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Many small businesses work hard to attract clients and customers. Having a website and covering the web design basics is just one way to attract new customers or market your business.
At Web Design Sunshine Coast we often find small businesses marketing is often full of holes.
The biggest holes in small businesses' marketing efforts are
in lead generation.
For those that don't know it already,
identifying, attracting and building a steady stream of
prospects is the number one marketing task for growing a
service business.
You need to know who is interested in
your products and services in order to market to them,
again and again.
Every small business has some sort of lead generation
strategy, whether it's just handing out business cards,
sending out press releases, writing articles, asking for
referrals or, in more recent years, putting up a web site.
The problem is that many of these approaches are used
sporadically not systematically, and techniques aren't in
place to capture the contacts made. More on this in web design steps.
Interested prospects are missed, or if contact is made,
are pushed away by your materials, web site or phone
system. The result is that hundreds and thousands of
potential prospects fall through cracks in your marketing
and you can't profit from their business. If your lead
generation strategy and systems aren't generating
dozens or hundreds of new leads each week then your
marketing strategy has a big gap in it.
Four common holes in marketing are:
1. The Lack of Compelling Content
Whether it's the title of your web site and the description
shown in the search engines, or the title of your article
and the first paragraph, your content needs to pull in
prospects. Too often marketing materials are written from
the sellers' point of view instead of the prospects'. Web Design Sunshine Coast builds this into your website.
Compelling content captures rospects' attention by
focusing on their problems. Without good copy rospects
won't be moved to become clients.
- Is your marketing content compelling from prospects'
perspective?
- Does it lead with information about prospects' problems
and concerns? Ask about our Web site Redesign services.
2. Limited Reach
If you could contact all the people who need and want
your services, you might want to. Using advertising,
direct mail or cold calling to do this is in most cases
cost prohibitive. PR, writing articles and having a web
site are some low cost ways of getting attention. The
objective with any of these is to reach as many people
as possible in order to find qualified leads.
Despite effort put into creating marketing materials,
building web sites and writing articles, independent
professionals rarely get the visibility they want.
Articles are only read by a handful of people and
web sites are hard to find.
To leverage the time and money you put into your
marketing materials, articles, and web sites, you need
to do everything you can to help people find them.
Read more about website homepage.
This sounds obvious, but most service professionals
write an article and just post it on their web site
or send it to a few clients.
With hundreds of online
ezines and offline publications looking for content,
you could be putting an article in front of tens of
thousands of people instead of just a few.The same is true of search engine listings. Most people
can't even find their own sites in the search engines.
Help the search engines put your web site on the first
page or two for your keywords and you'll increase your
exposure and reach hundreds of new prospects each week.
Depending on your business, this is easier than most
people realize and will extend the reach of your
marketing dramatically.
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