Author: Tony

Great Ideas for Marketing and Design in Florida

There are many great ideas for marketing, design for any Florida business, and the best ones will depend on your specific goals and target audience. However, a great website design in Florida is an essential component of modern marketing and business strategies. A website serves as a digital storefront for your business and is often the first point of contact that potential customers have with your brand. A well-designed website can help you build credibility and establish trust with your audience, showcase your products or services, and generate leads and sales.

Some of the benefits of having a well-designed website for your business include:

1. Increased visibility
2. Improved credibility
3. Better customer engagement
4. Increased sales

Overall, it’s a great idea for marketing your website and it’s a critical component of any successful marketing and business strategy. By prioritizing website design and optimizing your site for user experience, search engines, and conversions, you can improve your visibility, credibility, and sales.

Many business owners want to know what is the best website they can get for their business.

The best website for a business will depend on the specific needs and goals of that business. The very minimum is getting a professional website that you can easily edit, that includes SEO, and gets your business found online where people look. However, there are a few key characteristics that a great business website should have:

1. Responsive design: A responsive website is one that is designed to work well on any device, including desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. This is important because more and more people are accessing the internet from their mobile devices, and you want to make sure that your website is easy to use and navigate on all of these devices.

2. Clear and concise content: Your website should have clear and concise content that is easy for visitors to understand. Avoid using jargon or complex language, and make sure to explain your products or services in a way that is easy for people to understand.

3. Easy navigation: A website with a simple and intuitive navigation system is important because it allows visitors to easily find the information they are looking for. Make sure to organize your content in a logical way and use clear and descriptive headings to guide visitors through your site.

4. Professional design: A professional and well-designed website can give your business credibility and help you stand out from the competition. Invest in a high-quality website design that reflects your brand and makes a good impression on visitors.

5. Conversion-focused: A great business website should be designed with conversion in mind. This means that it should have clear calls to action and make it easy for visitors to take the next step, whether that is making a purchase, filling out a form, or contacting you for more information.

Overall, the best website for a business will be one that meets the needs and goals of that business, and that is designed to effectively engage and convert visitors into customers. If you are looking for the last website design your business will need, you can easily edit, that includes SEO, gets your business found online where people look. Contact us today!

How to change outbound to inbound marketing

Why your website should work as a marketing tool.

Using the Internet for marketing allows you to switch from outbound marketing to inbound marketing. Instead of spending time, energy, and a lot of money sending marketing pieces out to people, buying radio and tv ads to be broadcast out to people, spending money on direct mail campaigns sent out to people for a 3% return if you’ve done them well, use the internet to bring people in.

When you have a website that has good search engine placement for your targeted keywords, the people who are searching online for your products or services will find you. They come to you. 85% of adults use the internet, and most of those people pre-shop, research, or buy products online. This means that your target market is online looking for you at some point. Don’t you want to be found by them?

You change the game when your website is found by your customers during their peak interest. They have specifically fired up their web browser to search for a company like yours. They want to learn about your products. They want to know what makes you different. They want to choose where to spend their money. When you send out mass marketing, you’re goal is to convince people to think about your type of product. With inbound marketing provided by a good website, you are getting in front of the right people at the right time – when they are open to the sale. They have sought you out.

You must provide multiple ways for the captive consumer to become your customer. Some people will call, some will email for more information, some will buy now, some will want to receive your newsletter, but every single one of them will want to know they’re getting a great deal. Offer coupons, internet specials, discounts for emailing their information or free downloads. When you capture visitors’ information, they are essentially giving you the green light to market to them. They want to know more or be a part of your client club.

Communicate the way your customer wants!

There is such a paradox in today’s marketing techniques. On the one hand, we have been beaten over the head with the idea that if you make a personal connection with your customer you make the sale. But we’re also bombarded with the very impersonal Internet which impacts today’s consumers in a huge way. How do you balance your need to connect with your customers and their need to check you out online before they let you invade their lives? – Yes, invade… it is an invasion until you have the chance to make that personal connection. Get the paradox yet?

I hear from businesses all the time that they would rather get a phone call from a potential customer instead of an email. Wouldn’t we all? To have someone new call us up out of the blue asking how we can help them? And we respond to their every question with the perfect answer, make that personal connection, and bingo! Money in your pocket. But the reality of today’s consumer is that the Internet and email equals “you’re lucky to be contacted at all.” Also, today’s consumer thinks differently than a decade ago. Today’s consumer wants information and truly believes they’re entitled to information. The majority of consumers use the Internet to research products and services online before they plan to buy.

The old sales routine:
1. My business spends money on advertising, direct mail, business flyers, etc. to spread the word about my products.
2. I wait for customers to call or stop in.
3. A sales person tries to make personal connection with a potential client
4. The sale – maybe.
5. Not enough sales, start over, repeat step 1, but this time get more aggressive and cold call people. They don’t know they need us, so let’s sell them on why they need my product now.

