The natural extension of this is: you don’t need to sell your website visitors on the concept of buying widgets.  You need to sell them on buying YOUR widgets.

That means your marketing message has to focus primarily on differentiation from the competition and any other alternatives they have available to them.

When you successfully establish real points of difference in your prospects’ minds, you’ll not only generate more leads, but you’ll also reduce the proportion of people who are “shopping around”, versus those who have already made up their minds to buy from you.

Usually the question is followed up quickly by reasons why it WON’T.

Reason Why Internet Marketing Won’t Work #1:

“Our get all our new customers by referral.  People just don’t look for our service on the Internet”

This statement came from the owner of an (admittedly successful) business in the technology space that has grown strongly via strategic alliances and, yes, referrals.

Meanwhile, we happened to have a client in the same city and the same industry, who was keeping 4 full-time salespeople busy with high-quality sales leads generated via the Internet.

Google is the new Yellow Pages.  You might be surprised how many people use the Internet as a primary source of research.   Not only consumers but purchasing managers and C-level executives who have needs that need filling and money to spend.

Reason Why Internet Marketing Won’t Work #2:

“You recommend Google AdWords as a principle traffic generation strategy, but I never click on the ads… I always click on the left side of Google.”

This is another one I hear surprisingly often.

My response is always the same: Google’s ad revenue in Australia is in the billions, and my company Marketing Results directly manages over $1.5 million in AdWords clicks every year – so somebody must be clicking on the ads.

With the right strategy and execution, I believe AdWords can be made to work in almost any lead generation scenario.

If you think Internet lead generation won’t work for you, is that really true or have you just not found the right formula yet?

Something to think about…

By this I mean: how does blogging stack up against other online marketing methods available to business owners in terms of Return On Investment, Return On Time and Return On Effort?

There’s no one-size-fits all answer to this question, but let me share a few insights after working with many SME clients from multiple industries on their web marketing strategy, which has often included a blogging component.

Blogging for “offline” businesses

In this post, I’m mainly considering how a typical “offline” business selling products or services can use blogging to enhance the performance of their website.

There are two broad scenarios I’ll consider:

1. Scenario 1: “Necessity-based” businesses - when your prospects and clients don’t have a particular interest in what you do beyond the result or outcome you can produce for them. This would apply to many strong  “Yellow Pages” categories such as pest control, landscaping, rubbish removal etc.
2. Scenario 2: “Interest-based” businesses – when your prospects and clients can identify more strongly with the “subject matter” behind the products and services you provide, especially in “information-rich” industries  (e.g. model aeroplanes, financial services, Ultimate Fighting Championship subscriptions, coaching clubs etc).

In other words, some businesses and industries tend to easily spawn a wealth of information that your prospects and clients will eagerly lap up.  In others, prospects will have little personal interest in drilling deeper into what you offer (e.g. latest techniques in rubbish removal).

There may also be cases where different customer segments may fall into the first category (e.g. a home computer shopper searching for the lowest price desktop PC) and others the second category (e.g. an avid computer geek following the launch of the latest must-have graphics card).

What this means for your blogging strategy

Where your customers don’t care deeply for your subject matter and are simply looking for a result (Scenario 1 above), the main benefit blogging can offer your business is that of increased search engine visibility.

Briefly:

1. Search engines like “fresh” content.  Blogs offer a convenient way to add fresh content without interfering with key conversion pages.
2. Regular blog updates allow you to add posts which target long-tail search terms.  It is difficult to rank the same website for multiple competitive terms, especially when you have  a limited number of pages on your website.  Blogging effectively allows you to add more search-engine optimised pages, which target less competitive key phrases.  Good rankings for many specific long-tail or multi-word key phrases can add up quickly.
3. With this strategy, it’s important to quickly convert the search into a conversion.  Because users are not necessarily interested in your content, clear calls to action and/or seasonal offers are vital to ensure you do something with the traffic you generate.

Then there’s Scenario 2 - in which the user is potentially highly interested in what you have to say.

Here you have the option to use your blog to gain a position of Thought Leadership in your market.   You’re not as focused on the quick conversion as you are in building a reputation with prospects, clients and even colleagues and competitors in your market.

There may be the same SEO benefits as with Scenario 1, but the principal benefit of this strategy are the long term conversion and loyalty benefits.

