Is your website designed to drive results?

When a potential new customer arrives to your website for the first time, what is their experience like? From their first impression a few seconds after arrived until they decide to finally click off, how effective was your website in helping the customer move through the buying cycle?

Most company CEO’s probably could not accurately answer that question. That’s because as companies grow and become increasingly complex, so to do their websites and the quest to explain, engage, and connect with a diverse range of buyers.

Sure, there are a lot of metrics and tools to analyze your website effectiveness such as time on your website, articles read, and visitors converted to leads. But those numbers tell just part of the story. You really don’t know what the results would be if your website offered the optimal online experience.

In fact, when you become overly focused on just the metrics, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture and how your website shapes and builds your company’s relationship with its buyers.

To gain important insights into your website’s effectiveness, start by asking yourself these 3 questions:

#1: Does your website effectively tell your company’s story?

Whether it’s a first visit to an ecommerce website or a 3rd visit to a b2b technology website, buyers want to know why they should be doing business with you. Your company story goes beyond just talking about your product, services, and benefits and explains why you exists and why your customers should be doing business with you as a company.

Your company’s will help you build a more authentic connection with your buyers. Done the right way, your company story incorporates your brand character, messaging, visuals, and  everything else that results in delivering the right impression on your visitors throughout your website and at multiple points of engagement.

#2: Does your website inspire confidence and build credibility?

As buyers move through the buying process, they may return to your website multiple time to dig deeper. For some buyers, that may mean reading your blog and learning about specific topics or services. For others, that may be looking carefully at your customer stories or case studies.

Once buyer are already interested in your product, they begin to look more carefully at your company As a buyer moves closer to interest buyers are considering someone is interested in doing business with your company. Is yours a company they want to do business with? Can they trust that you will deliver?

Whether you’re a multinational consulting company or tech startup, your website should tell a credible story about your past successes and how that success translate into future results for any new client.

Over the past couple years, I’ve seen a consistent trend of moving customer stories front and center onto website home pages. It’s a highly effective move that because it helps minimize any doubt in buyers mind whether you can deliver results.

Does your website drive sales and marketing efficiency?

It easy to have a good looking website that impresses. But if your company’s goal is grow, your website needs to generate buyer demand and help your sales people close more deals.

All too often, websites are not built with a cohesive strategy that works to improve or optimize the sales process. Whether it’s targeted landing pages or personalized marketing assets, there are limitless ways to engineer your website around your sale and marketing efforts.

To get from a good website to great website, look for ways that your website can help optimize sales and marketing efforts and work together more effectively to drive results.

Wrapping Up

The next time you do a review of your website, keep the big picture in mind and consider how your website could better help you achieve your key business objectives. Does it offer the right messaging, positioning, and story?  Once you’ve achieved that, then it’s time to dive into the details and start the optimization process.

Why you need full a funnel content marketing program

To make your content marketing work effectively, companies need to engage and educate their buyers at every stage of the buying journey. It’s no longer enough to focus on only top of the funnel content that gets buyers interested and helps to generate leads.

To make content work, companies need to execute on a full funnel content plan that engages buyers at each step of the buying process. That means developing and distributing content that is timely, relevant, and interesting to the buyer at the beginning, middle, and end of the funnel.

 

Full Funnel: What is it?

Once upon a time, most content marketing focused on lead gen and getting buyers interested in the early stage of the buying cycle. For example, by offering gated content on a landing page with a guide download, companies generated leads and hopefully got the sales process moving.

Over the past several years, however, content marketing had moved from a niche channel to the leading channel in a lot of verticals and B2B marketing. Buyers today are more sophisticated and, more times than not, want to self-educate throughout the process. By offering full cycle content, you’re creating content for each key stage of the journey, from start to finish.

As your salespeople know all too well, generating a lead and getting through an initial sales call is just the start. As your prospects begin to compare your company to the competitor and look at all benefits, drawbacks, and risks of moving forward, quality content can help move things forwarded. 

