MARCH 2012 IN THIS EDITION

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1 Hi there, Welcome to your March edition. For some like us, this represents the last 31 days to achieve all you wanted to during the 2011/2012 financial year. So with these people in mind I ve kept this edition a bit lighter on text but a bit bigger on pictures. You should be able to skim through this version in under 5 minutes. Starting from now. I start with some screen shots of a couple of new customer reports now out of beta stage and available on full release to all customers for whom they apply. We design all our reports with the hurried business owner in mind, showing only the most relevant of content in an easy to read form. They are produced here by Tom using our own reporting engine. This application pulls the core data directly from your Google Analytics account and then represents it in our own special way. All feedback is welcome. Checklists are also great for people in a hurry. So this month I ve added one in to help those who want to ensure they have the basics of online marketing completely sorted. Remember, it s the basics shown here so don t fret if you have done stuff that s not on the list just ensure what is there is complete too. My main article this month was written for those who focus more towards online lead generation. All the good methods and processes required for effective face-to-face selling can also apply online. So to highlight this point I pull from my past (selling commercial printing) and explain how relevant some of my early lessons still are for those wanting to generate more leads this month than they did last month. Getting the basics right was the subject of last month s customer coaching call. We went right back to explain how marketing online is so different from traditional media. Then we covered why Google demands so much attention and the few things that make optimizing your website so much easier and the one thing that, unless fixed early on, will always hold you back. Good work done getting the basics sorted can underpin any super smart strategy relied upon later. Skip this part and well it can get a bit messy. And that s the last thing we all need. MARCH 2012 IN THIS EDITION Introducing... February Customer Coaching Call - An Introduction to the Basics of Effective Online Marketing Spotlights on Permission Customer Reporting Your Online Marketing Checklist Online Lead Generation Lessons from before Mobile Phones, Sky TV and yes, even the Internet Calendar of Events March 22 Customer Teleconference Call All the best for, Chris Price Director Permission NZ Ltd facebook.com/permissionwebsitemarketing Permission Website Marketing Update twitter.com/permissionnz Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved

2 Introducing... For those who haven t come through to our new offices in Grey Lynn here s a snap of four of our Auckland-based team so you can put a face behind a name. From left to right we have me (Chris Price), Tom Bielanski, Tikhon Tasenko, and Ben Thomas. Missing were Claire Price and Mello the rather crazy Spaniel. Offshore we have Leslie in Toronto and Bernard in Manila. Tikhon can make a mean plunger coffee so do drop by when you are in the area. February Customer Coaching Call - An Introduction to the Basics of Effective Online Marketing This month I went back to the start with a presentation titled - An Introduction to the Basics of Effective Online Marketing. This session was written to appeal to both those new to Permission and others who have been with us for a while. Get the basics right and you create a solid foundation for more complex tactics to prosper upon. Miss out on this step and rarely will any results follow your actions. The agenda I covered was a simple three step plan: Online Marketing - some recent stats and the key differences this media offers Google - why it requires attention and where your time should be spent Your Website - what will stop you from making ANY progress and likewise what will make your life so much easier. If you are a customer you should have received either a link to this presentation or a copy of the CD with your monthly notes. Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 2 of 8

3 Spotlights on Permission Customer Reporting This month we released a couple of new reports for clients one for our Grow Conversions Website Optimization module, the other for our Grow Traffic Google AdWords module. To follow are screen shots of each. First up we have the conversions report. We wanted this to help you quickly and easily locate the conversion rate of your website compared with the previous months well as a rolling four-month historical period. Our reporting engine pulls the data from your Google Analytics account and then re-formats it in the layout to follow. Nearly all of our conversion clients have performance agreements linked to their expected growth in conversion rate. This report will make it easy for them to see how we are performing relative to our targets. The next report has been used internally by the team for the last five months and is now ready to be released to all those customers who use us for our Google AdWords management service. This one tracks the status (online / offline) of our client s website. Whenever a site goes offline we are notified. When this occurs for extended periods we pause any inbound paid advertising. No point paying Google to send traffic to a website that doesn t exist :-). Either Tom or Ben will call you if your website is offline for extended periods of time. Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 3 of 8

