Back in the day, I was working with a software company that sold real-estate productivity software package called “Realtor-Pro.”

By early 2006, our most successful call to action at this point was “Call Us,” with over 70% of our revenue was done through an inbound phone call, and only 30% was done online annually.

By year-end 2006, online sales conversions were up 110%, and with compounding factors of additional site traffic and a new product release getting some press, revenue was up 250%.

The Problem: What Should Be On Our Landing Pages?

We needed at least a decent baseline landing page design from which to improve our direct online conversions! What out of the 50 key features and benefits we could put on our conversion page page to compel customers to proceed.

The Solution: Survey Recent Customers!

We called 100 customers who had recently purchased by finding us on the web, but required an in-person demo or phone call to complete a transaction.

1. We found out that the top 5 feature needs of over 80% of customers surveyed were the same, and only 3 were on our landing page. The simple question was “Can you recall what product features sealed the deal for you; what got you excited to buy RealtorPro?”

2. We found out that initial trust was low, and most customers were calling us with a “trial objection:” how many people work there, how long have you been in business? will you really honor this unlimited satisfaction guarantee?” Using testimonials to back-up those key objections and making the Better Business Bureau online symbol more prominently placed, we were able to see a 30% lift immediately.

Lessons Learned:

If you are in e-commerce, there are a few things that are actually happening.. marketers don’t talk about it much, but it’s just like a personal sales person.

1. Take A Walk In Their Shoes. Does your site answer these questions:

1. Am I in the right place?
2. Does this solution fit?
3. Do I trust this website?
4. Do I trust their claims are valid?
5. Handle my objections - make me an offer I can’t refuse

2. Find Out What Questions Are Being Asked of the Sales Team

3. Survey Recent Buyers

I met yesterday with a group of accomplished sales professionals and business owners from Vancouver. Industries such as Telcom, Insurance, Mortgage Brokers, and a chain of specialized fitness stores to name a few.

The question was the same from most of this group - we don’t have 100 hours a month to devote to this, nor do we have unlimited budget, but we need to know how to get online lead generation working for us.

The answer starts with Google AdWords:

1. It’s easy to control costs (maximum daily budgets)

AdWords gives you the unique opportunity to pay only for clicks, and to tell you exactly how many of those are turning into leads. On the simple side of things, you can estimate the value per lead and adwords will show you if you’re in the black or not.

If you are running an e-commerce system, realized revenue can easily be matched to a specific campaign and thus you can always see which campaigns generate the highest ROI.

If you are B2B, it will be important down the road to track ROI of specific campaigns by integrating AdWords with a CRM system like salesforce.com this way you can tell exactly how much forcast and realized revenue is coming in for every dollar going out the door.

TIP: I like to look closely at customer’s average deal size and profitability for a specific campaign that we’re targeting, so before I get going I can understand what our target “Cost Per Acquisition” should be.

2. No overhead to start seeing results

In competitive markets, a small business webiste may never crawl to the top of the search engines, even with 100 hours a month in Search Engine Optimization, link building and content generation. It is possible to lay out 100K just to get there!

3. You only pay for very targeted clicks

If you are looking for people in your local market that are looking today fora mortgage, AdWords will deliver those people in a lot less passive way direct to your website (ideally to a landing page) we will talk about that in a later post.

“elliptical trainer” “first time mortagage” “mortgage broker, Vancouver” (+ regional limitations)

4. Again, contrary to any myths out there, you only pay for clicks.

As our markets get more competitive and customers are constantly getting inundated with information, many SME’s are finding their costs are just too high on AdWords. The reason for this is largely due to lack of targeted ad text and realavent landing pages that drive conversions.

Most customers I look at that say AdWords isn’t working, (while there can be a variety of issues in their account), the biggest thing is lack of realavent, targeted landing pages, with clear calls to action.

Many customers have had conversion rates below 1% on cost per click of over $2.00 for a small business that’s selling a $2000 item, $200 just to get a sales lead is a little tough to swallow.