Bottom line: this strategy takes longer to gain traction and requires a higher standard of content writing to demonstrate the Thought Leadership which fuels outsized results.

What will be the investment of time, money and effort?

With Scenario 1, the investment of time, money and effort can be fairly modest.

Design and setup of a blog may cost anywhere from $0 if you DIY to a few thousand dollars (sure, you can spend more if you go for a super-premium design which is overkill in 99.9% of cases).

Then there’s content production.  As the aim is not to demonstrate Thought Leadership with cutting edge content, it is easier in this scenario to outsource the content production function to a writer with very little effect on results.

Having one blog post a week written and published might cost you a couple of hundred dollars a month – a fairly modest investment.  (This is also one of the deliverables we often roll into our Gold Client Internet Marketing Program for SMEs).

Blog content usually gets picked up by search engines fairly quickly and it doesn’t take long to build up a base of posts to feed the search engines.  Within 3 to 6 months of regular posting, you can expect to get a comparatively large proportion of your organic search traffic via your blog.

However, you should recognise that this can be a bit of a “brute force” strategy – a large proportion of the traffic you generate via your blog will NOT convert – so it’s also important to ensure your offers and conversion strategy is sufficient to squeeze some conversions out of the traffic you do get.

Now let’s look at Scenario 2.  Setup costs will be similar to Scenario 1, but the content generation task tends to be much more labour and time intensive for the Thought Leader (who is often the business owner).

For example, if you’re an expert in cutting-edge loan structuring approaches for property investors, it’s hard to employ a low-cost writer to produce content that does your strategies justice and engages your audience.

My friend and blogging expert Yaro Starak talks about building a successful blog in 2 hours a day.  The problem for business owners is that most don’t have that amount of time to devote to a strategy that may take 6 to 12 months to gain sufficient traction to generate a payoff.

Many business owners under-estimate the ongoing work required to keep a Thought Leadership blog going. It’s common to see business owners write a few good articles before getting distracted by other things and it doesn’t take long for a blog to get “stale” and lose traction.

There are ways for business owners to leverage their time with a Thought Leadership blog (e.g. dictating post ideas to a good writer and proofreading the draft before posting), but there is still a substantial investment of time involved to ensure both post quality and frequency.

How long will it take to see results?

As mentioned above, in Scenario 1 you may see search engine benefits in 3 to 6 months sufficient to justify the ongoing investment.

In Scenario 2, the payoff tends to be slower (although it can be large if you manage to achieve a position of true Thought Leadership).

I’ve been writing this blog for 6 years now and although the payoff is sufficient to keep writing, by no means has blogging been one of my highest-return marketing activities.  However, I do see blogging as one component of the pre-eminence building process.

How does blogging stack up against alternative promotional approaches?

I am no doubt revealing my bias toward targeteded traffic+ conversion here, but I see blogging primarily as a supplementary promotional strategy for “offline” businesses rather than a primary one.

My advice is always to get your conversion funnel right first so that you know you can convert a visitor into a client.  You should test and tweak your funnel to ensure maximum throughput and maximum velocity from first-time visitor to loyal client.

Only once your conversion funnel is in place would I recommend looking at blogging as the “cream” on top of your strong foundations.

The final verdict

Blogging can be a very useful traffic generation and pre-eminence building strategy for SMEs – but you need to go in with your eyes open and be clear on your objectives, what the resourcing requirements will be and whether or not you’re prepared to pay the price.

It may also be prudent to think about what support is available to leverage your time and efforts to ensure you get the highest net return.

For example: www.xyzpl.com.au or www.wxyz.com

Unless you’re IBM, this can be a very costly strategy for a few reasons:

1. Abbreviations are meaningless, especially to people who don’t know you. Does BBS.com stand for Brisbane Baking Supplies or Boat Building Services?
2. Because abbreviations lack meaning, they tend to be harder to remember… for your prospects and clients.
3. Keyword-rich domain names assist your organic SEO results, both directly (domain names are a ranking factor for search engines) and indirectly (keyword-rich domain names lend themselves to keyword-rich inbound links)
4. Relevant domain names dramatically increase your Google AdWords (and other PPC) Click Through Rates and conversion results. In some cases we have seen different domain names outperform others by up to 400% when tested in AdWords ads (like in this online marketing case study, for example).

So what do you do if you’re already using an abbreviation as a domain name? My advice is to seriously consider changing, or at a bare minimum investigate other domain names to “park” over your existing domain name.

