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 takes a first look at digital marketing.
The internet has changed the way most of us do business and interact with each other. Even most of the die hard sceptics have got an email address and have probably used a search engine at least once. Like it or loathe it, the internet has changed our world.
Online or internet marketing was hardly known a decade ago but in a few short years it has become a huge subject that has spawned a new marketing world all of its own.
The modern term for online / internet marketing is digital marketing and to highlight its increasing importance, both the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) and the Institute of Direct Marketing (IDM) run specific digital marketing courses with industry accredited qualifications.
So what is this digital marketing all about? And why should you know about it?
To answer that question fully would require far more space than this column allows me, so I’ll just cover the basics.
If you have a specific point that isn’t covered, let me know and I’ll try to deal with it in a future column.
Broadly speaking, the objective of digital marketing is the same as with traditional (off-line) marketing: to generate interest in your products or services, convey a specific message, raise your profile, create leads, reinforce your image and identity, and increase your profits and your sales.
In digital marketing, the primary way to achieve these objectives is to drive traffic to your website. Once there, your prospect will (hopefully) learn how your company can answer his questions and eventually become a new customer. But in the first instance, the number one objective for digital marketing is to engage the prospect enough to lead them to your website.
Digital marketing isn’t a magic bullet. Unless you’re running an
e-commerce business, where you provide a virtual shopping basket and customers place their orders without any ‘person to person’ interaction, you’re no more likely to make a direct sale through digital marketing than with traditional marketing.
It’s important that you set realistic objectives before you start. Don’t expect orders to increase the week after you start a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign, but do monitor the traffic on your website because you should expect increased volume and hopefully some hot leads in the form of new enquiries.
Of course, this assumes you have a website and it’s effective at turning your visitors into enquiries. This is where so many people go wrong. People ask me about SEO (search engine optimisation – which involves improving your position in search engine results to increase your website traffic) but when I look at their website it’s clear they need to make significant improvements before they spend money increasing traffic. Otherwise they’ll just end up with twice as many visitors who don’t turn into customers.
SEO is only half the story. Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which focuses on improving your visitor conversion rate, is equally important.
I don’t care if only 100 prospects visit my website in a month. If my visitor to enquiry conversion ratio is 20% I’ll have 20 new leads every month. If my enquiry to order conversation ratio is also 20% those 20 enquiries will provide four new orders a month. But to achieve that the content has got to be right.
There is so much more to this subject – email marketing and data capture and evaluation analytics, just for starters – that I’ll revisit it in more detail in the future.
Next month’s article will be on the subject of the fastest growing area of digital marketing: social media (Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, blogs).
For now, I’ll close with one of the most important aspects of website content. To quote digital marketing guru Seth Godin: “Who cares”?
In the tough world of increased profits and reduced costs, no one really cares about your business. They care about what you can do for them. The building industry is, in general, truly awful at website content and most websites generate fewer enquiries than they should as a result.
Instead of using your homepage to drone on about how wonderful you are and bore your potential customers into submission. Remember: “Who cares”. Start by telling them how you can solve their problems if they contact you.
You can read Seth Godin’s blog here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com