Website as a sales tool
Use your small business website as a sales tool.
I was recently involved at a local bridal show - related to a project I am working on. A couple of things simply floored me. First off, it was very interesting to see what kinds of businesses came out and took part. Some you would expect, some you might not. But I was blown away at how few of these businesses actually had a good website. I mean, it is not rocket science to build one, nor does it cost a small fortune to outsource a nice site. I understand that not everyone can build one but this is part of your marketing efforts.
For example, there was an event planner there. To my knowledge they don’t even have a website. I have looked for them online and can’t find them. Nor do they have a site listed on their business card. Their email address is at gmail.com. Painful really.
Another company had a beautiful display at the show. The are a business that rents out portable shelters. So if you want to have an outdoor reception, you call them, they bring in a big tent and set up your deal. Their business is named All Shelter Sales and Rentals, which unfortunately is not completely what they do. They had a beautiful display at the trade show offering complete catering equipment, location decorating and so on. Their website does not do justice to the different types of services and products they offer.
Here is what we do. You see, our website at starsluxurylimousine.com is used daily right within our business. Maybe someone finds our info in the phone book or from some advertising and they call us. They are looking for a wedding package. Great, we have 3 different wedding packages they can choose from. But instead of trying to explain what these are over the phone, we just simply send them to the website. Go check out our website and give us a call back (now, of course we take their contact info in case they do not call us back). We do this for a couple of reasons. First, you can’t explain the 3 packages over the phone and what the differences are. People can’t remember that many details all at once and it just ends up sounding like gibberish when you are done. So, this is all clearly laid out on our website - it is easy to find and easy to understand. Secondly, we want people to go to our website. It looks good, it displays our limousine very well, it is a good website and we are proud to have it. If people go to our website and then to our competitors, they will book with us. We want them to go there, call over another family member to say “hey, come see this site” and we want them to bookmark it for future reference.
Now, when people call back after seeing the site (most of the do, by the way) they are ready to book. Very few questions are left to answer and we have had people that call use, go check the site, and call right back ready to book. Now that is a great feeling - and a great use of our website.
Tags: internet marketing, internet marketing tips, niche marketing, website optimization, article marketing
Build the Website
So, how can we build a website? Well, there are a few options here. You could hire some kid to do it on the cheap, but really, this is your business we are talking about here. You don’t want to do that. You could outsource it completely, and this is a good idea if you really have no clue on anything related to building websites. I would rather see good money being spent with a good marketing company than to try and skimp on this. It will affect your bottom line.
For me, I do have experience in this and could have even coded it by hand if I wanted to but I chose to use Wordpress. Wordpress has become my favourite way of building sites. It is fast, easy and can be set up very well for SEO. Maybe I’ll do a post on that down the road. But for now I am using wordpress with the Corporate Theme put out by StudioPress. In fact, the exact same setup as on themarketersmind.com. I like the Corporate theme - it has a good layout that is easy to navigate and presents a simple, yet nice site. I love the Featured Content Plugin they integrate as well. It can take a bit of customizing if you want to change the menu or things like that.
OK, platform and theme selected. Now create the site. So, let’s think about the goals of this site. We want to come up in the search engines of course, we can to present a very professional image to anyone who goes to the site and once people come to the website, we want them to call us on the phone. At the end of the day, all of our business will be done on the phone. We can’t offload that to the website. There are special requests that people have, questions they need answered and so on. We can put as much info as possible on the site but eventually they need to call us on the phone. So the goal of the site is to presell our company and lead to a phone call.
Now we post all the info we can think of on our site. We listed different packages we offer, obviously our contact info and definitely lots of pictures. This business is one that has to be visually appealing and we want our site to show off our limousine.
Tags: website optimization, niche marketing, internet marketing, internet marketing tips, Jonathan Hook
New Marketing Project Underway
I know it has been a while since we did a lot here on TheMarketersMind.com, that is about to change.
I figured that instead of just relaying theories an ideas to you that it might be interesting to watch a real business being developed.
So, I have a new - from the ground up project that we are going to work on. We are referring to this as the limousine project. Here is the background…
I recently took over an existing local business. This is a very local, service business. A limousine company - www.StarsLuxuryLimousine.com. Almost as basic a company as you can get. We have one car, I got a few leads, company name, existing website and phone number.
Go time…
For me, first and foremost (obviously) is to get the website in order. The site that they had was not bad but for me, that is where marketing starts. For me a website is a good place to organize your marketing and refine your copy.
Tags: internet marketing tips, internet marketing, website optimization, Jonathan Hook, affiliate marketing