As Americans, we want everything fast! Instant oatmeal, instant approvals, instant messenger, and instant coffee. Marketing isn’t any different. Everyone wants to know, how fast until I see leads? When will I get more traffic to my site? How long will it take for the program to impact my business? Business owners, executives, and marketing professionals should be asking this question. But at the same time, they should be realistic when evaluating the answer.
As we have been talking about all week on our blog, marketing has become much more complicated than ever before. No longer are you able to place an ad and expect results. No longer are you able to employ a single tactic like SEO, PR, or email marketing and expect it to carry you to your goals.
Over the past 24 months marketing has become a complex collection of integrated and optimized tactics that include required new tools like content, video, web and social media.
But there are a few ways to deliver instant improvements. Here are a couple of the easiest ways to improve the performance of your marketing program.
1. Get more leads by adding more downloadable content to your current website. Your website is already getting visitors. Whether it’s getting 100 people or 100,000 people it has traffic. One of the fastest ways to get leads from your existing traffic is to give your visitors more content for them to download. These don’t have to be 20 page whitepaper; a single page Tip Guide is fine.
By offering visitors educational information you get them to identify themselves (email address) early in the sales process. After all, you have a Contact Us page. If these people wanted to start a sales conversation they would have filled out your form. They are just researching firms and yours is on the list. Give them what they want, information that helps them. Once you know who they are, now you can talk to them one-to-one.
2. Increase conversions by improving the messaging on your current website. You only get 10 seconds to make an impression on the web. I bet your website looks like everyone else’s in your industry and I bet it sounds like everyone else’s too. How would a prospect know you’re different if you don’t give them a different experience? You do want them to know your different right?
Start by talking about them. Everyone else talks about themselves because it’s so easy to talk about how long you’ve been in business, how big your building is, and how many trucks you have. It’s harder to talk about what your prospects need and how you’re going to get it to them fast. Craft a compelling message and story that can be delivered in a few words, maybe a sentence and then lead with that. Put testimonials on your home page. You don’t need to do an entire website redesign to make these changes.
3. Drive more traffic to your website by guest blogging. If you want to get more people to your site you have to go where your people are spending their time. Guess where that is? Right, Facebook (908 million people), LinkedIn (160 million users), and Twitter (500 million users). Wikipedia reports that there are over 200 active social media sites for everyone from moms to movie lovers and teachers to toga wearers. Every single one of these sites offers you the opportunity to post educational content. Find the site where your target prospects spend their time, post your content, and drive them back to your website for more educational information.
Here is a slant on the same idea. Every industry has a trade group and a trade magazine. Every trade group and trade magazine has an associated website. Most of these sites are desperate for content and actively looking for expertise to enhance their members’ experience. This is where you come in. Post your educational content, position yourself as a thought leader and drive traffic to your website.
4. Improve search results in days by creating a video. The success of YouTube isn’t a passing fad. People prefer to watch video over reading. To that end, Google wants to deliver content (ready search results) that people want, so video is quickly becoming a key element in search results. Enter Video SEO. We have been able to get clients on the first page of Google in 48 hours with video and you can too.
Make sure you know your keywords before you start. Please do some research before you start to make sure what you think are your keywords are actually your keywords. We have had many clients tell us what they think people are searching only to have us find a different set of keywords when we do the research.
Make sure your script has your keywords in it because Google has software that allows them to scrape the audio of your video and rank it based on the audio track. Make sure your description includes your keywords and make sure your tags use your keywords. Depending on the difficulty of your keywords you might be on the first page of Google too.
5. Drive more traffic and improve your search results by putting a press release out on the wire. Public relations is back in the mix, but its back in a different form. You still need an interesting story, but you need it crafted with search, social, and sharing in mind. Again, you need your keywords throughout the release and you need those keywords linked back to your site, in the release. You need video and pictures in the release and you need to put the release out on the wire service. Crafted correctly, you will be able to drive additional visitors to your website and we have seen actually press releases that were created years ago rank more highly than some client websites. Again, Google puts more value in press release content then they do in the content on your website.