Your Website is a neglected salesperson.
Your Business Website is the most important component of your Marketing Strategy.
It is your 24/7 online salesperson. Get it right and get customers.
You have read the Business Marketing and Business Advertising pages, if not, I suggest you do so now. This page will tie together many of the concepts mentioned in those pages.
Think about these facts:
- Your website is available 24/7/365. It takes no sick days, no vacations, it never has family problems. You don’t have to worry about it asking for raises, or paying health insurance. Yet it probably sees more prospects each week than your best salesperson.
- 84% of your prospects will check out your website (and your competition) before making a buying decision. It doesn’t matter where they heard of you, postcard, mailer, magazine, radio, or television. If you are not sending them to your website, you are wasting a lot of money.
- Your website is able to tell your prospect so much more than any other advertising media (unless you are doing 30-minute infomercials). You can tell them or show them your process, have pictures that show results, answer many questions (F.A.Q.), give them testimonies from satisfied customers, schedule appointments, and a whole lot more.
- You have the ability to track every visitor to your website, know exactly what they are looking at, how long they stayed, where they came from, and when and where they left. Can you say that about your human salesperson?
You have the most perfect prospect qualifier available to you… your website.
When you include your website in the overall marketing strategy for your business, you also have the best method of testing ever. It couldn’t be easier to try new ideas and see how well they perform in less than a month. When you find an idea that works, you can leverage it in other advertising channels.
This is what I have found to be true for most small business websites I have reviewed:
- 80% of the visitors only visit once
- This means that every month, you are buying new advertising to drive the same business back to your website, again, and again. Why not grab them the first time and stay in touch?
- Most visitors only stay for 10-15 seconds
- This tells me that your website doesn’t address their main concerns or problems. That may be ok for a door-to-door salesperson, but these folks are searching for a solution you can provide!
- The majority of visitors view two pages or less
- This is an indication that visitors are looking for a solution to their problem and can’t find it on your website. You can learn a lot from this knowledge. You can provide what they are looking for.
- There is no way to follow up with visitors
- Many visitors are in the discovery or research phase and will buy, just right not right now. You should stay in touch with them so they consider you first when ready to buy. It is much less expensive to send emails to keep your business “top of mind.”
When you consider all that your website can do for you, find prospects searching for solutions to their problems, convert them to leads, pre-sell prospects, schedule appointments and generate calls or orders. Yet, you want to get a website as cheap as possible.
How much would you pay or do you now pay a salesperson? $20,000 – $30,000. Your website is easily worth that much to you but you don’t have to invest quite that much. You should be able to get a good website less than half that price. Don’t you think you should give your website more attention?