adVision Marketing

Online users are more picky now than they ever have been. Just having a website with your name on it simply won’t be enough to land their business. Not only must you nail the look, feel, and overall effectiveness of your site, you must make your site visible to as many qualified eyes as possible.

At last count, there were nearly 110,000,000 websites on the internet, or roughly 1 website for every 61 people on Earth. Everyone from Plumbers to Lawyers to Farmers have websites touting themselves and their services online. The tragedy is that these very businesses will eagerly spend thousands of dollars on a new, shiny website, but generally put little to no thought or money into how they’ll gain qualified traffic or how they can maximize their site to make money. This romantic belief that “If they build it they will come”, is a surefire path to failure and frustration, but is all too common.

In order to succeed online, you primarily need two things: qualified visitors and a goal driven website. Qualified visitors are website visitors who have demonstrated a need or interest in the services you provide. This could be the result of their recent behavior online, the websites they’ve visited, or a particular search they’ve queried at Google. A goal driven website, on the other hand, is a website that’s designed to convert as many qualified visitors as possible into business leads. Everything from the page headlines, to the site images, to the call to action statements are intentionally planned to persuade the website visitor to pick up the phone or complete an online contact form. Independently, neither strategy will be enough to have a successful website campaign. However, when combined, they can turn your website from something of an online brochure, into an effective lead (revenue) generation tool.

Without qualified visitors, you have a zero percent chance of making money from your website. Think about it, if people can’t find you online, odds are they aren’t buying from you either. Fortunately, you can attract qualified visitors to your website in a number of ways by advertising online. According to the website, www.SeekingAlpha.com, there are roughly 435,000,000 searches taking place online every day. Undoubtedly, some of these searches are taking place in your industry at this very moment. It’s imperative that you advertise your business to these individuals at the very moment they go looking for the products/services you want to sell more of. Whether you choose to advertise with Pay-Per-Click ads, Behaviorally Targeted Banners, or a Remarketing Campaign, advertising your website is as critical a strategy, if not more so, that the creation of your site to begin with.

On the flip side of things, you can attract all the qualified visitors in the world to your site, but if they don’t like what they see when they arrive, if they become confused, or if they don’t know how to quickly buy from or contact you, they may as well not have visited at all. In fact, if you can’t provide the information they’re after in less than 3 seconds, odds are they’ll leave your site entirely to check out the next guy. Whereas a few years ago, just having a ‘brochure’ style website may have been enough to get a phone call or online lead, people have become quite picky when determining who they will and won’t work with online. Nowadays, not only must you have a great looking site, you need to keep the content relevant and up to date, the site must be easy to navigate, the images must support the content, and it needs to be easy for the website visitor to contact you from anywhere on the site, just to name a few… To create a website that will not only inform the visitor, but also lead the visitor down the path of a goal, start the website design process with the goal in mind and build backwards from there.

If you’ve explored, or at least thought about both points above, you’re on the right track. Success won’t happen overnight, but if executed correctly, it will happen. The key is to partner with an expert in online advertising and web effectiveness who truly understands you and your business goals. This partner will know how to properly plan, build and execute an advertising campaign to not only meet, but exceed your online goals within budget. And last but not least, make sure your partner has the ability to track online leads, offline phone calls, and detailed web analytics to realize a complete ROI on your advertising efforts. It’s a fact, online advertising will generate offline phone calls for your business. If these contacts are not credited appropriately, you’ll end up short changing the success of your advertising campaign altogether.