That will allow you to at least test new ideas in Google AdWords and gauge response – then if the results justify it, consider a complete change.

Although this blog is “dofollow” (i.e. if you make a comment it will pass some “link juice” to your site), there are still standards.  The rule is, “if it doesn’t add value, it doesn’t get published”.

(Thank you to legitimate commenters though…your guys rock!)

Half the battle is fixing stuff that annoys, confuses and frustrates your visitors.

When you’ve fixed all the roadblocks and chokepoints, only then is it time to think about positive motivators to act.

Phase 3: User involvement

User involvement (also called “qualitative analysis”) simply means getting users’ input into the optimisation process — what they do and don’t like, why they would or wouldn’t buy from you and the “WHY” behind what they do on your site.

There are many ways to get this information, but until recently, the cost or effort was prohibitive, especially for smaller organisations.

Two of the most useful tools for getting this qualitative input are the 4Q iPerceptions exit survey tool and user testing videos provided by UserTesting.com.

I’ve written a previous review of 4Q iPerceptions, but the “Cliff’s Notes” version is that 4Q allows you to understand why users came to your site and whether or not they were able to achieve their main goal for their visit. If not, why not. If so, what they liked best.

Input from 4Q can easily by fed back into your website improvement initiatives (for example: copy ideas to test, pages to emphasise, pages or elements to de-emphasise etc.). And the cost? $0.

Then there’s UserTesting.com — I’m very excited about this because it makes it fast, easy and cheap to get informed end-user feedback on your site.

Here’s how it works: for (only!) $29 per user, a trained user tester will review your site and deliver output in two formats:

1. A Flash video that records the entire session, showing you every mouse movement, click and keystroke, along with spoken comments.
2. A written report detailing what they liked, what they didn’t like and what would have caused them to leave your site.

There are a few reasons why this is a very significant development:

1. Traditional user testing costs around US$250 per user at a fancy usability lab. Now, for around 1/10th of that price, you can get pretty much the same thing, from anywhere in the world, without leaving your computer.
2. You don’t need to test a lot of users – 1 to 3 users can be enough to give you a good idea of general patterns and trends that you can ACT on.
3. Crucially, this input is coming from outside your business or sphere of influence. This is nothing like the traditional business owner practice of “emailing a few friends to see what they think of the new site”. Such “insider” feedback is almost always tainted by filters that don’t impact on results.
4. It’s a good way to introduce fresh ideas into your improvement process which otherwise may not have been considered

I’ve introduced a number of colleagues and clients to UserTesting.com and they are universally impressed with insights and value it provides.  I invite you to check it out!

So now you know about internal orientation, objective measurement and user involvement. What’s the next step? Tomorrow we’ll look at Phase 4 – Total integration.

Phase 1: Internal Orientation

Internal orientation is where people within your business (typically the business owners in the case of SMEs) decide what your website should look like and how it should be optimised on an ongoing basis.

Internal stakeholders often have definite views on “what a good website should look like” and how it should be managed. For example:

• “We need a website that looks really dynamic and interactive”
• “Plenty of pictures and graphics is the way to go – visitors won’t read heaps of text”
• “Our home page should tell visitors all about our company”
• “We need to update our homepage regularly to keep people coming back”
• “My sales letter isn’t working… I know, it must be too short! Let’s add more information!”
• “Let’s put a “news ticker” on our home page to keep people informed about new developments at our company”

Whether or not these statements bear out in the real world is not the point.

The point is that many (almost all) online marketing decisions are made on the basis of personal opinion, instead of in the context of  maximising a result desired result. “Generating as many quality sales leads as possible for $100 or less per lead” is a focused, measurable business goal.  A news ticker in pretty colours is not.

One advantage of internal input is that people who are intimately involved in a business often have valuable insights and experience that can inform the web design or website optimisation process.

But the disadvantage of this internal orientation is that it tends to be “blinkered”, focusing more on the company’s needs and priorities ahead of the website visitor or customer’s.

The internally-oriented approach in isolation invariably leads to sub-optimal results because the appropriate feedback mechanisms aren’t in place, but it is a starting point in the process of website sales funnel optimisation.

To find out whether or not what you’re doing is actually working, tomorrow we’ll evolve to the next level – Phase 2: Objective measurement.