This month I am republishing a newsletter from Jim Simpson of Ziptech Services – a specialist in IT support  for SME companies.  Rather than have me hammering away at these same themes, I thought it might be more interesting to hear directly the story of one of my clients.

Talk to you directly again next month.

Stephen Orr

Generating More Leads At Less Cost Via The Web

Like many businesses today our website is a very important part of our marketing.  A year ago we generated very few leads from our website.  Today it generates 73% of all leads and 45% of all new customers.  During this period we have reduced the cost of a web lead by almost 60%.

If you aren’t using your website to generate more sales you are missing out on the most important marketing development of the last 10 years.  The performance of our website means that I can personally vouch for this.

We have an ongoing program of continuous improvement for our website and a few weeks ago we took a big step forward by launching this redesigned website.  The goal of the redesign is to further increase the number of leads generated and to keep driving down the cost per lead. 

What follows is a case study on the redesign of our own website incorporating many of the lessons we have learned over the last 12 months.

Fancy design doesn’t matter – so instead of spending your money on expensive graphic design focus on the mechanics of getting visitors to your website and then getting them to take the action you want them to take.  Only when your website is performing is it worth spending money on the design – after all until then nobody will see it anyway!

The web doesn’t change the rules of marketing – good headlines and great copy still matter.  Everybody told me we should have nice graphics, very few words and a few bullet points.  That’s what I did at first and it didn’t work.  Now I apply the well proven principles of the direct marketing letter to our website and the results have improved significantly.  I found an excellent book called “The Ultimate Sales Letter” by Dan Kennedy incredibly useful in developing the headlines and copy.  I suggest that you get a copy and use the approach in it to improve your website.

Give them something free that is genuinely useful to them.  This has been one of the big successes of our site.  We now have 2 reports, a free support offer and lots of other useful stuff that they can download.  The really hot leads download the reports and then call us on the telephone.

Make your website friendly and personal.  Against my better judgement we’ve included pictures of most of the team on the website.  Once again I’ve found that my “better judgement” was wrong.  People have commented on how much they love this change, despite us not being the most photogenic group in the world.  I suppose I should speak for myself rather than my colleagues.  If you would like to meet the Ziptech team go to www.ziptechservices.co.uk.about.php

Make client testimonials an important and very visible part of your website.  I suspect you are a small company like us so you won’t have any brand recognition to help make people trust you and feel comfortable with you.  Testimonials are a great way for a small company to get over that barrier and build trust.  I’ve found you can’t have too many testimonials on your site.

Put sound and video on your website. We’ve used video to add interest to our website and make the client testimonials that we spoke of really prominent.  They are the main feature of our new home page.  Go to www.ziptechservices.co.uk and click on the images to watch one of our videos.  There are more to be found on our client stories page www.ziptechservices.co.uk/client-stories.php.

Outsource your Google campaigns and search engine optimisation.  Initially we tried to do this ourselves, but the learning curve was steep and we never seemed to find the time to do it properly in-house.  Eventually we outsourced to Stephen Orr of Web 4 Marketing (www.web4marketing.co.uk) and since then we have seem major improvements.

Now our website redesign and improved Adwords campaign have been running for about 6 months and the number of leads AND the number customers from our website have almost doubled. 

Already it’s more than paid for the investment that we’ve made.  Based on our experience my advice would be to get serious about internet marketing and reap the rewards.