You probably spend more time this year trimming your Christmas tree (or toenails) than you have researching marketing trends, so let me offer a candid tip: The future of advertising and marketing is online. Over the past five years, every marketing research house has been saying the same thing - advertising and marketing dollars are moving from "traditional" channels to the web.
So, how does your website and overall online presence measure up?
Are you playing to win or doing the minimum necessary not to lose? As I cruise surf the web, I see an awful lot of contractors that appear to be doing the latter. The number of outdated, untracked, poorly optimized websit's that are practically invisible to prospective buyers, continues to be mind-boggling.
It appears that many contractors are employing a "bunker mentality." Given the current economic downturn, They are trying to play it'safe by either staying put and making no changes (gotta conserve my cash) or doing the bare minimum in order to say, "yeah, I tried XYZ marketing strategy." Trouble is, this "staying put" mentality - or tip toe testing mentality is almost always a bad idea. This is playing to not lose. Of course, the ironic thing is that when you play to not lose, you almost always lose.
I used to be a semi-professional cyclist and a cycling coach. Whether it's mountain biking or road biking, one of the hardest things to teach new bike racers is that speed is their friend. The faster you go, the more stable the bike is. If you're mountain biking and you come to a "rock garden", the natural tendency is to grab the brakes and slow down. Do this, and you're asking for serious trouble.
Counter intuitively, the right way to get through the rock garden unscathed is to let go of the brakes and accelerate.
In some ways, the same is true in business and marketing.
Forward motion is your friend. it's more dangerous to tip-toe along (playing not to lose) than it is to accelerate your level of advertising and marketing activity (play to win). Besides, it's not like going "all-in" with online marketing is taking a big risk. Five years ago, online marketing is "the new way." Today, it's just the way.
Take a look at this chart put together from a study by MarketingSherpa, a research firm specializing in what works in all aspects of marketing, recently released the following data:
The chart above compares the responses for the questions:
- "Which of the following sources generates the greatest volume of traffic coming to your website?" and
- "Which of the following sources generated traffic with the greatest conversion rates on your site?"
Three standout sources really stand out: Organic search (aka. SEO), Paid search (aka. PPC), and Email marketing campaigns. These are the online marketing sources responsible for the greatest volume of traffic and the most web conversions (typically leads). Now, think about your online marketing strategy (you do have an online marketing strategy, right?). What percentage of your 2012 marketing budget went into testing these three? How will your strategy and your budget change in 2013?
Of the contractors I know (that are not clients of mine), I'd say about 40% invested a couple thousand dollars (total, not per month) in an attempt to optimize their, often woefully outdated, website. Another 20%, also took the $100 AdWords credit Google sent them at some point during the year, and used it to test Pay Per Click advertising (most mistakenly concluded that PPC is a waste of money). Another ~10% tried a self-created, monthly email newsletter using Constant Contact, MailChimp or some other provider.
These guys are the epitome of playing not to lose.
If you're still reading, you're probably at the point where you're asking, "Okay, okay, I get it, but what does 'playing to win' even look like? I Don't have time for all this crap." Here are some web marketing tips to help you make the shift from playing not to lose to playing to win in 2013.
1. Get an online marketing audit and have a written online marketing strategy.
it's virtually impossible to create a plan to get to your goal/destination if you have no idea from where you're starting. An online marketing audit will show you exactly where you are today'so that you can create an intelligent plan based on your goals.
A typical online marketing audit will include the following:
- Implementation of the analytics tools required to get an accurate baseline of where you are today
- Review of your website - the code/structure, content, and linkscape
- An analysis of your 3-10 top competitors (how their websit's measure up, their online marketing strategy, etc.)
- Review and assessment of your overall online presence
- Creation of an online marketing strategy and implementation plan (your blueprint / plan of attack for 2013)
Don't fool yourself into thinking that the "free analysis" offered by virtually every online marketing company is sufficient. An effective online marketing audit takes 50-100 hours to create. The best online marketing companies in every niche are in very high demand. No decent web marketing firm is going to do this for free. Your website is your single most important and valuable marketing asset. Playing to win means making the investment of time and money to understand how your site performs today, how it compares to competitors, and working with a professional to create a plan to achieve your business goals.
2. Make data-driven decisions.
You can't win the game if you Don't know the score. Imagine building a house without measuring anything - just eyeball it. You wouldn't do that in a million years, so why do you operate that way with your website and your online marketing? When it comes to making advertising and marketing decisions, your gut intuition stinks. All of the plumbers using this website probably think that print yellow page ads are worthless. Smart plumbers - the ones actually accurately tracking their ads - know that print yellow page ads are not worthless (far from it).
Your website is like a virtual sales rep for your business. At a minimum, you must know metrics like:
- Visits per month
- Non-branded organic visits per month
- Visit-to-lead conversion rate (web forms/emails AND phone leads)
- Cost per lead by traffic source
- Lead-to-sale conversion rate
- ROAS
If you Don't know these numbers, you are getting crushed (or going to get crushed) by all the contractors that do (and more contractors invest in marketing and web analytics with every passing day). When you know these numbers, you can continually optimize your visit-to-sale conversion rate. Contractors that track and methodically work to improve this metric dominate their market. Most contractors have no idea what this number is, let alone how to improve it.
3. Invest in the big three - SEO, PPC, and Email Marketing.
The web is a real estate game. Your primary website is your main sales funnel. Each micro-site, social media profile, etc. is like another funnel leading prospective customers to your main sales funnel or to the front door of your business. If time and money were no object, you'd put your business everywhere online. Since no contractor has an unlimited amount of time or money (far from it), you should start maximizing your real estate on the search engine results pages.
Why? Let's say you own a roofing company. While there are a lot of people on Facebook, not all of them own a house or need a new roof. Contrast this with people living in your service area Googling, "roofing contractor city, state." Search engines offer the potential to put your business in front of people that have INTEREST and INTENT. This is where you want to invest your marketing dollars first.
The way to maximize your search engine real estate is to invest in SEO and PPC. On the SEO side of things, you need to understand that Google doesn't rank websit's. Google ranks web pages. The easiest way to increase your organic visibility, traffic, leads, and sales is to create more web pages (this assumes your site has been coded in a way that makes it easy for search engines to find, crawl, and understand). But Don't create content just for the sake of creating content. You want to create content that answers your prospects' implied questions. You want to create content that establishes your company as THE authority for what you do in the markets you do it.
If you're a computer savvy contractor, you might be able to get away with managing your own SEO and PPC. Based on my experience, I'd estimate that less than 2% of contractors fall into this category. The rest of you will end up wasting a lot more money than you make. Think about the average homeowner you serve. What do their DIY projects look like vs. the work you do? Marketing your business online isn't much different. Hire a pro.
The goal with SEO and PPC is to bring qualified visitors to your website for targeted non-branded keywords. Non-branded keywords are keywords related to the products/services you offer that do NOT include your company name. Every time you a new visitor reaches your website using a targeted non-branded keyword, you're building your brand and your business. Some percentage of these visitors will inquire immediately. These leads are like diamonds.
However, some visitors will not contact you during their first visit - either because of the timing, where they are in the buying cycle, etc. If you do nothing, some percentage of these visitors will return and eventually become a lead/sale. However, many will never return. You can increase the number that do by investing in opt-in email marketing. If SEO and PPC bring new visitors into the top of your sales funnel, opt-in email market helps nurture them through to the bottom of the funnel.
Conclusion
2013 is almost here. Are you going to stay in your bunker and take a "wait and see" approach or step up and decide to start playing to win? Five years ago, it was a big risk to go "all in" with online marketing. Today, the big risk is NOT going all in.