TO INCREASE SALES LEADS

It may have been working for years but how often does your website get checked? You need to go back to basics. Forget you’ve ever seen your site or know about your business. Now open your site in a browser and check it out as a prospect. Is it easy to find what you’re looking for, quickly? Go to Google search and enter a search term, does your site come up at the top? You need to review key criteria like navigation, on-page SEO, anchor links, external links, old data, blog articles, product information. It’s to easy to ‘set it and forget’ and then wonder why nobody finds what they need and why nobody contacts you from your website.

Adobe® Flash was great – it was a powerful way to communicate with your audience with movement, animation and interaction. But the key word in that sentence? WAS. Adobe Flash is dead. It has been for several years. It is no longer (think Monty Python dead parrot sketch!). So why do you still have some flash elements on your website? If your audience is mobile – and Google says over 50% of searches are done on mobile so you must have mobile users – then you already lost most of them. Apple never supported Flash. So while they aren’t the only mobile provider, if 50+% of your users are mobile and 30+% are Apple – they’ve been frustrated by your site for years. Combine this with Google’s Core Web Vitals which wants ‘visual stability’ i.e. a minimum amount of movement and animation, then you just can’t go there. STOP IT NOW!

Unless you’ve been hibernating you can’t fail to know that social media is the new PR and has become a firm rankings favourite with Google & Bing. So let’s do it – get your company on all of these social channels: X(formerly Twitter), Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat ….. Right? No. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong! Yes, you need to embrace social media but focus on the channels your audience is involved with. Social media is essential but you need a core strategy, a communication strategy and a response strategy. Our clients have seen massive PR gains, increased web traffic and the holy grail: increased leads and sales with a proactive, focused and managed social media campaign.

Who told you that? Paper press releases are definitely not ‘in’ but news announcements are still key in driving enquiries to your website. 64% of website managers focus on press release announcements to generate activity. Getting your news announcements on key publication sites that are relevant to your audience and that have a high domain authority will add value to your search ranking when you gain links back to your site.

When you talk to your customers, you’re sharing your expertise on your company, products and services but also your extensive market knowledge. The main reason business relationships develop and flourish is because of trust and confidence between both parties. You can’t create that same level of confidence with everyone because you can’t spend the time talking to every customer and every prospect in detail. But you need to bridge that gap and spread the word. And the route to take is regular blogs. Blogging is proven to be in the top 5 most effective content triggers for lead generation and traffic sourcing. The reality of business also means that blogging is the top item that needs to have a focus. But you might think pressure of business and lack of writing expertise will stop you. But with the advent of AI, using online tools such as ChatGPT, IBM Watson, Google Bard (and others coming out of the woodwork daily!) you can get blogs written for you – you know what you want to say, you just can’t get it across succinctly, so get help from AI and blog away!

…hey, we’re in marketing so we can expand a bit. And Tip 11? Well it’s obvious, your website needs fixing to drive sales leads and it takes a lot of time and effort, needs to be sustained, managed, monitored and owned. It needs technical understanding as well as creative input and fresh minds. We’ve been doing this (this being online marketing, SEO, websites, social media, outsourced marketing support, blogging and PR) for over 20 years. We’ve achieved success for our clients throughout that period, as well as awards and accreditations. We’re trained to do this ‘stuff’ – and we enjoy it.

So tip 11: Use Insight Group Marketing!

Try us out – you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.