4 Your Online Marketing Checklist Checklists are powerful things. I m reliably informed that pilots use them a fair bit especially during that all-important phase when they are readying their plane for takeoff. Probably not a good time for human memory to be the only thing relied upon to ensure every step is taken correctly. Apparently,checklists began their life after a pilot forgot something critical. For those interested, you can find more about it here - Now, I know that practicing effective online marketing is nowhere near as complex as flying a plane. And likewise if you miss a step or two there s no chance of anything fatal occurring. But nevertheless it s a complex space to work within and there s a lot to miss. So here s my checklist on the basics of online marketing. Think of it as a companion document to the recent customer conference call on the same subject. The Basics of Online Marketing Checklist A website analytics application of Google Analytics standard or better is running on your website Time has been spent learning or being trained in the data this application reports upon You know what the five most insightful web analytics data points are for your type of website and you track them each month Your Analytics application has been configured to track the success of three or more actions or goals your website visitors will achieve You present these actions to your website visitors on the high traffic pages of your website or even inside an area called FREE STUFF You offer content specifically written to help your prospects work through their decisionmaking process The split of content on your website is roughly 20% sales (about your business and what you offer) and 80% prospect-centric valuable information Every two weeks you add more prospect-centric content to your website There s a place on your website for customer testimonials This area of your website is updated at least monthly You use marketing You send a message to your list or lists at least once a month You offer an incentive for new subscribers to join your list You have set up your marketing application to work with your website analytics account. This enables you to track the effectiveness of your inbound website traffic generated by your marketing campaigns Like your website, the split of content your messages contain is 80% prospect value centric and 20% sales promotion You know how much traffic the Google search engine sends to your website You know the keywords people have used in Google to find your website before they have clicked and arrived You know which of these keywords have high search volumes behind them You know the high search volume keywords that you are not ranking for within Google and are doing or having done some work to improve their ranking If you are using any paid search advertising methods you know how much each lead from this traffic source is costing you and whether this is commercially sustainable You are having some fun doing or having done for you all this work :) Tick When Complete Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 4 of 8

5 Online Lead Generation Lessons from before Mobile Phones, Sky TV and yes, even the Internet Cast your mind back to a time before cell phones, ithis and ithat, and even the Internet. Yep we are talking ancient history in technology land or approximately 20 human years. This is where the story starts, with Chris Price as a freshfaced new recruit ready to sell up a storm hawking commercial printing to those unsuspecting souls in East Tamaki. Anyway, during my early days doing this, I was shown a strategy that I m now going to renovate and present back to you as something super smart to apply to your online lead generating efforts. Think of it as a matt, dull object from the past that is probably a bit more valuable than its usually shiny, bright cousin we come across each and every week. Anyway, this business had a rather crude but effective way of generating leads. It involved sitting its sales force down at their desks, arming them with phones and phone books and then yelling at them repeatedly to cold call prospects in their chosen territory to make sales appointments. OK, so perhaps the yelling part is overstating the fact a bit. But still you were expected to be at your desk from 8:00am until 10:00am calling up purchasing managers (remember that role) and convincing them to see you either that day or sometime soon over the week. It was a soul-destroying task but, surprisingly, a reasonably effective one. Printing was a fickle business then as it probably is now. Printers came and went, service levels were up and down, and staff churned away. So if you were fortunate your call could coincide with someone who was so annoyed with their current supplier that you got a hearing. If you were lucky. I really hated this cold calling part of the sales process. So I would arm myself with as much coffee as my body could contain and then work through my call list as fast as I could. I repeated my sales script in a jabbering caffeine-fueled way in what was probably so much of a blabber that no one could tell what I said and as such any chance of success was quickly snuffed out. So as the clock struck 10:00am I was evicted with the rest of the sales force. They bounced off to their first call. I drove down the southern motorway just knowing what was coming up next. Now as sales people we were only allowed back in the office after 4:00 pm and then only to write up our orders from the day s calling. So if my phone cold calling drew a blank then I had a day ahead of an even worse experience door knocking. Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 5 of 8

