The other day, a group of us were talking over lunch about a “new” Chinese restaurant by the office. The reason “new” is in quotes is because before it was a Chinese restaurant, it was a Mexican restaurant. Before that, it was a sandwich shop. Before that, it sold specialty cupcakes. All this in the last two-and-a-half years.
Any bets on if the Chinese restaurant is going to last?
If the owner realizes what the previous three proprietors did not, it might. The location stinks, so instead of relying on drive-by or foot traffic, they need to drive traffic to the location if they are going to prosper where others failed.
Furthermore, they better have a plan to get repeat business that’s better than “If I serve good food, they’ll come back.”
I bet you know a spot that, over the last several years, has been a revolving door for restaurants. Some of them were good, and you wish they would have made it. So do they, but wishing isn’t a sound business strategy.
Many MSPs and IT services business operate their websites the same way these failed restaurants operated their locations. “If I build it, they will come.”
This simply isn’t true!
Even if they do come, I doubt you know it or are doing anything about it.
That all changes now with my three digital marketing musts to get leads, appointments, and sales online. And I’ll show you how to do it for next to nothing.
Digital Marketing Must 1: Get More Website Visitors.
Just like a restaurant, if a website is going to be successful, it needs a steady stream of new people.
While there are many ways to spend (or waste) money attempting to get people to come to your website, I’m going to bypass those and instead focus on FREE (Yes! Zero! Zilch! Nada!) ways to get traffic to your site.
If you’re not familiar with the idea, “zero-click search” listings are queries in search engines such as Google or Bing that do not send you to a third-party website from an organic search result.
In a nutshell, these are the listings that come up when you Google “pet store near me.” Zero-click means you never have to click on the organic results and go to a website, but instead, Google displays the locations, store hours, directions, etc. right in the search results.
I’m not going to get into this much because it’s very easy to be listed for free on the sites you want to be on.
They are Google My Business, Bing Places, and Apple Maps.
You may already be listed on these, but “verifying” your listing and completing your profile will get you listed before your competition if they haven’t done so (fools!).
I’d start with Google My Business because if you fill out your info there, Bing Places actually lets you import that info straight into Bing. (It’s like they aren’t even trying to be different.)
Apple Maps will require you to fill out info as well.
Do this, and you can see search traffic increase by 50%–100% in as little as a month! (Screen shot below after just one month of verifying a business.)
Digital Marketing Must 2: Capture Website Visitors.
Do you know how many unique visitors come to your website a month? And of those, how many are you getting information from?
A great website gets 2%–3% of website traffic to fill in information and become a lead.
That means great websites are still letting 97 out of 100 visitors get away.
While many marketing salespeople sell you on increasing website HITS (which I affectionately call How Idiots Track Success), I doubt you’ve ever bragged to your friends about depositing HITS in the bank.
What you need are people to give you their info, right?
Maybe not actually …
Let me explain. There are tools that I’ll describe as caller ID for your website, and they allow you to capture information from website visitors even if they don’t leave a single piece of information on your site.
The service we use (there are many to choose from) is Prospect Detective. This captures information based on the IP address of the website visitor. Like caller ID, it’s sometimes 100% complete and sometimes not.
I can see hundreds of companies visit our website every month and leave without giving me any information, but our sales team can still follow up with them. This service costs less than $100 a month, so a single sale a year would pay for it.
It’ll often provide me with the company name, domain, email, location, and phone number of the website visitor. How great is that?
Even if it worked just 10% of the time, that’d be a 400%–500% increase in information from website visitors!
So, if you do nothing else, get some type of website visitor capture system. If you want a place to start, you can check out the Prospect Detective that we’ve built at https://TechnologyMarketingToolkit.com/prospect or look at LeadForensics.com, which I’ve also used (but is much more expensive).
Digital Marketing Must 3: Convert Website Visitors.
Being in the business we’re in, you’re probably not surprised that we can capture info from people who visit our website.
But did you know you can actually track people who visit your website all around the internet?
This is a strategy called “retargeting,” which allows you to use platforms like the Google Display Network, Facebook Ads Network, LinkedIn, and more to show ads ONLY to people who first visited your website. Again, without them leaving any information … or so they thought.
Basically, this is like planting a billboard in the front lawn of the house of anyone who visits your website, and you can leave it up for six months for less than a penny a day per person.
I’ve used this strategy on basically everything, and most recently, I found that I can show a website visitor an ad 155 times for $1 using Facebook Display Network.
But does it work?
Good question! In the screenshot below (taken direct from Facebook Ads Manager), you can see where I targeted people who came to our website with an offer for a free report, and they converted into leads for an average of $1.88 apiece. Hot damn, that’s cheap!
These website visitors that would have been lost to the ether are instead become leads for less than $2! I love retargeting, and you will too!
This is how you turn website visitors into leads, appointments, and sales. Show them ads, make them offers, and stay in touch for less than a penny a day.
Use these three strategies to drive traffic to your site, capture it, and convert it into appointments and sales for just a few bucks a day! This is far from all you should do, but it is something most people aren’t doing that could give you a giant leg up on your competition.
