Based on your input, your score is AVERAGE.

What this means is that you have probably already went through a number of different online marketing tactics. While business is going okay, there are quiet periods or times when leads suddenly drop. Businesses like yours are usually looking for consistency in their lead generation or are trying to reduce their marketing costs (cost per lead).

How to Improve Your Score…
Based on our professional experience, here are 3 tips that will help your business:

Tip 1: List Building

If you look at the value of your business you will quickly realise that the actual value is not in the business itself, but is mainly in the customers you possess.  More specifically it’s the database of those customers consisting of names, emails and phone numbers. Having is information allows you to communicate with those clients using email marketing campaigns.

While communicating with clients seems straight forward, many businesses do not communicate enough to their prospects. The prospects are the people interested in your services, but not yet sold. Creating a list of prospects is not a difficult, but can be a challenging exercise. Many businesses give away information without realising that it can be used to build lists. For example many businesses give out catalogues and price lists without collecting any information. The simplest way to change this is to offer website visitors to put their name and email to receive your catalogue/price list regular updates.

Once you create a list of prospects, establish a regular pattern of communication to deliver value as well as education. As a business owner you need to understand that not everyone is your potential customer, however there is a good reason as to why they came to your website in the first instance. Some clients are looking for specific products, whilst others are researching. Another type of prospect could be someone looking to purchase a gift. So offering gift vouchers for your services can be very effective. So it is best to divide those prospects in to separate categories and communicate with them appropriately.

If you run a sophisticated business that has a sales team and you record client activity, it would be great to integrate this with your email marketing. This way your sales team can see how educated your prospects are before speaking to them.

Tip 2: The Biggest Marketing Mistake

Most businesses that start marketing run a very general campaign. The key to being successful in your marketing is to be niche specific. Instead of marketing the whole business under a single campaign, break down your niche services into individual campaigns.

Once you identify those niches within your business, create individual pages for the top three niches. Make sure that each of those pages has an attractive offer (e.g. Free Quote, Book a Consultation) that addresses the problem your prospects are trying to solve. These pages are called landing pages; the concept is to drive your targeted traffic to land on these specific pages.

The idea behind this exercise is to focus on the top 20% of your services that generate 80% of your results. As you can imagine, this will result in far more focused prospects visiting your website. This is called the Pareto Principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 Principle.

Tip 3:  Point of Difference

When it comes to marketing online, make sure that your business stands out from the crowd. For this particular reason, niching into specific areas works quite well. It’s the whole generalist vs specialist scenario where the specialist always get paid more simply because they are an expert in one area.

What make a business stand out? Here are some of the most common ways to set you apart from your competitors:

• Specific services offered
• Geographical areas of service
• Quoting process
• Job turn-around time
• Service guarantee
• Product warranty
• Service delivery transparency
• Years in business

So make sure you research your competitors and what they offer and then work on your website content to have a point of difference.