly prove you wrong with their actions.

How often are we wrong?

Ronny Kohavi had some very good data (yes, data) on that subject from some of the world’s great testing companies. These are companies that test EVERYTHING and each test clears a number of hurdles including web designers, usability experts, copywriters, marketing geniuses and executives before it is run. Everyone believes the challenger page in the experiment has a good chance to deliver better results than the existing page.

Amazon finds that half of the experiments they try fail to show any statistically significant improvement.

Microsoft finds that about one third of their experiments have a positive effect while one third have negative effects and one third have no significant effect at all.

Why test if most tests won’t give you positive results?

Because you don’t know where the positive results lie until you test! If the experts gathered by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft guess wrong most of the time, far be it from me to be able to tell what works by just looking at it.

And I prove that to be true over and over again with our own experiments.

Keep testing.