You have 2 options; get serious about digital for your business; or leave it. At the end of 2017 I realized there are 12 internet marketing pit-stops. Skipping a pit-stop makes the next one just that much harder.
When you understand the roadmap; the journey becomes clear.
Sometimes when we talk about the internet we put everything under one umbrella. Fact is; it is a path, a journey, a discovery. Here are 12 key pitstops on the journey:
- Your first email account: For many the first step is getting an email account. An account to communicate with other people. You subscribe to newsletters; email friends … exciting times.
- Your first website: Getting your first website is exciting. This is typically a brochure site. It is focused on what you do; what you offer, and contact information. After some time, you realize you are not getting business from your site. What should you do? You Google it … and the answers is …. get traffic to your website!
- Get traffic: You get people to visit your new website. This traffic could be from Adwords, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or social media (ie Facebook posts or ads). You spend some money, get some traffic, but no leads. Why are they not contacting me?
- Getting leads and landing pages (conversions): You do some work on the site to start getting leads; suddenly your website converts traffic into leads. Or, you get a company to deliver leads to your inbox. Great news! You give the leads to your sales people. Two weeks later you have a meeting and ask about sales from the leads. You get one response from the sales team; the leads suck! They phoned the leads the next day and never followed up. Do you see the problem here?
- CRM or LMS (customer relationship management or lead management system): Capturing leads in a system and following up becomes a critical sales process and a big discussion point. We have found this could x2 business turnover. Sales people do not like all the attention on what they are doing (activity-based selling is focused on your actions to deliver results … no action; no result … wrong action; wrong result). This is not a stick to hit sales people with. This is putting a sales process in place to get better results. If people are fighting this process tooth-and-nail; there is something else going on; better investigate … just saying.
- Newsletters: Communicating frequently to your database becomes a priority. You realize converting paid traffic into owned traffic makes a lot of sense (having people on your database means you can easily re-market to them). You have already paid for the lead; why not follow up with them? Instead of sending one email at a time, you do bulk newsletters. You start building the relationship, making offers, increase sales and create more sales opportunities. You find the money is in the list!
- Sales Training: You realize there is a desperate need for sales training. People must be able to sell more products and services to the leads and current clients. One change in a sales process increased the closing ratio from 50% to 80% for a client in 30 days. One change for a client had a drastic positive impact on results (best month in 8 years!). Sales training and developing a measurable sales process unlocks this potential. So much to do!
- Marketing Automation: Work is getting too much, and you need to save time. Introducing marketing automation. Suddenly you can have more done in less time. Dedicated campaigns, lead scoring, email journeys, automatic follow up; a central database and more! What should we do next? Can we automate that?
- Sales Funnels: You start developing key sales and marketing processes. These support your marketing and sales function.
- Statistical Improvement: A/B split testing or multivariate testing becomes key factors in improving the results from your marketing and sales efforts. You make better decisions based on statistical feedback; not guesswork. You now know what works for your market and how they respond. Who knew they will respond like that?
- Tested Marketing Frameworks: What is a framework? It is a proven way to get better results from the start. From statistical tests and best practices specific frameworks are developed. This instantly improves all future campaigns and results from campaigns. This is one of the reasons I created the scary sales stats course. If you know the scary sales stats you can start doing things to improve your results (a scary statistic is a result from a certain activity … you are not bound by it! By doing something different you get better results than the average company who follows the trend).
- Digital AI (artificial intelligence) and Customer Messaging: In some way we are already here. It is possible to have a different message on your website depending on who is visiting your site. AI will take it to the next level!
