Alan Gayle is a sales and marketing consultant specialising in the construction industry. In this column he offers advice on how to make an impact in the market. This time he continues his discussion of conversion.
Continuing from last month’s article when I introduced the idea of Conversion and explained the importance of increasing your Conversion Rate if you want to improve your Return on Investment – that is, reduce how much you’re spending because your marketing is more effective. This month I want to try to answer the question: “How do you improve your conversation rate?”
First of all is should point out that there are whole books dedicated to this subject, so I can only cover a few points that I believe are particularly relevant to the construction industry.
1. Customer Focus: Your marketing communication should be about solving your customers’ problems rather than telling everyone how great you are. Benefits rather than features.
2. Differentiation: Forgive the marketing jargon. It means that you present your company as being different from competitors. Emphasise your USPs (unique selling points) and tell potential customers why they should choose you.
3. Value: Your competitors are just a few clicks away; to win new business you must have a compelling offer. It’s not good enough to match the competition. To really grow you have to offer more. Consider how Virgin Atlantic took on BA.
4. Real Conversations: Unless you have an internet basket / checkout system to take payments (e-commerce), the primary purpose of your website is to generate enquiries. No matter how good it is, it won’t convince potential customers to buy or specify your products or put you on their tender list without talking to you first. Demonstrate your expertise but don’t give away all the answers away – you want them to phone you.
5. Social proof: Referrals, recommendations, and testimonials can powerfully influence your potential customers to use you rather than your competitors.
These points can be applied to your website, blog, brochures, email marketing, advertising, press releases, case studies… in fact, virtually all your marketing.
I’ve written about points 1 to 4 previously, so now it’s time to look more closely at social proof. I recently read an article about this called ‘The Review Site Conundrum’ on Mark Buckson’s excellent Construction Marketing Ideas blog.
I’ll quote the first few lines: “Undoubtedly, one of the most challenging game changers in the contracting community, especially for business-to-consumer services, is the evolution and expansion of review sites … speciality and local review sites turn word-of-mouth opinions into hyper-drive. A few bad reviews, and your business can be toast. Several positive reviews, consistently received… can result in so much business volume that you won’t need to do much, if anything, else, especially in paid marketing.”
What Mark is talking about is the huge power of social proof in the form of online reviews.
There are several types of social proof. There is expert and / or celebrity social proof – when Peter Jones of the Dragon’s Den suggests small businesses are better off with BT or Jessica Ennis says PowerAde helps her performance.
As I’m sure you know, those endorsements cost big bucks.
The one that we can all use to great effect is user social proof. This is when your company or products / services get the written approval of your customers. These include the reviews on websites such as Amazon and Trip Advisor. Apparently independent online reviews are powerful consumer marketing tools and can be just as powerful B2B (business to business) marketing tools when presented as customer / client testimonials on websites, case studies, brochures, adverts and press releases.
I’ll cover testimonials in more depth next time. In the meantime I leave you with some reading. Go to the Construction Marketing Ideas website constructionmarketingideas.com/2013/05/ and read ‘The Review Site Conundrum’. I think you will find it interesting.