So now that you understand why AdWords can help you generate leads for your business, you’ll need to learn about landing pages..

Stay tuned for landing pages 101 and a free webinar on best practices for landing page optimization.

Two tools that have  been a little ignored in the shadow of Facebook

Last week I had the good fortune of attending the IMC Internet Marketing Conference in Vancouver, Canada. The panel included:

Twitter does some heavy lifting

Before last week’s panel discussion, I really was in the school that had two major objections to Twitter:

1. Twitter is the ultimate time-suck

2. I really am not that interesting on an minute-to-minute basis

Maybe you’re already there, but I know I wasn’t alone in thinking that Twitter is the ultimate in ADD and was reserved for marketers that are a little ‘over the top,’ but I hadn’t seen anything compelling to convince me otherwise.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger, of Tactical Execution & Author of Make Yourself Useful, Marketing in the 21st Century shared with the group his success in leveraging his time with Twitter.

It turns out, for the savvy, Twitter is actually more like the late adopter analogy I make for smart phones: if you still use one device to send email another to take pictures and another to call and text, then ..

Twitter feeds can roll right into your Facebook and blog posts!

2. LinkedIn has been a little ignored lately!

A lot of marketers, while maintaining their profiles, have been paying a lot more attrention to Facebook, but I think the tide is turning. Linked in is becoming more relavent for a lot of B2B marketers, because it is full of decision makers, while facebook is full of everyone!

When someone launches a facebook group, maybe we listen now.. but maybe not.. it’s starting to get lost in the noise.. but when someone does something on linked in.. people take notice, because they feel it’s somehow linked to their career standing?? I don’t know exactly.. having not surveyed many, but I can tell you for sure, IIMA / IMC picked up over 50 attendees in a very short period of time by updating linked-in statuses of the 10 board members.

That means 1/3 of our event marketing was done in one evening in a sum total of 10 minutes!

Total cost: $0.00 / Total return: 5 figures

Unless you don’t really care about generating leads online, and just want a little brochure site, CMS is dead.

Most of us are finding that if we want to beat our competitors, we need to make the most of every visit to our site. If we’re a software company, we pay AdWords $3-$5 per click just to get someone to our landing page!

Why Marketing Automation?

1. Conversions - Squeeze More Out of Your Existing Site Traffic

If you are a serious online marketer and probably spending somewhere between $2000 and $100 000 in online every month. If you are, Marketing Automation is more than another buzzword. A marketing automation system is like the difference between a smartphone, and running around town with an email device, a camera, a cellphone and a little black book full of addresses - insanity!

2. Execution Time - More Campaigns in Less Time:

Most marketers are still spending days stitching together a simple email to web campaign and at the end of the day, are challenged to determine ROI. If you’re one of these, don’t worry, you’re not alone, but the tide is turning, and today’s ‘rocket science’ of A B testing landing pages, lead scoring, automated drip marketing, are tomorrow’s standard.

3. Analytics, Sitemaps, Split-testing, Landing Pages, and Email Campaigns All Under one Roof

Some marketers get turned off by the price of these systems, but once they’ve added in email marketing costs, custom programming for landing pages, excessive time spend building and submitting google sitemaps..it’s clear that there’s big returns to be had.

4. Align Sales and Marketing

People talk lots about this, but where the rubber meets the road is if sales reps are calling the right people at the right times and having releavant conversations with them.

5. Prove Return on Investment on Everything You Do in Real-Time:

A lot of marketers have started to pay attention to the ‘New Breed of Content Management system;” now dubbed “Marketing Automation.” To confuse things, my latest search on google, showed that everyone and their dog is now claiming to have a marketing automation offering.

Tommorrow’s post will explore purchasing a marketing automation system in more detail

A Comprehensive Marketing Automation Technologies - Download FREE report:

cforms contact form by delicious:days