6 Yep, picking some unsuspecting street in industrial East Tamaki and working from one end to the other asking to see the person in charge of printing. I hated this even more than the phone. After the first month, it was obvious to everyone that I was not the company s best hire. So it was no surprise when my boss called me into his office and sat me down for a chat about my future. Clyde told me he could see some promise but things had to change and fast. He then pulled out a pen and paper and began to map out my progress to date. Their sales process required us to complete daily call reports that showed exactly who we had phoned or visited, what was discussed and a nice space to list down the orders we had achieved. My reports had a bunch of stuff in the activity areas, but very little in the place left for orders. Between us we tallied up the orders made that didn t take too long then the number of phone calls and sales presentations I had made. The numbers for the two weeks just gone were something like 200 agonizing phone calls made 10 appointments made 9 sales presentations delivered resulting in 3 orders collected with sales worth $6,000. As a rookie sales person I was on a very small base salary, which was topped up with a commission on gross sales so I knew the dollars but the activity numbers were new to me. Clyde then broke down each step of the sales process and assigned a dollar value to it. So the orders were worth $2000 each and on average I needed 3 presentations to make an order which means each presentation was worth $667, while each appointment was worth $600 and each phone call hold on was worth an amazing $30. This changed everything. Now, whenever I picked up the phone I didn t just think fear, doubt and extreme worry I also thought three nice and shiny $10 notes just waiting for me to grab them. And when I was presenting to a prospect, while I thought features vs benefits features vs benefits features vs benefits, I also thought $667 is very close now so listen hard and don t blow this. I would have liked to say that this epiphany changed everything and overnight I went from a cold calling disaster to become king of the phones. But it didn t. Nevertheless, it made things a bit easier the phone wasn t so scary; the appointments were not so haphazard. So how does this apply to your lead generation website? First, let s kick off with the general agreement that there s a multi-stage process people follow before they buy. For printing it involved me calling and convincing them to let me in their office for an appointment. That was all I was told to present. Nothing about what I could offer just the benefits of sitting in a room with me to discuss their printing needs. That was step one. Some agreed and booked a time. Others fobbed me off and asked me to send a brochure in the mail (sort of like a step 1.5). Anyway, I did what was asked of me and then called back politely but persistently to get that appointment. If all went well then step two had me placed eyeball to eyeball across their desk pitching them what I could offer. And all going well, one in three would buy. Let s now apply this to lead generation on the Internet. Some prospects will come by your website, immediately like what you offer, and complete your Contact Us page form. Now, this some could be between 2% and 5% of your total visitor traffic depending on your industry, the content you offer, and your standing in the market. Think of these as the purchasing officers who were absolutely fuming about their printing supplier and were very happy I called that day. But there are not a lot in this group, so you have the remaining 95% to 98% of your website visitors who do nothing. Some of this group will be mildly interested. But how do you entice them to linger a bit longer and eventually transform themselves into a lead? Before we talk about some options, it s worth remembering that the Internet is a cruel, harsh environment when it comes to prospecting. As a rookie sales person, very rarely did I have people slam down the phone on me within the first 30 seconds of my phone pitch. Nevertheless, prospects visiting your website could arrive, not like what they see and read, and be off in half this time. They are truly a fickle and demanding bunch that needs a selection of enticing stuff to capture and hold their attention. So for stuff you could offer blog posts, free reports, newsletter subscriptions, pre-recorded seminars, and teleseminars all containing content that your prospect would deem as being very valuable. For example, you may offer a PDF report they could download without registration, a recording of a webinar they can stream off your website and an Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 6 of 8

7 information-packed Free Report they could register for. Now some prospects will grab all three options, while others will pick just one that suits them. And by reading, listing or viewing it they will become a bit more likely to contact you rather than your competitors. Once you have these available on your website you can sit yourself down and calculate the relative values for each content piece that prospects consume just as Clyde did with me. As an example, your figures could tell you that out of 10 web contacts you will make 6 appointments, which produce 3 sales worth $1750 each. So your appointment sessions are worth $875 ($5250 / 6) and your web contact requests are worth $525 ($5250/10). Now working back through your analytics data you can see that out of the 80 visitors that decide to take up the option of your PDF download only 2 go on to make a web contact, so that action is worth $6.50 ($525/80). Delving further into your Analytics data you find that of the 130 visitors that look at your webinar, 1 makes a web contact so that action is worth $4.00. Meanwhile, of the 30 that register for the free report, 4 have gone onto make contact, which makes this action worth a whopping $70 ($2100/30). Now I realize that the numbers are rough and there is room for some double counting BUT you can start to see how all this helps to prioritize your efforts so you spend time optimizing your website for more prospects to register for that free report before you try and get them to watch the webinar. There s gold in that there strategy. Plus, if you are content to live with the rough edges of the relative amounts of these action values you can then include them in your Google Analytics account so the totals are tallied up each day. For instance, seeing that your website produced a relative $2500 worth of lead generating actions (PDF downloads, free report registrations, etc.) during the week just gone all without you having to make a single cold call yourself should be something to smile about. Have fun Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 7 of 8

8 Advertisement from recommended partners. Double the effectiveness of your writing in just one day! A one-day intensive Wednesday 21 March Auckland Is your writing delivering the results you re after? Do you wish you could write faster? Writing for Results will transform the speed and clarity of your writing. We spend a full day coaching you one-on-one on the key elements of business writing. Then we follow that up with an 18-month online programme where you get to practice what you ve learned. It s unique. It s proven. And it works. For details and to register, visit departmentofwriting.co.nz/writing_coaching Brilliant! Ryan Ashton, Brand Manager ICONZ and 2Day.com e: info@departmentofwriting.co.nz p: Not all of our customers use all of our services so as a refresher here is a short list of the key areas of our capability. Marketing design and html set up. Spam checking and delivery monitoring. deployment technology advice, installation service and support. content to RSS transfer. While we don t build websites per se, we have expertise in blog design, creation and marketing (Wordpress platform only). Postal Address: P O Box Point Chevalier, Auckland Office Address: 60B Surrey Crescent, Grey Lynn Auckland, New Zealand Online Lead Generation Strategic planning. Landing page design and creation. A/B and Taguchi testing tools. Website analytics installation and support (Google Analytics only). Website marketing support. Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing paid advertising set-up and support. Website search engine optimisation (SEO). Phone Contact: Chris Price Office: sales@permission.co.nz Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 8 of 8