 

Top of the Funnel

For most companies, Top of the Funnel refers to lead generation and awareness building. Sometimes, your buyer is still unfamiliar with your company or service. Other times, they know what you do, but need to dive into the details and determine if there is potentially a good fit.

Most buyers will start on your website and, often times, then move onto your blog. They are first and foremost interested in how your product or service works, but also very interested in determining if you can solve their specific business problem. For that reason, Top of the Funnel content is often framed as in a problem > solution context, highlighting industry pain points and delivering a compelling story about how your company can alleviate then.

Because Top of the Funnels are not there to buy – but learn – it’s best to focus on educating, not selling. In this stage, focus on product benefits, features, and positioning your company as a viable choice. To generate traffic and drive buyers to your landing page, focus on outbound channels like email, social, and PPC.

 

Middle of the Funnel

When your buyer moves from lead to opportunity (although every company has their own terminology), they have reached the Middle of the Funnel. Typically, sale and marketing teams are now focused on lead nurturing and relationship building. Their goal is to building interest and moving the opportunity into strong opportunity.

Middle of the Funnel buyers are often looking at specific aspects of your service while also running high level cost benefit analysis. Your content strategy needs to address these issues, which often means offering more complete case study analysis, white papers, or other education resources.

As Middle of the Funnel start to follow you on social media or read your blog, it’s important that you consistently publish quality content that is targeted at their specific needs. Yes, buyers want solutions, but just actively and consistently publishing content can help set you apart from the competition and keep your prospects engaged.

Sometimes, your buyers just kind of hang around. They’re still interested, but they are not quite convinced and don’t feel urgency to make a move. In such cases, Middle of the Funnel content plays an important role by keeping your buyers in the loop and focused your company – not the competition – until they are ready to buy.

 

Bottom of the Funnel

When you’ve arrived at the Bottom of the Funnel, your team is focused on closing the deal. At this point, companies are focused on overcoming specific roadblocks and beating out competitive offers. Your sales team, and the content that supports them, needs to help you win.

One of the ways to do that is to deliver content that builds trust in your company, team, and your ability to deliver what you promise. It’s a good idea to have one or several stellar customer stories or testimonials. The better your current customers can vouch for you via your content, the more effective you Bottom of the Funnel content will be.

But there are a host of other considerations to keep in mind. Typically – and this is particularly true when it comes to technology – multiple people from different departments will need to buy into the final decision. Because of that, it’s important to create content that helps to minimize the perceived risk of your product. Happy customers, unmatched support, and deep experience onboarding new customers are all winning ingredients. Sure, your sales team can promise these things, but the right content can help support sales as they close the deal.

 

Turn Customers into Happy, Loyal Customers.

One big mistake I see companies make is not putting enough resources into current customer engagement and management. Unless you have a product your customers simply can’t live without, you need to stay in touch with them and build the relationship over time. From upsell opportunities to referrals to user generated content, your current customers are pay a huge role in your next round of growth.

Try to deliver at least a few pieces of content a month to current customers by email, social, and other channels. Customer engagement is one of the best ways you can spend your marketing dollars because you have a direct, captive audience to speak to.

Customer Spotlight: House Buyers of America

Real estate tech is booming and house flipping is back.

For real estate tech companies, that great news. For realtors who sell homes the traditional way, this spells what could be long term trouble.

In 2017, tech startups in the real estate sector raised an impressive $3.4 billion in funding, a 5x increase over funding in 2013, according to CB Insights. Most of the funding is going into startups that offer platforms and software + service hybrid models to bring new efficiencies to the home buying, leasing, or selling processes.

Our customer, House Buyers of America, was capitalizing on growing trend that is starting to reshape the residential real estate market: selling your home directly to investors. The overall process is not new. House Buyers of America purchases the home from a seller, makes improvements a needed, and then puts the house on the market to sell.

What is new is the way the company, alongside a growing list of fast growing real estate startups, is using the web, data, and a deep experience in home values to buy and sell large numbers of homes at a profit. House Buyers can purchase the house with cash to eliminate risk to the seller and move from quote to closed transaction in a matter of days. For buyers who are in a rush to sell, the certainty and speed of the transaction are worth more than the slightly discounted sell price that the company will typically pay.

