Here are our top tips for gaining new clients online and a few others about how to use your website to help increase your profitability. Just by implementing a few key tips you can start to substantially grow your
business on the internet
Tip 1 – A Great Website is No Good if No One Knows About it. If you are going to have a website, you won’t gain any new customers or clients from it if nobody visits. As fantastic as our websites are, they can’t gain new clients for you if nobody knows about it. You must understand the different processes by which visitors will be attracted to your website there is lot more to maximising this than just online search engines.
Tip 2 – Understand the Reason(s) Why You Want a Website If the only reason you want to have a website is because your competitor down the road has one, you don’t yet fully appreciate the potential of having a website.
And if you don’t understand the potential it’s unlikely you’ll do much with your website.
Tip 3 – Make your Website the Hub of All Your Marketing Activities You can make your website the hub of your marketing activities. Whether you do blog / news posts, adverts, mailshots, networking or whatever, the easiest way to tell someone all about your practice is to use your other marketing activities as a tool to point them to your website. This can then fully explain what you offer in as much detail as the visitor wants to read. The vast majority of potential new clients will, before calling you, now visit your website after receiving any promotional material from you. In fact, they’ll look at your website before they call or email you. Just think about how often you now check out potential suppliers on their website before making contact. It’s not just online marketing that drives traffic to your website, but traditional marketing methods can probably send substantially more traffic to your website.
Tip 4 – Provide Real Benefits to Clients / Customer. Your website can now be more than just a brochure site. You can provide information of real benefit to your clients that is easily accessible online. Interactive sites allow prospects and clients to interact with you online and gain real benefit from your site. By providing lots of useful, relevant information and resources, you will help them as well as demonstrate just how much you have to offer them. If they can get all this just on your website, imagine how good they think you’ll be when they become a customer or client Just providing links to other sites is a very poor second – prospects want to see what YOU can do, not others.
Tip 5 – Increase Working Speeds by Putting Information Online You can reduce costs by putting information and documents online for clients and staff to use. For example, put all the brochures and forms used by your customers or clients on your website so you and clients have immediate access to them in one place whenever needed.
Tip 6 – Throw Away Your Brochure and Use Your Website Instead. There’s no need for expensive glossy brochures that quickly go out of date. Your website can be updated instantly and is always up to date. So if you have a new service, special offer, etc it can be integrated into your website straight away. Many top marketers suggest just using a long sales letter that you can produce in Word and amend whenever you need as your rochure/information pack. It will of course direct people to your website, won’t it?
Tip 7 – Know Your Target Clients and Niches Who are your target clients? the Internet is a prefect fit with the general profile for most business clients. It’s now the first place they go for information. Beyond this consider any niche markets that you target and put content on your website directly aimed at them. So if you are a plumber that wants more bathroom installs then make sure you can direct them to information related to this on your
website.
Tip 8 – Make Your Website Appealing. When potential clients visit your website, you need to make it appealing. You need to attract their attention, build their interest and desire and get them to take action. A poorly constructed, home made looking website, (we’ve all seen them) is not going to do that. If you have a shabby looking site, what are the prospects likely to think about you, no matter how professional you really are? The web is a visual medium and it needs to look bright and attractive. Flash designed pages can dazzle and impress but they can’t be read by the search engines, we havent recommended Flash for main websites ever and that advice will not change anytime soon, so be very careful in their use.
Tip 9 – Use Two Step Offers with a Soft Offer (TOP TIP!) Some services are perceived as being a high value item and as such it is hard to make a one step sale. Offering a FREE No Obligation Appointment, report or cut-down service is often a pre-requisite to the direct marketing of a business. For most medium to high value service businesses It’s unrealistic in most cases to call someone, send a mailshot or be referred to someone and have them sign up with you before meeting you. However, the marketing activities you use on your website should allow you to get many more prospects that make positive contact with you, that you then keep in regular contact with until they sign up. The drip drip effect can catapult your results through the roof over time. Marketing that brings in the most leads, ends up in more appointments and more converted clients.
The offer of a FREE Consultation is a two step offer, first they meet you and then
they sign with you. However, the problem with making an offer of a FREE
Report, cut-down services or appointment is that it’s a hard offer. It involves the potential client in having to have some personal interaction with you and many customers or clients don’t necessarily want this at this moment in time. So, if you’re only offer is a hard offer, that will often be the end of the matter and you’ll never hear from the prospect again. Your marketing cost has been wasted.
A Special Report, white paper or whatever you want to call it is an example of a two step process but it is a soft offer. For example, suppose the back of your business card had an offer of a FREE Special Report worth £49 on how to make your house more energy efficient or whatever it is you could help them with, that can be downloaded from your website. Imagine how many more people you gave your card to would now visit your site than when they just had the card with no offer. Once you’ve written your report, there’s no cost to you at all. The secret is to add an alternative soft offer to your hard offer and make it easy to start a relationship with the potential customer or client. A brochure of your services could be used as a soft offer but if you really want to motivate the prospect to take up your soft offer it needs to be something that is really going to be of benefit to them. The right offers also help give credibility to what you offer. An alternative soft offer could be just to sign up for your Monthly Newsletter.
There are many different marketing methods you can use such as ads, mailshots, etc to make the soft offer but your website is an ideal place for all of them to lead to for downloading your soft offer. Imagine the extra impact that is now possible with your marketing activities.These free two step soft offers can be offered as giveaways in mailshots, adverts, telemarketing, faxshots, seminar giveaways, basis of a press release, to endorsement partners as giveaways to their prospects, etc. And all you want in exchange is an opt-in email address. It’s easy!
Tip 10 – Collecting Email Addresses. When making a soft offer the key is to collect email addresses, so that you can then grow that relationship. Collecting opt in email addresses on your website when downloading the soft offer makes that process very easy.You can then send helpful regular information such as your monthly company newsletters. This really is the marketing persons dream – instant marketing at zero cost at the push of the button. Collecting other contact details is useful but don’t ask for so much information that you put prospects off of registering with you. Collecting their first name allows you to personalise any emails you send to them. Having to answer 101 questions is just a barrier and will drastically reduce your responses unless there is something very special at the end. Don’t forget to add a privacy policy page. Many people want to know how you will use their contact details before they provide them. Don’t forget your legal disclaimer page either to ensure you are fully protected.
Tip 11 – Give Customers Reasons to Choose You – On your website, give the potential customer stacks of benefits and reasons to choose you.
Tip 12 – Avoid the Front Page Block – When people come to your website they want to get to it, not click on another link to get in. A flash designed block page may look cool and help your ego but it’s just an annoyance and turn off to your visitors.
Tip 13 – Make it Fun and Interesting. That doesn’t mean it can’t still be totally professional. Your business website doesn’t have to be boring and you want to keep people interested in your site and get them telling others about it. For example, you could add a free to play game on your about us page
Tip 14 – Have A Meet the Team Page. Let people see who you are and find out about you.
Tip 15 – Use Testimonials. Adding endorsements, client case studies and testimonials on your website can enhance the power of your messages and improve your credibility. The search engines love websites that get updated regularly and this ‘unique and free’ relevant text needs to be put online as soon as you get it from your customers.
