Content: Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool
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Your website is the single most important marketing tool your company has. An effective website will increase your search engine hits, capture leads, and establish you as a leading managed services provider. But the key element to building great websites is one that many technology-based companies overlook—relevant, well written content.
The goal of your company’s website should be to attract and retain customers. If you’re like most people, the first place you turn to when researching a product or service is a search engine—most often Google. Your customers do the same thing.
A fully realized website with layers of up-to-date content and internal links is the best way to ensure that your website appears in the search engine results of your potential customers. It’s important to utilize SEO tactics like using keywords, but work those keywords into your content naturally.
Do not stuff web pages with unrelated keywords or lists. This method is counterproductive in two ways: 1) Google recognizes this black hat tactic and does not highly rank such pages, and 2) visitors get frustrated with your site if they can’t find the information they want—not the experience you want to elicit.
Once a potential customer finds your company’s site, they need to be able to determine two things about your company very quickly: who you are and exactly what you do. If either of these things is not obvious from your company name or logo, consider adding a short tagline or description in a prominent location on your homepage.
Transforming Visitors Into Customers
Let’s say a potential customer has found your site and is has discovered that you’re an MSP. Mission accomplished, right?
Wrong—and it is precisely at this stage of the customer’s knowledge-gathering process where quality content becomes the most crucial.
Well-crafted, pertinent content will not only encourage potential customers to linger on your site, it will give them a reason to come back to it. For example, if your website contains simple yet thorough descriptions of your services, a potential customer is empowered to make a buying decision.
If you go one step further and provide general information about managed services—an explanation of how online backup works, for example—your website then becomes a resource for SMBs, not just a selling platform.
Providing this information does two things for your business. First of all, it increases the trust your customers have for your company. Secondly, you’ll be able to more quickly shuffle a potential customer down the path from product awareness to paying customer by accelerating the frequency of “touch points” your customer has with you.
As a busy MSP, spending time (or money) on these “soft sell” tactics may appear to be a waste of time. But just because their effect is difficult to measure, does not mean they are not worthwhile. In an industry based on word of mouth, it is exactly these trust-building strategies that will make your business stand out from the pack.
Eric Webster is VP of sales and marketing for Intronis. Find Intronis partner program information here. Guest blog entries such as this one are contributed on a monthly basis as part of MSPmentor’s 2010 Platinum sponsorship. Read all of Eric’s guest blog entries here.
Good points, Eric. But to go a bit further on what you are saying, not only is content important but capturing who your visitors are and what they are interested in learning more about is also a major piece of using a website as a true automated marketing tool. And the automated part is the key to why spending time and/or money on this media is well worth it.
As stated you want to use SEO to attract potential clients via search, have good content that explains, in layman’s terms, what your business does for its clients and add educational value. But you also want to use it to trade that education, on say backups, in exchange for some information about them. Now you just generated a lead and can keep pushing them through the marketing process/funnel over time and into the sales process.
This is where you can actually see and track your results like you would with any other marketing method.
George Sierchio
George: Capturing reader information is important but I’d be careful. I hear from scores of readers who are tired of being asked for their name, email, title, etc., by companies they don’t really know yet.
Build the relationship and familiarity first, then ask the reader for some info. It’s a delicate balance.
-jp
It’s a fine line as you mentioned Joe, but at some point it needs to be tested. At one point or another you need to find out who is visiting your site and why with an actual name and not an IP address.
Simple information and other relationship builders can be given away all day long and things such as blogs are terrific for adding to your static web site. But there needs to be a line in the sand as to what you will release to someone without even the courtesy of them telling you who they are. Sort of like your sign up requirement at MSP Mentor to get to certain information and materials you have put together. Right?
And for those that have told you that they are tired of being asked for their information, they always have the option to not give it to you or even opt out later from getting emails from you. It all depends on how important what you have to give to them is to them.
If the relationship or indication of your company’s knowledge/experience has not been conveyed yet, then yes you are asking for that info from them too early and you will never get it.
For someone to be annoyed at the fact that they need to “sign up” or give a name and email address to get information your company worked hard to produce doesn’t bother me. Those people are free loaders or the info really isn’t that important to them. And you shouldn’t have a problem with not giving it to them because they already indicated to you by their disgust in having to sign up that they have no respect for your business. Maybe my opinion after successfully using website marketing for well over 10 years is a bit odd but that’s not someone I would want to deal with as a client.
But if you have done this all well enough, then asking for this kind of visitor info in exchange will do 2 things. First, it will drive away the free loaders that don’t want to ever pay you anyway. And there are a ton of them that visit every website. Second it will identify those that are fairly comfortable with you contacting them and pushing them further along in your marketing funnel.
If you don’t do something to identify true potential clients then a website is as useful as randomly dropping brochures on the ground where ever you go and hoping something happens. That’s not a marketing process. That’s hope marketing as in “I hope the right people see this and someday they decide I am worthy of their phone call”.
The bottom line is that for a website to be a marketing tool it has to have the same elements of every other marketing process. It needs to attract the correct audience, speak to them in their terms, talk about things that are of concern to them, convey you can help them out and compel them to take you up on your “call to action” which makes them a qualified lead and moves them along in the marketing funnel. And by call to action I don’t mean write on the site “please call us for ….”. Do that and you just lost them again.
Miss any of these elements and you really don’t have a marketing system.
Sorry for going off here Joe but websites as a marketing tool always gets me just a little bit fired up 🙂
George
George: Never apologize for sharing real-world advice. Thanks for taking the time to offer MSPmentor’s readers some extended guidance.
Best
-jp
Marketing is very simple. IT’s about building trust. Joe, your point is right on. We give snail mail a free ride here yet Email is set up for opt in purposes only and law states you must give the recipient the opportunity to opt out at any time. The reason for requiring info like a valid email and phone is because of all the phishing and spiders on the web that clutter inboxes with spam (a whopping 88% of all email).
On a side note, I need your help with SEO and I hope that you can help me.
So far, we’ve been expanding our business with traditional marketing activities, which produces reasonable results.
At this time, our company is pushing Internet Marketing and SEO is the first step. Here is my question for you: What keywords or phrases would you type in Google to find a software tool for managing your daily operation?
Regards,
Evan