We worked with House Buyers of America and created a totally rebrand of company with new creative, a new website, and integrated outbound communications. The recently launched new website moved the company away from an investor home buyer to a real estate servicing company that helps people sell with confidence.

But House Buyers of America needed to do a lot more than look good to continue to grow and capture market share away from realtors or other real estate investment companies. Optimyz helped the company rebuild their lead generation process, including website lead conversion optimization, lead engagement, and outbound email.

To improve inbound lead engagement and conversion, we created a new lead flow that integrated with Google Maps to enable visitors to locate their home on a map, confirm their address, and them move through the get a quote process. What we found was that, while the new lead flow process was longer than a simple form, it effectively enticed people to go through the quote process. It was a lot more user friendly and inviting then then the previous lead flow.

Another benefit of the new lead flow is that it required that he buyer be in the client’s market area. That was important, because each incoming lead required multiple phone calls from the sales team to determine if the seller qualified – thereby saving a lot of resources.

Once the leads came in, they were sent to Microsoft Dynamics and the outbound drip email campaign started. We integrated the website forms, built in WordPress, with Microsoft Dynamics using a custom WordPress plugin. Next, we created a custom email flow using Click Dimensions, which is natively integrated with Microsoft Dynamics.

Finally, to move yet another one step beyond the competition, we implemented an automated postcard flow so that a welcome postcard was triggered with each incoming lead. With the average cost per acquisition at around $2,000, adding another $.80 to send a postcard to each new lead made a lot of sense.

Our inbound lead mailer program gets the postcard to the recipient in 2-3 days after the lead comes in. If 1 out of 2,000 postcards helped close a deal, the client generated a positive ROI. With automated direct mail for inbound leads, because you already generated lead, the postcard drives engagement and helps to differentiate your brand from the competitor’s brand. As such, it can be tricky to attribute the exact benefit the postcard had toward closed deals. But we have a few ways to track effectiveness that work well.

Next Steps
As House Buyers of America continues to grow in its market, the next step will be to build integrated house map and notification system so that sellers, agents, and House Buyers of America can all be alerted to new potential deals.

We’d love to hear what you think. If you’re a real estate investor and are interested in improving your seller engagement or lead acquisition process, get in touch with us.

Digital Design on Demand. It’s fast. It’s good. It moves at the speed of business.

We live in a world of on demand services that are delivered fast. Streaming video. Groceries. Maps. Data. Webinars. Ridesharing. Pizza slices (granted, that one has been around a while.)

The fact is, we’ve come to rely on real time delivery of products and services, and that given a huge boost to our productivity, both when on the job and off.

But graphic design? Digital creative? Not so fast. Creative, design, and content development still tend to move relatively slowly if you want to maintain quality and budget. Creating high quality content takes time and typically involves a few different roles or teams.

In our experience, design and content needs are “in a rush” around 30% of the time. A big part of delay is design. The high growth in both personalization and content publishing means that more images and custom content is needed more frequently. Even for smaller companies with a single target audience, creating compelling designs for email, web, and social on time is a challenge.

That’s why we created design on demand. It’s our answer to a growing need for design and content delivered at the speed of business. How fast is it? Well, it depends. Sometimes we can deliver new designs same say. Usually within 24 hours. Always fast and prioritized.

But not just any design. Highly polished work. 100% Original. The kind of stuff that makes you say, “Oh, nice.”

So how do we create high quality designs so fast? With the right combination of process, experience, design capacity, and technology. It’s a process we’ve been improving over time and have augmented with software, which helps expedite certain aspects of the process.

After testing Digital Design on Demand for a few months, we’re now promoting the service. We realize that your design needs won’t always be rushed – and that’s a good thing. But when you are, it’s great to have Creative Design on Demand available.

Give it a try. We’re sure you’re going to love it. Get in touch with us to learn more.

Why company CEOs needs to build their brand

Businesswoman lectures at business conference.