The new way
1. A consumer has a need
2. the consumer looks online for a business that can fulfill that need
3. the consumer contacts that business for more information
4. The business follows through with giving the client information in the manner received
a. If the customer inquired by email, an email response is sent
b. If the customer filled out an online form with their phone number, a call could be made
c. If the customer filled out a form to schedule a face to face meeting, the meeting is scheduled

The 21st century consumer expects businesses to behave in the manner they’ve specified, not the other way around. If you refuse to communicate through email and expect your customers to adapt to you, you will miss many opportunities to bring in new customers. But also be aware that this doesn’t mean that today’s customers don’t appreciate the phone or face to face meetings. You can get the meeting if you follow their lead. If they’ve sent you email without a phone number, don’t look up their number and call them – you’ve just turned yourself into a telemarketer.

Analyzing the effectiveness of your website.

The biggest question website owners are faced with is: Does my website work? The first thing I tell my clients is to define what “work” means to them. Usually, then they say that a high number of clicks is their definition of a website that “works”. Now I ask them to think a little more out of the box. What if a site receives 100K clicks but no new business, does that site work? Traffic alone is not an accurate measure of whether or not a website is working.

Look at Business A as a case study. Business A is a type of medical facility. As a medical facility, they need clients to be able to come into their location for service. Business A is also located in a town of about 75,000 people. Getting 100K clicks per month on their website is an unrealistic goal for Business A due to the simple fact that there isn’t even 100K people in their town. And if 100K people suddenly wanted to be their customer, they wouldn’t have the ability to service them all. A more realistic goal for Business A would be to find a “number of new clients” goal and to target their online efforts accordingly.

Business B, on the other hand is a completely web based business. They have a number of products that they sell completely online through their website. Their products are shipped anywhere in the country and require a high volume of sales each month. This type of business needs a lot of traffic to reach their sales goals, so in this case, the volume of clicks counts.

How many new clients do you expect from your site? Do you expect all of your business to come from the web? Do you need clients to physically come into your brick-and-mortar store? Do you have a territory that you cater to? All of these questions help determine what your website’s role in your business could be or should be.

Search Engine Placement
In any business’s website situation, search engine placement is a large player in getting the type of results that move you towards your individual site’s goal. If your website cannot be found in the right keywords, making efforts to correct this short-coming will be the most cost-effective move to make. In the long run it will minimize the amount of online pay-per-click, pay-per-impression, and banner ads that are needed to reach your customer/sales goal.

Converting Traffic into Sales
Click to customer conversion ratio is another number that will help you determine if your website is working. This ratio is unique to your business so there’s no magic number or chart to use to determine what’s right for your business. If you look at the number of customers you are getting through your website and the number of clicks it took to get them, you can determine if you need to improve. The most common thing we see in converting visitors to clients is having or not having the right information on the website. If you have no call to action, no sales or bargains, or no value statements, your visitors are less likely to be converted to customers. You must ask for the sale, you must ask to be contacted, you must ask your visitor to become your customer. Changing your content to turn visitors into customers is the easiest and most effective way to convert traffic into sales.

Tools
A tool that I recommend to my clients is Google Analytics, its free, user friendly, and full of information that can help you determine if your website is on the right path. Sign up for this tool with Google and have your webmaster load it onto your website. You need a base line from which to start, so after loading the analytics tool, give it a month to see where you are starting from. Each day, each week, and at the end of the month login to see where your traffic is coming from.

Analyzing your traffic will help you form a plan.
Direct Hit – people are typing your dot com directly into their address bar or search bar This tells you that people know who you are and are probably current customers
Bounce Rate – bounces are usually when someone click on your site and stays for less than 30 seconds. This tells you that you are receiving the wrong traffic, people expected something else, your site design was repelling, or there is click fraud happening (if you are paying for ppc links)

Keywords – what keywords are people using to find you.
This can tell you if your placement is in need of work and if your keywords are in need of adjustment.
Page Views – this counts all the internal pages that visitors are looking at, so if you have 10 unique visitors and 30 page views, the average visitor is clicking through 3 pages before leaving your site. High page views can mean that people are digging into your site to learn more or shop more, or it can mean that its hard to find the information they’re looking for. Measure page views against leads or sales to figure out if you need to adjust your navigation or content.

Unique Visitors – this is the number of people who have come to your site for the first time, and if they return to your site, they’re not counted again in this number.

If you know for a fact that your site design is the problem, start with having a reputable website design company redesign your website. (Ask to see evidence of their client’s search placement for proof that they will deliver a correctly designed website.)